Peter KowaldAfter the session with Brötzmann, and the time alone on

Olympus with a traditional meal of grape leaves stuffed with rice, olives, lamb, and red wine, and the time flying above the Wupper-Rhine on the wings of thought, I made to leave my horse to his own realm of time on earth…but then he asked me not to, he invited me further into himself and that realm.

With many such vessels, I'd have ignored this gesture as the froth of passion, nothing I could trust them to really sustain…but Heffley had proven himself by now, at least so far as to make a risk on MY part a viable, if not necessarily guaranteed, proposition. The worst that can happen with any such invitation gone awry is an incident of "madness," something potentially destructive and harmful, infernal rather than divine, making fools orworse out of both the "human" and the "god;" the worst that would happen with a reliable horse was nothing more than benign, innocuous failure of inspiration, inconsequential or even invisible to his fellows and his world. That is the worse that would happen with Heffley; the best would be real edification for all concerned, including ME.

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Time, moment, and song as a fall of Heaven to Earth look very different than they do as a fall from same to same.

I went with him back to Kowald's place, settled into the flesh of his evening, the bones of its time's momentsand flows, the flesh of his flesh, as it cycled through its rhythms into fatigue and sleep; I shone and flexed MYbeing throughout his dreams that night, making them events he would remember as uncannily more than dreams for the rest of his life. By morning he was literally a new man—and one no longer a "he" to MY "I," but simply I myself, Heffley Himself.

Such incarnations are not so rare, but remain extraordinary, of course, however many "times" they occur. The payoff to the horse is obvious—deliverance from the mundane and incomplete to the fulfillment and perfection of the body in time on earth; but the joy for the rider is no step down, either. Cosmic heights have their charm, but their abstract nature yearns for concrete form as sharply as that flesh lusts for their wisdom and insight. The independence of the peak from thevalley is its freedom, but if it lacks at least a touch of connection it is death. The complete immersion and intermingling possible between god and human, orishi and

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horse, is not merely life but the fullness of its richestfertility.

Olympus, then, was behind "us" as height distinct from earth; step by step, "our" descent together traced the continuum of ground beneath "our" feet that bridged peak and valley. "We" (as the divinely righted kings used to say) were ready for action…

Fig. 7.1: Peter Brötzmann, Sven-Åke Johansson, Peter Kowald, Wuppertal, 1966; photo by C. Brötzmann.

Because the figure of Brötzmann abides in the vertical, the Northern European tumbling strain, the ecstasy of the moment, his place in Olympus comes throughhis heights on other peaks. The figure of Kowald is no stranger to those heights (nor, certainly, to Olympus's own), but he doesn't abide so much as visit, and leave to

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cover other ground, and do both so as to have many views of both peaks and valleys. He is as much flow as moment, and as much sweeping horizon as ascension.

Brötzmann is the painter, but Kowald's own associationswith the world of visual images make him and his work theeasier to (literally) depict in print. In their beginnings as the two Wuppertal players who would cofoundFMP, Brötzmann was the older, the new family man with a job, the strong player with a definite style—but Kowald, of the three pictured above, is the one I would have guessed for that role. His face signals alertness and determination, hunger, a man with a plan on the move; that intensity, like Brötzmann's cool, endures in his maturity.

Cut from 1966 to 1997. The visual medium remains important to Kowald himself; his two-book, one-video, one-CD package Ort (Place, in production during my fieldwork, documenting the 365 days of Kowald's fiftieth year, throughout which he restricted himself to only those places he could reach from his home on foot or withhis three-wheeled bicycle [with its bass-friendly basket]) is thick with photos of musicians, dancers, artists at work or conversing. Sehen Sehen (See See) is nothing but such photos, and the one on its cover, of Kowald in his prime, befits one granted such honors as

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the 1996 Albert Mangelsdorff Prize, that "best German Jazz Musician" award (including 25,000DM) from the Union of German Jazz Musicians; it could as well be captioned "Uncle Peter," as his New York friend and fellow bassist William Parker's wife Patsy affectionately calls him. If Brötzmann is the "father" of German free jazz, we can make a case for Kowald as its uncle, or brother.

The "place" Ort refers to is more specific than the local community, and as more emotionally evocative in German than English as the word Heimat (homeland): the word "Ort" is engraved on a brass plate fastened on the wall by the front door of Kowald's home, a three-story house on the Luisenstraße he bought in the early 1970s for peanuts because it was so run-down. The work to restore it was monumental in the early days for one with little money to hire it done, and enough time to do it himself. Now it's comfortable and pleasing to the eye, but still in process; Kowald and fellow workers were remodeling during my visit.

The first floor contains the work spaces for both Kowald and his wife Ireni. Her space is the biggest—high-ceilinged, big studio, paintings hung and leaning againstwalls, room to work and view things from various distances and angles. Kowald's space is an office-like room off the studio, crammed with piles of books, LPs,

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tapes, instruments, and a computer and fax machine on hisdesk. Ireni's studio was where he gave the weekly concerts and workshops, often with guests such as Butch Morris, Evan Parker, Joelle Léandre, Sainkho Namtchylakand other FMP artists visiting from far and wide, for hisneighbors and local students and fans.

Coming of Age Old

Kowald is something of an elder statesman at this pointin his life—decidedly not a self-involved bad boy who never grew up—but he brings to that role an edge and intensity that, according to him, has been a long time coming, and promises a youthful old age.

"I would say that I was something of a late bloomer," he tells me over our coffee at Tante Luise. "Also my psychology was maybe more that of a sideman than a leader. I was 17 when I met Brötzmann, and he was 20; he was already working with Nam June Paik as an assistant here for some projects. I was still like a schoolboy, andhe was like a big brother, even a father figure for me atthe time; he knew what he was called to do already then, I didn't yet. He was a man who would put himself right out on the front line. If you see the paintings he did at20, they still look very good. So at 20 he was already a very mature person, and I wasn't."

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Kowald's impromptu summary of his history with groups paints him as the perfect personality type for the oft-noted European organizational preference for collective bands, in contrast to the individualistic leader-sideman constructs more typical of American groups (to say nothing of the fit such a personality is with the traditionally supportive role of the bassist in jazz).

"The trio with Pierre"—Favre—"and Irène"—Schweizer, from 1968-69—"was more of a collective group," he says, "but I have to say that again I was the youngest in that group. Then I started playing with von Schlippenbach in both Globe Unity projects and in the quartet"—1973-78—"but still I felt more or less like a sideman. The quintet I led"—1970-72—"was an exception to the norm, andI gave it up largely because it was too early to do my own projects; they still lacked conviction.

"The first of my own projects was the trio with Leo Smith and Baby Sommer in '79. It was my choice of people;it was still basically a collective group, and we gave ita collective name. So I guess I'm not so much of a bandleader type anyway, to this day, even though I've hadmy own groups for a long time."

A glance at Kowald's resumé nonetheless reveals the strength and maturity that can issue from such a personality: collaborations with a vast network of well-

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known players, poets, painters and dancers from America, Asia, Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia, Russia, and Europe; recording projects such as Duos (1992 FMP #, a 3-LP/1-CD set of short impromptu duets with thirty different instrumentalists/vocalists from Europe, Japan, and the U.S.); ongoing collaborations with a few of thesecombinations, including the Siberian singer Sainkho Namtchylak, the Global Village group of improvisers from Asia, America, and Europe; and a pattern of art activism that results in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural formations and organizations devoted to presenting and promoting their products, such as the Sound Unity Festival and Musicians Coop he set up in New York with fellow bassist (often Cecil Taylor's) and friend, WilliamParker. By comparison, the approach of a strong leader always forming groups and statements around his own personality and concept would conceivably miss a lot of ground Kowald has covered, even broken, for the music.

Think Local, Act GlobalJoseph Beuys, in that line of thinking, called the

Social Sculpture the only art work he really wanted to establish, knowing that all people alive are the content of a coherent culture. His slogan was "Everybody is an artist." He added, "we are all as aperson part of the ancient past. The theory of reincarnation is convinced about our repeated participation in the historical process. The

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individual therefore has to create itself anew into the current time frame."

Louwrien Wijers (A&D 1993: 7)

Kowald's words to Noglik (1981: 442-43) show how long this sense of the global wedded to the local has held hisimagination:

There are in almost all parts of the world musicians who have come to improvisation through thenew jazz we play. They bring something from their own native idioms, but musical and regional differences begin to melt together in the music. I'mnot talking about some forced fusion of jazz and folk musics, but rather a common future built from the ground floor of similar essential experiences with improvisation. I am also convinced that in our time the biggest problem is no longer one of isolation, but—and this goes for other arts and culture in general, as well as music—losing ourselves in some sort of global, international scene.

His words to me sixteen years later echo this concern, one that has only grown through time. (It became a point of fascination to me in many of my interviews, as I noticed such recent cross-cultural, pan-global collaborations in the activities of those—Brötzmann, von Schlippenbach, Gumpert, Sommer—whose recording careers had initially defined their voices and statements as peculiarly, even narrowly, German/European.)

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I ask him about a trip to Africa he had mentioned. It was an exchange of mostly visual artists organized by an African painter who had come to Wuppertal to study with German painter Joseph Beuys.1 Kowald was the only musician, with four German artists, who lived in a West African village for two-and-a-half months in 1992 to workwith five artists there; the following year, the five came to Wuppertal.

"I draw a little bit, so I did some drawings there too,but I played with different people, a kora player and twodrummers, and a singer regularly. They tried to teach me all these rhythms, and I couldn't learn them," he laughs,"but I didn't say no. It took awhile for us to get to a point of trust, after which we arrived where I wanted to arrive, which was for me to be able to do my thing and let them do theirs, and organize it only in terms of whento start and stop and roughly what to do—and it worked, in the end; we did a concert or two, and it worked out. Ididn't have to leave my material and they didn't have to leave theirs…

"I have a group called the Global Village, after the Marshall MacLuhan term. Sainkho is one of the best

1. A major artist who came out of the Fluxus group. SeeA&D's (51-69) piece by Paik on Beuys for a glimpse of himand his work closest to this study.

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examples from that group of this co-creative concept.2 There are different people from Japan too, and from Greece, and from anywhere, in the theory that people growup in their tradition—but Sainkho is an interesting example because you can see it so obviously in her life. Her grandparents were still nomads. Both of her parents were already teachers, so she grew up with the music there in Mongolia, then she studied and learned some other things—but her early life, in her twenties, she wassinging Tuvan folk songs, going on tour with four other women. Then at a point she went to Moscow and met other people and left the folk song. But now when she improvises with us—she's now part of the family, okay? She left the folk song, but she brought all the stuff she

2. Sainkho Namtchlyak has, since this interview, expanded into the World Music/New Age market, with her CDTearing Down Borders (Musicworks CD68, 1997). Kowald wrote onher FMP debut recording's liner notes (Lost Rivers, 1991)—themselves his own meaty little ethnography of Tuvan music and culture—"in the cultural history of the Occident (from Heraklitos to Fluxus, the exceptions provethe tendency), the image of floating and letting go is rather unpopular; instead, there is an attitude of takingapart, cutting into pieces, separating, analysing, specialising. I consider it good and right that there is room in us for waiving feeling and willing thinking. I find it essential that there is proper (and not properly at all) floating between these two."

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learned in it, except for that local form, to our improvised music.

"It's the same with the Japanese shakuhachi player who starts to improvise: he leaves the local folk song but brings the techniques and vocabulary. Or an African drummer, or a bandoneon player from Argentina—they all leave the traditional local forms behind and come into the open situation of free improvisation, basically, and then they make the step into modernity—die Moderne, we say—they make the step into the twentieth century, somehow.

"I mean, I don't mind folk songs, they're fine; let's just say that if you leave the folk song—what Sainkho brought, all the throat singing, the shamanistic breathing, all that is still there, but not in its original context. She plays with Butch Morris on this record we did [When the Sun is Out you Don't See the Stars, FMP 1990]; the first night they played together she did her stuff and Butch did his, and it works. This is wonderful to me, this is really wonderful. That's how I believe it works. It's a method that could be something of a model, of how people can come from different cultures, differentareas, with different characters, with all of that, and they bring what they bring, and it's okay—just throw it together with the other stuff, and it works. After just a

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little bit of figuring out how it works together, then itdoes."

Listen to CD 7/4, tracks 41-52"I remember when I was in school, at about 15, we had a

good teacher. We talked about philosophy or something, Hegel, I think. He told a story about a very tall, thin man and a round, fat man; they were friends, and they were walking on this bridge. I remember exactly this image from this philosophical discussion. There was a question of how could they really come together? They were friends, but so different. One student said, 'the fatter one should get thinner and the thin one should getfatter.' The teacher said no, everybody should stay what they are; that is their best chance to come together, as what they really are." Kowald laughs at the memory.

"I remember that from school, so many years ago, because it's exactly what it's about when you improvise together. You come from different cultures and bring the stuff from each of them, and just do it. That makes another global village, not the Coca-Cola global village."

