Fred Frith
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Fred Frith has substantially re-invented how the guitar is played. He has recorded with artists as diverse as The Residents, Brian Eno, Swans, Negativland, Amy Denio, Anthony Braxton, and Thomas Bloch. His many bands include Henry Cow, Massacre (who recently opened for Metallica) and Skeleton Crew (a band which involved electric-harpist Zeena Parkins, cellist Tom Cora, and Frith playing homemade drum sets with their feet at the same time as their other instruments). Frith's long term collaborations with John Zorn has included playing bass in his postmodern-thrash-cartoon band, Naked City.
Frith's numerous compositions include ensembles performing his photographs as musical scores, a piece composed for a "walking" orchestra which wanders through French towns, a symphonic piece based on the writings of Pablo Neruda, an opera for the Theatre du Point Aveugle and "15 unemployed rock musicians," and the score for Thomas Riedelsheimer's homage to Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, "Rivers and Tides." Frith's international nomadic encounters are the subject of Werner Penzel and Nicolas Humbert's award-winning film "Step Across The Border," and his work with profoundly deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie was captured in "Touch The Sound." This interview took place at Frith's home in Oakland, California during March 2002.
STEVE ELKINS: I'm fascinated by musicians, such as yourself, who have made a life out of making sure you have no idea what you're going to do when you get up on a stage. That kind of vocation, to allow audiences to witness your own struggle with yourself and your instrument, is not something most people would be comfortable with. And in fact, most popular music in our culture is precisely about the opposite struggle: to smooth out those wrinkles, to make musicians seem able to transcend all the imperfections we have to wrestle with in performance and life. How did you become interested in this thing we call "improvisation?"
FRED FRITH: Any child that has a little bit of musical talent, the way that you recognize their musical talent is because they improvise. It's not because they suddenly start playing Mozart on the piano. It's because they're fooling around, and you think "Wow, they can make stuff up and that's really cool." So actually, music comes from an impetus which is improvisational. And if you recognize in our society that a kid has got musical talent, you sign them up for music lessons. And the way that music lessons usually work is they try to basically make you read music, and forget all about improvising, and do what you're told. If you go into a classical education, all of that impetus to improvise will slowly dissolve to the point the when you're a highly trained, very skillful orchestral musician, professionally, you will believe that you can't improvise. As I've often encountered such people who say "I don't know how to improvise, it's not what I do." But they knew when they were four. They just forgot.
(LISTEN): Fred Frith Solo Guitar Improvisations (1996)
FRITH (cntd): So I've always been interested in improvising. But your question has a second meaning for me, which is the idea that improvising can be something special that we call "improvised music." I don't know what that term means to you, but for example, there's an improvised music called flamenco. There's an improvised music called raga. In Western culture, our idea of where improvised music came from is centered around the history of jazz. But that's gone in so many different directions and splintered up into so many different paths, that now there's a thing called "improvised music." And in a way, one of the reasons it was called improvised music is because it wanted to distance itself from jazz, in order to make clear that there's the possibility you can make stuff up and it doesn't have to be in that cultural, idiomatic framework.
(WATCH): Fred Frith In "Step Across The Border"
ELKINS: To what extent can improvisation truly be spontaneous and free? Don't you have to come to it with an "approach," and if so, has your approach changed over time?
FRITH: As an improviser, one of the things I've learned is that an approach is a dangerous thing to have. In the early days, it was necessary for me to plan. So if an "approach" is a plan, I suppose my approach was to decide what I would start with, and end with, and maybe figure out some good bits that would happen in between. And then I would get up on stage and basically try to do that. And it would all be in a language which was "improvisational." In other words, I had made it up at some point and it had worked. And I figured, well, if it worked before then that will be cool to incorporate. But that's not how improvisation actually works. In fact, you have to be completely open to the moment. And you have to be always in the space that you're in. And if you're not there, then you're not improvising. I was planning way too much, and as a result, nothing was really happening. It was a process of learning how to get rid of all that, and to be able to get up on stage not knowing what I was going to do, and be happy about it. Of course, I repeat myself in some sense, inasmuch as I have my vocabulary, I have my history, and my way of doing things. But in order to get on stage and feel completely receptive, I have to really not know anything about what's going to happen.
