Mike Heffley & Vijay Iyer Interview

Mike Heffley Interview – Vijay Iyer



http://www.vijay-iyer.com

Transcript of phone interview, 3/6/07

MH You alluded in your email to your experience on the West Coast, which is where I grew up, around the Bay Area. You compared your experience as similar to the Asian-American guys I mentioned, saying something about the Asian-American scene in the Bay Area. Can you fill me in on that, and tell me what your experience was?

VI Are you familiar with that crew at all? John Jang, Mark Iszu, Glen Horiuchi, Miya Masaoka?

MH I know the names, but I don’t know any of them personally. I know a little bit about their work, and it’s what I’m just getting into now. I was in the Bay Area in the late ‘60s/early 70s, so I know all these names, but I haven’t been all that in touch with their work.

VI When I first moved to the Bay Area, I started hearing about this whole community of Bay Area Asian-American improvisers who had a collective called Asian Improv Arts. It was an artist’s collective formed very much in the spirit of AACM and BAG and those kinds of artist groups. In subsequent years they connected with the Asian Improv group. Tatsu Aoki in Chicago ended up being a lynchpin for their connections there. But prior to that it was mostly a West Coast thing. It was co-founded by John Jang, Francis Wong.

This was a very politicized organization, very much about community organizing, using music as the agent for social change and as an occasion for community organizing; also for articulating a politicized stance through the work. You should read Michael Dessen’s dissertation. He was a student of George Lewis, got his PhD at UCSD, and his dissertation contains a pretty solid history of Asian Improv, and an overview of its output. Also, Deborah Wong, whose work you probably know.

MH Yeah. I’ll get Michael’s dissertation.

VI Yeah, he writes about several different scenes—a bit about Asian Improv, also the New York downtown scene associated with Jon Zorn and the radical Jewish culture thread inside of that, and some about M-Base. It’s all sort of about these musicians’ collectives in the 80s & 90s.

MH Since you compared your experience to theirs, I was curious about what exactly you meant, because you’re not exactly a member of it, are you? you’re more of an independent individual artist, right? Your own CDs are all in your name, and you’re more associated with Indian than with Asian-American music tradition. How do you see the two worlds relating?

VI Actually, my first two albums were on their label, so I was pretty directly associated with the organization. I guess it depends on who you ask, but, to me, at least, and maybe more on the East Coast and in Europe, people consider India as part of Asia. So it seems like a strange distinction. When you’re talking about continents, you’re lumping together vast assortments of people, so it’s always a bit of a strain. Certainly, especially in the diaspora, when you start lumping together everybody from all over Asia in the diaspora as one community, it does start to be a bit of a stretch. I do consider myself Asian-American, but what that means specifically is really more about what it says about my experience here. More than about a shared heritage or something. It speaks more about having ties elsewhere, and so having that sense of displacement as part of my identity, as well as having the experience of integration within my immediate family—and also having this ethnicity that marks you as different within this mainstream culture in America, so that—it’s not even about the specifics of India v. China or Japan or anything; it’s just more that I have this name and this phenotype that marks me as different, and that ends up kind of framing the way I move in this culture.

MH I guess I’m wondering about the musical specifics of that. I had the experience of playing with Jason Kao Hwang. So I got to know his little gestures, what he was trying to do as a musician. Then I had the experience of hearing your CDs, and so I see a lot more direct influx, infusion of Indian music in your music, obviously, than in Jason’s music, which seemed correspondingly more related to Chinese music tradition. When you were playing with the Asian Improv guys then, did you have that distinction going on in your head? Did you take certain musical gestures or principles and make them be something else in your music?