"And it's also not the world music beat," I venture."Yeah, right, because Peter Gabriel has one groove and

three chords for everybody. That's okay, but it's pop

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music, and also it makes it such a soup, I think. Here it's possible to have the mix without making it a soup."

We met German musicologist Markus Müller in Chapter Four. His liner notes for Kowald's CD with Namtchylak speak to the dance between the Old and the New we're sketching throughout this study. He discusses the relatively recent discipline of Anthropology (Ethnomusicology's cousin), specifically through the workof Aby Warburg (Hamburg, 1866-1929) with Native Americans, as the West's way of reconnecting with the primal in its own culture. He cites Warburg:

"I didn't yet realize that this journey to America would give me such a clear insight into the organic connection between the art and religion of these primitive tribes as to enable me to see primitive man's identity or indestructability…which remain the same throughout all ages…so distinctly as to be able to rediscover them, not only in the culture of the early Florentine renaissance, but also later in the German reformation" (my emphasis). Müller:

Warburg asks himself: How do linguistic or artisticexpression develop, which feelings or criteria, conscious or unconscious, govern the way in which theyare stored in the archives of the mind, and are there certain laws which control their precipitation and re-emergence?

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Generally, Müller discusses the CD's music not so much as "free" improvisation between disparate cultures as an interaction grounded in, disciplined to, an organic, primal unity.

Greece the BridgeWe Greeks belong politically, of course, to the

Occident. We are part of Europe, part of the Westernworld, but at the same time Greece was never only that. There was always the oriental side which occupied an imortant place in the Greek spirit. Throughout antiquity oriental values were assimilated. There exists an oriental side in the Greek which should not be neglected.

—Odysseus Elytis (in Ivask 1975: 14)

This "think-local-act-global" cosmopolitanism began with Kowald's youthful passion for things Greek, awakenedby both positive and negative aspects of coming up German. The positive: his education at Wuppertal's "classical" high school, right around the corner from where we sit, where he took nine years of Latin and six years of ancient Greek languages, through literature. Theschool had an exchange program with a sister school in Athens, and Kowald's family hosted a Greek student, whosefamily hosted him in turn.

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"Spiros came, he's a little older than me," he recalls."Then when I was sixteen, he invited me to his family andI fell in love with his sister. I learned Greek very quickly," he laughs, "so when I was seventeen I could speak relatively fluent modern Greek, and then I studied it after I finished high school. Then I translated rebetiko

songs into German, and a lot of poetry."Besides this amazing genre that has been called "Greek

blues,"3 the sheerly instrumental music of the improvising rural clarinetists caught the young musician's ear; he "would bring a record here and there for Peter [Brötzmann], because he liked them too, these clarinet players with the kind of low, Johnny Dodds sound." These musical affinities have led over time to aninvolvement with Greek musicians with whom, along with his fellow FMP artist from East Germany, Günter Sommer, Kowald has virtually generated an improvised music scene in Greece.

"There was the junta in Greece until '77, and I didn't go for awhile. In '77 I went again, as a tourist, met some musicians, and there was a jazz club in Athens at the time, a legendary place because everybody from

3. Created by war refugees, it is depicted dramaticallyin Rembetiko: The Birth of Greek Blues (director Costa Ferris, 1983, New York Film Annex), winner of Filmfest Berlin's 1984 Silver Bear Award.

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everywhere played there, as well as the Greek musicians. The guy who runs it is still my friend. So I played a solo there, and all these Greek people came, and then somehow the Greek thing from my youth and the world of contemporary jazz—two things very far apart in my life—suddenly they came together. And then the trio with Baby Sommer and Leo Smith had a tour there, and a duo with Evan once; then a Greek jazz magazine started up, and talked about the stuff and so on. Now it's nice; I play continually in Greece."4

The relationship extends from the music to the language, and even the love life (both begun in that formative adolescence). Married since 1990, Kowald and Ireni have a second home on her parents' property in

4. A similar transmission of scene took place in Siberia, through Kowald's collaboration with Sainkho: "She took me to Tuva; I did two trans-Siberian tours withher by train. We went up to the Japanese sea.…She was married to an Austrian then, who played the bass clarinetand saxophone with us; there was a percussionist for one tour . . . and so I played in her home town, and all her uncles and family came, all the throat singers came. As Ihear now, it must have been a legendary concert, because now there are Tuva singers who play Tuva rock, and Tuva improvised music, and Sainkho gets their records and tells me, 'Yes, this one was at our concert.' Because this concert kind of did something to the whole communityof musicians there; there are not so many."

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Greece, where time is spent as liberally as here. And Kowald (whom Jost told me is a wizard at learning new languages, and whose home library rivals his record shelves in terms of intellectual breadth and depth) studied Greek philology at the university in Bonn, and has translated the work of modern Greek poets for German readers, including Nobel prizewinner Odysseus Elytis and Lenin prizewinner Yannis Ritsos, both also personal friends.5

Recalling my readings about the relationship between language and music, I ask him to comment on the connection or lack thereof between linguistic and musicalfacility; he confirms anecdotally the notion of homological similarity, but not shared neural process.

"Well, I don't know if there's that much connection, I must say. I know I learn languages in many ways by ear, more than in an analytical way. But I think many people do that. And I've known musicians who have great difficulty learning languages, but they're great musicians."

5. Keeley (1999) offers Greek studies a timely look at their body of work, conveying its update of the spirit ofancient Greek myth as well as its move from the shadow ofsame—a view that resonates with mine of FMP, particularlyKowald's work.

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I probe further from the base of background readings, this time from those on ancient Greece's role in shaping ancient West, and how it might be updated by whatever musical or other creative dynamic here is current.

"What's interesting to me about this is," I begin, "first there's the history of the European free jazz statement, getting America out of the way, all German, all European; but then it goes on to make these connections with Africa and Japan and Greece and Siberia and so on. So what's emerging is a real concrete picture of how the global village works and how the local situation works with it; you've explained that very well.

"But… "—probing—"it seems to me that the more I look into people trying to make something that is new to them,it takes them back into the depths of time, to the old, in their own sphere. What interests me with you is your relationship with Greek culture, simply because in a way Greece is the source of Western culture." I leave it hanging there, wide open, general, ambiguous: the perfecthole for anyone who really has his shovel full to fill…

"Greece is the bridge," he says. "I remember learning in school that it started in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then it went to Greece, and then it spread out to what wecall Western civilization. But since the Ottoman Empire, Greece is the bridge between Europe and the Far East.

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"I talk to my wife, and to the brother of my wife, and all the young people. They are not so happy with Europe, because they say Europe is too European, so they feel likea bridge, too, between the East, the Orient, and West. Greek music, Greek food, Greek daily life all has a lot to do with Turkey—even though they don't like that," he laughs; "it has to do with it a lot. But it's not as Turkish as Turkey is, so it's the bridge. Then you go to Persia and so on; so Greece is from this side the bridge,and that's what I'm interested in, because it has a lot of Eastern qualities, that extend to Japan. The whole East starts in Greece, through Turkey, Persia, India, andthen it goes to China and Japan—or it doesn't go to, it came from there, but from this point the East starts in Greece."

I suddenly have a picture I never had before: Western Europe on a geo-cultural as much as geographical (though not geopolitical) continuum extending to the East Coast of Eurasia, akin to the American West Coast's connection to its own East Coast. Obvious enough, but segmented in my own mind more radically discretely until this point inmy education. I'm engaged…

"The whole idea of a thing just standing there in the world being itself, like the music, without being manipulated or mediated so much, is still strong when you

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read ancient Greek philosophers," I say (I was reading Heidegger's musings on Greece at the time). "Before the West started, you get this sense of that. That's what I see happening in the music a lot, here from Europe and also black American music and thinking and so on, there'sthis big concern with where all this came from, and what we should get back to somehow."

"Also, I've always liked Socrates more than Plato," Kowald adds, "and I've always liked the fragments of the pre-Socratic writers I've read, like Heraclitus. So even in the ancient writers you have that dichotomy between the more Eastern and the more analytical thinkers.

"I always remembered John Cage saying that he wasn't too interested in music as a conversation. I always try to keep that in mind—but still, the way our music is… there is a lot of storytelling in it. Even so much as being a

method of performance.6 All these questions are not conclusively answered, I think.

"We see that other cultures, when they talk about important questions of wisdom, a lot of them do it

6. My emphasis; we will meet this idea again in the manI came to see as Kowald's East German counterpart in manyways, Günter Sommer. It suggests the real language-music connection as lying not in neural processes or homological links, but in narrative, or rather that part of the human organism dynamically organized by narrative.

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through telling a story. Europe, or, let's say, Western civilization, has developed this analytical mind where you don't necessarily have to tell a story in order to talk about something. And that's very close to what we talked about before"—[ahead, in this text]—"in the difference between Jon Zorn and Rashid Ali. I don't want to say that Jon Zorn is just an analytical player, or that Rashid Ali is just a storyteller; it's not that limited. But still, it clears the picture to say it this way. And I want to say that I try to be a combination of both, again."

(The "again" refers to this earlier exchange: "I translated this interview you did with Bert Noglik, and Iremember you saying something about wanting to play between two poles, which you described as the vertical and horizontal."

"Yes. I always thought that someone like Monk was a vertical player, you know; and that someone like, say, Wynton Kelly is more of a horizontal player. It has to dowith thinking. The melody is characterized by a horizontal aspect, in terms of the variety of its flow. And then the harmonic structure, that complexity, strikesme as vertical. Maybe it just comes out of the way the music is written on a page."

"But also in the rhythm, no?"

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"Yes, but in the rhythm it can be all at the same time,I think. In a sense, maybe Herbie Nichols was one of the ones who did both at the same time; he was a very melodicplayer and interestingly conscious about the vertical side of it too."

"So do you feel like you've developed them since that interview?"

"I don't think I ever got these two aspects really together. Sometimes I say in interviews that I want to play simple and complex at the same time. This is one of those contradictions that may never resolve, but it remains a good ideal. Sometimes I even simplify things now more, sometimes even near stupidity at a point. At the same time, I like to follow it with really complex material.")

America the Bridge Burnt, then Rebuilt

The relationship with American jazz has been as problematic in its own way as that with Western civilization as a whole, in terms of achieving healthy individuation. Kowald is a good source for this phase from FMP's first hour Emanzipation, because he is the one who articulated it with phrases such as Kaputtspielphase and"father-killing." The "fathers" in America's case included both European- and African-American aspects of

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the music and culture: the white side was the same Western diatonic tradition the FMP players were leaving behind in their own European culture, plus whatever particular musicians had been emulated for their mastery of that tradition in jazz terms; and the black side was whatever was peculiarly African in the American mix, an identity that could only be learned from, not drawn directly out of German musical/cultural soil.

"I remember in the studio we did a lot of things we'd never done, like playing with knives on the table, tapping," Kowald says. "So in this way I thought we did something of our own; but at the same time I remember thinking myself—I don't know if everyone else thought this—that I wondered if it would fulfill American standards… I think many of us wouldn't say that out loud;there was a point when we said we didn't want to be beholden to America—'father-killing,' as they say in psychology—so at that time it was still not clear.…I remember when we played in Donaueschinger in '66 or '67 with Globe Unity: Shepp was there, with Beaver Harris, a very good band, two trombones, Roswell Rudd and Grachan Monchur, Jimmy Garrison; they played after us. I think everybody admired Shepp in a way we wouldn't do now. I mean, we were still the young Europeans looking up to them, even if we didn't admit it, we did… I guess it's

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really normalized now. But those were phases of emancipation; you have to kill your father for awhile, ortell him to leave you alone. In the late '60s, early '70s, step by step we did that."

Of course, that is the same thing black Americans did with white musical culture to come up with jazz itself, and with advances in it all along the way.

"Let me go back for a minute to Machine Gun and that period," I say. "You gave me a good explanation of the GUO experience. For the smaller groups, and the records that came from them that have become classics, was there a feeling in you at the time of the kill-the-American-father thing, of leaving America aside for something better?"

"I remember when we played with Machine Gun, that band played live first," he says. "So we played in Frankfurt in the festival. And I think Jeanne Lee played with Gunter there, and she liked us, I remember that; and Lee Konitz was sitting in the audience, and he came up after the concert, and he liked it. So I wouldn't say we… it was more the feeling that we got respect from establishedAmericans somehow, like Lee Konitz was. We didn't expect him to like Machine Gun, but he did. Maybe he was just being nice, but I think he was really interested in the movement of the late '60s and stuff, so he was open."

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"So maybe you had a connection. Once you stepped out ona limb and killed the father, if the father says, yeah, it's okay, then maybe it's…"

"Well, it was two things at once. You still admired theAmerican musicians, but you also were saying you didn't need them. Very normal father relationship."

"But the expression of your own music, once you got to that point: especially now that you've gone so long with it, what is it that you find in this music that you don'tfind in American music?"

