The art and the craft of collectively creating totally improvised music is a nearly impossible thing to describe. But there seemed to be no better time nor place to try than in my dining room earlier this month, when I had the members of Triganol — Douglas Ewart, Anthony Cox and Davu Seru — over for Indian food and whiskey.
I have written feature stories on each of them in the past and had proposed this dinner conversation as a means of previewing their concert at the Cedar Cultural Center Saturday night.
Each of the three is a stalwart in the dedicated but delicate process of group improvisation. Ewart, born in 1946, is a maker and player of a wide array of percussion and wind instruments. He became a member of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians shortly after its founding in 1965, and served as its president from 1979 to 1986. The nonprofit organization is widely acknowledged to have been, and remains, a predominant, influential conduit for creative improvisation.
Cox, an internationally renowned bassist and cellist born in 1954, has played with a vast array of jazz musicians, from mainstream performers such as Joe Lovano and Pat Metheny to more open, thornier stylists including Dewey Redman, Andrew Cyrille and Geri Allen. He has also released a half-dozen albums under his own name.
Seru, born in 1978, is a drummer and percussionist whose formative influence came from attending the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians School of Music. In addition to currently being a member of the association, he is Curator of the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota and a first-call drummer for a multitude of gigs around town as well as leading his own bands and performing solo.
If you were going to create the ideal jazz-oriented trio immersed in group improvisation out of musicians here in the Twin Cities, Triganol is the most likely configuration to conjure magic. Although they have performed together in this open format less than a half-dozen times, they have developed an enormous amount of mutual respect watching and listening to each other live and on record over the years.
What I thought would be a dinner discussion of what a person coming to the Cedar would encounter became unworkable — in terms of the actual music to be created, they honestly don’t know how it will unfold. But they were happy to detail the personal investment involved to make a collaborative improvisation a joyous experience for players and audience alike.
To hear them tell it, the music they were raised with begins to imprint the DNA of how they will listen and express themselves in spontaneous interaction. Cox and Seru cite Twin Cities radio stations that featured Black musical artists — KMOJ for Seru, WUXL for Cox — while Ewart recounts the short-wave radio signals and street parties in his native Jamaica.
“There was a diversity of music going on that you might liken to what the (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) says: ‘Great Black music, ancient to the future,’” Seru said. “You got everything across the diaspora represented, and we listened to it religiously because it was the only place you could hear it. And what you learned from it was the specific ways Black music gets in your body. I play out a lot, and I love communities across racial lines. But there is something special when you are all under the umbrella of great Black music, and you know the people onstage have experienced, consumed, danced to that music their whole lives, authentically. It becomes a kind of (musical) score you can trust, a base of operations to work from. It is cultural. You can’t fake it.”
“We’re having a conversation. We impact each other,” Ewart explained. “You know how a person will say something that changes the conversation? That happens in music. We are using a vocabulary, using sound, but we are seeking sounds, sounds unknown — you know good sounds don’t always just show themselves. You have got to look for it and then try to keep it because….” He suddenly looks away.
“Because it’s gone!” Cox said with a rueful laugh.
“Gone,” Ewart continued, “and you may never get it back, but it has taken you into a region of new possibilities and now you are on a quest for that.”
“Are you going to stay bound up and frustrated that you can’t find the sound or move on?” Seru asked rhetorically.
“It is like a sunset. By the time you say, ‘Hey guys, come look!’ it has already changed,” Ewart said. “But it feels good to be in a position where you are working with other seekers, who are listening, and who have listened to Art Tatum, listened to (John) Coltrane, to (Eric) Dolphy, to Leontyne Price and Mary Lou Williams and Betty Carter. To Mahalia Jackson and Bob Marley.
“All of these things are in you. It is part of your nourishment, your musical nourishment. And it comes out.”
“People naturally tend to look at it through this one Western European lens, so it is like, ‘How did you know how to end at the same time?’” Cox said. “But these things are intuitive; that’s what we’re about, that’s what we play, that is how you develop a language — because there is a language, you know? And when you have it there is a natural chemistry that just feels good.”
Ewart quickly follows up. “People underestimate the acumen that it takes to improvise well together. It is still not seen as composition, like a song. Yet we have made some beautiful things and I guess you could have them transcribed and people could play them and people would look at it and there would be all sorts of analytical things to say about it. A piece or a chord built on a third and then also built on a fifth; the relationships that mathematically exist within music and you can make a template of it.
“But music communicates on many levels, and that includes feelings and electricity. We practice on our instruments but we also practice listening — it is a major part of being a musician — especially an improvising musician.”
At this point my Western European lens wanted to know how judgments between listening and engagement were honed. Ewart responded with the analogy of a rowboat.
“You’re rowing and rowing and then you lift the oars up and let the boat drift. That is a big part of what we do, too. The ship is the collective and you don’t always have to steer the ship. The ship will take you somewhere.
“But then sometimes somebody else takes it. I remember one time when Anthony picked up his bow and we all went to a very different place. But we have a saying, ‘When in doubt, lay out.’ And keep listening.”
So then I asked in what ways each felt they had grown as an improviser. Cox let out a sigh as he contemplated the question.
“The older I get, the more I hear,” he began, to murmurs of assent from the other two musicians. “To begin, it was just, ‘God, help me put my fingers in the right place.’ But then I got way past that, felt more fully formed, and by the time I was 40, I got the sense that I could play what I hear and just got deeper and deeper in my response.
“I still work on a lot of things. I keep a book —” Cox continued as the room erupted in laughter. “The guys make fun of me, but one day I was going on tour and I wanted to keep a document of it in a book. I went to Target to get any old thing and I got this book that was a girl’s journal. And people would say, ‘Oh look at you with your girlie book’— it had stars on it and it said, ‘Be Yourself.’ And I liked it; it became part of my thing. It got to the core of what I’m about, so that’s how I practice now, with that in mind.”
“As to getting to the core of what you’re about, for me — please, take all this with a grain of salt. I’m 46 years old, and I think I know some things, and that will change,” Seru said. “But ‘getting-to-know-yourself’ to me has meant returning to the person you have always been. Shedding the layers that you have accumulated moving through this world. And reminding yourself of who you actually are the whole time.
“Whatever maturation I can claim as an improviser still points right at this person I feel like I have known myself to be my whole life. And that is somebody who is not only capable of listening, but being connected to something. To something that is available to everybody but it is actually just hard to touch. It is super-mystical sounding, because it is. Because I can’t give you evidence, except come hear us play. That is the only evidence I can give you.
“To me it is exceptional, this situation, to play with Black musicians who know, understand, better than I do, this thing I have hitched myself to — this continuum, this tradition, that a lot of people have taken on heroically. Because it is not what people are used to hearing. But this (musical) approach to time, rhythm, sound, textures, harmony — all of it — is old enough now that I would expect more people to see that it is not some aberration, by reckless people living in the moment recklessly.
“And I promise we will approach it with sincerity because it is easier to do that now; it is easier to risk sincerity. I expect you will really like what you hear.”
Britt Robson
Britt Robson has covered the Timberwolves since 1990 for City Pages, The Rake, SportsIllustrated.com and The Athletic. He also has written about all forms and styles of music for over 30 years.