These last two interviews explore a different facet of music’s relationship with painting. Whereas the preceding conversations have featured visual artists who have been inspired by music, here I talk with two musicians who have not only been influenced by the visual arts but have recorded CDs that relate to specific painters whom they greatly admire—Marty Ehrlich’s The Long View (2002) comprises music that he wrote for an exhibition of work by Oliver Jackson; Jane Ira Bloom’s Chasing Paint (2003) is her tribute to Jackson Pollock.
Multiple reeds and winds player Marty Ehrlich was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1955 and grew up in St. Louis, where he found early musical inspiration from that city’s Black Artists’ Group (BAG), especially from saxophonist Julius Hemphill, who became a mentor and friend.1 Ehrlich later studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where his teachers included Jaki Byard, Joe Maneri, and George Russell. He has recorded with many eminent musicians, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, and Andrew Hill, as well as leading his own groups, such as the Dark Woods Ensemble.
In the spring of 2000 he and painter Oliver Jackson (also from St. Louis and a founding member of BAG) were invited to Harvard to collaborate on a project—dedicated to Julius Hemphill—that involved Ehrlich writing and recording music to be played throughout an exhibition of new Jackson paintings in 2002–3. (Figures 14.1 and 14.2 are examples of Jackson’s work for that exhibition, to which he later gave the title The Garden Series.) The music was released on CD as The Long View.
I spoke with Marty Ehrlich in his apartment on New York’s Lower East Side in October 2003.
GL: I’d like to talk in particular about your relationship with Oliver Jackson and The Long View CD.2 You’ve written that his paintings have inspired you for many years. Can you say what it was about his work that first attracted you?
ME: I first saw Oliver’s paintings in St. Louis at somebody’s house. I think Julius [Hemphill] had some. And I met him through Julius in St. Louis and we became friends. I got a couple of his catalogues, early on, and when I said, would it be okay if I use one of your paintings for the CD I’m doing, he said, yeah, anytime, just call my gallery. So I’ve used his paintings on four, maybe five, records to this point, not including the collaboration of The Long View.
I think what Oliver’s paintings do for me…it’s a pretty visceral response, for the most part, and I think he’s a pretty visceral painter. I like the fact that there’s this combination of both a very painterly abstraction with some figurative, almost totemic figures. The human body is always there: he throws things in—masks, parts of bodies in motion. There’s something about the combination of the abstract and the figurative that has always resonated with me because of how I balance music, how I find the balance in my own music making, perhaps between the known and the not known. So I feel a certain kindredness compositionally with how he paints. But for the most part it’s a visceral thing; his paintings just grab me. Sometimes they’re narrative too; there’s definitely some kind of rite or ritual being enacted.3
GL: Do you see any changes in his work over the years?
ME: When we were in Boston two years ago, he gave a talk at an art school and showed about 100 slides of his paintings. It was amazing! I would say sort of yes and no. One thing I’ll say, at certain points he used very spare canvases, which I found really musical. They’re 60 to 70 percent unpainted.
GL: Why do you call that musical?
ME: There’s like a sense of space, you know, register…I could immediately feel a piece looking at them. At this point in time, he seems to be filling in the canvas a lot more. But there’s a great consistency to his paintings, as different as they can be; he has a tremendous compositional sense. He’s a very good sculptor as well.
Figure 14.1 Oliver L. Jackson, Garden Series IV. 2000. Mixed media on linen, 108 in. × 120 in. © Oliver L. Jackson. Photo: M. Lee Fatherree.
GL: Is his work very influenced by music?
ME: When we worked together, we were very clear not to make any literal connection. Other than that, I don’t know anyone more into music than Oliver. He lives with music, he paints with music, he sings along while he paints. The act of listening is very important to him. He’s old enough to have seen Charlie Parker as a young man, when Parker played with Jimmy Forrest in St. Louis—it’s still one of his seminal experiences.4
ME: He listens to a lot of classical music, a lot of jazz. He loves bebop. He listens to a lot of Julius …
GL: I haven’t seen many of Oliver’s paintings but they don’t seem to make direct reference to music. For example, the paintings with The Long View CD.
ME: There was no attempt to be referential or figurative or to say that this is that when we collaborated. We were very clear on that. And he doesn’t do that: he didn’t do that project to my music. My music was composed after he composed the paintings. Well, some of it was composed concurrently, but the music was not recorded until after he had done the paintings.
GL: Can you say a little about how that collaboration worked in practice?
ME: For me, it was a process of trying to figure out…the main struggle wasn’t so much content as pacing and a sense of space. We had taken on this idea that the music and the paintings would be concurrent in the same space, and for a long time I was hung up on the contradiction of that. Which is that a painting you see all the time, you see it in its totality, whereas music has to be experienced through time. So right there you have a big difference.
