steve coleman über chicago ende der 70er und einen durch von freeman ausgelösten rhytmischen schock:
You could play with professional R ‘n’ B type cats, or there was a lot of blues happening in Chicago, you could play with professional blues musicians, or you could play with cats like Von (Freeman).
There were at least three distinct scenes – Chicago was very segregated then, it was all among black musicians. There were three separate scenes that were all kind of related in some way. At least in terms of the feel thing a lot of them were related. The Blues scene and the R ‘n’ B scene were closer to each other, than with what Von and them were doing. Because you really had to know a lot to do what Von and them did. You had to know harmony and shit like this, so this wasn’t a scene that you could just jump into. I mean if they’re playing ‚Days of Wine and Roses‘, you just can’t come in there and just play pentatonic scales – you had to know something.
So their scene had to be combined with the sophisticated pitch shit they were doing, and the other scenes didn’t. In those scenes you could get away with playing blues licks and pentatonic things and stuff like that. So I did that first, but when I started following Sonny Stitt and these guys around, their shit was way more sophisticated pitch-wise. But the rhythmic thing, they still talked about it in the same way. So I said to myself ‘OK the pitch shit is more sophisticated but they’re still on this rhythm thing’. And the first thing I noticed is that when I played with Von and we’d play ‘Billie’s Bounce’, or anything, how different it felt. I mean I’m playing with him, but I feel like ‘Man, this guy – the weight of what he’s playing, and the feel – just the way it feels and everything, it’s so much different to what I’m doing. I mean I’m playing the same notes, but it’s not even close!’, you know.
And so I started trying to analyze this whole micro-beat thing I was talking about the other day, like why does it feel like that when he’s playing and not when I’m playing? What is it that I’m missing here? What’s happening?
So I started to try to analyze this, not in a way like – I don’t know if you ever saw Vijay Iyer’s essay online where he does this whole computerised kind of thing, in terms of like ‘we measured the beat and it’s 15% behind’ kind of thing – well it wasn’t that you know, it was just trying to figure out what was happening with what these cats were doing. And then I started listening to the drummers and everything.
So that was one kind of shock, was that whole period of figuring that out, and also realizing this stuff had nothing to do with reading music. It had nothing to do with what cats were doing when they read music. This was something completely outside that and it couldn’t even be notated. Even when I started transcribing, I would transcribe something and I would just write ‘lay back’, or ‘pull back’, or whatever, because there was no other way of notating it. But pull back where? How much? None of that was there – there was no information, I just knew what it meant when I saw that sort of like a ‘stickit’ thing {a stickit is a note you write to yourself} once I saw that it reminded me that that had to be done.
And so I realized that their beat was more like this……….it was like this variable amoeba-like thing, but it wasn’t just amoeba anywhere there was a certain concept to how to do it and it just took listening and all that. So that was my first shock with the rhythmic thing and it included the R’n’B thing and stuff like that.
weiter über mel lewis & thad jones, doug hammond u.a. von hier.
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