"Well, I must say there were two people who were very important to me after the early experience with Brötzmannand everything, and that was Han Bennink and Derek [Bailey]. Han regularly, because he played in the trio with Brötzmann at the time—and that trio was a great trio, with Fred Van Hove and Bennink—and Brötzmann invited Derek sometimes. They did some really great music; I remember leaving concerts really very emotionally touched, deeply, yes."

"In a way that was unique to European identity?""Yes. I must say, now, that thinking about it, it was

really European music, and it really touched me sometimes. It was crazy, you couldn't believe it."

"Is that one of the main reasons you were just able to be free and open it up?"

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"Yes.""And it was a different—no hint of trying to play like

Americans. That was what was good about it.""No, it wasn't just that it was reactive—it was its own

self—if you talk about it theoretically I guess you wouldsay that we were developing our own territory, but you wouldn't think about that American thing all the time."

"I guess what I'm trying to figure out is," I push, "…it's obvious what happens on a human level; it's obvious from the recordings what happens on the musical level, you can hear it there; but when your experience as a European or German who has learned the music through American jazz and European classical tradition, or through art or poetry or the other things you do—then allof the sudden you have a music that works uniquely for you…what is new there, what in the consciousness is new? Did it sing something about your historical experience here, or what?"

In response to that, Kowald backs into his own personalhistory in America.

"The developments were very organic. They didn't happenovernight, so the consciousness developed slowly too. I had a secret criteria in myself for many years back then,which was: would Cecil Taylor like to play with me?" A search for a figure to replace the fathers who couldn't

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be trusted, or had to be killed? "That lingered for a long time, until the late '70s or early '80s. Then I wentto New York in the early '80s a few times, and then I applied for a fellowship here in Germany to go to New York, in '82, then '83, then I got it in '84. … So at that time I wanted very much to go to America and play with musicians there. I had met a few people—Billy Bangs,John Betsch, and Marilyn Crispell, with her quartet in '83, we had a long tour here—and then I played with different people in New York here and there when I visited.

"Then, even still in the '80s some musicians said theydidn't want anything to do with the Americans. But by thelate '70s I decided I wanted to collaborate with some of the people, and I was not in a position that I was asked by Americans to play with them. Here and there I did; I played with Marion Brown for a couple of concerts in the late '60s, and then Jeanne Lee for a couple of times; shewas living in Europe, but then she married Gunter [Hampel] and so on, so they did their stuff. But then I was not in a position that many Americans would ask me todo tours with them or something—like Han Bennink was, forexample, he worked with a lot of Americans on European tours at the time: Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins and others.

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"I heard Leo Smith at the Moers Festival, I think in '77 or '78," he recalls, "then I asked him if he wanted to do something with me. He said yes. Then I had since the early '70s a friendship with Baby Sommer who was far away, in Dresden—because Dresden was further away than America, in a

sense, because you could not go into the country, and you couldn't bring him

out, either, until '78..... But then I started to play with Leo Smith, and then he invited me over for a few times in theearly '80s, '81; he lived in Connecticut then, and we dida tour in Canada then, and a tour in a trio to the south,to Carolina and Virginia and places like that."

"That was your first time in America?""Yeah."Listen to CD 7/3, track 1-2FMP as a whole lies solidly in the tradition of

European support for American musicians and music, by providing performance and recording work; Kowald is the only FMP musician I met who has had a similar impact as an individual through money he's attracted and invested in his American colleagues.7

7. My interview with William Parker revealed a situtation the latter would like to see change: an overreliance of American players on Europe. He reaffirmedthe current live-and-well status of this longstanding condition, stating that any American musician working in this scene has to work mostly in Europe and Japan to make

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"When I got the fellowship, at that time I was friends with A.R. Penck, the painter. He made a lot of money. In '83 the Sonnabend Gallery from New York called me up and said, 'Next week we have a Penck show, do you want to play for the opening?' I said okay. They said, 'How much do you want?' I said 3000 marks—1000 for travel, 1000 to spend in New York, and 1000 to bring home. I went to New York and played this opening, with Penck—he played piano and drums and stuff, and Billy Bangs played. The whole show was sold out, for a million marks that night, Penk'swork. Every painting, nothing left. Then I knew I had notasked for enough money," he laughs.

"So Penck sold very well at that time, and he had a lotof money, like some painters have. Then in November '83 Iknew that I would get the fellowship for February '84 to start to go to New York, and he came to Wuppertal and I told him I had the fellowship to go for one year to New York—wonderful—and he said, what are you going to do there? I said I have a lot of friends I can play with.

any money at all. Parker would like to see Americans shore up their own scene enough not only to work mostly at home, but also to host cultural exchanges with the Europeans that would equal the conditions they offer Americans. As it is, Americans always go to Europe at Europe's expense, and Europeans always come to America attheir own.

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'Ah, bullshit,' he said. He pulled out fifty thousand marks and gave it to me and said, 'You have to do something.'

"I got together with William Parker and we did the first Sound Unity Festival with that money. Then William and I talked a lot about the possibilities for this moneyin the Lower East Side. We decided I would not use the the money for myself, but use it to organize a big event for many musicians who would not normally play so much inNew York."

A two-hour documentary film, Rising Tones Cross (visit www.shef.ac.uk/misc/rec/ps/efi/video/rising.html), presented a picture of New York, the Europeans (includingBrötzmann, Irène Schweizer, and Rüdiger Carl) who joined Kowald for what would be called the Sound Unity Festival.Kowald's relationship with William Parker, dating from 1982, is a personal friendship, a meeting of minds between fellow bassists, and, of most general import, a transatlantic link between activists serving a common aesthetic vision and interdisciplinary grassroots arts community. The spirit of self-definition/production/promotion that spawned FMP itself is ongoing in Kowald's initiatives of this sort.

"Since you started working with Leo Smith and William Parker," I ask, "have you had many conversations about

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the difference between the American and European traditions of improvising?"

"Yes, there have been quite a few," he says. "William is a very open person. I stayed in the same building for months—he found me a sublet in his building, so we were very near each other, and spent a lot of time together, working on the festival and so on. We spoke about the need for musicians to organize things for themselves, which we were doing with the Sound Unity Festival. But also that kind of attitude.

"I told him we played in Wuppertal in the cellar for a year-and-a-half before the first person came to listen. We found out that many things, even with Wuppertal and New York being so different, had the same kind of social context. Except for the attitudes of the musicians tryingto keep it up, New York being New York, of course; but wehad a lot of understanding about that."

Perhaps the most interesting collaboration with an American player, in terms of the dynamic on both sides ofracial and national identity for individuation and recalibration of the formerly unbalanced relationship, has been with saxophonist Charles Gayle.

"Just when I went to New York there was a little festival at Sweet Basil's at the time, Music as an Open Sky, featuring a different group every night for two

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weeks," says Kowald. "Right after I arrived they had thisfestival, so I heard a different group every night: Geri Allen, Frank Lowe's band, and Sonny Murray's band with Grachan Monchur—and Charles Gayle. I really loved his music, but when he left the place late at night I didn't feel like speaking to him. But I thought about him for weeks, and then I called Grachan Monchur, because Charlesdidn't have a telephone at the time. Grachan told me to call a certain newspaper stand in Brooklyn, and they'd tell him. I left my number with a woman there, and the next day Charles called me.

"He came to my apartment upstairs from William Parker, the next day in the morning, at 8:30. He was playing in Times Square from 7 to 8:30, then he came to my house. Heplayed in the morning while people went to work; he does that still. I told him we were doing the festival, introduced him to William; I told him we were having a series of duos every Sunday at the Live Café, and that I would like to play a duo with him. He didn't say yes or no. He told me later what happened. He went back to Brooklyn and told his fellows that there was a German bass player who wanted to play with him, and what should he do?" he laughs. "It was really funny."

"What was that about?"

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"Well, he had never played with white people before. Hewas in a kind of hardcore political thing, a black consciousness thing in Brooklyn he was a part of; nothingvery organized or public, but it was there."

"So they gave him permission to play with you?""Well, I think there was one woman, I never met her,

and a drummer whom I met, who were his two main people toask about it. I mean, he wasn't a man who had to ask others what to do, that wasn't the issue; it was just an unusual idea for him—that a bass player from Germany would ask him to do a duo. But then he said yes.

"The Live Café is on Tompkins Square, and I knew this because concerts had happened there in the early years when I went to New York , but at that time nothing had happened. When I went there with William, I said we woulddo a festival for two months, and we wanted to have a little concert every Sunday night. They said, 'Well, we haven't had this music for awhile here because nobody organized it, but if you come for a program for two months, wonderful.' Billy Bangs was a little angry; he said, 'We've been asking for a gig there for months, and then you come from Germany and you motherfucker get two months.'" Laughter.

"It's the same as when the Americans came to Europe, yeah?"

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"Yeah, and it's also that we gave them a full program for eight Sundays. So William played with Masahiko Kono, Jon Zorn played with Wayne Horvitz, Jimmy Lyons played with Karen Broca, and I played with Charles Gayle. That concert was wonderful. I think for the first time we justplayed. We started to play, and then looked, and it was anice concert. A couple of his buddies were there and theyliked it too. They didn't expect a German bass player to play so far out, I think.

"Then we did more things with Charles Gayle. I brought him to Europe that summer, and we had a few things here."(The recording Touchin' on Trane, with Rashid Ali, Gayle, andWilliam Parker, is one of FMP's best sellers.)

Economic politics was one area that proved difficult inthis trans-Atlantic alliance. In the end, European socialism prevailed over American capitalism, to general approval—for a moment.

"We decided that each musician, whether famous or not, would get the same money," says Kowald. "And I remember William nearly crying, because it was so hard to keep that up with New York musicians. They said, 'What are these people doing to me?' I remember some people gave usa very hard time because they wanted, as bandleaders, more money than the rest of the band. We said if you playwith eight people you get $800; if you play with three

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people, you get $300. It was a European system we had practiced in Berlin and Wuppertal. William liked the idea; I think in the end—I mean even Don Cherry played for $100, and Ed Blackwell and people like that. So some people understood and others didn't. In the end, everybody was happy that it worked out like that, becausenobody could say, how much did you get?"

"Have you continued to operate this way?""No, we did the second one in '86 or '87, and we didn't

keep that up. Couldn't, maybe, anyway.""And Penck financed that one too?""Yes. Now, William and Patsy [William's wife] are

finding money; the one where you and I met last year, at the Learning Alliance, they financed. It's not called Sound Unity any more, but it's the same concept."8

Form as Time Informed

Cut from there (early) in our conversation to the following (later); take in stride references to things said you may not yet have read—all will sort itself out in the end. Cut so, because the following follows directly better for comprehension's sake. It does so in the roundabout way it resolves the tension between

8. It is now the Vision festival, a full week or so each year in New York City.

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Germania (best understood in this context as the generally grandiose: the father to be killed, the West, America, empire, tradition, Big Ideas) and Germanity (thelocal, the individual, humbler gestures) by conceiving, in music and art, the former as symptomatic of a youth reckless by virtue of its fascination with the big and powerful (youth's New, the eternally springing desire to storm the Big House), and the latter grounded more than that recklessness in an even keener spontaneity by virtueof a riper wisdom (maturity's Old) that is both more impressed and more comfortable with the close, human scale.

Kowald has been expressing to me the difficulty with which he has developed the feel for timing in jazz Americans call swing. For him, the vertical and horizontal axes in music figure more in rhythm than in pitch relations, the horizontal being the flow of time asconceived in swing or similarly metered rhythmic patterns(eg., march music), and the vertical being rhythmic gestures, like accents, conceived more as moments outsideor imposed on such a flow.9 I call up, as I did with

9. Moving still further back, he told Noglik in 1981: "I speak sometimes of horizontal and vertical playing; I don't mean the difference between melodic and harmonic aspects, but rather that between a continuous and discrete rhythmic flow, or an unfolding of sounds rather

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Brötzmann, a line from my interview with the Wuppertalians' East German colleague that looms large formy study.

"Günter Sommer said something that was interesting to me along these lines, about how he noticed this too, withAmerican drummers and the feel of time and everything—but

than pitches. Coltrane is an example of wholly horizontalflow; drummer Milford Graves tends more to the vertical, as do Eric Dolphy and Monk. Among the bassists, the DutchMaarten van Regteren Altena is a prime example of one whohas broken most decidedly from the traditional jazz feeling of continual pulse. I wish to be able to move back and forth between both at will, without getting hung up in either one. I would alsolike to move back and forth between playing within very complex structures, like Barry Guy, and very simple playing. In fact, I would like my style to really be a synthesis of those two sets of poles."