The other difference was that I, as a composer, had no control over the length of time someone at this gallery was going to listen. If I wrote a five-minute piece whose main import was how I went from the beginning to the end, I couldn’t depend on that to be the meaning because someone could walk in in the last twenty seconds or come in at the beginning and leave after two minutes.
Both of these things eventually became strengths to me but it took me a lot of meditating on them. The first one, I began to feel that the visual and the musical, though they were different because of the time factor, on some other level, perhaps more emotional and cognitive, they were more similar; that as you watched the visual, it changes—you are the time element. And even though you’re able to go back and refer to that corner of the painting you looked at, you also have at least a memory of the music. Most of us may not remember exactly, but we remember something. So I stopped thinking of that as a problem.
Then, with the pacing, I found that for me, there was a place I really believed in that was halfway between standard development and collage. And this was a place I felt very comfortable with as concert music, as just music, and it could also function. It felt like I’d found something that could exist with the paintings, without overwhelming them or simply accompanying them, and would also hold together as a pacing.
GL: How did the exhibition actually come together? You said Oliver did the paintings first?
ME: We were in residency together and he painted while I composed. And I did learn a lot from watching him paint. I then had to go through a certain struggle…as the collaboration continued, my ambition grew from writing just some overdubbed saxophone music in this little one-room closet they let me use at Harvard, to wanting to write very colorful scores for a lot of musicians. Eventually I was able to get funding to pull off the latter, so the collaboration helped me realize that I needed a much larger palette than I originally had at my disposal.
GL: When you say you learned a lot from watching Oliver paint, can you give some examples?
ME: Yeah. One thing about painting, you don’t start at the beginning and go to the end. He would paint in a circle, and I began to think that way. I began to put music before parts I was writing, after…I began to get a little freer in how I arranged parts of the score. I got less hung up on, like, I’m here and I have to immediately figure out what comes next. It freed me up to be more associative.5
Oliver and I really had faith that we were on the same page. I think there’s a certain bluesy element, but I don’t know how to describe that; it’s just a feeling I have. Oliver said, yeah, I really like that you’ve got some blues in there. But that was about it. We didn’t want to put any talk around it, where, like, you have to believe the talk.
GL: What about the fact that there are six paintings and six movements on the CD?
ME: I did end up doing six movements, but the movements don’t each reflect one painting. It’s not Pictures at an Exhibition.
GL: What I’d like to figure out is the relationship between the paintings, or the act of painting, and the music, or the act of making music. For example, when you were watching Oliver paint, did you then compose with that painting in mind? Was there any kind of synchronicity?
ME: Not at all. In fact, I hardly looked at the paintings after they were done. I wasn’t going for a John Cage–Merce Cunningham thing of no connection at all, I just felt that I knew what was happening and that I had to do my own work at that point. Which Oliver concurred with. Also, I wanted the music to have an integrity, because I didn’t know which painting someone will be looking at while the music’s playing.
GL: Is there an internal structure to the music? Are the pieces in a particular order?
ME: They are. I put them in order since it’s a CD; one could argue that they could go in a different order, but there’s a certain logic to how they are. The two outer movements are a little more big band-ish, fanfare-ish; the second and fifth movements are more rhapsodic and use a fair amount of space. The fourth is a little more edgy, improvisational. So there’s a shape to it.
The biggest difference between painting and music is less in the composing than in the production. In other words, Oliver himself does the paintings. One of my big fights with Harvard to get a bigger budget—I said, here’s Oliver, you’re acknowledging that he’s a great painter; I need to be able to do the music with great musicians; I need to come to New York and use musicians that I know well and can write for. Thankfully, they agreed.
GL: So was there anything about the paintings that influenced your choice of instrumentation?
ME: For me, it was feeling the breadth of what Oliver did; the expansive palette he used from painting to painting. I felt I needed a lot of musical color, and I ended up feeling that I wanted to touch a number of the instrumentations that I’ve written for over the years, that have been sort of signature things for me. The saxophone ensemble; the bass, cello, and sax movement, which is like my Dark Woods group; there’s a trio with Bobby Previte and Wayne Horvitz, two musicians I’ve worked with for many years, which is very improvisational. Writing for a brass quintet was a new idea. I got to use both Mark Dresser and Mark Helias on bass; I got to use Pheeroan akLaff, Mike Sarin…I got to do the Ellington thing of being able to write for certain individuals.
Figure 14.2. Oliver L. Jackson, Garden Series VI. 2000. Mixed media on linen, 108 in. × 132 in. © Oliver L. Jackson. Photo: M. Lee Fatherree.
