I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.
I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted.
Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I’m struggling all the way through to think, “What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I’m hearing that I like so much?”
I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can’t be a deep human being without it or any of them.
We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That’s occasionally what happens.
I think the other thing that’s important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time.