VI Here’s how it worked for me. I was coming of age at that time, in my early 20s and kind of figuring out if I was going to be an artist, first of all, and if so, how I was going to really make my music be a direct—rather than being a journeyman jazz person who was trying to get the idiom right, how could I actually make it somehow tell my own story inside of this world, or even outside of it. So it was right around that time that I connected with these people. To be clear, while Asian Improv members do collaborate as musicians, it’s not a collective of musicians who play together. It’s a musician-run presenting organization and label. They created their own superstructure that circumvents the music industry and is much more directly tied to community, and collective political action. So it was in that context that I found a way to sort of harmonize with my own heritage by observing and participating in the artistic precedent that they set in specific ways. Just like you could say about the AACM, that there’s not really an AACM sound, but that there’s a diversity of viewpoint that was strengthened and nurtured by the AACM, because that’s the way it worked. This was very much the case with Asian Improv, in that everyone tied to it has had their own way of dealing with these very same issues, but it’s really the orientation to that direction, and the fact that they were all in it together that kind of defined what it was. Or, there’s not even a definition, it’s more just an historical moment.

MH That was a Bay Area thing. When you got back to New York, are you still involved in any kind of a community thing like that?

VI I guess the way it works for me—part of what was happening in the Bay Area for me was that in terms of demographics, there wasn’t really a critical mass of South Asians, meaning people from India and Pakistan and that whole community. Whereas here, we number in the millions. So it’s a different thing. So my experience with Asian Improv, in terms of my first 2 albums being put out there...and also they presented me on some of my first major performances, my first major gigs in the Bay Area: they’d have their own annual festival, and I performed in that leading my own group a couple of times...

MH This was when you were a student at UC Berkeley and studying physics and math and all that...

VI During and subsequent to that, yeah.

MH So you’re saying that this time and context was your initiation into the music, because that’s when you decided to become a musician instead of a scientist?

VI Yeah, it was all around that time. 1995 was when I put out my first album, which was on Asian Improv, and it was very much instigated by Francis Wong, who was at the time president off the organization. He sort of took me under his wing and said, you should do this; you have all this music, you have some momentum here, and this would be a good time to make it happen. There wasn’t an abundance of money, but at least by doing it, I would be a part of something. It wouldn’t be like a tree falling in the forest, it would be really...well, something associated with what had become like a legacy, a substantial body of work.

MH Then you also ended up writing a dissertation in music rather than science, right?

VI It was actually about music cognition, so I guess it was a little bit of both, I guess you could say. But yeah, I did leave physics.

MH I will get your dissertation, and Michael’s, and we’ll refine this interview as I do educate myself more. Fresh in my mind now, actually, is the CD I just heard by Michael, with you on it. I got a definite impression of a New York scene that was sort of an update for me—which is something I’m in the process of with this project, of updating my awareness. I noticed all the names behind the CD on the label that he thanked—Marty Ehrlich, JD Parran and all these people whose music I do know fairly well...and I noticed the way you guys played together and worked together with interest, just because it struck me as sort of a New York that’s opening up. I got a definite sense of a community of Brooklyn musicians...you mentioned the AACM—and Muhal’s name was among those Michael thanked--and I’m sort of seeing like a fulfillment of their dream of how they were in a way like the more world-music-oriented of the black artist groups that came up in the ‘60s and ‘70s—but it was all sort of an African-American version of the world. By comparison, New York seemed more insular than that vision, more intense and uptight, even, in certain ways, compared to Chicago and even San Francisco in my mind.

What I see now, and in this community and in the music you guys are playing is sort of a realization of this vision of a more world-music kind of scene, only it’s not just African Americans who are simulating that, it’s actual people from all over that world, who are doing it. The music itself seems to have sort of opened up in a looser way, and a more transparent way, in the way that they did in Chicago too, as compared to New York.

Anyway, that’s just my observation. What I would ask you, as someone who is in it and knows it: do you have a sense of where you are now as a community of musicians, and of yourself as a part of it? and how would you describe that scene?