GL: When people try to make links between jazz and other art forms, they often seem to focus on notions such as spontaneity and improvisation. I’m intrigued that you talk about Oliver’s painting and your music more in terms of composition.
ME: Well, I used two methods. Half of the music is through composed. That doesn’t mean there’s no improvisation, but there’s a lot of writing, you know, the backgrounds; like a more traditional approach, the events are worked out be forehand by me on paper—whether it’s a subsection that’s fully notated or a section with a single soloist—I’ve set the dramatic shape, the musical parameters.
Two of the movements were done in the opposite way, where I did a number of improvisations with different musicians in the studio and then I composed the piece afterward in the editing room, similar to how you make a film. This isn’t a new idea; people have been doing this with music since the tape recorder was invented. It’s one of the bases of experimental music. This is one place where Wayne Horvitz, as producer, was collaborating no small amount. Wayne has great ideas for this sort of thing and we kicked them about…Oh, we could change this around, put this here. So two of the movements were really put together in the editing and a number of things ended up on the cutting room floor, to use the film term.
GL: Was there a particular reason why you chose to use those two methods?
ME: This is something I feel from the paintings…there are different types of music you get through the two processes. I mean, they’re unified in many ways but they’re different in others. The composing tends to be a little more complex; the improvising, I tend toward very simple themes and then work from simplicity to complexity. I think it brought more emotional depth to the work, doing it both ways. I think the piece sort of meets in the middle: it doesn’t sound like a heavily composed, overly determined piece, yet at the same time it’s far from an open improv.
GL: When you watched Oliver paint, did you think his approach was both compositional and improvisational?
ME: I’m not sure. I never asked him how much he knows in advance. He doesn’t totally work it out before he paints it, that I know. And he’s made a lot of paintings, so I think he has a lot of faith. He’s going to trust his instincts.6
GL: To put this in a larger context, you’ve recorded Julius Hemphill’s piece “The Painter,” which he wrote for Oliver.7 Do you know how he came to write that piece?
ME: I know this—“The Painter” is a type of composition Julius wrote a couple of versions of. He liked those sprightly, almost triadic pieces; I think he thought it was colorful. It’s a great composition because it has both an immediate mood and it’s got some very subtle touches in it. That was dedicated to Oliver because they were very, very good friends. Oliver was in St. Louis at the beginning of the Black Artists Group and then, when he left to teach at Oberlin University at Ohio, Abdul Wadud was an undergraduate there, and Oliver called Julius and said, I got a cello player for you! He set up a concert for the two of them at Oberlin. That LP, Dogon A.D., is the first record of Julius and Abdul, so Oliver was sort of the midwife.
GL: I wanted to ask about the track “Fauve” on your Song CD.8Is that a reference to fauvism?
ME: I guess it is. It’s a pretty harmonic piece, and something about the harmony, the harmonic progressions I used, reminded me somehow of fauvism, which had a lot to do with really bright colors. Vivid contrasts in colors. I don’t mean to sound like I’m erudite or know about art history, ’cause I don’t know that much. [Laughs.] It’s a sort of layman’s knowledge of art.
GL: Have you ever played a painting? You know, performed live with a painter?
ME: Yeah, a little. [Sighs.] I was not into that. That isn’t what I think it’s about: doing it in real time. I’m not interested in that happening at the same time, the playing and the painting.
GL: You prefer to have time to absorb the painting?
ME: I guess so. I think it’s more about internalizing. I think I’d stand in front of the painting and still close my eyes. I don’t look at a painting as a musical score: whatever the relationship is between music and painting, it happens on a deeper level than the literal. What I don’t want is to imply that it’s literal, which that kind of event does. Or can.
Jane Ira Bloom is unusual among jazz saxophonists, both in focusing exclusively on the soprano saxophone and in that she has developed a personal system of
electronics with which to expand and modify her saxophone language. The first musician to be commissioned by the NASA Fine Arts program, she may also be the only saxophonist to have had an asteroid named after her.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1955, she spent time at Berklee and Yale before moving to New York in the late 1970s, where she studied with George Coleman. She has led her own ensembles for more than twenty-five years (members have included Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Julian Priester, and Kenny Wheeler) and she is a prolific composer as well as an improviser. Long inspired by painters, and especially by Jackson Pollock, she devoted her 2003 Chasing Paint CD to a musical exploration of her thoughts about, and responses to, Pollock and his work.
Our interview took place in New York City in October 2003.
GL: There was a track called “Jackson Pollock” on Second Wind,9 which is an early recording of yours from 1980, so I assume Pollock in particular and painting in general have long been influences on your music.
