Andrew Durkin
is one of the most interesting composers in the contemporary
jazz scene. That’s contemporary as in avant-garde, not smooth
(Is there crunchy?) jazz. His working band, the ironically named
Industrial Jazz Group, showcases Durkin’s compositions and his
sidemen who are master improvisers. We were fortunate enough to
get Durkin to take time out of his busy schedule to answer a few
questions.
WG: You’re a jazz composer and the leader of the
Industrial Jazz Group, one of the most exciting ensembles on the
West Coast modern jazz scene. Tell us a little bit about your
background.
AD: I was born in 1968 in New Jersey. I developed the
composition habit early, in second grade, from my first piano
teacher—I knew her only by her first name, Shelly. Part of her
approach was to have me compose a short piece each week, using
whatever musical principle I was learning at the time. So if I
was learning the quarter note, I would have to write a piece in
all quarter notes, and so on. Composition became kind of
second-nature out of that.
Shelly also exposed me to a repertoire that was a little unusual
for a second-grader. One of the first piano pieces I learned, in
fact, was “Blue Monk.” I learned some ragtime from her as well—I
think it may have been popularized at that time by its use in
the movie The Sting. After Shelly I got the typical piano
student background: lots of Bach and Beethoven in particular
(the Bach stayed with me, the Beethoven didn’t). Around the same
time I also started playing clarinet, which I stuck with until
high school, when I switched to tenor sax and trumpet. Piano has
always been my main instrument, however.
Many of my earliest musical associations are dramatic. The first
recorded music I can remember seeking out—maybe third or fourth
grade—was Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance, which I
had seen on Broadway. In addition to concert and jazz band, I
did school musicals, and community musical theater, and as a
result I got into Sondheim, as well as things like Jesus Christ
Superstar and Little Shop of Horrors. In junior high I wrote
adventure and science fiction screenplays—for a while I wanted
to be a film director—and I listened to soundtracks while
writing.
In high school I became a fan of a great New Jersey radio
station, WFMU, where I developed a taste for more out-of-the-way
stuff—Fred Frith, Captain Beefheart, Tangerine Dream, some other
things. In high school I also discovered the Beatles, which
prompted a ten-year exploration of pop and rock music. I played
in all kinds of song-oriented groups in that period. The best of
them was the Evelyn Situation, which lasted from 1993-1994. We
specialized in unusual harmonies and quirky lyrics, sung by
three frontwomen—we were kind of in the same vein as the Roches
and the Bobs, with touches of Tom Lehrer thrown in. I wrote lots
of music for that group, most of which was about inconsequential
things like food, holidays, sci-fi movies and unpleasant day
jobs.
Somewhere in the late eighties I began to develop an interest in
jazz. I read a biography of Duke Ellington when I was nineteen,
and that prompted me to seek out the Cotton Club recordings:
“The Mooche,” “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,”
“Mood Indigo,” and so on. That stuff changed my life; it’s still
some of my favorite music. Just before I turned twenty-one, I
had an uncle who passed away—a very close, ex-hippie uncle who
had always encouraged my artistic leanings—and his extensive
collection of jazz LPs ended up at my Mom’s house. I spent many
evenings listening to those records—first I think as a way of
mourning him but then out of a growing love for the music. That
was where I first learned about Oliver Nelson, Sun Ra, Coltrane,
Miles Davis, Lambert Hendricks and Ross, the Modern Jazz
Quartet, Stan Getz, and many others. I started a short-lived
jazz band and we played my arrangements of Ellington, as well as
a few originals and other things. But I didn’t start playing
jazz seriously until after I had moved to Los Angeles in 1995.
WG: Who are some of the people who have influenced you
the most musically?
AD: From the vantage point of my thirties, I feel the
greatest affinity with Zappa, Ellington and Mingus. Zappa in
particular over the last few years. Monk, Erik Satie, Carla Bley,
Lester Bowie, Raymond Scott, Kurt Weill, George Russell, Bob
Graettinger have also all been very influential. I love Bach,
Ives, Chuck Berry, John Lennon. Really there are too many
influences to list them all here. My tastes are fairly broad—I
only try to avoid stuff that gives the impression of
self-importance or preciousness—unless it’s deliberately and
self-consciously inflated and therefore amusing. My worldview is
basically one of comic existential resistance in the face of
absurdity, and I guess I like that in music too. Of course that
kind of thing can be expressed in many different ways, and I
often hear it when other people swear it isn’t there.
I should also point out that I’m strongly influenced by the IJG
itself—the different players who have come and gone in the years
since we’ve been together. I can’t write in a vacuum, but when I
surround myself with talented musicians, who have their
distinctive voices and their own musical interests, the material
flows pretty freely. In that sense creativity has a very social
dimension for me. I try to tune in to the music that moves the
members of the group, and I think I intuitively gravitate toward
their aesthetic personalities.
WG: Why Zappa?
AD: Zappa was a breakthrough of sorts. He strikes me as a
very relevant composer, in that he employed a collage aesthetic
that has a lot in common with the diverse hybrid world we live
in. You have this choice as a musician. You can jump from style
to style—like Miles Davis, or John Zorn, or the productions of
Hal Willner. Or you can stake out your aesthetic territory and
stay within it, explore it to the fullest. Ellington, Armstrong,
Billie Holiday and to some extent Mingus were all masters of the
latter approach, turning up endless variety out of some very
basic ingredients. In fact most western music up until the
twentieth century is like this. But once I started listening to
Zappa I realized I wanted to go the other way (not that I’ve
come close to succeeding at it yet). I think I realized that the
collage approach was a way out of the trap of “the end of
music”—the idea that after the “destruction” of tonality, form,
meter (through free jazz or serialism or whatever) there’s
nowhere else to go. You don’t have to keep thinking linearly—the
next “school” of music, the next “language”—but rather you can
get to a “new” place by taking in and utilizing everything. You
can go from do-wop to musique concrete to hard-rock
blues-oriented guitar solos to chamber music to free jazz to
spoken word stuff—as Zappa does in albums like Uncle Meat, We’re
Only in it For the Money, Lumpy Gravy. And that’s just the
beginning, really; with the digital age there’s now even more to
draw from.
The thing with Zappa was that it was all so extreme. The
juxtapositions were more striking than with Miles, because often
they were all jammed together on the same record; they were more
impressive than Willner, because Zappa was composing and
producing; and they were more engaging than Zorn, whose building
blocks—the pieces he uses to create his collages—very often
don’t stand up on their own, at least to my ears. In any case,
the collage aesthetic is what makes the most sense to me
now—free jazz is meaningless without complex written scores,
pretty melodies are meaningless without noise. Bach is
meaningless without Ornette. Once you start isolating these
things—playing all pretty music, or all noisy music, or all
counterpoint, or all microtones, or whatever—you fall back into
the trap of linearity and genre.
WG: You’ve got a Ph.D. in English. That’s a little
unusual for a jazz musician. How does this inform your music?
AD: I may be too close to the transition from academia to
jazz to be able to say for sure, but one of the more ironic
effects is that I’ve stopped writing music with words. I became
less interested in narrative, and disaffected with the idea that
texts (or musical works) “mean” something in some consistent,
absolute way—when you start talking about literature with other
people, you realize very quickly that audience and context play
a very significant role in determining what a text means, and
that meaning is always shifting. To an artist, that idea is
humbling—you realize your work is essentially out of your hands
once you’ve completed it. But it’s also empowering to let
something go in that way—it allows you to not be weighed down by
futile aspirations toward “greatness,” and that leaves a lot of
energy for further creation—which is where the real fun is
anyway. In the end, I realized after studying literature for
nearly a decade, art is both incredibly important and terribly
insignificant!
There was also a certain rebellious impulse going off as I was
making the switch. Whether fairly or not, I have always
associated jazz with rebellion and innovation, and also with
raucousness, wildness. Not to feed any cliches, but grad school
can be a very dispassionate, antiseptic place. For me playing
jazz was the best way I knew to defy the stuffiness of the
university system without also undermining the importance of the
intellect—because jazz is certainly an intellectual music as
well.
WG: Who are some of your favorite authors and why?
AD: Donald Barthelme and Eudora Welty may be my
all-around favorite authors. They seemed very plugged into the
kookiness of life, and yet I never feel drained after reading
their stuff. There’s an admiration for people behind it all that
I find engaging.