He told me: "What concerns me is the mechanical aspect involved in just keeping quiet between phrases, to make them flow as they should—timing, I guess. It's much more difficult, for all Europeans.…I think very few players are good at it. I even think, as much as I admire him, that Derek Bailey hasn't got great timing. I think Misha is maybe very good at it. But also with the drummers, it's difficult; a really hip drummer here is not so easy to find.…I don't think Dennis Charles is the most fantastic drummer in terms of technique, but he has this little thing he does, a wonderful thing, and it's very hard to find someone who has that here. It has to do withthe way certain people sound on the drums. Dennis Charles, Ed Blackwell, Rashid, they don't beat hard. They

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he thought while they had a very sophisticated sense of doing that, they had a less sophisticated sense of, as hesaid it, improvising form."

"Yes, that's true," Kowald agrees instantly."In a way, it's the vertical-horizontal thing you talk

about, and it sounds to me like what you just said is that you struggle with the horizontal more; but the thingthat you do master is tied up somehow with this sense of the structure of time, your ability to know when forty-five minutes has passed. That seems to me like a skill with form."

"Yeah, like an umbrella over the flow or something, yes," he says. "And also I'm always aware of my solo having formal aspects, even if I improvise. But there aresome people—Jerome Cooper, a drummer in New York, used tobe a man who was very conscious about form in that way. Maybe, in a sense, Milford [Graves] is, because I heard asolo concert and he was very clear, too.

"It's interesting; I think Andrew Cyrille is a fantastic improviser, because when you go on tour with him, he never does the same thing. He never starts the second night the way he started the first. Rashid Ali is not such a great improviser in that sense, but then he has this wonderful thing he does, and he always does

play intense. Andrew Cyrille beats harder."

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that. I love it. So everybody there is very different, aseverybody here is very different.

"But that's right, there's a certain aspect of form, with people like Ellington, and Monk, and George Russell,and Ornette, maybe, that they have been aware of—but thena lot of musicians who play in their bands are not so aware of it. But it is maybe more of a European structuretoo, which is yet another sense of form."

"How do you think of it when you think in terms of American jazz history, and the fact that most European jazz fans have been more interested in the African-American than European-American music?"

"That's not necessarily true, if you look at the festivals—David Murray and Cecil Taylor, from that side, and Elliot Sharp and Jon Zorn from the other side. I followed that a bit too, in New York, because it was interesting to me, the way Jon Zorn worked in the mid-'80s, because I liked his radical aspect of how to treat the music. He was able to make cuts. William Parker, by contrast, would do something continuous, to make up a long form, but when Jon Zorn played he would always abruptly cut.

"I try to do both, in a sense, again. I play for an hour without any intermission, so in that sense it's continuous; but inside I have certain shifts, sections

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where I stay for awhile, then go to other sections which happen to come. I don't think William Parker would think of a one-hour solo of his in sections, he would just see that he develops something, see where it goes to, leave it, and come back.

"Also I've worked with the ensemble with young people here in town for one year every week, and I tried to explain it cinematically, as if your feeling in the musicwas like a love scene that culminates in a kiss, then that scene is cut abruptly to a walk in the forest, then they step into the car. So the film is always cutting, but it makes a continuous love story. That's how I try toget them to make more active decisions, and not just perpetuate this Jackson Pollock action-painting process in the music. I think of improvised music having this strong element of

both process and decision. Butch Morris is interesting. When hestill played cornet I really liked him, because he made decisions continuously, but in a warmer way than Jon Zorn; Jon Zorn is really cold in a lot of ways."

"Are you still speaking about that subject in terms of the solo playing in the solo records? This subject of howyou best fill up the time, how you know when to just keepplaying with the process and when it's time for a decision?…Again, I'm thinking about this biological clockthing we were talking about. I was thinking about

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Schönberg, who developed his grand system, and then alongcomes Webern, who made these little distillations of it, like you're talking about. Is this process of making little short pieces, crafted in the studio, a developmentin you of the biological clock as the source of form? of decision making? Do you become more aware of your timing somehow?"

"It has to do with a point of view. I guess Chinese or Asian philosophy has talked about that much more, in a way, than European science. To look at things from different sides. It's interesting that Japanese have a word for 'know,' but they never use it. Roland Barthes' book The Empire of Science, is an interesting book for this. This is a wonderful book about Japan, which he describes as being not really about a real place in the world, but if it was it would be about Japan. Which is a very Japanese way to describe something. That is to say that Ifeel you can look at things from a lot of different angles, and I try to do that always. So everything is many things at the same time.

"For example, the Cecil Taylor Orchestra was a very opulent aspect of this music—monumental, if you will."

"What was your experience like in that project?" I ask."I know how he gives instructions word by word, note by note to his large-ensemble players. How did that go?"

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"One of the Dutch guys said it best. He said the best rehearsal was when Cecil Taylor was not there. Cecil had to leave one day, so William [Parker] led the rehearsal; and suddenly everybody understood what Cecil had talked about for three days.

"I thought it was a great experience in many ways. It was great to be in a project of Cecil's, which I dreamt of somehow for so many years. It was a great experience to be the other bass player with William in that kind of context; it was a great experience to play with a lot of European people I'd never played with, like [Louis] Sclavis, and Wolter Wierbos and others. It was also greatto have such a large group. It was larger than Globe Unity ever was.

"I think the first concert was so crazy and out, I don't know… I don't know whether that was better or the second day, which was more organized. But then also that whole project was great, because I listened to a couple of the projects—Derek and Cecil were fantastic. And that was an interesting thing to see, because I always thoughtthat Cecil was a very quick player, not only in terms oftempo and fast piano technique, but in terms of thinking,quick thinking. In his groups he's always in front somehow; Jimmy Lyons was very near to him, but still Cecil was in front. But when Derek played with him, Derek

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seemed to get the idea just a little bit before Cecil most of the time; Cecil kind of followed Derek more than Derek followed Cecil, I felt."

"Paul Lovens told me he felt the same way about his duo; he thought that Cecil was following him a lot more than he expected. And Günter Sommer expressed the same thing you said about Cecil being quick, but that when he played with him he noticed how slowly he was thinking in an arc above all his notes."

That musical aspect—the rise from hectic, interactive, energetic, even chaotic phenomena to clear, serene order arcing above, emerging from, without leaving it behind, like a phoenix-flower rooted in it as soil—suggests to mehow the shift in consciousness from crazy youth to riper wisdom actually happens. Kowald:

"I liked the monumental aspect more in the early years,but now I'm more into drawings as opposed to masterpieces. I don't have problems being involved with amonumental thing, like Cecil's was, but I like for myselfmore the little detailed things. I prefer often to go to artists' shows where you see the little drawings, and I find them often more important to me than the big paintings. The big paintings are maybe more difficult to make, but they also carry a lot of unnecessary weight, which can take you away from what is really essential. I

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don't know if that's true, but I find I have problems lately with monumental things.

"Now Berlin is leaning toward the monumental, in the move to make it the capital of Germany," he notes. "It's horrible, a return to a kind of Wilhelmanian quality. Andalso in the cultural realm, Berlin as the site of a thousand years of culture, or it could be New York or Wuppertal; suddenly all the culture rains down on everybody and then it's over. That's why I did my Ort

here, because I believe in the infrastructures people canactually be a part of. The monumental is so impressive because of its monumental qualities, but I believe in thesmaller quality, connections which become networks; I trust them much more, they're closer to the truth to me. And if you transfer what I'm saying to the music, you come to a lot of little new views, okay?"

The thousand flowers blooming…and a reminder that "monument" and "monster" share the same Latin root, monere, to warn, both words originally connoting an omen of something evil.

"I think I understand that," I say. "When I saw you in New York, I remember the way you opened up your solo concert was to say 'When one gets older, the music gets slower.' Could you give me a few words about the experience of starting out with the music young and

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staying with it for so long, and what it looks like at this point in your life, at this age and everything?"

"I think Bert Noglik said something he doesn't say about everybody in an interview about me, that he thoughtI was a very collective-oriented person, a person who likes collective work, and I think that's right," Kowald says, taking us back to the opening image of his youthfulidentity. "In the early years I was relatively insecure about many things, about myself, about the music, but I was very happy to be part of that whole movement, to be part of a group, a rather large group of people who did this music. But I wasn't so sure of myself that I would take the banner and go in front, like Brötzmann was, for example. That's why, as I said, I didn't make my own groups, really, at that time. But I was part of the wholemovement, the whole group, and I felt happy in that bag.

"Then it was also without question for me that I alwayswould continue. I met a few people in the early years, very good people, good musicians, who just stopped playing suddenly. Claude Derons was a fantastic Belgian trumpeter, played with Brötzmann and myself, with the group sometimes; he stopped. Okay, whatever it was in their head, for me it was clear that I wouldn't stop; this would be my life. And even if I had to do other jobs, which I did—until five years ago I still worked in

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the bar next door here in the summer, when I didn't have too much work—it was clear that I would do this music until I couldn't do it physically. So that answers one part of the question, I think.

"The other part is that now I feel—I had a big personalcrisis when I was about 35, and couldn't even play for about nine months in public. I came out of it with much more security and self-confidence than before about the music I did; that's when I started the group with Leo Smith and Baby Sommer.

"Now, I don't know… it is so self-sufficient in me, with a life of its own. To do this music, to play with others… I like to play with younger people now; in my group the people are basically a little older than my 30-year old daughter: Le Quan Ninh, he's about 33, this Chinese woman is about 33, the Greek singer is about 35; Gunda [Gottschalk] the violin player is 28. We have a trio with Baby Sommer and Connie Bauer, which we do off and on; so they're all my age, and that's nice too, for the old men to play that stuff we haven't been doing for a long time, in a sense. But then I like to play with theyoung people a lot, and I also like to—I wouldn't call itteach, but just be with the young people and let them seea few tricks of the trade, as Frank Loyd use to say it. Because I think more now, especially after this year with

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the Ort ensemble, I think now that you can, in a sense, methodically convey some of the knowledge about this music."

The thousand flowers blooming, and going effectively and successfully to seed…all in good time.

All Roads Lead to Heimat

We will fill in the missing background discussion of the biological clock, Jackson Pollock action painting, and other loose ends also in good time. Here we rather move from bridges burned or whole, links through space and time, to the soil of the Here and Now, where Kowald's(Brötzmann's, FMP's, German free jazz') music is rooted. Then we'll move to his relationship with his instrument, and with improvisation and composition, and through that to the pertinent details of his anatomy.

Kowald has always been active in the local community cultural life. Apart from a time away in Belgium and Switzerland to avoid the military, he's lived here all his life. His 360°—Spielraum für Ideen (360°—Play-Space for Ideas) was an initiative he conceived in FMP's first hour, as a performance event embracing not only all artistic expressions but the daily street life of the city as well; one musical result of the concept is documented on the 1976 FMP LP Jahrmarkt. That was also the

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first FMP-related workshop to be supported by the city, with the Globe Unity Orchestra, at which point the band was ten years old.

"That was one of the transformations of Charles Ives' ideas into our reality," Kowald says of the project. "ButI must say, it was not that simple. I remember Brötzmann's trio was very out there for awhile, with FredVan Hove and Han Bennink; sometimes Albert Mangelsdorffmade it a quartet, and I remember once when Han couldn't do it, and they made it a trio with Albert.

"That trio had a certain quality which people used after it; I think even Jon Zorn—maybe he didn't get it from there—but the trio had something that was like a collective autonomy. Han was very loud, as was Brötzmann,and Fred was in many ways a poor man with an acoustic piano, and sometimes the piano was bad. But then he woulddo really wonderful things. Han would go really far out and then stop, and Fred would proceed entirely unfazed bywhat Han did, would just continue with his own stuff. Also the duo with Misha [Mengelberg] and Han, the same thing: Misha would make Han crazy, because he just kept doing his thing, without really responding to Han. Han would react to Misha when he chose to, but Misha never." (See Whitehead 1998 for much more on this relationship.)

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"That was a very modern aspect during the '70s, what theydid.

"So the Jahrmarkt idea was an extension of this approachthe smaller groups were developing, which also resonated with the Ives idea of having independent things happeningat once. Everyone stayed on his own line, and then you could interact, but you didn't have to. Or maybe you wereinteracting all the time, but subtly, subliminally. That was the interesting thing."

About Globe Unity, the band's 1966 recording debut, Kowald had spoken to me earlier as a successful synthesisof American and European sensibilities.

"We had heard the early Sun Ra records on ESP here, andthen we had loved Mingus' large group, and stuff like that, so somehow Alex had the courage at the time to say,'Now we'll do our orchestra with this music,' in a very early stage. And he formulated it very well. I think the two pieces on the record are very different pieces, one very heavy and intense, the other with a lot of interesting colors and so on. And I think it has a very nice quality to it. And of course, it was influenced by music coming from America, still."