(LISTEN): Fred Frith — "No Birds" (From Guitar Solos, 1974)
ELKINS: Is this what led you into redefining how guitar can be played?
FRITH: There was a record called "Guitar Solos," which I made in 1974. At that point, Henry Cow had recently signed to Virgin Records, and as is typical of a major record company, they had decided that they wanted to have the guitarist make a solo record. They thought that rock guitar players should make solo records, because it's "cool." But they had no idea what they were getting into in my case.
I gave this to myself as a kind of challenge. I gave myself two weeks in which I would try to completely redefine for myself what I thought a guitar could do, and then I would go into a studio and record it. One of the things that came out of that period is that I started to experiment with laying guitars on the floor. What I started to discover, when I no longer had the guitar in the "playing" position, is that there were things you could do which no longer were concerned with gesture. Gesture, to me, seemed to be very important. Your playing gesture, the way in which you produce sound is tied to a whole bunch of assumptions about technique, and once you lose those assumptions, interesting things start to happen.
FRITH (cntd): One of the things I did for that record, was I laid two guitars flat on the ground, with their necks coming from opposite directions. So I had these two necks, which were basically like keyboards, and I started preparing them. I'd seen David Toop, who opened for Henry Cow at a concert in 1971, using alligator clips on his guitar. That led me into a whole thing about, if the alligator clip could produce a sound out of an electric guitar which sounds like a gong, then there must be all kinds of things you can do to a guitar, which are going to do comparably interesting things. So I started to try out everything. I used sticks, bits of glass, metal, springs, chains, and all the things which have become a part of my vocabulary ever since. Dropping things on the guitars came later.
I don't think anymore, when I'm playing a guitar with a paintbrush, or pouring rice on it, that there's anything unusual about it. It's just like using a pick for me. For somebody who's not used to this, seeing someone play a guitar with a paintbrush is kind of funny. And I have no desire for them not to find it funny. I mean, I don't want to impose any restrictions on how people react to what they perceive. But something I observed when I started performing solo concerts is the palpable relief that people feel when they understand that this is not going to be difficult. That they don't have to be genius to understand it. Because there is a lot of preconception about "new music" being cerebral, but once you come into a room and find that it's ok to laugh, that can be a very big relief, and I like that. The only problem is that once people start laughing, it's very difficult to get them to stop. You have to learn to project a certain kind of intensity, which creates a tension between the thing which they are finding funny, and make it also perhaps feel a little bit dangerous.
(LISTEN): Fred Frith Guitar Improvisations — Solos & Duos
ELKINS: You've been improvising for so long. What keeps it meaningful for you?
FRITH: André Previn once said something that I always liked, which is that, the difference between a piece of composed music and a piece of improvised music, is that, in the composed music, the score will always be better than the performance. It's a very interesting idea, the fact that you can never actually do a perfect performance of written music. It's just built in that there's going to be problems. You're always imposing something on a space. As a composer, if I go into a hall, a lot of the work is finding a way in which you can make that space work with what you want to do. In a rock band, it's even worse just trying to get it to sound right. I mean, when do you ever hear a good sounding rock concert? Almost never. It's a contradiction in terms. You just try to do the best that you can, but you're always constricted by the context in which you find yourself, and you're always trying to overcome it. With improvised music, it's completely the opposite. You walk into a space, and that space is what you are that day. So you accept everything, and you make out of that what comes out of that. Philosophically, it's a completely different place to come from.
(LISTEN): Fred Frith Guitar Quartet
FRITH (cntd): I think I was always terrified of jazz, because I would have had to be much more chops oriented. The idea of learning how to play be-bop solos in all the different keys never attracted me even for half a second. It seems like such an arid exercise. One of the reasons I've been engaged in so-called "free-improvisation" for so long, is because it is a way in which you can meet anybody, without needing a specialized vocabulary. I can play with Peter Brötzmann, like I did last night, or I can play with Ikue Mori, who has a totally different sensibility. There are so many improvisors out there coming from so many different perspectives...cultural, personal, whatever...and I like that you can achieve a vocabulary which allows you to dialogue with a huge variety of people, in a very easy-going and spontaneous way. You don't have to learn chops.
