The Ten Gambits

[Stephen Stralka]

It seems like Tom Djll is out to start an argument with his opinion column in the current issue of Signal to Noise. Anyone up for it?

Personally I enjoyed the article, and related to a lot of what he had to say (not as an improviser, by the way, just a fan). Gambit 3, "Extend that technique," particularly resonated. Djll writes, "The exploration of new sounds and techniques seems an inextricable part of music's progress, and there will always be someone there to do it, but a single-minded focus on this one aspect of music -- especially on the bandstand, where it's tantamount to practice and not performance -- is numbing."

This reminded me of a free improv show I attended in Berkeley a while back, where one of the musicians, as a matter of fact, was Tom Djll. The set he took part in was pretty good, actually, and managed to avoid most of the pitfalls he discusses in the article, but before that there was a trio that included a contrabass clarinet. I remember looking at that monster up on the stage before the show and thinking, "Damn, this is going to be cool."

Alas, it was not to be. The guy in charge of the contrabass clarinet turned out to be a devout extended techniquer, and his entire performance consisted of the usual array of pops, squeaks, flutters and strangulations. He didn't allow so much as a single thunderous blat to escape from that horn. What a waste.

Thinking about it afterwards, I decided that there's sort of a leveling effect with extended technique. If you take, say, a contrabass clarinet and a tenor saxophone, and cause the air column inside each of them to vibrate by blowing on the reed, the sounds they produce are strikingly different. If you just click the keys, however -- not so different. One could argue, of course, that the keys of a contrabass clarinet and the keys of a tenor saxophone each have their unique sonic properties. True enough, but then you could extend the argument to say that everything has unique sonic properties, so why bother with musical instruments?

On the other hand, I didn't entirely agree with Djll's fourth gambit, "Surround yourself with mystical mumbo-jumbo." But this post is already pretty long.

[Enforcer]

[LutherBlissett]

Originally Posted by Stephen Stralka

It seems like Tom Djll is out to start an argument with his opinion column in the current issue of Signal to Noise. Anyone up for it?

Personally I enjoyed the article, and related to a lot of what he had to say (not as an improviser, by the way, just a fan). Gambit 3, "Extend that technique," particularly resonated. Djll writes, "The exploration of new sounds and techniques seems an inextricable part of music's progress, and there will always be someone there to do it, but a single-minded focus on this one aspect of music -- especially on the bandstand, where it's tantamount to practice and not performance -- is numbing."

This reminded me of a free improv show I attended in Berkeley a while back, where one of the musicians, as a matter of fact, was Tom Djll. The set he took part in was pretty good, actually, and managed to avoid most of the pitfalls he discusses in the article, but before that there was a trio that included a contrabass clarinet. I remember looking at that monster up on the stage before the show and thinking, "Damn, this is going to be cool."

Alas, it was not to be. The guy in charge of the contrabass clarinet turned out to be a devout extended techniquer, and his entire performance consisted of the usual array of pops, squeaks, flutters and strangulations. He didn't allow so much as a single thunderous blat to escape from that horn. What a waste.

Thinking about it afterwards, I decided that there's sort of a leveling effect with extended technique. If you take, say, a contrabass clarinet and a tenor saxophone, and cause the air column inside each of them to vibrate by blowing on the reed, the sounds they produce are strikingly different. If you just click the keys, however -- not so different. One could argue, of course, that the keys of a contrabass clarinet and the keys of a tenor saxophone each have their unique sonic properties. True enough, but then you could extend the argument to say that everything has unique sonic properties, so why bother with musical instruments?

On the other hand, I didn't entirely agree with Djll's fourth gambit, "Surround yourself with mystical mumbo-jumbo." But this post is already pretty long.

Bravo ! a nice article ext. technique become one of free music's worst indulgences consisting of nothing but substanceless pips, clicks, squeaks and honks are just sound effects used to excess
this seems to be the devices of mainly reed or woodwind players than keys or strings although playing the piano "guts" and prepared piano has long become a cliche also

its a good article, its good this kind of critique of free improv is in a magazine devoted to that style of music

[Steve Reynolds]

well Mats is an anitdote for the above when that is all I seem to hear

even Urs lets loose from time to time


No Try, No Fail, baby

[Stephen Stralka]

All that said, the pops and squeaks can be used effectively in a tension-and-release kind of way. And then you've got players like John Butcher, who rarely produces conventional saxophone sounds (that I know of), but the sounds he does produce are consistently interesting. Of course, he's another one who cuts loose from time to time as well.

[Brian Olewnick]

The whole issue of extended technique seems so beside the point to me. Someone's a good musician or not (or somewhere in between). The technique through which he/she conveys this musicality, imho, isn't important though, of course, it may or may not be fascinating in and of itself. Two guys'll be clacking their sax keys--one may sound beautiful, the other not. Again, it's like saying, "That Rothko with his messy blobs of color! Why doesn't he just paint a recognizable flower?!" There's nothing wrong with either approach of course, and some of us love both Rothko and Vermeer, Axel Dorner (at his wheezingest and clackitiest) and Don Cherry, etc.

[Stephen Stralka]

The issue isn’t Rothko vs. Vermeer, or Dörner vs. Cherry. That’s certainly not how Tom Djll frames it in the STN article. He indulges heavily in extended technique himself (I have a distinct memory of him tapping various objects on the bell of his trumpet), so it’s not as if he’s calling on his fellow improvisers to just play nice. He’s just pointing to what is, I think, a real issue in improvised music, which is that technique is sometimes foregrounded at the expense of musical expression.

I fully agree that technique isn’t, or shouldn’t be, all that important, and it’s certainly not what I’m thinking about when I’m listening to music that really works. But some music doesn’t work, and sometimes a preoccupation with technique is exactly the problem.

[Brian Olewnick]

Yeah, I understand that technique (any technique) can "get in the way". otoh, you get plenty of listeners who find themselves in an unfamiliar situation and only concentrate on the problems they're having with the technique, being unable, or unwilling, to grasp the whole. This, of course, could just as easily have applied to someone listening to Coltrane in 1964 as Butcher today. I know Djill's work only slightly and understand he writes articles sometimes for the purpose of being provocative (in a good way) but--not having read the article in question--I get a nagging sense that he's been confronted with some folk who he can't quite decipher and, instead of allowing that he might simply not be "getting it", prefers to cast doubt on the musicians' credibility. Just a guess, though. Does he name names?

If Djill's simply saying that there are a bunch of crappy musicians out there plowing in the free improv/eai field and that one of the ruts they get into is obsessing over extended technique at the expense of a larger creative view, well, yeah. No problem there.