VI Well, I guess something that happens to you in New York is that you find yourself intersecting with a lot of different scenes. Certainly there is a community of players who keep track of each other, but I find also that, by keeping in mind the sort of legacy or heritage of the AACM-oriented artists, or those people affiliated with that world, is that it’s really about thinking beyond the histories of genre or anything like that. It’s really about just trying to be a fully realized creative individual –always researching, always working, and always expanding. My whole track record has been about collaboration with people of all sorts. Obviously, the collaboration with Rudresh looms pretty large in the history of what I’ve done, but then I’ve also done these collaborations with Mike Ladd, who’s this poet and underground hip-hop artist. Our work together has taken me in a very different direction, artistically and everything, but it was created with all of these different strands of who I am in mind, and very much brought to bear on that.

Then I’ve also worked with people in the rock world, the hip-hop world, and in classical music, or new music, as it’s called. What I’ve found is that the notion of a scene is hard to be viewed as something that is contained. It’s more like a series of intersections between very large communities of people. So I guess what’s really interesting to me is being at a node in the network, where you find yourself connected to a wide range of communities and worlds, which is what excites me about it.

I think it’s very possible to exist in that way, and I find that more and more people are thinking in those terms. Not so much in the antiquated terms of whether this trumpet player can cut that trumpet player; it’s got more to do with really thinking about your output as an artist. Maybe I’m being idealistic...

MH No, it sounds just the opposite to me.

VI I mean as a thumbnail sketch of my community—because certainly, in reality there are these smaller communities that are more insular that I’m also connected to. But to me it’s about expansion and connection to the rest of the world.

MH One of my points of curiosity to question you about from hearing this CD with Dessen was actually about that—collaborations—because I had just heard all of your other CDs, where you wrote all the music, and you had the concept, and were very much in your own creativity and so on. And I have yet to hear your recordings with Rudresh and Mike Ladd [have heard them since...] What I wondered about when I was hearing how you worked with them and comparing it to how your worked on your own thing—obviously, there were similarities, because you were interacting with other musicians in both contexts—but I wondered what the experience was like for you, the switch from doing your own initiated projects, around your own concepts and ideas, and then coming to the table of someone else’s?

VI I’ve been doing work as a sideman all along. I worked for years with Steve Coleman, and continue to work with Roscoe Mitchell and Wadada Leo Smith. So I have had to have that adaptability as part of my arsenal—coming to someone else’s music and being able to execute it, as well as offering something else besides what they foresaw, perhaps. That’s sort of what’s called for, when you are an improviser playing someone else’s music. They’re asking you not to just execute it impeccably or whatever, but also to turn it into something else that they didn’t foresee. That’s kind of what the name of the game is, and that’s definitely how I try to operate in these contexts.

I guess in terms of my own playing, I tend to be more self-effacing as a soloist—I mean, there are a lot of piano solos on my CDs, but in terms of the way I play and the way I tend to interact in an ensemble, I often think of myself more as part of the rhythm section, rather than as the burning bebop soloist or something. So even when the focus shifts to me as an improviser, I tend to be building from that foundation, so my improvisations tend to be more rhythmic in nature and more textural, and more about sound and environment, rather than about foregrounding melody or something like that. That ends up being really a way in when you’re working with other musicians, because then your statements are necessarily interactive in nature, they’re not just about foregrounding your own musicianship or something.

MH I enjoyed the differences and the similarities between your own CDs and the one with Michael Dessen. The stuff you did in the lower register of the piano seemed really conversational, kind of surprising to me...like a little drum down there or something...

VI Yeah, yeah.

MH And the way you do your little sprays in the right hand, really lovely little kind of arpeggios on the top...soft touch. I also noticed that when you do solo you tend to do a lot of single-line kind of playing, rather than chords in the left hand, or in both hands—although you can obviously play chords when you want to—but you seem to like to play the piano like a single-line instrument a lot.

VI I guess it depends on what’s called for, and sort of what the music suggests. Different musical instances call for different things. I think when I’m playing over changes, I do tend not to make it too thick. But then there are other instances when it really is about harmony and chordal material...