(LISTEN): Fred Frith + John Zorn
ELKINS: How do you judge if an improvisation is good or bad, if it's even possible?
FRITH: People always joke that there are no mistakes in improvised music, and it's true in a sense. An inexperienced improvisor is the one who you will notice when they think they made a mistake. For the experienced ones, it just becomes a part of the performance. You don't notice it, so it's not a mistake anymore. A mistake is something that goes on in your mind. It's when you decide to define an event as something that shouldn't have happened, when you can just as easily define it as something that happened that you have to deal with.
Let's not call them mistakes, let's call them unexpected events. They can actually lead to a completely different idea about technique. So if something happens that you don't expect, you have the choice to ignore it, in which case it becomes a mistake, if you like; or you can decide to incorporate it, in which case you start seeing what you can do with it, and maybe adding to it. Eventually, in the third case, that becomes something which you can produce on another occasion. So the thing that happened that you didn't expect, you've now learned how to make it happen when you want it to happen. And then, that becomes technique, because that's what technique is: it's when you produce an effect that you want to happen in any given moment. So mistakes can also become techniques in improvised music, and usually there's a dynamic relationship between all three of those stages going on all the time.
Fred Frith's "Massacre"
ELKINS: How do you approach teaching students to improvise, since it is essentially a gesture of personal freedom in which even perceived "mistakes" are embraced?
FRITH: Like any other kind of teaching, it's not so much about teaching people to do stuff as teaching them how to teach themselves to do stuff. I think that's the only effective way of teaching anything. The most important thing is to learn how to listen. And to listen critically within the context of doing it. I have a lot of incidental activities that I do with my ensemble here at Mills College, which have mostly to do with breaking down peoples ideas of who they are, and what they should be doing. Because especially musicians have a lot of ideas, even though they may be self-imposed, about what is and isn't music, and about what you should and shouldn't be doing, and what technique is, or isn't. In improvised music, you need to get rid of all of that really.
FRITH (cntd): And so, I have games that are designed to, first of all, help people to lose their inhibitions, and second, to stop worrying about what the others are thinking about them. Because I've discovered, working with very high-level classical players, like when I do improvised music with, for example, the Ensemble Modern, that the biggest single fear they have of improvising is what their peers are going to think of them while they're doing it. Even though these people have been working together for years, they're one of the crack ensembles of the world, and they can play anything brilliantly, but when they improvise, they feel completely vulnerable to each other. Now if they feel that way, then that must be kind of prevalent everywhere. The trick is to try to get people to get rid of that whole way of thinking, and remove all hierarchy from the situation, so that the people who appear to be technically good don't intimidate the people who are just beginners. Often, it's the beginners who are the better improvisors. They can just play what they feel and hear, and if you're keeping it simple, a beginner can probably do a much better job. You have to learn how to stop your hands from moving if you have a lot of technique, because when you have a lot of technique, you tend to want to use it all the time.
So I do exercises for the people who are really good, like tie one of their hands behind their back. That's a lie. I don't do that.
ELKINS: Maybe you should.
FRITH: Probably.
(WATCH): Fred Frith + Deaf Percussionist Evelyn Glennie In "Touch The Sound"
FRITH: Usually, when I start working with people, I make them put their instruments away, so that we're only working with the voice and the body. Because the instrument is a powerful statement, and it's a way in which you can impose yourself on other people. I think the first thing I want to do is get rid of that, and have people just react together as people, so they just have to deal with who they are, without the prop of technique or anything else. The second thing is that I try to do it at a very high speed, which means that nobody has time to think. You just have to react constantly. Of course, in the process of that, you make an absolute idiot of yourself. The lesson from that, is that actually that's really ok, and you're not going to get anywhere until you get to that point.
FRITH (cntd): There are other things I'm playing with where I'm giving people freedom, but for very limited amounts of time. That produces certain types of gestures which interest me. As with so many people, when you say "Improvise" to somebody, the first thing they'll do is immediately start doing something. One of the things I try to impress on people is that improvisation isn't filling a space, it's owning a space. If I say "Improvise" to a classical ensemble, they usually start playing anything, as fast as they can, as if to say "help!" And actually, all that is, is listening differently. So, from the moment when I say "start improvising," it's not necessary for anybody to play anything. They could all be quiet, and in fact, that would be a wonderful thing to do; and then start seeing what could happen. This is not about just doing something as soon as you're told to improvise, it's about changing the way that you listen to the space that you're in.