JIB: I’ve always been a visual thinker. I was quite young, I think, when I first saw a Pollock; it was probably in the early ’70s. I went to a museum and saw a real canvas, and when I looked at his work, it’s like I could hear it. I don’t know any other way to describe it. Some people see Pollock’s work as chaotic and disorienting—absolutely not for me. It looks supremely musical and rhythmic and full of movement, which is kind of a signature interest of mine. I just understood it, I don’t know why.
So it began early on and that track, which is on one of my first albums, was the beginning of my musical journey thinking about Pollock. If you look at my recordings, you’ll notice that pretty much all of them have one piece that’s referring to him or to a painting of his. Finally I got the idea to do a whole larger work about him, which is Chasing Paint.
GL: I’d like to come back to that. But you’ve also done pieces on other painters, so is the response you just described specific to Pollock or are you similarly attracted by many painters?
JIB: Pollock definitely has a special connection for me. But going to museums and feeling moved by very particular visual images…Van Gogh, Miró, Chagall. It’s hard for me to put into words, but those impulses, those feelings I get when I look at those painters…I always feel very at home.
GL: Yes, those kinds of connections…I don’t think there’s a language for it.
JIB: No, there isn’t. You can talk on paper about translating one medium into another, but in an artist’s mind it all swirls around in what feels like the same place. Which probably makes it very hard to write about. [Laughs.]
GL: Well, let’s try to talk, at least. You have a track titled “Chagall” on The Red Quartets CD and a track titled “Miró” on the Art and Aviation CD.10 What were the musical differences in your responses to those painters?
JIB: Chagall was very much about watercolor, and if you want to make parallels to the music there’s a great deal of sustain and harmonic sustain and color shift that I was interested in there. As for the “Miró,” I think probably the salient feeling going on in that work was about unpredictable spontaneity: melodic motifs, rhythmic ideas that can’t be anticipated and that have a very playful sense about how they’re placed in space. I guess that’s the best way I can describe that.
I used the color palette of my electronic spectrum to speak that Miró language. In the Chagall piece, I had more interest in sweeping and movement of sound, physical movement of sound past microphones, so you could feel the spread. The Miró, although it also has motion in it, had a more extreme, more extensive palette of sonic color.
GL: In each case, you link them with another song: “Chagall” with “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Miró” with “Straight, No Chaser.” Is that because you get similar feelings listening to Monk, say, and looking at Miró?
JIB: Yeah! I tried to imagine what would happen if Thelonious Monk had met Joan Miró. [Laughs.] They would have had a lot in common to talk about; musically and artistically. That was my idea for the piece. It’s hard, you know, asking a musician to explain themselves—that’ll never happen. But these connections go on in your head and you allow them to flow freely.
GL: One quality you mentioned in reference to Miró was playfulness, which is something that Monk has too.
JIB: Absolutely. He has a brilliant sense of humor.
GL: Are those the kind of links you had in mind?
JIB: I guess so. We’re just talking on a conscious level here; we’re not talking about all the layers and tendrils of thoughts and ideas about these artists that go beyond what I’m talking about. There are many, many more layers to it than we can talk about.
GL: Oh, I agree, but what we can talk about, let’s talk about it. You said when you saw that first Pollock you could almost hear it: did you have the same kind of feeling looking at Chagall or Miró?
JIB: When I set about to write those pieces, they were so clear to me, they each had their own feel about them. But this pull—it feels to me like a pull—so that I gravitated toward Pollock…I think I’m not the first improviser to have felt kinship to his spontaneity, his movement, the physicality of his work. Ornette Coleman and many other improvisers before me have found a likeness there.11
I’m trying to remember sitting in this wonderful room in the Museum of Modern Art. They used to have a room with all of his canvases; you go in and these giant Pollock canvases surround you. It was so exciting!
GL: I’ve seen a few Pollocks and I thought the movement, the vibrancy, was amazing. You can get lost in them.
JIB: Absolutely. And the arcing, sweeping techniques that he used in his action painting, the drips of paint, that is so synonymous with the kind of music I use in my playing to create changes in sound. I take the bell of the soprano saxophone and I’m swooping it, to create those Doppler-like effects, of different velocities, in different directions: 90 degrees, 180 degrees, 360 degrees. I’ve spent time thinking about that idea and even translating that idea into other instruments, other brass instruments, into orchestral writing, into how I think about my jazz quartet. Throwing sound around!
GL: I wondered about that. It seems to me Pollock builds up textures, he layers textures, and a musical equivalent might be overdubbing. But you don’t do that, do you?
JIB: No, I don’t use overdubbing. Try to imagine, though, if you have a quartet of musicians, try to imagine them as four paintbrushes—it’s not just me.
GL: But they’re playing simultaneously, whereas he can make layers, build up textures.
