The same questions, asked to different improvisers in Perth. Credit for the idea, and some of the questions, goes to the Addlimb archive.
Photo taken by Zal Kanga Parabia.
What led you to improvised music?
I grew up in Mandurah (a very small city about an hour south of Perth) so I found most music online. I’d listened to free jazz relatively early in life, maybe when I was around 14: Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and so on. My high school saxophone teacher encouraged me to explore that music further, but I never really felt like it was something one was actually allowed to do (and I had no one to do it with). When I came to study at WAAPA it instantly seemed more possible, so I started to improvise early into my studies, using my rudimentary saxophone extended techniques in compositions and improvising with other students in the course. I saw Golden Fur and Dans les arbes perform in my second year as a student, and I found both groups incredibly striking. Then when I met Michael McNab in Melbourne through the Speak Percussion Emerging Artist’s program, I realised there was a whole culture or ‘scene’ for this music specifically (before that, I didn’t separate it from all the other contemporary art music I was hearing at school). That’s what started the investigation more deeply, and I think it was amplified by how nice everyone in that scene was.
What instrument or equipment do you use to improvise, and what is your relationship with this equipment?
At the moment I’m mostly using alto saxophone, though I also sometimes play with a very harsh-sounding digital feedback system, and have also occasionally played Bb clarinet. In the last year or so, I have really managed to beat back a lot of demons about the saxophone, which for a long time was a source of pervasive anxiety. It is hard to undo ideas of what you “should” sound like, or what the “right way” of playing the instrument is. But since I have found ways to give myself permission to just practice what I like, and what I care about, the instrument has become extremely fun to play and I have gotten much better at playing it.
If I drop my fingers anywhere on the instrument, there’s an almost infinite range of possibilities I can achieve without moving my fingers. I feel really excited by this - way more excited than working out how to get through the fingerings really fast to make melodic lines (though I do respect people who can do this very well). The saxophone has such strange acoustics, that there are always surprises. It really feels limitless, and as I get better and feel more free and relaxed playing the instrument, I just notice more and more worlds open up.
I think I’m not precious about being “a saxophonist” or anything, though, and I still like the idea of doing radical about-turns at each gig, finding new ways to subvert my own habits and such.
What keeps you improvising? What do you think makes this music important, either personally, socially, politically, etc.
It’s really fun. Speaking a bit more broadly, though, I think my aforementioned encounters with improvised music as a younger person were what Alain Badiou would call “events”: they revealed the situated “truth” of this way of making music, and thanks to the visceral, transformative power of those encounters, it is no longer really possible for me to go on living or making music disregarding the impact of those moments or pretending they never happened. Pursuing truth for Badiou is real work against the normative order of things, and I really believe in this and its potential. What most people are able to experience in the world today is incredibly narrow, as adherence to the logics of the market has extinguished so many beautiful, fertile and specific things and the contexts for those things to grow and continue. We have algorithms and “curated” platforms superseding vital grassroots culture everywhere, and in Australia we have ossified, lofty cultural institutions and major festivals perpetuating the sense that art is what some people make and what other people observe. Continuing to make this strange, raw, visceral and ungraspable music, with an extremely low barrier for entry and extremely high ceiling of accomplishment, despite the near-total absence of material reward, actually feels pretty vital.
I am aware of criticisms of improvised music which highlight the fact that the shared comprehension of what this music is and how to do it, thanks to decades of history and practice as well as the increasing institutionalisation of the music in some small pockets of the world, means that many performances of improvised music are just a recycling of already-understood notions or tropes of freedom. Whilst I sympathise with this perspective to a degree, and enjoy thinking about it and through it, I also think it’s quite unfair to judge a process-based music for not achieving upheaval, or even success, the majority of the time. It remains viscerally true to me that a successful improvisation can re-write the world and what one believes to be possible or fertile in it. I think it is rather the oppressive social structures in which we live which lead to this recycling of tropes, not necessarily the practice of improvising itself - as well as the real difficulty of creating situations where profoundly new things can actually emerge. But these criticisms are nice calls to remain committed to unravelling all kinds of structures as we work on this music, and having a certain healthy distrust of intuition.
What are your feelings on the relationship between planning and spontaneity in improvisation?
I think spontaneity within a ‘planned’ framework is a fascinating way of discovering new things when the framework is clear and one is really focused and in-the-moment. I wonder if that’s what ‘free’ improvisation always is, even if the framework is unspoken. I particularly like it when groups of people, and their shared, emergent fascinations, become like frames, or scores.
How do you evaluate or reflect upon improvisations you’ve played? How does the evaluation of a recording differ from the evaluation of a performance?
If I thought something went well, or had a lot of potential, or that it might’ve suited being listened to as a recording, I will listen to it a lot and try and find ways of articulating what was suggested by it. If I didn’t think it went well, I think I just try and leave it alone - would rather listen to other things that I love!
I’m in the camp that feels that recordings are totally different to the live performances they captured. Even a bad show that was recorded beautifully might be interesting to listen to, just for the perspective it offers on what that situation was, why such things occurred…I have really begun to enjoy the recording process as an artistic one, as well.
Do you think there is room for discursive thought, as opposed to the idea of having an empty mind and being totally ‘in-the-moment’, in improvisation? Can discursive thoughts whilst playing be productive rather than distracting, and if so, do you have an idea as to when this might be the case?
My feelings are increasingly that immanence is quite important to playing live music of any kind, at least for me. It is about being in the “thick now” and experiencing all that richness. But I think these little spaces can open while playing where one makes a kind of conscious decision to work in a certain way. Or where one notices something isn’t working and has to make a marked decision on how to deal with it. So these little openings might be a space to enter into a different, specific kind of immanence, which really focusses the situation. But I’m such a beginner, really, I’m not sure how I’ll feel about this in even a year.
Can you name three albums/pieces/experiences that inspired you to start improvising, and three that are currently inspiring you?
Other than what I mentioned in the first question, the most earth-shaking experiences were:
Will Guthrie - a live performance in 2014 (and 2015, and 2017, and 2018…)
Alice Hui-Sheng Chang - a live performance at the 2015 Totally Huge New Music Festival
Morton Feldman - the Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns? CD on New Albion Records
Nowadays, these are of great consequence:
Michael Pisaro - Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation
Meredith Monk - Turtle Dreams
James Rushford - The Body’s Night
And seeing Jean-Luc Guionnet & Seijiro Murayama perform in Paris was pretty important as well. There’s so many more!
What do you feel should happen next to see further growth in exploratory music practice in Western Australia?
I think we just need more places to play, and to play for longer. Go deeper into things. The scene is at the point where the music is getting so strong that I think it’ll convince people purely by its quality of presence and the clear passionate commitment of the artists. I think growing audience matters - audiences bring a support and energy that is so vital - but its the raw power of the music that’s going to do that well before any marketing gimmicks or strategies. The existing platforms for this music in Perth all encourage short performances and this has been good for fostering a culture of participating and inviting new folks into the scene in a gentle way. But we should start making some occasions which facilitate magic happening!
I also think we have to find ways to really walk the walk of this music’s potential to bypass or oppose institutional ways of learning and understanding music. There are a lot of uphill battles there, but having recently done some workshops with high school kids and seeing how beneficial playing music in this way was for their focus and sense of play and freedom, finding enduring and sustainable ways of de-institutionalising this music feels important.