And if you try impose that kind of an instruction in a three-bar period, you immediately have a contradiction, because as a good improvisor, you'll be trying to listen, but you don't have time. So I like that kind of tension that's created by giving really top improvisors something which is going to mess with their heads a bit, so that they have to find solutions.
FRITH (cntd): I happened to be sitting on a plane, coming back from Australia, with an oboe player who turned out to be from Ensemble Modern, and we began talking. That's how my connection to Ensemble Modern began. It was by complete accident. She asked me to compose a piece for them. What I wrote for our first concert was a piece where what I wanted to do was take away the props that classical musicians normally have, which is a sense that you know what you're going to play when you get on stage. We developed a language consisting of improvisational gestures, so that by making a sign, I could get them to do certain things. Then there was pure improvisation, and there was also a wild card, who I would pick without telling anybody else. So right before we went on stage, I would take the cellist aside, for example, and say "you're the wild card today." That meant that they were free to go in and out of the notation. They could actually start improvising in any notated part without warning.
(LISTEN): Fred Frith On Bass In "Naked City"
FRITH (cntd): On top of this, the players had no idea what the order of the notated, or improvised, parts would be. They didn't even know which musicians would play what parts, no matter how we had rehearsed it. I improvised the structure of the piece through hand signals in real time during the concert. The order of events was absolutely spontaneous. So they were in a state of panic.
What was interesting was that at the concert we did after making a studio recording of the piece, the musicians had carefully taped together the different fragments of the score in the exact order of the recording, to make sure it would be exactly the same. So even after all this experience, when it came down to it, they were making absolutely sure that we could get something that they wouldn't have to worry about. So we had to do the order that we had on the record, which is not what the piece is about at all, but they wanted that security in the end. Which I always thought was fascinating after all the things we had been through.
"Rivers And Tides" (A Film About Andy Goldsworthy, With Music By Fred Frith)
(LISTEN): Fred Frith's Score For "Rivers & Tides"
ELKINS: It sounds like your pieces sometimes reveal underlying patterns in how people think. What are some of the other ways you've played with the tension between composition and improvisation?
FRITH: I have stacks and books of photographs that I take when I'm traveling, because I always get interested in recording what I see. I imagined what it would be like to look at some of the photographs as a musical score. For example, I had a photograph of a brick wall, and placed six musical staffs over the wall and had six musicians play whatever was in their own staff, which might have been what was in between the bricks, or the grass growing out of the cracks, or whatever, but they had to interpret it in a consistent way. I started to perform them. It was amazing what happened. You really have to start dealing with what the concept of a soloist is, and what an accompanist would do if you don't have a specific idiomatic idea, and also how time works.
I have another piece where each musician is allowed to make one short phrase in a ten-second period, which they invent spontaneously during the first ten seconds. I'm conducting, and we just repeat that ten seconds. Each time, they have to do exactly what they played the first time, in exactly the same place. Which sounds really simple. And it's amazing how people can't do that. Even the most highly trained musicians find it incredibly difficult to repeat something like that beyond three times.
(WATCH): Fred Frith & Friends In "Step Across The Border"
ELKINS: You've spent your life traveling around the world working with musicians from many cultures. Have you found that improvisational music has the ability to break through cultural and language barriers where genre-specific music is unable to?
FRITH: I think music in general is something that cuts across barriers. Not just music that is specifically improvisational, but then, in most cultures, music is improvisational. It's only western culture that kind of eradicated that. Even classical music used to have a high degree of improvised content, which has become ossified out of existence. I think that music is a critically important social communications medium worldwide.
One of the most moving things I heard all year was the sound of music coming across the radio in Afghanistan for the first time, after the Taliban had banned it, because in their version of Islamic culture, music is not allowed. The idea that a culture could be so barren as to not allow music is pretty heavy.
-Oakland, California
March 2002
Fred Frith Blowing Rice Through His Amplified Guitar Strings