JIB: Well, for example, the compositions on Chasing Paint, they communicate to the other musicians a certain musical direction, a springboard for the imagination.12 They don’t dictate but they give some hints or clues of directions to move in, and I think that’s what compels certain choices that the other musicians will make in creating everybody’s simultaneous painting. In that sense, I, as the composer, do have an involvement in the textures of what’s being created, if not quite in the same way as a painter.
But not overdubbing…I guess my interest in him is not imitative in that way. It’s compelled by more of a feeling response. And, in translating that feeling into my own musical language, I’m not trying to re-create a Jackson Pollock by any means. God, I wish I could! But in allowing the thought and feeling and inspiration that I feel from his work to flow through me and what I do, something else comes out.
GL: You said your compositions on Chasing Paint provided the springboard: was there anything specifically different about those compositions?
JIB: There were a couple of things on a personal musical level that they did that other works of mine hadn’t done. One was…hmmm…over the years I’ve been very interested in a different kind of melodic motion, lines that have a different kind of movement and flow, not just strict eighth notes and such but things that accelerate and decelerate and use unusual patterns. The music, the lines, you hear on Chasing Paint, I felt as if these lines were pushing that interest and spreading those melodic ideas intervallicly and register-wise throughout the whole ensemble. If you listen to the piece “Chasing Paint,” the line begins way at the bottom of the register and it’s passed around through the entire ensemble and it’s like all of us are swirling the paint. [Laughs.] In a much larger, more expansive way than I had ever done previously.
Also, one thing I found particularly fascinating about Pollock was learning about his method, allowing his intuition…thinking about a painting for a long period of time and then just doing it. There’s a piece on Chasing Paint called “Alchemy.” I had been thinking about that painting and looking at it and the piece came about by me sitting at a piano one day, turning on a tape recorder, and just seeing what came out. What came out was that line, which I transcribed and then wrote for the ensemble. It came from a different layer of thought process because it wasn’t the kind of line that you can sit and erase and try to make perfect; it was a complete flow, and I don’t know where it came from. That for me was quite new, because I often like to work at the compositions, finesse them. This wasn’t like that at all, it just—whoosh!—came out.
Something else: the simultaneity. Many times composers will write a piece of music with all the parts lining up vertically, right? In many of the compositions on Chasing Paint, there are a lot of parts being played and, in terms of the bass and saxophone lines, those were written completely horizontally; they were not written as if they would line up on a vertical pole but more as if I knew they would work together. I just wrote them and we played them together simultaneously and [snaps fingers]—they just worked. For me, that was a new process.
GL: This was all inspired by Pollock?
JIB: Yeah, I think he was inspiring me. [Laughs.] I think so. More imagistically, I can think of the recording of “Blue Poles” on Sometimes the Magic, that was another composition that flowed from me sitting at the piano one day and out came that line.13 You hear the bass functioning almost like the poles in the painting, playing those double stops…again, it was the same process. It was more compelled by a visual idea than by a lined-up musical one. It just felt right, and it worked better: so that was visually inspired.
GL: The track “Five Full Fathoms” on The Red Quartets, is that a Pollock reference?
JIB: Yes, I just reversed the title Full Fathom Five. That was one of the canvases I remember seeing at the Museum of Modern Art. That track was a new technique for me too. In the post-production of that album, we got kind of creative with the panning of the sound. If you have headphones on, when you hear the full ensemble improvising, you’ll hear the piano starting here, then sweeping to there; the saxophone starting a sound in one ear then winding up in the other. Had I had more spatial miking we could have done a lot more. But it was an experiment with trying to impart a three-dimensional quality to the sound, so as you listen the sound would move; each of the instruments and their lines would move in your aural field.
GL: Have you performed Chasing Paint live?
JIB: We premiered the piece at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas, in front of Jackson Pollock’s Canvas #6: it was right behind us on the bandstand. They didn’t have the canvases I reference on the CD. I wish they had but it was fortunate that the people in Houston were so forthcoming because most museums will not let you get anywhere near their paintings. Especially a bunch of musicians giving a concert.
That concert also involved a kind of spatial speaker system: it was a fascinating concert. They put a couple of Lee Krasner’s paintings out at the side too.
GL: How did the spatial speaker system work?
JIB: I happened to have a very creative sound designer at the concert, who, during particular moments of the improvisation, would spin the sounds. The audience was surrounded by four, five, six speakers. I don’t know if he had a joystick or what, but as you can imagine he was a creative part of the ensemble, taking what we were playing and panning it spatially through the speaker system. People got quite a thrill sitting there listening to the sound swirling around in, like, a 360-degree aural field. It was so exciting! I’d love to do more concerts like that. I dream about it! Doing concerts with dimensional sound. [Laughs.] Space is the place, as you know.