The quintessentially European Globe Unity's name began to be lived up to after the fact of the band itself, through individual members' collaborations with Japanese

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butoh and other dancers, poets, and artists from around the world.10

"We were tired of it, money was always a problem, so wedecided to stop it and try something else," he relates. "We had another festival from 1983 every two years—1985, then '87—called 'Cries Across the Border' (Grenzüberschreitungen). That included not just music but also artists and theater people, with a special emphasis on bringing people from other cultures. [Butoh pioneers] Kazuo Ohno was there, Min Tanaka, whoever. By that time we had already traveled a lot to other parts of the world, so we had met people whom we thought would be niceto bring to Wuppertal. This festival lasted for six years, and then after that we had a collective gallery

10. The butoh dancers are particularly interesting artistic allies. Their movement emerged, like FMP's, as agesture against American cultural and military hegemony; it was characterized by a rejection of Western aesthetic standards, and a commitment of the body to ancient Japanese archetypes, dance thick with images of animality, death and horror, raw sex—the 'primitive' personalized, then worked [also like the free jazz movement] to more refined statements from there. See the video documentary Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis (Michael Blackwood Productions, Inc. 1990) for an excellent overview of the movement and its principals, including those Kowald mentions here.

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with about fifteen artists and musicians here in the neighborhood for awhile. We had about eighty events therein two years, exhibitions and music and everything. Then my Ort events.

"I didn't move, didn't use a bus or a train for the year, just my three-wheel bicycle, which can carry the bass to another part of town. I stayed home, and every Saturday night I played for the neighbors. A lot of guests came, too; I think out of sixty-five concerts I did that year, I only did five solo bass concerts; all the others were a little solo in the beginning, and then guests playing.… People knew that every Saturday night there would be a half-hour solo concert, then another solo, then something with guests. Then I decided to work with the young musicians in town here, since I would be here, to meet once a week, and I told them I would be at their service, they could do whatever they wanted with me.

"I'm trying to go a little bit deeper into this question of what a local identity means, and how important is it. There's this guy from New York I read about, an artist from Puerto Rico, who said his identity is based simply on where he happens to be at a given time, that he has no other"—that reminds me of my similarfeeling in Dagmar's apartment alone, on my first visit

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—"which I don't believe, but being an artist in New York,he said it like this. So this is an interesting aspect. The whole war in Yugoslavia has to do with these questions, and it's quite difficult, because what does itmean to have a national feeling? Earlier I mentioned how natural it was for the Greek and Japanese people to feel good about their culture, but one can see its dark side.

"I try to think what it means in the music too. You have to have an identity, you have to develop a personal voice, as everyone has said in jazz tradition since LouisArmstrong, so this is something that has to do with your human nature, your personal identity, so how does it workin our culture? How does it mix—not the superficial 'multi-kulti' thing, but the real intercultural exchange I seek for the Global Village?"

One answer to that question goes back to the issue of musical/biological time.

"When I met Tanaka a few years ago, he said, 'Maybe I react to this music, but maybe it will be five minutes later," laughs Kowald. "That was another way to say it; Ilove it.11 That's what I tried to teach my youth ensemble

11. Some of the words of the butoh masters Kowald workedwith are worth citing in passing, for their strong resonance with this study's view of its German music. Akaji Maro: "I like to be wild and reckless. Intuition, not intellect, is what guides me. I have an inner

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during the Ort year: if you want to, react immediately, but if not, that's okay too. See what happens. Usually the

more interesting music would result from people not overtly interacting. Which goes to another typical stereotype of spontaneous improvisation, that

it's so unrelentingly reactive between players, which is bullshit. It's one

dialogue—that's what motivates me…Butoh is timeless, It is always about to be born. If it actually came into being it would cease to exist. Butoh is eternally unborn…Temptation is the power of the simple daily actions of humanity, which have been shed in the course of human evolution. It is the gestures, the signs that have undergone friction, abortion, miscarriage, that I gather together and rearrange, gestures that are not intentionalor deliberate that is the source of 'temptenshki' and that is how I construct my drama…It is not the bodies that dance, but what emerges in the space above them. A kind of monster…I am always paying homage to the body. The body is supported by something you can discover with language. You can't chase it with words." Min Tanaka: "There are those who believe that we are physically movedby unseen forces that inhabit the flesh. In Japanese, ma refers to the space between, an interval, spacial or temporal. People wonder, what is this ¨ma¨ trying to ask?what is it trying to do? it is here in this space betweenthat spirits and gods dwell. To capture those spirits, those gods inside our body, that is what butoh is all about." Kazuo Ohno: "You should not think of the past as being dead and gone, with no connection to the living. Ifyou took that out of my dance, there would be nothing

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of the possibilities, but one can train oneself not to react always, to get beyond that limitation."

"It's another aspect with interesting social implications too," I reflect, then consider it too as a deliverance from what psychologists call codependency…

"Yes, it is; that's what I mean when I talk about the global village, too, that it's a social lesson."

Form as Information Organized (and Taught?)

"What was the extent of your work with teaching improvisation to young people in the Ort project?" I ask.

"Most of us have always been asked to do workshops, usually from three to five days, and you get a group of young people and work with them for awhile. The key question is whether we have to give a performance in the end or not. I prefer to do it without a concert, but manytimes it's required, then you have to kind of work for three days relatively free, then the last day you have toorganize something for a forty-minute set. I did things for Globe Unity in the late '60s that involved big piecesof wallpaper with letters which I pulled up. In the early'70s I developed some of the conducting stuff."

"You mean letters for the notes?"

left. It is my history."

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"No, more like instructions about what to do in part A,part B and so on. I would improvise as a conductor, in a sense, like Butch does, detailing musical strategies.12 Jon Zorn's Cobra piece had that going on, where he put up signals to change the music, wooden plates or something. That way, there's no composition overdetermining the improvisation, but a composer-conductor himself can also at least partly improvise. So I tried to develop different things.

"I think eight came the first night, then it quickly grew to twenty-two, all different instrumentalists, with the common interest in questions of collective improvisation, how to structure it methodically. I never played with them, I was always in front, and I would interrupt with feedback, coaxing them to play something again that I liked. That never worked, but something different would happen that was interesting too. It

12. "Conduction" is Morris' term for the way he spontaneously directs ensembles of improvisers. He explains it fully in the 43-page booklet of his 10-CD setTestament (New York: New World Records 1995). Kowald shared with me a blow-by-blow transcript of a workshop Morris tried to conduct the Ort ensemble through, to theirvociferous resistance to the authoritarianism they perceived in his concept and posture. They worked throughit and did record something included on Testament.

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served to make them conscious about certain tricks of thetrade."

"So this was the first time you'd been active as a teacher of this kind of music?"

"I wouldn't even call it teaching; I was just there. I called myself the Big Ear, because when you are in it youcan't really hear the total sound; you listen to yourselfand a limited part around you, but you maybe miss something happening in the corner there. So I was the BigEar, and I tried to get them to shape their own improvised ensemble music and to have an experience with it. We had about forty-five such workshop evenings in that year, and there was a definite difference by the end. We played a concert at a little theater here, and itwas wonderful, because it was so structured and clear, and I didn't do anything, I was just standing on the side; I didn't even raise my hand once."

"That was probably the first time you had a chance to work that long and consistently with a group of players..."

"Yes. And Evan came toward the end of the year, and hisinterview in the book is a discussion with many people inthis group about group improvisation, and it was so interesting to him that he was talking about going back to London and doing something similar, to have that

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experience of working with the same group of people for acontinuous period of time.

"Before I wasn't sure at all if you could… people always call it teach, but that's a very limited word somehow. But I believe now that you can transmit some of the knowledge about this music to younger people. Evan said, when we talked about it a few months ago, that he thinks this process might save them here and there some time but that he wasn't sure this was good for them."

"Everyone who is an improviser has his or her own language," I say. "So the thing you have to do with the younger people is bring their own language out, rather than teach them yours."

"But how do you do that? You can tell them to do their own, and they say, 'What the fuck is he talking about?' So I rather try and make them listen; it took me awhile too when I was young to really be able to listen, which means to believe in what you play, to listen to yourself and say, 'so this is what I do? how does it sound? do I like it? do I want some cream on it, or today maybe I don't want any cream on it?' This kind of listening. And in the group, too, listening to what there is.

"We started when we worked with very simple things; it was never boring for them to do something like five notes, or seven notes, just to see what they were, and

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what they were together, whether they liked it, and all these very simple things. And I think many of them understood what I tried to do. I would tell them that when they played they also had to believe in what they played, because if they didn't, who else would? This kindof thing and, I think, a lot of little tricks, because also a lot of them have been in the cliché of that free jazz thing, saxophonists and guitar players. Then it cameup, I didn't even talk about that, but during the listening they understood themselves that they were in a cliché. Suddenly they didn't have anything else in this cliché, they understood it, I didn't have to tell them, and that's a point that maybe gets to what you asked."

Ort had no backing to start, so Kowald borrowed 25,000DM to support it. His desire to do it reached the critical point of keenness required to act after some musical experiences as quintessentially global as it was local.

" I played in 1988 in Korea at the Seoul World Olympic Games," he recalls. "I played in front of 120,000 people,solo bass, then a duo with Evan, and a trio with Evan andAndrew Cyrille. I was invited to bring a group there. It was in the middle of the big river. They had a cultural program the night before the Games started."

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"That's an unusual situation for improvised music. Did the audience seem receptive?"

"Yes, it was interesting because the concert started around 7, but all these people filed in at about 5. The first rows seemed to filled with people all over 70 yearsold, especially women, because after us was Korean traditional music, with drums, and they didn't get to hear that so often. So I think the first twenty or twenty-five thousand people there were all older people. The stage was about thirty meters—bigger than a lot of places I've played in—so I was a little afraid that it wouldn't work. But there was a fantastic sound man, and it sounded very good. We played the stuff and it was great, they really seemed to enjoy it."

"Traditional Korean music can be pretty interesting too. Have you explored that at all?"

"Yes, I brought a lot of stuff back from that trip. Butback to what led me to do Ort. A year later on I was at a festival in New York called Ruhr Works, in '89, with art from the Ruhr Gebiete here; Brötzmann and I were invited to play in New York for this, and we played with New Yorkmusicians.

"So—you go to Korea, play for an hour and come back; then you go to New York and play for an hour and a half and come back. So I thought, that's okay, we loved it,

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it's nice to be on the jet set—but then the baker from across the street has never listened to my stuff. I just started thinking in the early '90s after those two experiences that I would like to stay home for a year andsee what happens. I had my fiftieth birthday in April '94, so I started on May 1 and ended it on April 30, '95.William Parker says that's what he's been doing all the time," he laughs.

Listen to CD 7/3, tracks 3-6, 35

Bass and the Art of Zen Improvisation

I remember when I was 17 I told my mother if I ever had a son I would call him Mingus.

—Peter Kowald (my interview)

A major aspect of Kowald's musical identity comes through his instrument; he is part of a jazz lineage dating from the players in the '30s and '40s who pioneered the bass as a solo instrument, from Jimmy Blanton to Charles Mingus to Scott LaFaro, David Izenzon,and Gary Peacock (all of whom Kowald mentions as influences). His account of how he originally got into the "lower-register instruments" (he also plays tuba on some of the early FMP sides) is typical: they were the

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ones left unchosen by the kids in school who beat him to the more popular horns.

If instrumentation reflects Western social class hierarchy, the bass has reflected the lower, working class, with its functional droning and simple timekeepingon the root notes of the chords. Kowald says it was the last instrument to be emancipated from this position by the revolutions in the music of the "first hour." (Interesting, in the light of his self-image as one who lingered long in the role of support base for the aspirations of others, before reaching for his own distinctive statements.)

"How did you develop as a bass player in the context ofthis music, because you—"

"Oh, that's a very interesting question, because I use a lot of unusual

techniques," he finishes for me. "I've studied classical music, but I hardly use any of those techniques.

"I think it had a lot to do with starting to play in places where there were not yet amplifiers. It was a problem, even with Irène and Pierre. Pierre is not the loudest drummer, but he can be loud, or just fill up a lot of the space sometimes. I remember Johnny Dyani said,'If they play for two hours, I play for three, just to beheard.' So that was part of it. I started using the bow a

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lot, which was unusual for that time, just to be heard more.

"I can say that in the playing of the music I was very influenced by the

horns, in the first step," he says. "Later on there was an influence from Ornette Coleman's violin and David Izenzon's bass, because on some records they had this mixture of string sounds. I tried to put that sound on myinstrument; somehow a lot of the bowed stuff that I do now came out of that aspect of violin and bass mixing."

To try to get the highs and lows all on one bass—like Brötzmann's vision of all sounds in one sound; like the German historical development of the octave (and the strings, for that matter), in the spirit of the tumbling strain.

"In the early years I just had to keep up with different drummers;we had that first trio with Brötzmann, playing time when we first started. Then we opened up the time step by step."

"With these first recordings with the big and small groups, did you have a feeling at the time that you were stepping out into something that was a very original statement that you weren't hearing anybody else on records from America doing?"

"It's hard to say. I think that in terms of this style,let's say, the first record I tried to get an influence from was Spiritual Unity by Albert Ayler and [bassist] Gary

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Peacock," he recalls. "I love Peacock on that. I tried tocopy some of Peacock's stuff, but it couldn't work.

"Then also I think in terms of pizzicato. I'm not the greatest bass player around, so many people have done so many great things, from Jimmy Blanton to Mingus, the whole jazz tradition. But somehow I used the bow a lot because I just had to keep up with saxophone players. I played with Brötzmann and then very early with Evan too..."

"And then you also recorded with von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens," I add. "I had an interview with Paul Lovens, and I got a sense of his experience. You've told me, and I've read, a fair amount about your relationship early with Brötzmann. What about when you started playingwith people like Evan Parker and von Schlippenbach and Lovens? Did this experience distinctively develop your bass work?"

"Evan has been very important to me, because I'd grown up with Brötzmann, and then suddenly there was a saxophone player of the same caliber, intensity and so on, but very, very different from Brötzmann. Because Brötzmann was Brötzmann, but then Evan was the one who worked on all these details, soprano saxophone, and also the way he played the tenor, with a lot of details. That was interesting for me, because I could develop other

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stuff on the bow playing with Evan that I didn't do with Brötzmann."

"Such as?""Well, Evan had the speed, and Brötzmann had more like

his certain qualities of strength and sound; but Evan hadthat speed, so I tried to play fast on the bass like he was doing on the soprano. So these two horn players have probably influenced my bowing more than anybody else."

"We were talking about getting to New York finally, anddoing the Sound Unity Festival and all of that," I recall. "It was about this time in the '80s that you started releasing the duos with people. One with Barre Phillips, an American who's lived in France since the '60s, and Barry Guy—"

"1979 was with Barre Phillips; the first one, with Barry Guy, was '71 or 2, and in '74 or 5 with Maarten Altena; these were the bass duos," he says. "We did threeso far, and I've tried to make the covers all the same way. I'd like to do more, but they're rather specialized items, so we don't sell so many."

"Did you do these with the other duos?""No, it was separate.""Did Penck also finance those?""No, these were just made by FMP."

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"So you had a special interest in bass duos for some reason?"

"It's interesting. Many bass players do it, even traditional players do it more now, after these records with Slam Stewart and Major Holley, which I love. And I just saw the Robert Altman film, Kansas City; they played a bass duo in the end, Christian MacBride and Warren Carter. So there's been something like a tradition to it.It's just interesting to play a duo with the same instrument."

"You mentioned that you tried to get a sound on the bass that was inspired by David Izenzon with a violin, with your bow. So when you play duos with other bassists,are you able to get off into some part that you usually can't do alone, because the partner is covering somethingfor you?"

"The bass is one of those instruments that has a very big range," he says. "If you tune the low string down, you can get really low, which I often do. Then if you getreally high, with the flagolets and stuff, it can go really high. I think it's an instrument that also has a capacity for a wide range of languages, if you just leavethe conventional techniques a little bit. So in this sense it's good to play with another bass player, becauseone can pluck while the other bows, one play high while

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the other's low, etc. But it's similar to two pianos, or two drummers, or two saxophones, in a way.

"It's interesting to work with the same instrument as aduo because you have certain things in common, but at thesame time you have different characters, stylistic attitudes, whatever. I would have liked to continue with them—I could have done ten by now. William would be one, and Fred Hopkins, and a couple of bass players over here."

Listen to CD 7/3, tracks 7-28(Von Schlippenbach Kowald calls a more distant

presence, a likeminded spirit more than an intimate interacter; he does single out for mention the pianist's ability to pull off both small-group and large-group events with equal effectiveness.)

"How do you practice the bass?""I practice slow, that's one of the first things," he

says. "I say to young people who start out trying to playthe bass so fast, just go slow and listen to the sound. So I play slow, especially in the beginning. Then I practice intervals a bit, just to hear them, because I always feel my ears aren't so good with intervals. Then Ido sometimes things that I remember that I'd touched in asolo concert that I'd never done before, that I want to explore and learn more about. I practice partly my own

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material and partly the usual stuff everybody practices—not so much scales, but intervals a lot. I sometimes try to play likeDolphy." He sings a quick multi-interval jump; again, I note the verticality of Germanity.

"I sing sometimes. Like Jeanne Lee said, it's wonderfulto be a singer because then you can sing in the kitchen while you cook. I sing a lot on long trips with the car, because the motor sound gives you a drone to work with. Also at the house here sometimes. I don't practice regularly these days. There are periods when I practice more than at other times."

"You sing when you play sometimes. Is that something that you only do when you play solo? or how did that start?"

"I went to a singing teacher for awhile, then stopped, and I want to do it again," he says. "First of all, I wasin a Zen monastery twice, for very short periods, and allthe monks get up at 4 a.m. to sing the sutras, and that was one of my favorite musical experiences, because therewas the old master, who was very tiny, very small, skinny, tiny old man. He wouldn't sing louder than everybody, but he sounded like Coltrane over the monks. I'm not someone who says such things easily, but it was unbelievable, and I felt like a little baby in the lap of

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his mother the first time I heard it; it really impressedme a lot.

"Then they gave me the text in Latin letters I could read, so I could sing with them, and I loved it. Then I found out that the octave of the bass and the really low singing really matches very well.

"Then there's another aspect," he adds, "which Evanagrees with, and I think Brötzmann would too—he wouldn't say it this way, maybe—but to play this music is a catharsis in many ways. William Parker said after the concert in New York, that after every good concert everybody's a little bit better person. That's a nice wayto say it. In the Ort interview Evan talks about the cathartic aspect of the music, and in the early years, I remember when Brötzmann didn't have a gig for a month, hegot a little nervous. Not about making money, but just because his system needed it. So I think he would agree that this music cleans the system.

"So I usually do the singing at the end, even if I do alot of different crazy things—and I think the solo for meis something where I can show all my sides, even those which are not so nice; I do quite agressive things sometimes. But then I want to finish it with a kind of cathartic and meditative thing, so I always do that. And it also bringsthe audience in again; some people might have gotten lost

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along the way, but this brings them in again, so it's good.

"We can talk about the solo aspect of it too, because Isometimes think I could imagine a bass solo which has to be—okay, you do one thing, and then you go to the next, and the next, and so on, like a line or sequence of things; but I also can understand it like an orchestration, with a fullbodied vertical underpinning. But it's just a feeling I have, it's something I feel, I can't really prove what I mean. I don't mean that it would be like a bass orchestra, but if you play the solo, you are

certainly bound to the flow of the moments through time; but you also can

imagine it being all part of the same long moment. I think that's something that Braxton has tried too, because he was quite fascinated by a piece of mine in Globe Unity when he took part with us in '76. I split up the whole orchestra into trios and duos, all over the studio playing different music at the same time. He really likedthat, and I know he has used this idea after that too. But he always liked that piece. It was Charles Ives' idea, and Cage has used it in a way, and Braxton.

"I think Charles Ives must be one of the most importantpeople of the century, more and more, because what he tried then, now it's all our reality—what the electronic people do… or just in real life, you often hear many

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different things happening at once, and Ives did it. I think if you really think about his work, it's more important now than it was even fifty years ago. It was really right, what he did."

Improvisation/Composition, (a) Matter(s) of Timing

Listen to CD 7/4, tracks 35-40"You bring your big bag of stuff with you anyway when

you come to a solo concert—like Santa Claus, with all this stuff," offers Kowald. "That can be a burden, because you might play all your clichés. On the other hand, you need some routines, in order to fill an hour with bass solo music; you need to bring something, you can't just do it spontaneously.

"A lot of people who hear about improvisation without knowing much about music, they always think that improvisation is so spontaneous. I always say, 'okay, we bring in a big bag of stuff and then we open it and pull out things, and sometimes things come out that we didn't expect. But a lot of stuff is already there.' So if I play in a certain field, a certain musical area, I try to feel

how long it can really last.. I push myself to keep it going longer than I feel

like doing, to see what happens with myself, to the people listening. Then

suddenly I cut, and go to an opposite extreme, from maybe a big, loud

dramatic thing into a little tiny tone. But the inner stream continues."

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Yes, these are the words for which italics are made. This is the vein I'm mining for, information about unmetered timing, intuitive decisions about when and how long to make your musical-existential stand and when and how to cut and run to another.

"That's what I try to tell the young people: you have to feel your inner stream, then whatever you do, whether it's loud and ebullient, or tiny and hesitant, the inner stream still goes, and people feel it," he tells me. "Even

if you have completely cut from one idea to a new and different one, they still

feel if your inner stream is there. That's an interesting question. That's how I

try to combine, let's say, what we have learned from jazz as an ongoing—

from the African thing (I went to Africa too, and saw the drums play for 48

hours)—and the formal, more European thing, of dividing things up into

sections."Thank you, Herr Kowald. Let us pursue this matter

further."On one of those tours to Japan, in '85, I played in a

club where they wanted to show a film after my solo. Theysaid, 'but we still want two forty-minute sets, so can you play eighty minutes, without intermission?' That was longer than any I had done, though since I've done othersabout that long. So I said okay; I knew that I had to play an hour and twenty minutes, and I clocked out of my playing at an hour and nineteen minutes.

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"I've developed over the years a time feeling, so that if people tell me to

play for forty-five minutes, I can be very exact, without thinking about it; I

know about what has happened in me. You get used to it."

"Is it something that happens more in solo playing?""Yes. Group playing is more difficult; I can do it much

better than when I started, but not so precisely. In solo, I have a clearer sense of what has happened."

"For instance, you said you gave a two-minute limit to the partners for your duo project…"

"Yes, that's an example. The mechanical time is not so important or interesting. The time question is difficult,because I realized when I went to New York how bad I was about time…I'm filling up all this time [duration] with time [pulse], and I don't have that time [swing, feel] the Americans have, because you grew up with it…it has todo with the blues, I guess, or the American tradition of having time. I know it's very difficult for European people to keep good time. I don't mean the beat going on—that's one thing too—but I mean rather to keep space between your phrases, and how to phrase, in a way that keeps space and pulse both happening in the time.

"But I'm not the only one who has problems with it. I noticed it especially when I came back from America, I felt all the drummers in Europe played nervously, after Iplayed with Rashid Ali and Denis Charles and Andrew

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Cyrille a lot and so on. That's an aspect of the time too."

"Did that experience change your bass playing much? Didyou relax more, play less nervously?"

"I guess so, yes. But I have to—it's very difficult to bring it organically into our music, I have to think about it, to intentionally do it."

"Yet you say when you play solo concerts, and you're not really thinking about that, and are just playing the way you play—still, you can sense when 45 minutes is up?"

"Yes, but that's different," he says. "When I look backon how much I've played, then I know; in the moment, I don't really know. I'll think, 'how much have I played, now?' and if it feels like thirty-five or forty minutes, maybe I'll do ten more. That happens all the time. It isn't something I really have to work on."

Kowald tells me of a recording he describes as his "most radical," one that pertains both to time (includingthe difference between maturity and youth) and to Greece.

"We did a record which isn't out yet, with Baby Sommerand Floros Floridis from Greece; we only have short pieces, twenty-six two-minute pieces on the record, all improvised, but all designed to be a two-minute piece. And it's wonderful; I mean, it's a little stiff in a way,compared to the old times when the young forces of the

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music freed everything up, but I love it because each piece is very different from the next one. To return to your question as to how it developed from the early years, I think this is the most radical one I've done, with Baby Sommer and Floris, to say we won't play longer than two minutes."

But, I remind him, this is similar in concept to his Duos Europa/Japan/America package.

"Well, yes," he concedes, "but they were all between four and seven minutes, and they were not with the same people. They started in New York."

Listen to CD 7/3, tracks 29-34; 7/4, tracks 1-34

Duos/Solos I think Günter Christmann asked me when he

produced a festival in Hanover to play a solo concert. I was a little afraid about the time, because he wanted me to play for forty-five or fiftyminutes. I thought that was fine, but I didn't want to think about the time as a constraint, or as something to keep track of. So I made myself a little cassette which had different animal sounds every five or six minutes—whales, dolphins, birds, frogs—punctuating silence. I played it back into theroom so that I didn't have to think about time at all, could just focus on playing.13

—Peter Kowald13. See Mayr (1993) on "New and Rediscovered Zeitgebers in

Recent Music" for a discussion of the category of temporal organizers in which this device of Kowald's

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"The duo seems to be a real special thing that you do, that you want to do. A duo for me means a situation whereyou can really be intimate with another person's musical universe, more than in a collective or solo situation. Isthat how it functions for you?"

"Well, it's something between a solo and a trio," he says. "If the smallest group is a trio, then the duo is not a group, in a sense. But it's not solo either, so it's a special situation.

