A Ferment of World Jazz Yields a Trove of Tapes
A Ferment of World Jazz Yields a Trove of Tapes
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/arts/music/22berger.html
October 22, 2008
A Ferment of World Jazz Yields a Trove of Tapes By BEN RATLIFF
WOODSTOCK, N.Y. =97 The Creative Music Studio here remains underdocumented and little understood. But a definitive history of jazz in the 1970s =97 a book yet to be written =97 ought to give it central importance.
During the dawning years of jazz education the studio, run out of various repurposed settings =97 a barn, a Lutheran youth camp, a motel =97 was the unmusic school, roughly analogous to Black Mountain College, the progressive school in North Carolina that brought together avant-garde writers, dancers and painters in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
The constant musical activity at the studio, in workshops and concerts, yielded about 400 hours of tapes: startling performances by Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Lee Konitz, Frederic Rzewski, Jimmy Giuffre, Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Lacy, Abdullah Ibrahim, Carla Bley, Ed Blackwell and many others.
If the studio is to get its historical due, the tapes will lead the way. Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso, the husband and wife who founded the school, have recently started restoring and remastering the recordings, a task expected to cost about $120,000. A benefit concert on Friday at Symphony Space will raise money toward that end, gathering friends, supporters and former associates of the school, including Mr. Braxton, John Zorn and Steven Bernstein. (Information and tickets are at symphonyspace.org.)
When the tapes are fully digitized, Mr. Berger and Ms. Sertso plan to give them back to the individual artists to use as they like. "It's their property," Mr. Berger said during an interview at his home in Woodstock on Monday. "It's what they brought here. We only created the environment for it."
During the eight-week terms at the studio, students were not called students; they were "participants" who sometimes ran the classes. Mr. Berger emphasized a rhythmic training exercise called gamala taki to connect jazz to other musical languages around the world. There were meditative group-singing exercises in the morning, and visiting teachers from around the world sometimes played and danced with students around bonfires.
"In the history of contemporary improvised music it was a very, very big thing," the pianist Marilyn Crispell said of the studio, where she studied and taught from 1977 to 1982. "It was a totally unique place in the world, totally nonbureaucratic =97 a hands-on experience, free and creative." Ms. Crispell made many contacts there who helped guide her through the next decades of her life, including Mr. Braxton, who met her there and brought her into his quartet for a decade.
Its instructors were active performers and bandleaders, and they used the school as laboratory and playground. Student groups gave concerts every Friday night, and visiting teachers performed every Saturday. During most of the school's existence =97 from 1972 to 1984, when the decline of financial support for the arts hastened its downfall =97 the concerts were recorded, and the Saturday-night tapes include performances by major jazz figures of the time. The couple plan to release sampler CDs of selections from the material as further fund-raising efforts, and will donate the entire Creative Music Studio audio collection to the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University.
Mr. Berger explained that C.M.S., as the place is commonly called, was not an ordinary school. "It wasn't set up like a school," he said. "There was one guiding artist for each week, and the idea was not about the instruments. It wasn't, for example, about Dave Holland coming to teach bass. It was about Dave coming to teach his own ensemble work. He'd find 15 or 20 players here, create music for them, and play with them all day long, five hours each day."
The isolated-utopia feeling of Woodstock was crucial to the school's identity. Mr. Berger and Ms. Sertso arrived there with two children and $700 at a point when jazz musicians had just started to settle in and around the town, about a two-hour drive from New York City. Mr. Holland, who had played bass with Miles Davis's group and with a quartet called Circle, settled there; so did the drummer Jack DeJohnette, Ms. Bley and Mr. Braxton.
Certainly the discoveries of the students =97 there were never more than 30 a term =97 were matched by the discoveries of the teachers. The studio did not promote one style because its teachers were too stylistically diverse. But a handful of important bands or records would not have happened without the studio as a spur, where the players were introduced to one another and the ideas were hatched. They include Mr. Holland's "Conference of the Birds," from 1973; many of Mr. Braxton's albums from the '70s and '80s, including "Creative Orchestra Music"; the String Trio of New York, founded in 1977; the early-'80s jazz-rock band Curlew; and Codona, the trio of the multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott, the percussionist Nan=E1 Vasconcelos and the trumpeter Don Cherry.
Cherry, who died in 1995, was as important to the school as anyone. In the late 1950s and early '60s Mr. Berger, a vibraphonist and pianist with an academic background in philosophy, and Ms. Sertso, a singer, were performing in clubs in Germany, their native country. Part of their education came from the presence of American jazz musicians stationed at a military base near clubs where they performed in Heidelberg. These included the pianist Cedar Walton and the drummer Lex Humphries, who mingled with the German musicians. On a trip to Paris in 1965 Mr. Berger befriended Cherry, who hired him for his quintet.
The quintet was an international band with no common tongue. But Cherry thought across language lines anyway.
"Don was the first person I knew who actively used world-music material in the 1960s," Mr. Berger said. "He had a shortwave radio on all day. Even in a movie theater."
Having relocated with Cherry's band to New York in 1966 =97 to perform at the Five Spot and to record Cherry's album "Symphony for Improvisers" =97 Mr. Berger taught improvisation classes to sixth graders in public school. The students, he said, taught him to see all musical forms as naturally interconnected.
"Once, in Harlem, a girl sang a melody to me that didn't make any sense," he said. "Melodically it was all over the place, like a 12-tone piece. I said O.K. and played it on the vibraphone. She said no, no! Because she knew every note she had been singing."
He talks in similar ways about teacher-student exchanges at the studio, like one when the Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista arrived at the school as a student. The first day he was encouraged to play a complicated odd-meter rhythm, never having encountered such a thing before. "It was the shock of his life," Mr. Berger said. "He entered into a whole new world."
"The kind of information that people got at C.M.S. really influenced both their listening and playing habits from then on," he added.
The Buddhist practice of calming the mind =97 both for players and for listeners =97 is central to the Creative Music Studio experience. "This is not about technology that anybody needs to learn, but about going to a musical place that's readily accessible," Mr. Berger said. "You've got to stop the chatter and just listen." =09 =09Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy