PO Box 7896
Austin, TX 78713
or email jronsen@mail.utexas.edu
Anthony Coleman is a New York pianist who also uses samplers and other assorted keyboards. While I was in New York last summer, I talked with Coleman, who has worked with John Zorn, Roy Nathanson, Glen Branca, Christian Marclay, Tom Cora, Nicolas Collins, Marc Ribot, Don Byron, Shelly Hirsch, Iggy Pop, David Moss, Zeena Parkins and that was just last month. I did an amazingly lengthy interview with him, the major portions of which will be in the next issue, but here I print the conversation as it relates to God Is My Co-Pilot and some Jewish issues. Ok, the title for this is stupid, but I was compelled to do it. Deal.
JR: Last week I interviewed God Is My Co-Pilot so I would like to talk about your relationship with them. How did you meet them?
AC: How did I meet God Is My Co-Pilot? Well, let's see: somehow Craig and Sharon were involved with Zorn for a while.
JR: Yeah, he was on one of their records [Speed Yr. Trip].
AC: And, it's the way I meet people with John, usually going out to some enormous lunch somewhere, like at 2nd Avenue Deli, there's always John with an enormous group of people, and usually you don't really meet them. Like I've been to lunch with Mesha Mengleberg for example, but I couldn't tell you what we talked about, with all the members of the Boredoms and the Ruins, and so on. Somehow I started to know them, and then they invited me to be in one of their noise workshops at the Gargoyle Mechanique over the summer, and I really really liked them.
JR: So you got to know them socially.
AC: Yeah, socially and playing at the noise workshop. And then I guested on some of their little side projects like Pope John, and then I was on a couple of their records, and then I made the tour with them last year. Then I made one record that I really like with them, this 45, "Childhood Daydreams of whatever and whatever". Did you get it?
JR: Uh...
AC: "Childhood Daydreams of Torture and Betrayal" or something. I forget. It's two horrible things. "Childhood Daydreams of Mutilation and [laughs]
JR: Uh...
AC: It's good. What I did was take a DAT of outtakes from their recent albums and I just freely sampled what I thought was nice, and made a sample sequence, and then they played on top of it, and Sharon sang on top of it. So this was the closest to a real collaboration that I've done with them. I would love to do that more. It was completely fun to do that, to take somebody's stuff that they don't know what to do with, take it like raw material and then make something out of it. And I think it came out pretty good, but I haven't really been dealing with them too much since we've did this tour.
JR: Tell me about the tour.
AC: What did they say about the tour?
JR: They seemed to want to avoid mention of it.
AC: It was a nightmare for them, in a way. Cause dealing with this Knitting Factory stuff, they really came up against it, like boom, really clashed into it. I missed a lot of that, because I was in Munich for six weeks working on a project with Shelly Hirsch, and I didn't join the tour until mid-point...
JR: So did you go to Finland with them?
AC: No, that was afterwards. That's really the classic GodCo, the Peel Sessions, Finland, so on. But, this was with Fred Lonberg-Holm, so it was a very weird GodCo, no Alex, no Siobahn, me, Laura Cromwell on drums, and Michael. But Michael and Fred do a lot of improvising together, so that puts it in another direction. The tour was for me strange, because it was this radical Jew thing, and there were problems for me. The whole thing was so trivialized in a way, in the sense that we had this stuff that was, yeah, ok, peripherally Jewish, we did these Yiddish songs and Gary Lucas did "Silent Movie Of The Golem" where he played the Draddle Song in the middle of it, and some Hasidic New Wave which is essentially like a Miles Davis of "Bitches' Brew" period with klezmer scales, and...
JR: So you're back to klezmer.