"When I stayed in New York in '85, I had to go back, the fellowship was finished, and I said, 'I want to keep some of it, some of these relationships with these different people I met in New York, some of the friendships.' So I said, 'Okay, let's record a little duo, please, I'll put it somewhere.' It took seven years to put it all together. Then I went twice to Japan in

falls. "The term Zeitgeber was first introduced by chronobiolobists to denote those environmental factors which determine the temporal characteristics in the behaviour of organisms…From chronobiology the term Zeitgeber—which in the English language is sometimes replaced by the term 'synchronizer'—has made its way intochronosociology, where, next to the natural Zeitgebers governing man's biological rhythms, the numerous sunchronising agents created by man himself are considered" (81).

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those years for longer periods, three months each time, and felt the same way about my relationships there. I thought about it as a unit at the end—one record with theAmericans, one with the Japanese, and one with Europeans—but in the early years it was just a personal desire to make something to use for a later time."

"Did you have a stopwatch or something to keep to the time limit?"

"No, I just told everybody around five minutes—""I mean for the CD with Baby Sommer… ""No, it was natural time; it wasn't exact, some are

2:50 or 2:30.""So you said two minutes, and then everyone sort of

knew when two minutes was up?""Right."A.R. Penck, again, financed much of the Duos project.

Even the most radical and adventurous painting attracts more recognition and reward than its counterpart in sound, or even in print; commercial recordings and films are as big a business as visual art, of course, but not in those areas of interest to us "serious" artists and scholars. A painting is the still result of a fleeting process, recordings and films rather the recreation of it, at least from the point of view of reception. Does this tell us our Western culture's monied elite can better

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recognize and reward originality and genius when it is captured—controlled, taking none of our precious time, stirring our bodies not a whit?—in a moment "out there" rather than a flow coming in?

"When I rented a studio in Tokyo it cost about 5000 marks," says Kowald. "And FMP couldn't pay that. I had the tapes ready, but in order to pay for having them processed, Penck gave me a painting and I sold it to the Wuppertal museum, financed the whole project from this."

"Interesting history there with that painter.""I know that Rauschenberg financed Merce Cunningham,

and Jasper Johns. So that's a similar situation." "We've talked about your duo work a lot—" (covered on

CD narrative)—"how is your solo recording going?""One came out in '88, another in '95, recently," he

says. "I cannot make solo recordings so often, only once in a while. Somehow the solo thing for me involves a whole system. When I played in my Ort project, I played about sixty solos that year. When I started, in the firstmonth, I wondered whether I should work on it systematically, limiting myself to certain material one week, then another the next. I thought of something Diamanda [Gallas] had said to me, about having some four hundred materials and two hundred transitions. If she's able to say that, that means she made a list, archived

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her sounds and strategies; and if she has four hundred, many of them must be very, very similar. So she was a model of how to do that systematically. I decided not to do that for that year, because I didn't want to limit theemotional side of it. So I played without preparing myself in terms of materials or decisions, I let it grow.

"Then I felt, after a few weeks, that I was repeating myself so much, because I'm the one who knows about that the best, of course. But the other people who were following it, including my wife, and friends who have heard a lot of solo concerts over the years, said that totheir ears it changed quite a lot. To me it didn't changeso much. That's why I don't make a solo record very often, because I feel the stuff hasn't changed enough yet. Unless I do consciously work with certain material to do a certain concept recording—but I need more organicdevelopments, and relatively slow ones too, even if I'm also being very decisive and cutting directions and flowsabruptly. At the same time I need organic and slow developments; otherwise the stuff doesn't live, it's not coming from inside."

What We See is What We (Really) Get?or "Knowing the Score"

The following part of our exchange tied the act of painting directly to the compositional impulse—and

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brought me back to my first experience with Cecil Taylor's TMM performance—in a way that speaks to this section's focus on improvisation/composition.

"So how has your relationship with other arts, and visual art developed? I know the Fluxus movement was important in the beginning."

"Well, I was a boy when the big Fluxus thing was here, when the 24-Hour Festival was in Wuppertal," he recalls. "I was twenty years old, so I was watching it. Peter [Brötzmann] was in it, in a sense, because he had been Paik's assistant, and he knew more people than I, so—but I was following a lot of things, and there were a lot of artist friends. Not so much dance, because that came later; until my collaboration with Pina Bausch I had a difficult relationship with dance, I didn't like it so much, it was kind of too elegant for me."14

(Hmm—the moment of the eye came more naturally to him than the flow of the whole body, in the beginning.) My

14. See Servos (1984) for a rich portrait of the Bauschensemble as a Wuppertal phenomenon. Bausch's sense of dance grounded in an interdisciplinary mix of theater, music, and visual art, all conceived as that which motivates the body to move as it does in dance, fits in well with Kowald's approach to making music, as does the vision of dance expressed by butoh pioneer Kazuo Ohno, as the way a body heals its most psychic wounds (Kowald 1998: 101).

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eye had caught a book on a table in his studio earlier that his last words recall to mind: "What exactly happened with this?" It is a program about a gig he did with Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno.

"The trio with Leo Smith and Baby Sommer played in Japan in 1980, for a week in Tokyo, then did a little tour, including Yokohama," he says. "During the concert there, in the intermission, a 73-year-old man came up andsaid, 'I'm a dancer, and I've never heard this kind of music before, but before I die, I want to dance with it.'So we said, 'Second set.' And when he undressed himself, he had some kind of white woolen underwear, and he painted his face white, and it was Kazuo Ohno.

"Since then, we have been in contact. I did a little solo concert in Tokyo, in one of those cultural cafés; when I got there, an hour before the gig, he was standingbefore the door. He had gotten on the train from Yokohamaand said, 'You know why I'm coming—second set!'" Kowald laughs. "He likes to dance with this music, and he likes the way I play. Then he came to Wuppertal because we invited him, together with Pina Bausch. He had a big performance here, and then he asked me to play fifteen minutes in his piece, so he changed his piece for that night.

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"We've had several other collaborations, both here and in Japan, whenever we can. He's the first generation of butoh dancers. Also I played with Min Tanaka, in a trio with Butch Morris; he is the second generation, my age, 53 or 54. Then there's a couple of younger butoh dancers I sometimes play with—but Kazuo Ohno is one of the two people who invented butoh ; the other one died."

So—the dance (of the slowest, deepest, most primal and often violent sort) came into Kowald's system from the East. And, I learn next, the painting that most resonatedwith his music was a depiction of a kind of bodily dance.

"But always with painting it was okay.""Yes, with the work of those artists who first touched

me.""How does that relationship work over the years?""It was on a very simple basis," he says. "Very often

the artists ask you to play for their openings. I remember we played in Holland in a barn, which was where a farmer had built a big gallery, a wonderful place. WithBrötzmann in the early years—'65 or '66—we played for twelve hours there; the opening was at four in the afternoon. Everybody liked it, and then we just stopped to have a beer, and then went on for about twelve hours. Completely out; and then after twelve hours, the last people left, and we stopped. So this was the school."

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"That sounds like what Peter told me about the Moroccan thing, it just keeps going and going and going. So how does the painting figure in your creative process and thinking about making music?"

"Well, I found out relatively early that the questions are relatively similar, more so than you would sometimes think," he tells me. "If you have a certain material, a certain language that you've established after a few years of playing, the painter has the same problem. If you want to overcome the limitations of your own language, for example, you have very similar problems.

"The difference, of course, is that the painter is all by himself in his studio,

and we are doing our music collectively, which provides us a big area in

which to question our own limitations. In a group, you know, peoplekick your ass, but a painter has always to be there by himself. I know some artists envy us this direct way, that we're on the stage, in the moment, and the people respond to us as we work, and clap and say thank you, whereas they have a long, indirect way to go before that point; that and the group situation they envy. But I've envied them their option of throwing a painting away, which we can't do."

"You mean if you have a recording, and it's out there, you're stuck with it."

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"Recordings at that time were basically documents of live performances; we hardly made recordings as objects in themselves, just to record. That's another thing we have to talk about, because that's changed, a little bit,anyway. But at that time, the recording was conceived as just a document of a live process."

"So you're saying you can't throw away the live process."

"Yeah, it's public from beginning to end, that's the method of its making. Now I say that the point the painters envied was also problematic for us in some ways,because you could never throw away the music, and say it didn't happen. So this is a methodological question.

"I think some people also work as composers to get closer to the painter's

situation. I think William Parker is a guy who understands the problem in that way; he likes to compose, he's been acomposer from the beginning, he wanted to be able to shape things differently than improvisation would allow, so he worked with composition from the very beginning. Machine Gun has one of his compositions. So that was a wayto avoid that dilemma of not being able to throw anythingaway; if you organize a composition, you can throw part of it away.

"Jackson Pollock was important, I think, and independently from Ornette Coleman [who used a Pollock

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painting on the cover of an album]; his stuff was over here by the '60s. I actually use that as an example when I work with large ensembles of young people. I saw a retrospective of his stuff in the Pompidou, I think it was in the late '70s; I realized he had three phases in his work: his early phase, which was something like a post-cubistic style; then he had an area which I call themiddle period; and then he moved to the action period, which he really got famous for. But to look at, I like the middle period best, because you can see a lot of detailed things, and it's very much an original language already too, but you can see a lot of things there, whereas in the action paintings you see more the idea, and the overwhelming result of the process."

"What would be the musical analogy?""That's the interesting point. Butch Morris was talking

about the energy bands in New York in the early '70s; I think the energy bands were a very clear analogy for the action painting. Also here, if you got a lot of people together playing for a couple of hours, they were reflecting Jackson Pollock's attitude in a lot of ways. Butch was making the point that he wanted to keep certaindetails in his music, which corresponds to the period before the action painting, which includes certain details you want to be able to capture. And it was

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interesting that I spent much more time in that middle period, because I want to be able to see these interesting details too."

"After the late '60s when we had established that free space, where we shed the American influence, the idea of content, Stockhausen's influence, all of that shit, we pushed it all to the side—and what we did was like the action painting," he says. "That's a very simplistic way to say it, but somehow it works.

"But then after we freed the musical space in that way,we had to fill it up with something again; this was the '70s, I remember we discussed it consciously. That's where a lot of musical quotations started to sneak in; Brötzmann, for example, quoted this song Brazil, others Eisler quotes, von Schlippenbach did Wolverine Blues by Jelly Roll Morton on the Wuppertal '73 Globe Unity LP, and Monk—these were attempts to see what could be there."

"When I hear, for example, that Jelly Roll Morton piece," I say, "I think, okay, here's the European guys, they've found their voice, and now they're singing with that new voice this particular song. So it's a little different…"

"There is a quality of irony in the quote…but for Alex to play Jelly Roll Morton, or Monk, it's more than just irony. It's more like a tribute to the fathers you just

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killed. But then also for people who would be in the improvisation area—it's hard to say; there's the term 'abstract,' which I don't like to use, because nothing's really

abstract, but if you look at abstract painting, then you could maybe say that a lot of free improvisation is in anarea that is 'abstract' in that same way. But sometimes Iwould love to see a little face somewhere, or a figure, or a foot, okay? In musical terms, that might mean the element of melody. Maybe the analogy is a little dangerous, but for me it works sometimes. I want to recognize something I've seen before, maybe in another context, or another color, maybe with another aesthetic about it, but I want to see aspects of melody function that way, like a foot or a hand in the painting. And thenif you do quote—if you draw a hand or something—maybe youshould do it differently than it was done before, just togive an aura. It may be very hard to draw a hand differently than it's been done, but then maybe it's justthe way it's situated in a context, so that it has a different aura. That still works for me, and the music isvery similar to that."

"Can you give me examples of how that worked in a givenrecording? Is there one that sticks in your mind as having achieved that well? More broadly, when you think of your body of work for FMP, could you describe it in

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the terms you just used? an early, middle, and mature period in some way?"

Improsition, Compovision

"One of the early steps away from the action painting approach of long processes was the Carpathes LP, with Misha, Peltz and Paul Lovens," he responds. "We did it ina studio, we started with an attitude that 'now is a moment when we don't record as if it were a live process;we make relatively short pieces, each piece has a different idea or a different area that we want to touch,' and so on. So it's not so process-y, it's more craftily parsed."

"Maybe that's a way of composing in this music without composing on paper?"

"Yes, it's a certain very open way of composing, just in terms of—like Into the Valley, it's not a composition likeSteve Lacy or Mingus does, but it's composed to the extent that it spells out the sequence of the players andthis kind of thing. I called it structured improvisation for awhile. And when we went to the studio we said, okay,now we do a piece based on a certain concept, and then wego into another one from there."

"Was that the first studio project you did like that?"

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"Maybe it was for me. Of course, I played with Karl Berger, and people like that, where we had pieces, but those pieces had thematic material, and beginnings and ends—that was different, in terms of—that was an early piece. But it touched things like this.

"I remember when we did the Santana record, Irène and Pierre, we already had something like slower areas, more balladesque areas, and faster areas; we had certain areas, here and there. But I'm talking about it as when the consciousness begins to say, okay, out of this activity of playing we can maybe take something and look at it, and give it a certain value, and say now we'll make a whole little piece out of it. So you start to formulate things again, after having freed the space in front of you, something like that."