GL: [Laughs.] Indeed. Can I ask how you chose which paintings to reference on Chasing Paint? Most of the titles refer either to Pollock himself or to specific paintings by him, don’t they?
JIB: They’re just the paintings I love to look at. Some of the titles are references to ideas. Let’s see, there’s “Alchemy,” “White Light,” “Reflections of the Big Dipper”…hmm. “Unexpected Light” is just a thought, it’s not a particular painting, although when we performed the music I had color Xeroxes of the paintings on everybody’s stands. Part of the playing of the music was looking at reproductions of the images and one of the images, though it’s not directly referenced, was Canvas #1. It’s one of the canvases I’m particularly fond of, an old favorite of mine. It’s one of the most evocative drip paintings, very fluent.
“Many Wonders,” that’s also a thought, more a feeling about him. I had been reading about Pollock and I think it was a reaction to so much of what is popularly known and written about him; the tragedy of his life, you know, the alcohol, all of that. “Many Wonders” tried to look underneath that at the man; what it must have taken inside him to compel all those beautiful paintings, despite the tragedy, the mental problems he had to deal with. I guess he wasn’t a well man; but it was kind of looking closer to the core of him, because I do feel those paintings are beautiful.
GL: The pictures you gave to the musicians, you asked them to look at those when they were improvising?
JIB: Absolutely. That’s as much a part of the information that they’re thinking about, or being in, as the music. After a while, it became less specific. It’s just something for their imaginations.
GL: Was there any talk about the kinds of things you might want in the improvisations or did everyone just relate to the paintings in their own way?
JIB: There was talk, yeah. A lot of times there was discussion about how the quality of the improvisations would be different. Because the compositions were looking at different aspects of the paintings, at different paintings, so they couldn’t all be alike; they had to have something unique about them, and we would talk about that, the different directions to take. But remember these are people I’ve been working with for years: you know, Mark [Dresser], Bobby [Previte], and Fred [Hersch] are all mature composers and improvisers in their own right. You can say something and they’re absolutely right there: not a stretch. I mean, Bobby’s done his own project on Miró, as you know.14
GL: When you say you were looking at different aspects of the paintings, can you explain that in a little more detail?
JIB: I’m trying to remember the rehearsals. If you listen to the kind of rubato way we work with the harmonic and melodic information on the tunes “Chasing Paint” and “White Light,” at first glance the lines have a similar sort of motion and flow, and they do have some harmonic material that we’re referencing when we play the pieces, but if you listen you can hear the way we approach those two pieces is quite different. The density, maybe a reference more to the fractal—have you thought very much about the fractal? [Laughs.]
GL: Me? No, not at all. [Laughs.]
JIB: I’ve read some fascinating things about the fractal content of Pollock’s paintings, and the density of “White Light” is quite a different matter from the density level we’re dealing with in “Chasing Paint.”15 I’m talking about the collective improvisations that we were doing. There was a definite feel for how that was different.
And sometimes the compositions, the music itself, communicated: because of the intervals, the way that the melody moved, the harmonics, the musical material itself communicated something very different, about what to play.
GL: When Jackson Pollock did his paintings, he often listened to jazz—but fairly early jazz: swing, New Orleans,…
JIB: I think he liked Billie Holiday: that’s good taste!16
GL: I think it’s fascinating that this music was inspiring his paintings and his paintings then inspired your music. When you were writing Chasing Paint, did you think at all about what he had listened to? Was that a factor?
JIB: No, no. I know many painters and most of them listen to music when they paint. And sometimes when I’m at the piano, I have a lot of art books and stuff, pictures, on my piano. It’s just the way the artistic force swirls around.
GL: Do you paint too?
JIB: I wish! I take photographs. I’m an amateur photographer. I have several photographs around my apartment that look like what I wish I could paint like. They’re very abstract uses of light: I photograph light reflections on water. They make beautiful…like abstract paintings. You know the photographs in The Red Quartets CD? They’re mine; that’s the kind of stuff I’m interested in. If I could paint, those images are close to what I wish I could paint like.
GL: You mentioned earlier “throwing sound around” in your orchestral writing. Was this a piece for big band?
JIB: For symphony orchestra. For soprano saxophone, improvisers, and symphony orchestra. It’s a piece called “Einstein’s Red/Blue Universe”; it’s a fifteen-, sixteen-minute piece where I experimented with translating this rather intuitive movement that I’ve told you about in my playing to whole sections of orchestral instruments.17 Try to imagine a whole trumpet section or a French horn section or a trombone section or the woodwind section standing and moving the bells of their instruments in unison to create these Doppleresque sounds en masse. At different velocities, creating changes in the timbre. We premiered it at Carnegie Hall and we had twelve of the brass players up on the highest balconies, so we were also swirling the sound, spatially. It only happened once, but it was something!