MH Maybe more so on your own CDs?

VI Yeah, you might check out some of Rudresh’s CDs too, because that’s probably where I’m most foregrounded as the piano player. His music covers a wide range, and I have to do a lot of different things.

MH Also in this book, as in my other two, I’m interested in the ancient history of music, and all the different kinds of occult systems that go behind it. That’s been a longstanding important part of my work, and it seems to be a major aspect of yours too.

VI It is in the mix.

MH Obviously that’s what Steve Coleman was about, right?

VI Still is, more and more every day.

MH A couple of little things I was curious about. I’ve seen Indian musicians do what they called shadowing, where the violin player “shadows” the vocalist?

VI Right.

MH And I’ve noticed a similar kind of linear interactivity going on in your music. Is that something you’ve thought about much consciously?

VI I guess that specific heterophony kind of quality that you’re talking about in Indian music I’ve sought after in specific cases, but perhaps it ends up being a more general template for me unconsciously too.

MH In one of your interviews, you talked about Roscoe saying “don’t follow me, just do your own thing.”

VI Right, right.

MH So I wondered if you ever had a conflict between the two strategies, of that interactivity as opposed to just two parallel voices going on.

VI I think that it’s still interactivity, it’s just a different notion of it. One perhaps is very demonstrative, and the other is more about counterpoint. But I think that they’re both interactive strategies. When Roscoe says don’t follow me, he’s not saying ignore me. It’s almost more like you have to avoid him—which means you have to listen harder. You have to create something that has its own stability, and that doesn’t interfere with what he’s doing, which is a very different kind of listening that has to happen, actually.

Often you’ll hear beginning improvisers, or people who haven’t listened to a lot of improvisation, when they try to improvise together, they’ll do so by imitating each other. So that’s sort of like an aspect of the quality that he’s seeking to avoid.

When you hear, say, karnatic musicians interacting in that way, it’s actually that they’ve got a very specific repertoire of melodic material that they’re both referencing, so it’s not just that one is following the other but that they’re both reaching into the same well.

MH With Lineal, all the way through it seemed like a prevailing strategy was loose interweavings of the written with the improvised, darting in and out of both, stating whatever was written together and loosely, and improvising around it and just kind of having a conversation with it. Is that a fair characterization?

VI Yeah. One thing that actually really impressed me about Michael’s work, previous to actually playing it—like, for example, the stuff that he’s done with this group Cosmologic—is the way that these somehow devastating orchestrated passages would emerge out of what seemed like completely in-the-moment improvisation. They would just sort of seamlessly appear out of nowhere, this extremely ordered statement out what seemed like everyone on their own path. I really like that quality, because what it suggests when you hear that is that, oh, well there was order all along that I wasn’t aware of.

MH How does that actually come about in practical terms?

VI Well, they have a lot of different strategies. I sometimes pursue similar effects through different means. Sometimes it’s specifically directed, other times it’s just like, okay, eventually we’re going to gravitate to this, and we’ll find our way there. Of course you have to know the material really well enough to achieve that effect.

MH How does that work with your charts? I looked them over with interest, and they all seem very formal on the page. In one of your interviews, you were talking about how the music has both the characteristics of rigor, of high art, but also that it feels like a folk art. I also recall you saying you like working with Mike Ladd because he was very intuitive; and yet your charts looked to me like you’re obviously a formally trained and schooled musician. I’m curious about how you in practical terms bring about that synthesis in rehearsals and first engagements of the music by others. Do you all just kind of read it down as it is until you feel comfortable with it? Or...?

VI Well, the lynchpin tends to be rhythm. When I compose, a lot of the formal properties are rhythmic in nature, so it’s about working with people who can handle that and can still create in the midst of pretty intricate rhythmic form.

MH Obviously you have this long relationship with the carnatic music, and you’re fascinated with the intricate, complex rhythm, but you’re also very comfortable with it. Is it like you conceive something, write it down, and then just play it over and over until what was first in your head is finally in the rest of your body?