"Was Carpathes the first example of shifting from the concept of recordings as documents of live events into one of studio artistry?"

"Well, only to the extent of discerning between the twosituations of going out to play live and going into the studio," he says. "It also had to do with a dawning awareness that we never listened to tapes of our live concerts at home. Many of our friends also said, we love to come to the

live concerts, but that shit at home doesn't work. Then, step by step, yes, maybe you have to make the music for a record

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different, to be able to listen to this music; it doesn'thave to do with the radical aspect of it, the music can be very radical too, but you just don't want to follow the sequence that has happened at a concert when you sit at home with your earphones, or between your books; you listen differently. I decided at a point to say, okay, wehave to do the music for a CD differently than when we play live."

Listen to CD 7/2, track 16-21"My best recording in recent years is When the Sun is Out,

You Don't See the Stars. I love the record, I think it's my bestso far. It's a collective record, which I've always lovedas a process; I didn't organize the music—I organized it a little more than everybody else for that record, but basically it was a collective thing and I still love thatcollective improvisation. And it's wonderful because Butch and Sainkho met for the first time in that studio, and then she does her overtone things, and Butch does hiskind of Rex Stewart trumpet, this traditional black trumpet music. Wonderful, I love it."

Comprosing, Imprevising

"How would you discuss your relationship with composition as opposed to improvisation?"

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"Well, I've always followed the discussion and have done both all the time, but not as extensively as others," he answers. "I think Joèlle Leandre is a good example of someone who does both things very well, and has been into contemporary composition for bass a lot too. I'm not a great reader any more, I don't do it much.At the same time, I haven't been as radical as Derek [Bailey] has been, to refuse to play anything written. But I have followed the discussion. In my Ort book I have a lot of material on the subject: what does improvisationmean by itself, and what does it mean in relation to composition? Butch Morris, Misha [Mengelberg], Evan Parker and I talk a lot about this question in the book" [Mengelburg, 76-83; Morris, 150-55; Parker, 180-86].

The Artist's Studio

I say, "I have an interest, from what you've talked about, in this idea of the music being mostly a collective experience out in public that doesn't work when someone wants to listen to it at home. I'm wonderingwhat you think about the Glenn Gould syndrome, or concept, for improvised music. Do you think there's a future for it in the studio, where someone could be a composer in the studio, as it were, and make an object that hangs well on the wall at home?"

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"Pure improvisation, really radical improvisation, is very rare, in a sense," he muses. "Derek is one who always kept it up in Europe, taking a stand for it completely. But a lot of other things are mixtures, have been mixtures; even the things I did in the studio for When the Sun is Out were a composite activity that I kind of organized. (I wanted to finish explaining the crediting process on that. The record came out under four names. Wemade them alphabetically: Kowald, Ludi, Morris, Namtchylak. But at the same time Ludi said it was good that my name was first because I took a lot of space in the organization of the music.)

"I believe in aura, in a sense. I remember when we played in Chicago, in this FMP festival two years ago, there was a theater, the Chopin Theater. It had about three hundred people, but in the back room it was open; there was a problem with some groups, because the bar wason the side, and the people at the bar could not see the stage. So there was a lot of talking going on at the bar.But everybody said that in my solo nobody talked at the bar. It had to do with the aura of the music more than mepersonally, maybe.

"So I believe that the music is basically a live music,and I don't see that that should be given up. But at the same time I think that when you make a CD, you have to

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have a little bit different concept. Sometimes a live concert can be—it's still fine to talk about a live concert, I don't mind that, but I don't like to listen toit so much. Again, visual artists have more of a chance to do that, to get certain essences out of the process and put them out. That's why we did this record of short pieces we discussed. To try and get a certain essence, whatever essence means; it's just an aspect of essence, not the essence itself.

"It has to do also with clarity," he adds. "I always tell the young people, 'Don't make all this spaghetti music; spaghetti music is fine for awhile if you decide on it, but be conscious about it.'

"I had a fast last month, where I didn't eat for twenty-five days. I started to read a few things that I usually don't read: the letters to the Essenes. Then I found out from a few things from the library that they said that—well, there was one interpretation where Jesus was called Saturnis, the unconscious side, as opposed to the conscious side. So it has to do with these questions.

"When you eat unconsciously, like junk food, regardlessof the quality of the food, you don't really eat it, consciously. I realize that now while I work on my house at night, I get a pizza; but when you eat consciously it's a different thing. And when you come to a point in

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the music sometimes—Butch [Morris] said this when he talked about the seventy energies, that there was sometimes something he heard that he wanted to keep—sometimes the process of improvising brings you to a clarity at a point. It disappears again—but I talk about clarity a lot. If we have an action painting, suddenly Pollock, for

example, might come to a point where he says, this is a good picture. He

decides too, out of the process, what he wants to keep as a result of the

process."

European Union, German Reunification, Eros, Gender

We close our discussion under the above subtitle in a spirit unifying all four of its components: as issues andrealities, they're all predicated on differences to be negotiated; in Kowald's life and views, both the differences and most negotiations between them are tempests in a teapot he prefers to fill with good tea.

"The European Union is basically about business," he says. "They're going to make it a castle against the poorparts of the world, on the one hand; on the other, as a business, they want to be able to compete with America and Asia, economically. I mean, it would be nice not to need a passport any more to go to France, but that's not the real point of this Community. Except for Ireland, I think I've been to every European country, playing the

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music; also I have friends and colleagues in every country where I've worked. So there's a bit of a network built up.15

"I am just about to form the EMAD—Europa-net for Music,Art, and Dance. It has to do with me traveling, and my longstanding interest in people who are acting locally intheir communities, organizing stuff, on top of organizingtheir own business. For example, there's a collective gallery in Thesallonica; I know them, I've worked with shows there, I've played there. There are activities in Barcelona, in Madrid—groups of people organizing themselves. The idea of William Parker's Vision Festival,in smaller ways. In Sweden, everywhere. So I wanted to just make this network visible to itself, give it an umbrella, a name, put all these activities I know of under it, and see what happens.

"We are going to Sweden in early spring; Ireni had a show with a gallery of local artists, and I played for the opening, and now they are inviting the Greek people, whom they don't know except through me. I somehow believe, there's the business of the whole thing, of the music, the art, and everybody has to survive, okay—but

15. Kowald's assessment is not incompatible with Andrews' (1998) look at the potential of the European Union to create economic superpower status for its members.

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also I like when the artists take certain collective activities or certain things in their own hands, and function more socially than only as individuals.

Kowald's words about the Reunification have a similar distance from it: he hasn't felt isolated from Eastern musicians or culture, even political culture, for many years; whatever about the East that can inform or be informed by him has been doing and being so all along. His view of the European Union extends to much about Reunification—big business and its political allies running roughshod over real people. More to the musical points, the Eastern lack of guilt about being German doesn't seem to have had much impact on his own more Western complexities, though he's certainly been exposed to it enough ("they have a little less broken feeling with the German tradition, at least less than I, and, I would say, Brötzmann too"). What he does choose to say about the music there goes to Hans Eisler's shadow.

"I always felt that the East German musicians had a little different quality of identity than the West Germanmusicians had; it had to do with how they were brought up, but also with certain identifications they felt with Brecht and Eisler as musicians. Many of them knew Eisler,and he was there in their time; they identified with him in many ways, so that's an interesting thing. It is very

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interesting the way he did marches, they're never really left-left-left foot, there's always something off. And he has a lot of jazz influences in his songs, especially after he went to America; some of them sound like the jazz of the '30s. I think he was a very clever and a very moral man."

Speaking of America, consider the old question of how its shallow commercial culture may be geared to choke offthe very music its freedom from certain depths has spawned, forcing the European transplant we're considering here. Consider the Eros in the androgynous asthe force sometimes most effective against such base crime…

"You see, the music changed so much in America somehow;let's say, in Archie Shepp playing standards, for instance," he muses. "I understand that, and I don't mindit so much, in a sense." Consider the African-American voice looming largest in FMP's own voices and voice: "ButCecil [Taylor], since the early '60s—or since we've knownhim here, which was the early '60s—always had that special feature about him. He kept it up, and then—he's ablack homosexual; and this music somehow for long has been a very male music, somehow. It still is, in many ways, mostly, I mean the '60s music, let's say; now it's changed, but the '60s music was really a male music, and

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there was this very special man who was a black homosexual, and I think the black men, many of them, don't like homosexuals. So, it is strong; he kept it up really strong, and built it up into his system. I think Irespect him very much, and he is still one of the fathersof the stuff. I don't know if everybody would say it thatway, but it's something… "

"I agree," I say; "that's always a theme of fascinationwith me too. In the book on Braxton, I got into this whole thing about the man and the woman, and I was thinking about the stories about Sun Ra being gay, and Miles' bisexuality. It's important, it's a part of life.

"What I've noticed with everybody I've interviewed hereis that many of them are either collaborating with their wives or partners, and many have wives and partners who are also artists, somehow—musicians, dancers, painters. Or, when I ask them how they've survived over the years, they say their wives or partners supported them. Both of those things. But it's most interesting, the number of collaborations there are that make the music have anothershape. Do you ever do something in connection with your wife's painting?"

"Not in terms of art work; but Baby Sommer's wife is a dancer, and she's doing a project next March where I'm going to play and I think Ireni's going to do something

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like live drawings, with an overhead projector or something. Inge's dancing, and she's invited us to do this with her. That would be the first time; but I do play a lot of her openings.

"Also, we organize our travel together sometimes, because now there're these people in Cyprus who wanted todo something with Ireni, and we told them to wait until Icome for my thing in November. So she has an exhibition at the same time, and we can go together. We've done thatin Sweden, Spain, Greece, whenever and wherever we can."

"Do you think this dynamic between the men and women inyour circle developed as people matured?" I ask.

"I can say something about that, but I think you shouldalso talk to Irène Schweizer and Joélle Leandre about it.I think that's something interesting to look into, and they talk about it all the time.16

"Yes, it has not been easy for the women," he says. "I don't know if, in the early years maybe more than now, wemen players contributed to that difficulty. Irène's been around since '66; she came with the drummer Manni Neuemeier to Wuppertal, with her trio, and then we playedwith him too. So Irène was around, and we played a lot with her. But there aren't many others in the early

16. See Kowald's own (1998) interviews with Léandre, Namtchylak, Jeanne Lee and other women artists.

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years. Carla Bley [American] was here, and we toured withher."

I'm reminded of his most striking collaboration with a woman. "You said that When the Sun is Out You Don't See the Stars isone of your favorite CDs…"

"Of the recent times I also like Global Village Suite, but that was made in '86. It is still more in the cliché of 'free jazz' somehow. I think what I like about the other one is that it made that step out of free jazz, in a sense—but it's still a very radical record in many ways. Not as a free-jazz statement, but something to do with the choice of people. It had a saxophone player on it too, Werner Ludi; there's Sainkho there with the Asian thing, and Butch there with the black American thing, andsomehow it was a lucky recording. I love it."

Listen to CD 7/5, 13-16; 8/1, 1

Walking Wuppertal, Circling Olympus, Holy Geist or The Sound Between the Sounds of the Wholly Won Two

Duosnippet inFinity: (Heffley/Heffley)

I walked for a long time around the town after my job there was finished, the afternoon before the night train back to Berlin. In the process of pondering these two founders of FMP who were also two of the musicians it wasformed to serve, the form not only of Part II but of the dissertation and book (they would be different) as wholes

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suddenly became clear. This is not the place to detail, simply to mention as falling into place, the formal decisions spelled out in the various Introductions. It is, however, the place to reflect on the terrain they map, and the magic of it emerging, like Atlantis, at thisparticular point in the research rather than before or after it.

That terrain sprang fullblown into my inner landscape as a direct result, I felt, of the music and talk of these two (Peter B. the vertical, Peter K. the horizontal)—something like a reflection of the way the history of the group itself largely issued in real-world real time from their early collaboration. The offspring it was of Jost Gebers's spirit in action was a more worldly thing; paradoxically, also a more idealistic thing, as Dagmar said. The practical, everyday world of the music-makers was elsewhere, in those realms that looked ideal to those not making the music, but were as much a part of the fabric of the world as was the processof doing art's business while idealizing art.

I walked and walked, circled and circled, let the talk and music and sights of Wuppertal seep into the planning taking place, the inspiration of just how it should all unfold, just which writer's tools would serve it best, just which audio and video recordings would enrich the

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text, and how. I marveled over how it all came about so, and knew that it never would have had I not been as much a maker of the music as I was a writer about it (indeed, I felt like I was winding down after a great gig playing with two great musicians).

Having figured out the book's whole plan thus, I finally detach myself from MY horse. We have both had enough for now; we part satisfied with our exchange, and happy to turn away from each other to our respective realms.

(Mich Thank you for staying so long this time. I think we did what we needed to do.

ICH The pleasure was all MINE, and I AGREE.)

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