Other twentieth-century writers I like: Ralph Ellison, for the
constant qualification, the deep complexity of his take on the
world, and his ability to express it elegantly. I try to reread
Invisible Man every five years or so. Sam Shepard for his
austere, fragmented sense of character, and John dos Passos and
of course Faulkner when I want to be depressed. I also went
through Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens phases as an undergrad.
I will always love Shakespeare and Chaucer, for the language,
for the keen perception of and sympathy with human nature.
That’s about as far back as I go.
WG: Have you ever read Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home
about the talking bear who happens to be the world’s greatest
jazz saxophonist?
AD: No—sounds interesting though.
WG: In the field of modern jazz, who are some of the
musicians you find to be the most interesting?
AD: Well, I’m always coming across more stuff that I
like. It’s an unending process. If I somehow was able to listen
to a new CD every day for the rest of my life, there’s still no
way I’d be able to hear all the good stuff. If by “modern jazz,”
you mean folks who are working now, I’d probably start with
Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Jason Moran, Kenny Barron, Charlie
Haden, Don Byron, Henry Threadgill, Randy Weston, Andy Milne,
Willem Breuker, Uri Caine. I just discovered a great group out
of Texas—actually it’s pretty much centered around this composer
named Graham Reynolds. They’re called the Golden Arm Trio.
They’re not swinging jazz, but they’re great, very quirky and
interesting, and strong compositions. There’s an interesting
guitar group out here in Los Angeles called Double-Naught Spy
Car—they’re sort of jazzy, but not straightahead, and they do
other guitar styles as well. There’s a lot of interesting new
jazz in Los Angeles, actually; a big band led by composer Jerry
Grant, called the NuJazz Alternative; guitarist Nels Cline and
his various groups; the venerable Vinny Golia; Adam Rudolph and
his Go: Organic Orchestra; Boxes of Water, with Cory and Aaron
[Wright and Kohen, reed player and bassist for the IJG]. I’m
sure I’m leaving many people out, but in any case, there’s a
real scene here. People tend to think of L.A. as a jazz
wasteland, but it’s actually pretty vibrant.
WG: Tell us a little bit about how the Industrial Jazz
Group came into being.
AD: It was sort of accidental—which may be why it worked.
I had assembled a group to back a singer for whom I had written
a bunch of songs. Most of it wasn’t really jazz, though it was
far jazzier than any of the pop I had written previously. Aaron
and our first tenor / clarinet player, Mike Dodge, were in that
edition of the group, and Evan [Francis, alto sax and flute]
came aboard shortly after that.
The singer may not have been totally ready for the commitment of
a group, because I soon discovered that she couldn’t always be
counted on to be at rehearsals. I figured that since I’d have
these great musicians on hand for two hours at a time, and I
never knew whether the singer would be there, I might as well
prepare some instrumental stuff for when she didn’t show. I
didn’t even really take it seriously at that time—I usually
threw the charts together the night before. I certainly never
thought that kind of thing would eventually becomes the group’s
raison d’etre. “Lucky Duck” and “Valley of the Smokes” were two
of the first tunes we did, as well as “Negative Minor” and
“Sketch B” [the latter two pieces remain unrecorded]. I think I
knew as soon as we started playing this stuff that we had
stumbled onto the right configuration for something. So I
started pursuing it to see where it went. Three years later,
here we are.
WG: What are your plans for the future for the IJG?
AD: Onward and upward. I feel as though we’ve just barely
scratched the surface of what we can do. I’ll admit that I’m
insanely ambitious about the group, but I also believe there is
something inherently interesting about attempting the
impossible. The high risk of failure is itself stimulating. One
of the big risks right now is the fact that the regular
performing group has expanded to a nonet: three reeds and three
brass, plus the rhythm section. That’s economically and
logistically nonsensical, but that’s the group that will be
recording the next album. And after that we’ll probably get even
bigger—I’m already thinking about percussion, bassoon, maybe
french horn or tuba. I’d also like to incorporate other arts
into the live show; I’d love to utilize dancers and maybe film
as well. Maybe put out an album or two every year if we’re
lucky.
WG: Touring?
AD: Yes. That’s really the key to everything else, as I
see it. You sort of have to take the music directly to the
people, so to speak. Right now we’re concentrating on expanding
within California, but by the end of the year I hope to have
made treks to Arizona, Canada, and possibly New York.