GL: You also said earlier that you were a visual thinker. Apart from painting, are there any other visual influences in your music?
JIB: Oh, absolutely. I wouldn’t say it was only visual imagery but there was a lot of visual input that I got when I was commissioned to write music for NASA.
GL: This is the Art and Aviation CD?
JIB: Yeah, although there are things that preceded that CD, and that came afterward, that were still very much inspired by that experience. I had special access to many of the NASA facilities around the country, including the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, which is where all the imagery from the deep space probes comes. I got a wonderful close-hand tour and had access to a lot of NASA imagery, things that were just coming in, photographs of galaxies, all kinds of things that compelled my imagination when I was writing that music. It makes me think too…music feels more like a spiral than a sphere.
Tangential to that work, I began doing concerts in planetariums. We did this four or five times at the National Aerospace Museum in Washington; they have the Einstein Planetarium and the director is quite hip. He was interested in improvising light shows while I was improvising with the jazz ensemble. If you imagine, the audience is listening to music while they’re watching a star projection show that’s being improvised to the music. That was fascinating. And the musicians as well were looking at star projections moving around us as we were playing; so again there was a cross-flow of ideas from the visual to the musical.
Oh, I don’t know if you read this; recently they found out that there’s a vibration in the universe, emanating from black holes, that resonates at B flat—but like thousands of times lower than we can ever hear.
GL: Like a real deep B flat blues? The universe is singing the blues?
JIB: Yeah. It’s some energy that’s emanating from black holes. You pick up things like that from NASA. [Laughs.] But it’s in B flat. The universe is resonating in B flat!
To see all of Oliver Jackson’s Garden Series paintings (courtesy of Oliver Jackson), and to hear both Marty Ehrlich’s “Movement V, ” from his The Long View CD (courtesy of Marty Ehrlich and Enja Records), and Jane Ira Bloom’s “Blue Poles,” from her Sometimes the Magic CD (courtesy of Jane Ira Bloom), please go to the Hearing Eye Web site at http://www.oup.com/us/thehearingeye.
1. For more on the origins of the Black Artists’ Group, see Benjamin Looker, Point from Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2004).
2. Marty Ehrlich, The Long View (Enja ENJ-9452–2, 2002). The documentation for the CD features two Oliver Jackson paintings from the 2002–3 exhibition at Harvard. Though untitled at the time, these have since been named Garden Series III (the foldout) and Garden Series IV (on the back). (All six of the Garden Series paintings can be seen on the Hearing Eye Web site.)
3. For more on Oliver Jackson, see Diane Roby, “Oliver Jackson: On Making,” International Review of African American Art 13.3 (1996): 50–57, and Jan Butterfield, “Interview,” in Oliver Jackson, ed. Joyce Brewster, exhibition catalogue (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1982), 23–29.
4. “A musician knows when he is losing the attention of his audience right away.…Working with musicians taught me about the whole matter of time in a painting, the need to eliminate the dead spots, the parts that don’t move. From musicians, I learned how to get into a painting, to find an opening. And the most important thing you learn from the best musicians is: just play the tune. There are some tunes, certain thematic ideas, that call for lots of notes and speed and intricacy. Others have to be done with very few, and very simply. The same is true of a painting.” Oliver Jackson, quoted in Thomas Albright, “Oliver Jackson,” in Brewster, Oliver Jackson, exhibition catalogue, 7.
5. In the CD notes Ehrlich writes, “I began working backwards and forwards in composing the musical images, much as I had observed Oliver paint, his large canvases stretched on the floor, moving in a circle around the emerging visual images.” A little later, after explaining there was no direct correlation between the paintings and the music, he adds, “My compulsion was to give expression to the place where beauties that should not be forgotten and beauties that have yet to be imagined collide, coexist, and transform.” Marty Ehrlich, “Composer’s Notes,” Long View, n.p.
6. “The business about ‘spontaneity’ is kind of a joke. Because things come quickly they call it spontaneity. It’s ridiculous—how it comes is not the point. If it comes over a period of 50 years and it’s right it will seem spontaneous—it will seem harmonious and effortless like your arm to your shoulder. Being able to act out of faith—that may be a better statement than spontaneity, which gives the idea of that which comes out of nowhere. If you work a long time in any field, what looks like spontaneity is just an absolute intimacy with the materials, and that you can have faith. You have this extraordinary faith.” Oliver Jackson, quoted in Roby, “Oliver Jackson,” 57.
7. “The Painter” has been recorded at least twice by Marty Ehrlich and his Dark Woods Ensemble, on Emergency Peace (New World Counter Currents 80409–2, 1991) and Live Wood (Music & Arts CD-986, 1997), the latter of which has a 1985 Oliver Jackson ink drawing entitled Intaglio Drypoint II on the insert cover. The composer’s own recording of “The Painter” is on Julius Hemphill, Dogon A.D., LP (1972; reissue, Arista Freedom 1028, 1977).
8. Marty Ehrlich, Song (Enja ENJ-93962, 2001).
9. Jane Ira Bloom, Second Wind, LP (Outline Records OTL-138, 1980).
10. Jane Ira Bloom, The Red Quartets (Arabesque Jazz AJ0144, 1999) and Art and Aviation (Arabesque Jazz AJ0107, 1992). An earlier version of “Miró” is on Bloom, Slalom (1988; reissue, Koch Jazz KOC 3–7827–2, 1996).
11. Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking 1961 LP Free Jazz featured Pollock’s White Light painting on the sleeve. This may have been the record company’s choice rather than Coleman’s, given that he later said it was the company that had proposed Free Jazz as a title and used it against his wishes. However, Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones, did report in 1963 that “Coleman has…stated that he thought his playing had some rapport with Pollock’s work.” See LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 234.
12. Jane Ira Bloom, Chasing Paint: Jane Ira Bloom Meets Jackson Pollock (Arabesque Jazz AJ 0158, 2003). The insert features a reproduction of Pollock’s Arabesque.
13. Jane Ira Bloom, Sometimes the Magic (Arabesque Jazz AJ 0155, 2001). You can hear this track on the Hearing Eye Web site.
14. Bobby Previte, The 23 Constellations of Joan Miró (Tzadik TZ 7072, 2001). Bloom plays on several tracks on this CD.
15. As well as the performance on Chasing Paint, a later version of “White Light,” recorded in July 2004, can be heard on Bloom’s Like Silver, Like Song CD (ArtistShare 0007, 2005).
16. The Museum of Modern Art issued a CD comprising seventeen tracks apparently selected from Jackson Pollock’s record collection: Jackson Pollock—Jazz (MoMA MM101, 1998). The artists featured were Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, T-Bone Walker, and Fats Waller. Two speculative accounts of how jazz may have influenced Pollock’s painting are Andrew Kagan’s 1979 essay, “Improvisations: Notes on Pollock and Jazz,” reprinted in Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, ed. Helen A. Harrison (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), 163–73; and Chad Mandeles, “Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Structural Parallels,” Art Magazine (October 1981): 139–41.
17. A quartet version of a brief extract from this work can be heard on Bloom, Red Quartets.
Brewster, Joyce, ed. Oliver Jackson. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1982.
Bloom, Jane Ira. Art and Aviation. Arabesque Jazz AJ0107, 1992.
———. Chasing Paint: Jane Ira Bloom Meets Jackson Pollock. Arabesque Jazz AJ0158, 2003.
———. Like Silver, Like Song. ArtistShare 0007, 2005.
———. The Red Quartets. Arabesque Jazz AJ0144, 1999.
———. Second Wind. LP. Outline Records OTL-138, 1980.
———. Slalom. 1988. Reissue, Koch Jazz KOC 3–7827–2, 1996.
———. Sometimes the Magic. Arabesque Jazz AJ0155, 2001.
Ehrlich, Marty. The Long View. Enja ENJ-9452–2, 2002.
———. Song. Enja ENJ-93962, 2001.
Ehrlich, Marty, & the Dark Woods Ensemble. Emergency Peace. New World Counter Currents 80409–2, 1991.
———. Live Wood. Music & Arts CD-986, 1997.
Hemphill, Julius. Dogon A.D. LP. 1972. Reissue, Arista Freedom 1028, 1977.
Jackson Pollock—Jazz. MoMA MM101, 1998.
Previte, Bobby. The 23 Constellations of Joan Miró. Tzadik TZ 7072, 2001.
Albright, Thomas. “Oliver Jackson.” In Brewster, Oliver Jackson. Exhibition catalogue. 6–8.
Butterfield, Jan. “Interview.” In Brewster, Oliver Jackson. Exhibition catalogue. 23–29.
Ehrlich, Marty. “Composer’s Notes.” CD insert notes. In Ehrlich, The Long View, n.p.
Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow, 1963.
Kagan, Andrew. “Improvisations: Notes on Pollock and Jazz.” 1979. Reprinted in Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock. Ed. Helen A. Harrison. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000. 163–73.
Looker, Benjamin. Point from Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2004.
Mandeles, Chad. “Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Structural Parallels.” Arts Magazine (October 1981): 139–41.
Roby, Diane. “Oliver Jackson: On Making.” International Review of African American Art 13.3 (1996): 50–57.