VI It does involve that kind of work. You might start with it completely posing the kind of challenge such that you can’t even put two notes together. But over time you do find a way to internalize it so that it’s not an issue. And it takes work; it’s not something you can necessarily just jump on. I believe in that process, of working through something rigorous in order to get to the other side, and find something new in yourself.

MH You spoke in another interview about musicalizing the Fibonacci series and other mathematical concepts in your pieces. Do you have a lot of such math-related ideas that you feel you haven’t gotten to yet, but hope to over the course of a lifetime? You know, some big, grand dream that you have yet to touch but know you want to someday?

VI I guess I tend to take more the small steps, but my entire output has involved the Fibonacci sequence. From the first record on, it’s always played some part in the compositional design.

MH You mean like one little aspect here, another one there?...

VI Yeah, I mean that’s how it works, you know; it’s not like there’s one master response to the Fibonacci sequence that will put it to rest! It’s something that is inherently productive; it’s something that continues to unfold and to offer new possibilities. Also, by not really being prescriptive; I mean all it is is a bunch of numbers, it doesn’t tell you what it needs to sound like or anything, so there’s so many possible manifestations of the same basic idea. I’m sure you know that Bartok mined that same set of ideas and came up with something that on the surface sounds pretty different from my music. But again, if you go back to my first album Memoraphilia, from 1995, there’s a song on there called Stars Over Mars. There’s a sequence in there that is both rhythmically and intervallically all about the Fibonacci sequence. The writing all the way throughout that album, in the way I put together melodies and rhythms, was informed by that. It’s my oldest album, and then if you look at my music today, I could tell you the same thing. It’s still in there, and is still something I’m mining and working. I have a whole new set of material for my quartet that I hope to record this year that is also about that. And it’s about a bunch of other things too, but these are all just a set of concepts that continue to reveal themselves and to offer productive manifestations.

The Golden Mean stuff, Fibonacci stuff, is one example. There are a number of other examples. So I guess it’s not necessarily that I have some grand plan to at some point do the musical equivalent of curing cancer or something, because it’s not like that; even curing cancer is not like that. It’s about making small steps that are informed by that overall idea, and having each of them kind of add up.

MH That brings this up in my mind. Of general interest to me was—since I’ve read about your background that you kind of came up in the same music I did, but you also have these other elements going on...could you just give me sort of a quick thumbnail sketch of how you see the three different rhythmic universe of, say, India, and Africa, and Europe?

VI [laughter] Well, if I’m empowered to give ridiculous generalizations about whole entire continents and cultures...okay, let’s see. You know, there are these clichés about it, that African music is all about polyrhythm, and stratification, and cyclicality, and dialogue, and verticality rather than horizontality. These are clichés I’m giving just to layout the broad picture; and they are clichés, meaning they’re somewhat true and somewhat fucked up.

MH Duly noted. Just keep talking.

VI Then, looking at the elaborative concepts of Indian music in general, which is hard to generalize about—but they use these elaborate arithmetic principles to develop rhythmic ideas, and these kinds of principles are often implemented in a serial way. So it sort of a little bit more linear, and more additive, and more like a rhythmic composition created by a tabla player, or mridangam player, which will take a long span of time and will spice it up in all these different ways, and divide it, so that it will span an overall regular time cycle, but there will be different sort of superimposed regularities within it that are of different speeds, or lengths, or orders—but it’s delivered in a very linear way, meaning it’s sequential, or additive.

