The Way of Butch Morris

Butch Morris was an original, a completely original thinker, a maverick. He was many other things – musical genius, sympathetic, understanding friend, bon vivant, fashion connoisseur, romantic, rogue, but what I will remember most about him was his originality. That was his most important lesson to us, I believe. Be yourself. Sing your own melody and sing it strong. He challenged us to do so in spite of the adversity, and there was plenty of adversity for Butch. When you are as original a thinker as he was, adversity comes with the territory. There are plenty of odds against you and you pay for that originality. As an artist and as a human being Butch paid dearly. He didn’t complain and wasn’t bitter. He took his lumps but he had plenty of fun. He would always tell the orchestra before he brought down the baton, “Try to have some fun.” – Graham Haynes

One of the most important impacts of any music is how much it changes the way other musics sound. Louis Armstrong, Debussy, Schoenberg, or Albert Ayler transformed their surrounding soundscapes. Charlie Parker’s precision, clarity, the velocity and density of his ideas, his rhythmic sophistication, his narrative fluidity and melodic richness couldn’t seriously be ignored and, thanks to recording, projects an example that each consequent musician has had to seriously account for, no matter how they might depart from it.

At the recent Winter Jazz Fest here in New York, Henry Threadgill debuted a new ensemble to perform a piece he’d composed as a “rememberance” of his close friend Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris entitled Old Locks and Irregular Verbs.

Something about these two very individual musical sensibilities stands out among everything else. Where many, certifiably “good” contemporary musicians seem to be generating music primarily out of other music, these two seem to have conceived more broadly from experience beyond category. Neither’s taken any convention or component for granted. Each element returns rethought, personalized, reinvented. Both seem to have been thinking in terms larger than personal expression with a guiding focus on the evolution of The Music as a whole, as a common living language. Both have developed unconventional, demanding musical idiolects with a thorough attention to both a music’s overall soundshape and its internal, communicational coherence — prizing collective improvisation while insisting on the same wealth of sonic interconnection and detail that’s more easily achieved through monological composing. Each has been very exacting about sound, about actual, very specific, totally palpable sounds versus formal abstractions.

In witnessing a concert where one very independent thinker is celebrating another, it’s hard to expect any obvious correlations. Henry certainly didn’t paraphrase Conduction®, but, with this debut ensemble, Double-up (Jason Moran and David Virelles – dual pianos, paired alto saxophonists Roman Filiu and Curtis MacDonald, Jose Davila’s tuba crisscrossing percussive bass clef with the cello of Christopher Hoffman, all punctuated 2×2 by Craig Weinib’s traps) the leader refrained from playing any instruments himself, sitting instead somewhat off to the side with a score attentively while occasionally stepping up to conduct transitional and key ensemble passages.

Most of the performance unravelled the current version of Threadgill’s ensemble thinking, which in recent years presents, over and over, uncanny shifts among instruments, where sounds reply among each other with a peculiarly vivid and ever surprising sonic luminosity, often splayed across asymmetrical rhythmtone cycles. Toward the end, emerged an unforgettable shift into a ballad paced piano duet that yielded to a distinctively Threadgill dirge-anthem homophonically singing across a churning rapid of percussion.

For my ear, I was hearing something else in the melody, some of the tenderness and vulnerability of Butch’s own shimmering ballads. I began to hear a fusion of these two personae in the music’s sound. The shape and the harmonization of the melody weren’t really like anything I’ve heard, but the simplicity and clarity of the evolving figure bulked diamond emotional compression. Henry’s energetic gestural conducting was turning full dance.

Something deep was happening way beyond musical technique and system here. The sounds seemed unexplainable. I could hear dedication, will, pain, endurance, cost, vision, joy, awe, more than words, something “reaching beyond” that was emerging out of a well planned and scored sonic design. And it was more than that.

* * *

“Come on down to City Hall. I’m doing something there.” I got initiated into Conduction during those two outdoor performances in summer 1987. He was doing a vocal conduction built only out of raw phonemes.

That’s also where I met Butch Morris, the person.

An intensely interested creative disposition who didn’t subscribe all that much to social hierarchy, Butch was a sensitive conversationalist. Walking together after one of the performances, he shared his frustrations about getting the right level of participation from even top shelf musicians, even where they were well paid. This was encouraging his expansion beyond musical communities of a common idiom in search of something else, some of the motive simply being the practical challenge of finding good quality attention for the music. He generously offered a good number of survival tips toward finding funding and dealing with performing rights organizations. I counted him as one of the most important characters in my musical world, a perfect example of the quality of intelligence I’ve always wanted to be in the presence of.

At the Knitting Factory, I’d catch this fantastic little trio of Butch with J.A. Deane and Wayne Horvitz. “Does that sound any good?” as if he had no idea of whether what they were doing was working. “What do you think about that?” Always, always the listener, no matter what the situation.

Earlier in the 80s, John Betsch had laid a copy on me of a walkman recording he’d made of a gig he’d done with Butch at Greenwich House, mostly brass instruments, luminous, subtly witty writing. I just about wore the cassette out. And before that had been all the cornet playing I’d heard live in the 70s and that fascinating, pithy, jewel like solo on Santa Barbara and Crenshaw Follies (on the David Murray Octet recording, Home) that I still can’t get enough of.

As part of the Jump Arts Orchestra in 2000, I was able to rehearse and perform with Butch what was recorded as Conduction 117. His procedures had turned clearer, more focused and meticulous. The hardest part was maintaining a player’s alertness while such extraordinary music was already composing itself right before my ears. I’d get so awestruck listening that a couple of times I’d even forget to put the horn in my mouth.