WG: You’re an English Ph.D. but the IJG uses wordless
vocals. Have you written compositions with words? Would the IJG
ever work with a jazz singer like Patricia Barber or Kurt Elling,
more from the avant-garde side of vocal jazz?
AD: Part of the aesthetic of this group is that nothing
is assumed off-limits. So yes, we’d work with Kurt Elling or
Patricia Barber—or Holly Cole or Shelley Hirsch or David Moss or
Cassandra Wilson or whoever, if they’d have us. I guess the
question is not so much whether, but how. Most songs with lyrics
are driven by stories or messages of some kind, and in many
cases the music has to serve that text, even if the music is
interesting on its own. You can have the greatest melody or
chord progression in the world, but on some level it’s still
supporting the words. Now that (at least for the time being)
I’ve moved away from songwriting per se, for me it’s the other
way around: the voice has to serve some musical purpose, like
any of the other instruments. The voice is a texture, like a
saxophone or a drum. Not many vocalists think that way, so
that’s the challenge.
WG: A number of great writers have also been influenced
by jazz. Philip Larkin, Thomas Pynchon, Langston Hughes, Jack
Kerouac, Julio Cortazar. Your thoughts on these writers?
AD: I certainly like the ones I’ve read: Pynchon, Hughes,
and Kerouac. It’s an interesting idea, that jazz influences
literature. I see the connections: using improvisatory
techniques to write, drawing on the imagery and language of jazz
(or some stereotype of jazz), employing blues forms as a basis
for poetry. It all makes sense to me—and yet I don’t pursue it
much. Part of that is just that there are a limited number of
hours in the day; it’s not that I have no interest in seeing how
jazz has influenced literature, but I’d prefer to spend my time
actually listening to jazz, or to music in general. The fact is
that I don’t spend a whole lot of time with literature at all
these days. I read a lot, but mostly I read nonfiction; stuff
about music, about aesthetics, about musicians—or else politics
and culture. I haven’t totally abandoned literature, but it’s
not my priority right now.
I also have this feeling that modern western society is more
about the eyes than the ears—we’re better at looking than we are
at listening. So maybe I have an underlying fear—possibly
unjustified, but who knows—that some people use “jazz
literature” as a substitute for going out to a club to hear the
real thing.
WG: What is your assessment of the performing scene for
modern jazz these days? What do you think of the future
financial viability of jazz in general?
AD: It’s no secret that it’s next-to-impossible to make a
living playing any kind of music. The odds are overwhelmingly
against financial success, whether you’re “mainstream” or “avant
garde” or whatever. The music industry is clearly absurd, caught
in an orgy of mediocrity and materialism and
self-congratulation. It’s much more visual and social than
musical. All of this is almost not even worth commenting on.
What’s so scary is that we’re dealing with a very powerful
system—and I’m not just talking about the multinational
record-label corporation conglomerate behemoths. They certainly
drive the whole thing, they set the tone. But everyone
participates to some degree. Much of the media—especially
radio—colludes. Good radio is incredibly rare these days. Much
of the academic establishment colludes by placing limits on the
types of music that are taught or canonized. Much of the
audience colludes by not investing time or energy or money into
learning about new music (or even old music for that matter).
Many musicians collude by not actively working to balance
“making a living” with trying new things, doing a few “out” or
art gigs. We composers collude—I do not exempt myself here—by
constantly underestimating the audience—either babying them, as
in so much pop music, or flouting them, as in most “art” music.
There are exceptions to all of this, many notable exceptions,
many commendable people who work hard against the collusion. And
it’s hard not to collude; it’s completely understandable why
people do it, it can often be a matter of survival. But it’s
like the political situation in the states—things will remain
the same for as long as most people fail to get up and do
something about it. It depends upon a critical mass.
So it’s hard to be optimistic. On the other hand, what choice do
you have? If you dwell on the system, it will defeat you—unless
you turn it into a joke, or part of a shtick, like Zappa did. So
instead you have to improvise. The conventional methods of
promotion may not work any longer. You take what you can get,
and you build from there. A case in point: we just played our
debut show in San Diego, in a club called Dizzy’s. A wonderful
club, certainly the most interesting club in San Diego, but not
exactly a haven for the avant-garde. In fact people discouraged
me from bringing the group there—that’s not our “scene,” it was
claimed. My attitude was “Hey, I want to play San Diego”—it’s
part of my overall plan to develop our audience throughout the
state, so I can’t ignore it. We did any promotion we could
get—we played a morning news show sandwiched between drawings
for the lottery and segments on cat adoption! We played as a
trio—unusual for us, a big switch to two horns and piano—for a
philosophy class at a local community college. Crazy stuff like
that. And it paid off. People came out, they dug the show. We
had a huge crowd in a totally new city for us, in a relatively
mainstream venue. Conventional wisdom could not have predicted
it.