But I guess the key to me is that it’s still done with reference to an overall metric template that is regular. So like these tabla compositions, or these cadential forms that are created by carnatic percussionists also...they’re performed in meter, and in overall meter. So what they’re playing may not reinforce that meter except in very longterm ways, but it is done as a kind of hyper-arithmetic elaboration of an underlying meter. So there is still a sense that it’s connected to a simple basic cycle, and that it’s something that’s a cyclical meter that you can keep in your head, or that you can play or conduct with your hand. So it still has that element of groundedness in it; it’s just that when you hear it by itself, you don’t necessarily recognize it as such, especially if you’re an outsider hearing it and not hearing it in performance, or in context, then it just sounds like this interminable string of elaborate and varied rhythms.

MH Having described those two sets of clichés, do you feel like that’s something you’ve had to deal with in your development, and that you’ve integrated the two of them in a certain kind of way?

VI I guess what I should say is that neither one was a part of my youth, except in a very generic way. It wasn’t like I sat and studied these things as a kid, or that they were really drilled into me in an unconscious way. It was really more that in my late teens and twenties I consciously studied them and did work to try to make them part of my own musicality. So it was a conscious endeavor, and it was something that is still ongoing.

MH That’s a good segue to the third cliché description, that of the European rhythmic universe. The reason I throw that in, of course, is because obviously what we’re talking about here in a lot of different ways is the intersection of these three universes in America. The two you’ve just described have the most musical interest to most people, including me, or anyone who’s been involved with this. But the way you look at and describe the European side too is crucial, because rhythm is the thing that has been so disruptive to that culture. So how would you talk about that?

VI I grew up playing classical violin, and I played in orchestras, so my experience with that realm is pretty direct, perhaps more so than with anything else, actually. Again, speaking in broad terms, what I’ve found there is that rhythm is just not emphasized as a component of music. If you look at the language surrounding musical technique and theory, Western music is impoverished utterly when it comes to rhythm. That’s something like a conceptual bias that you see manifesting in all different levels of Western music culture, from the pedagogy side to the performance practice side to the composerly side.

For one thing, the idea of regular rhythmic pulse has come to be severly doubted or questioned in 20th-century Western music, so what that has led to is a disconnect from the music’s connection to dance. In general, I really see it as connected to these kind of cultural stereotypes of and policing of the body in Western culture—or, say, to the specific ways that the body is policed in Western culture. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t policed in Indian culture—perhaps it is more so—but the role it has in the artistic process is by and large an unexamined one, so it ends up being something that’s marginalized and feared, essentially: the role of the human body in making music. And this is actually what my dissertation was about.

So that manifests in the way that rhythm is treated, I find, because rhythm and the body are essentially one and the same. [re: both diss & CIES paper] What I found is that rhythm ends up being this quality of music that isn’t discussed or studied, and that isn’t foregrounded except in very circumspect ways.

MH It’s interesting that you should touch on that now, for me, because I’ve been getting into Chinese music. Some of the Chinese musicians I’ve talked to have said that about Chinese music: that it was just sort of a duple rhythm, and a simple square four kind of thing, and that the reason was that it wasn’t rooted in dance, but rather in philosophy and mathematics and so on. So when they came to the West, and the improvisers started improvising with people in the West, or were just trying to learn other rhythms from other cultures, that it was very hard and strange for them.

VI Yeah, well when I say this about Western rhythm, that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be possible somewhere else. I think it comes down to this relationship to the body. That ends up being very cultural, and it may manifest in one way here and one way there. It can be sort of analogous in terms of the way this relationship comes about, or how it’s treated. And it often has to do with the relationship to a high culture, or whether the cultural role of the music gets disconnected from dance to the point that you’re not meant to move while either performing or listening to it. And that is the case, of course, in some music, as I experienced all my life playing the violin as a kid. They told me not to tap my foot, they told me not to sway, not to move. You go to a concert and tap your foot, and people are scowling at you...That’s just what it is. I’m not passing judgment, because that’s just what it is. But it has repercussions. You can ask the chicken or egg question, in terms of what caused what, but I think what you find is that as it becomes more of a contemplative or sedentary experience of the music itself, it becomes more and more dislodged from the physical.