Being on the inside of a Conduction gave me a lot to think about, especially about the challenges around individuals managing to connect and collectively integrate their distinctive and idiosyncratic logics amid such precision driven, high velocity settings. I was really curious about how a more seasoned group, with more mutual familiarity and common experience would sound and how it would feel for each player to compose under these circumstances. I finally got a chance to talk with Butch about this on the Bedford Avenue ‘L’ subway platform one night.

Butch was one of the few I’ve noticed who, for me, seemed to be really contending with how to generate music in a contemporary way. This isn’t actually a matter of a sound’s “style” because sound displays only a surface of what’s going on. Sound is also a result, a mirror, or a symptom, of a network of musical activities that can only be inferred through sound. These include not only the compositional decisions that determine which sounds happen when and the considerations motivating those choices but also how those determinations are communicated as information within a musical event.

Who decides is the most influential structural decision in music; and there are basically two ways to do this: either one person decides or more than one does. Each generates a different kind of social organization and, with that, a different kind of relationship with the music’s sound.

If only one person decides, composition separates from performance, and musical information (what to play when) channels in a straight line from the composer through performers to audience. The “music” becomes something that can sound “the same” every time. Within limits, this allows for the closest possible match between what a single composer imagines and how a music actually sounds.

When more than one person is composing at the same time, unpredictability becomes part of the music’s structure. Each contributor’s ideas and sounds have to constantly readjust to a shifting multidirectional flow of information.

Pan-African musicians have usually coordinated collective composing around a common reference matrix such as a time line, a clave or a cyclical “tune” (as in jazz); but, eventually, enough musicians figured out how to compose collectively without these conventions. Free improvisation proposes the most socially egalitarian alternative to the single composer model, but it’s not at all able to promise a well focused composite sound; and a range of other attractive sonic possibilities stay out of its reach completely.

A hybrid strategy has already been in play at least since Jelly Roll Morton, and that’s the role of composer-for-improvisers. While I never asked Butch directly, it seemed pretty evident to me that his imagination inclined more toward the totality of the music — toward the scale of its orchestral shape and impact — than to whatever he might be able to negotiate from the cornet alone.

Composers-for-improvisers tend to be improvisers who imagine beyond their particular instrumental role, hear the ensemble as an integrated whole and invent some way to act on that. The success of free collective improvisation as a viable compositional procedure has more so opened the challenges of ensemble connection and coherence in new ways. What many composers-for-improvisers have done is develop specific musical languages for channeling and optimizing these new possibilities.

Butch’s evolution of conduction figures a particularly brilliant and innovative response. Although the use of hand signals in musical organization isn’t, in itself, particularly exotic, I think that he perceived yet another mode of deliberately channeling musical information left underdeveloped by fixed compositions, free improvisation or composer-for-improvisers instigations. From the vantage of a conductor’s position, he could be able to hear an overall, evolving soundscape in a way that no participating player actually can from inside the music. Yet, by intervening in that progress through gestures, he’d be able to redirect and accentuate what’s evolving amid the ensemble and recompose that music from somewhere between the direct immersion of the improviser and the more distant remove of the monological composer.

This composer positioned as conductionist remains not only present during the actual music, but acts no less as improviser in dialogical relationship with the music than anyone else involved. His lexicon of signals became his instrument. Some musicians could recoil at having to give so much attention and deference to a coordinating leader, but the reality of his position is that he generated no sound himself and, in that respect, although intimately involved with the unfolding music, had no actual control over whatever would happen. What he could draw on was trust, mutual respect, rapport, collaboration, suggestion and subversion – the same as any other single contributor to dialogically generated composition – but perhaps even more precariously and daringly so in being even more vulnerably exposed.

Butch once described “the essence of swing” as “combustion and ignition,” an astute distillation that soaked deep below the delicious ubiquities of anchoring ching ching da chings. His probing into music’s connective tissue extended the intelligence of jazz process well past its signature sounds, sonically everywhere and anywhere, but, without ever losing The Music (or what some of us may still like to call “The Tradition”).

Conduction can extend precomposed material as pliably as it can spontaneous invention; and (to borrow some Anthony Braxton language) it opens into the transidiomatic. It’s able to incorporate any diversity of sound generators from anywhere in the world – which is exactly what Butch did with it, whether with David Murray’s groups, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar Arkestra, symphonic musicians, choruses of poets or the polyglot amalgams he’d assemble on his own. I can understand why Butch could apply this elegantly simple tool in the exploration of just about any musical question.

None of this is to say it’s easy. Frustration, persistence and humor had to footrest Butch’s pavement. Given the difficulties of human beings, not to mention musicians in particular, I could assume that more went wrong than right most of the time. Not only that, hand signals are inescapably ambiguous and interpretations have to vary. No one could know exactly what Butch was after at any moment, nor could he be any more sure about his musicians. This synaptic gap constitutes part of the music’s sound, content and process. But, for any genuine improviser, the wrong always offers material for the next moves, which I’m sure is something he had to thrive on. For musicians, conduction, especially with Butch, required extremely quick ears, reflexes and thinking. He was demanding in a way that pushed musicians to work at their highest capacity, which is in itself always a gift.

That’s a Butch SOUND: Immediately identifiable. a WAY — Like Butch Does It. Solidly topographical like Broadway’s millennia long stretch across Manhattan. Likely half of the musicians in any current NYC improvisers ensemble have experience with conduction through him, and I’ve read that there have been as many as 5,000 worldwide. Many composers have chosen to leave the serious exploration of its possibilities, along with the seasoned body of compositional parameters encoded in his vocabulary, to Butch (after all, he’d even trademarked the term). Butch changed our musical culture and influenced our conceptual mentalities, but that’s not finished by any long shot. I wonder now about the futures of his instrument.

 

 



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