AC: Well, it's not really klezmer, but on the other hand it had the other problem of being so peripheral and yet, with what Ribot calls "Identity Politics". I know that's not his phrase, but to use it in this context, a weird musical identity politics: What makes this music Jewish? It was really interesting in this Munich festival was you had all this interesting stuff, some of it was real overt, like the New Kleizmer Trio, and then on the other hand Zeena Parkins playing solo harp, and then contrasting that to a piece Alvin Curin played, triggering samples, and that to John and that to Elliott Sharp and that to Lou Reed and all this stuff that makes you ask the question "ok, what do all these have in common?" But that's really in the form of a question which is how it should be, whereas these shows were "we're here, we're Jewish, get used to it!" And then you get used to it and so what? The stuff is ok. I remember a friend of mine from Hamburg coming up and saying "you take away the Jewish and it's just another middle-rabble Knitting Factory jazz tour." And I realized it was true, and I was very sad. What made it most depressing, we were sending faxes back and forth to each other before the tour, with little pictures of Elie Wiesel cut out, he wrote "Night" a great book about the Holocaust, he's the big conscious of the Holocaust, he's a Holocaust survivor and he's always lecturing on how important it is for the world not to forget, so we had Wiesel at the Radical Jewish Festival giving the little pre-concert talk: "Six million were killed, right were we are, and the world is trying to forget, and we must never forget, we must keep memory alive... [real upbeat] And now here is a group of musicians who are keeping memory alive!" It was like that, it really was like that. They had a horrible discussion before the concerts, so a bunch of young, bearded intellectuals, a couple of engaged lefty people, and one old, insane Jewish person who was somehow still living in the town, and one or two other people would come, and have these completely useless discussions that touched on music not at all. Not "What is this music, why is this music Jewish?", which would be interesting, but, like, "how does it feel to be an American-Jewish musician playing in Europe, given the fact that there was the Holocaust?" This conversation, in terms of the music that we were playing, could not stand up at all. Imagine going to a concert of, I don't know, I can't think of something equally absurd. Imaging going to a basketball game and before the game ask "Do you think blacks are still being oppressed in America?" or 'Do you think the fact that there are black millionaires..." and have a pre-game discussion on this, and not one word on "do you think you're going to win?" or "what do you think your chances are?" Not even mention those but, "it's thirty years after the march on Washington now and here we are, and Patrick Ewing, you're a multi-million dollar athlete and what does that mean?" [laughs] Even on a lesser lever than that, it was stupider. To have this kind of discussion with this music, was for me so painful that I tried to be the court-jester after a while. It was a good training for Selfhaters, this was before Selfhaters, but it was good training. A lot of thinkers, Adorno in particular, have written about the banality of trying to sum such a thing of, of trying to say that the Holocaust was this and this. I can't explain it very well, but the idea that when you can explain something, it's not scary anymore. And that's how this whole thing was, to talk about... I mean, there's... argh! I loose words at this point. The simplest thing is to say that these things had nothing to do with each other.
JR: Just because you're Jews, or... I can see how that would be annoying.
AC: If the music could have related, if it were somehow haunted, and we could talk about-first of all, to do the talks before the music is insane, because people haven't heard the music. So what could they say? How can you really talk about the music then? And then, the music wasn't really informed by this. That was what was depressing for me. But when I look at it as a gig, it was a nice enough gig.
JR: How do you work with[inl GodCo?
AC: Well, with them you can work in different ways, like one thing is you come in and they have a bunch of different tracks laid down, they'll play them for you and then you record on that, or, I told you how I made "Childhood Daydreams...", Another way is just to make parts for previous songs, like learn their repertoire. They are very experimental in the way that they work, they're go everywhere from the construction of a song in the classical pop sense, in that you'll make a part for it, to that they have junk lying about, little phrases that they like, they like to do these little ehgh-ehgh-ehgh ehgh-ehgh-ehgh [Coleman loves to hum tunes to illustrate points -ed.] without any song attached to it, and then they say,, "what do you think it should be?" And then you can go "uh, I don't know. And then it could be that, taking these riffs that are attached to nothing and making something out of them. So they have about six different ways of working, they have ways where they have words and no music, or -yeah, it's interesting because they really don't have such a clear agenda, they'll work any kind of way. And they love the recording studio, they love to just play with lots of different stuff, and just pile it on, and if it works, and if not, they still have fifty more songs to try. So I've done things where I've gotten to know a track, and then laid a part down, other times, where I laid a part down without any idea of what is the track, like they say we re just going to play and if you come up with something, just play on it", and that's good too. But all those methods are cool.
Date created: 21 April 1996 Last modified: 12 June 1997