Good music is not going to go away. In a sense, conservative
cultural periods can provide fertile ground for artistic
innovation—just as much if not more than more artistically
friendly eras. The fact that you have a clear opposition makes
it easier to stake out your weirdness—you have something to
define yourself against. And there will always be people crazy
and inspired enough to take up that challenge.
WG: Tell us a little bit about your non-IJG projects.
AD: I occasionally do pieces for other groups, though
that happens less and less often these days. I just did
something for a Danish quartet called Four Elements, and I’m
working on something for Aaron, Cory and the bassoon player Sara
Schoenbeck, which they’ll be performing in a local new music
series. I do film scoring when it falls into my lap, but I don’t
seek it out—it’s fun but it’s not my main bag right now.
I’m trying to get a sideline going writing about music. I’d like
to publish my dissertation, which is on composition and
aesthetics, and I have a few other book projects in mind.
WG: What advice would you give young people wanting to
break into the lucrative world of modern jazz?
AD: My first piece of advice is to learn from experience.
I’m still doing that, and I can share what has worked for me so
far, but it may not be appropriate for everyone. Find what works
for you.
Part of the trick, even before the “breaking in” part, is to get
your artistic house in order. I think a lot of people do it the
other way around—they work on figuring out how to “make it”
before they’ve got anything to say. It’s understandable why this
happens—in terms of the resources necessary to play music (i.e.,
access to recording technology, distribution, and so on), it’s
easier and cheaper than ever before for anyone to pursue a
musical career. There are hundreds if not thousands of seminars,
websites, magazines, consultants, festival panels all eager to
give you helpful tips on everything from booking gigs to
mastering CDs to negotiating record deals. That’s an industry in
itself. But if you haven’t been honest with yourself and put
some time into figuring out what you have to say—i.e., what’s
your niche? Who’s your audience? Why should they care?—you’re
probably already doing this for the wrong reasons. What makes it
even harder is that you’re the only one who really knows whether
or not you’ve found your niche. In the two times I’ve had this
feeling—first with the Evelyn Situation, and now with the IJG,
it’s like something suddenly clicks into place, it’s a tangible,
physical feeling, and the artistic part just comes naturally
after that.
Beyond that I guess the most important thing is persistence.
There are so many talented people out there who just give up
after a point because they’re tired of people saying “no” to
them. That’s understandable, too. I’d say for every one door
that I’m able to pry open, there are about nine that get slammed
in my face. So the odds are not good, and that’s discouraging.
But the connections that you do make—i.e., the people who say
“yes” to you—tend to be the people who really care about music,
to the point where they’re taking risks or making sacrifices
themselves. Chances are the first person who plays your CD on
the radio is not making a living as a DJ, and they will have had
to work to find out about you, and if they like you, they’ll go
to great lengths to support you, because they have something
invested in you and what you do. They share the rush. So the
trick in part is being able to find enough of those people.
WG: At ZCPortal we have a tradition of asking every
interviewee the same light-hearted final question. Besides this
question, what is the most annoying question that you have ever
been asked in an interview?
AD: I don’t know if I can recall a specific question, but
the folks over at Tiger Beat were pretty annoying. I think they
wanted to know my favorite color or something. Do people
actually read this stuff?
WG: Andrew Durkin, thank you.
AD: You’re welcome.
For more on the Industrial Jazz Group, please go to their
website
To purchase the Industrial Jazz Group’s CDs at Amazon.com,
please click
here
This article was originally printed March 27, 2003 on zcportal.com
Andrew Durkin
is one of the most interesting composers in the contemporary
jazz scene. That’s contemporary as in avant-garde, not smooth
(Is there crunchy?) jazz. His working band, the ironically named
Industrial Jazz Group, showcases Durkin’s compositions and his
sidemen who are master improvisers. We were fortunate enough to
get Durkin to take time out of his busy schedule to answer a few
questions.