So yes, these are all clichés, but they are informed. That’s what I find to be different about the African-derived musics, and South Asian-derived musics: because of the centrality of rhythm—not just rhythm, but pulse, which is a kind of rhythm—it ends up being more connected to that kind of physical experience that we call dance. That’s sort of where it interests me.

It’s also true that there were plenty of forms in Western music that were also connected to dance. Over time, they became more abstracted and academic, or just conceptual or programmatic kinds of things, than actual “minuets” or whatever.

MH Who is Rishi Maharaj? [re: Invocation, on CD Panoptic Modes]

VI He is an Indo-Caribbean man who, in the late ‘90s, was living in New York with his family. He was young, I think even a teenager at the time, and he was beaten by white men with baseball bats. This was in Queens, I believe; so he was the victim of a hate crime.

MH So Invocation was dedicated to him for?...

VI It was an event that kind of helped people in my community, the South Asian diasporic community, realize sort of where they stood in relation to the superstructure here, and to the mainstream culture. I think that a lot of educated immigrants who came here, like my parents, in the ‘60s and subsequently, of a certain class background, who sort of had it good here, and were able to achieve a certain upward mobility here—they had a certain lack of consciousness about race in this country. So I think that particular incident helped clarify the order of things.

MH Tell me how you learned to navigate the South Indian rhythm system via Bud Powell. [re: Configurations, on CD Panoptic Modes]

VI It’s sort of like we were just saying, in terms of like you have this rhythmic challenge, and you have to learn how to overcome it so that it’s not a challenge any more. The way I did so in that particular case was by thinking about his own particular sense of rhythmic balance. When I hear Bud playing at these very fast tempos, there’s always this relaxation in it that I found I had to reach for in order to really be at home inside of this composition that I had created, which was derived from the South Indian rhythmic concepts. We come to imagine these systems as self-contained, when you talk about something that’s associated with a certain ethnic superstructure, or a certain tradition or something...we see it as something that all the answers are inside of it. What I found was that the answers were inside of me, in a way, but that was through reaching outward to other things that were in my life. It was just really about me being me, in a sense, because I was listening to Bud all the time too. So in a way, listening to that kind of music helped me to create mine in this way.

MH That’s a good story, for the way things merge. Another part of your work that I really enjoyed was the integration between the poetic or the literary images and the music. It’s not all just music science here, you know. That’s going to be a big part of my book too, in a certain way. So I was interested in your two sea-themed titles, The Antlantean Tropes, and Trident. I wondered if the sea as an image loomed large for you for some reason.

VI I suppose, yeah, for some reason. It had to do with the sort of spiritual questions I was asking, and a particular disposition I have, I think, and just trying to make sense of it all, in terms of who I was and what my heritage was. Somehow, that image and that symbol provided a relief for me, or an answer, somehow. It’s hard to say more than that, really. In the specific case of Trident, for example, part of what prompted me to create that piece was noticing that both Shiva and Neptune have that, as part of their iconography, which connects them in a very specific way. So the sea becomes something that’s associated with that symbol. It’s also actually the name of a McCoy Tyner album, on the cover of which he’s standing by the sea.

MH It’s also the name of the club where I used to go hear Denny Zeitlin play all the time in Sausalito, back in the late ‘60s, which is a houseboat city there in the Bay Area.

VI Yeah, yeah. So obviously I didn’t invent the relationship.

MH But I liked the way it connected up with your whole trope of “blood.” You write about blood a lot, like with Blood Sutra...

VI Yeah. So all I’m saying is that that particular lynchpin, the object of a trident linking these different ancient mythologies, thousands of years old, and how the sea ends up being the vehicle through which that happens. But also what the e sea contains, which is sort of everything...and yet it has an identity that is itself. I could say more, but it could get pretty weird...

MH But that’s what we want to get to; that’s why we need another hour. But I’m going to let you go. I really appreciate how much we did. We’ll pick it up and finish it later.

VI All right, man.