Mike Heffley & Wu Man Interview

Mike Heffley Interview – Wu Man



From Wu Man’s website:

Wu Man is an internationally renowned pipa virtuoso, cited by the Los Angeles Times as “the artist most responsible for bringing the pipa to the Western World.” The pipa is a lute-like Chinese instrument with a history of more than two thousand years. Having been brought up in the Pudong School of pipa playing, one of the most prestigious classical styles of Imperial China, Wu Man is now recognized as an outstanding exponent of the traditional repertoire as well as a leading interpreter of contemporary pipa music by today’s most prominent composers such as Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Tan Dun, Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Bun-Ching Lam and many others.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied with Lin Shicheng, Kuang Yuzhong, Chen Zemin, and Liu Dehai at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master's degree in pipa. When in China, Wu Man received first prize in the 1st National Music Performance Competition among other awards. She also participated in many groundbreaking premieres of works by a new generation of Chinese composers. Wu Man currently lives in San Diego, and she formerly lived in Boston for 12 years, where she was selected as a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. Wu Man was selected by Yo-Yo Ma as the winner of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize in music and communication. She is also the first artist from China to have performed at the White House.







My questions for you will reflect my book’s main interest, which is the relationship between different processes, functions, and aesthetics of music, cross-culturally. I have a fair sense of the historical connections between China and Western art music, including the contemporary composers whose works you’ve performed, from both East and West. My questions are more to fill in my understanding of your relationship to Chinese folk music, to “world music” (or other folk music traditions), to American jazz and the improvised music that has grown out of and beyond jazz throughout the world.



However, all those musical worlds—the contemporary composer’s, the world music and the folk traditionalist, and jazz/post-jazz improviser’s—all become my areas of interest where they intersect. Whenever they overlap in your work--through instrumental techniques, concepts, collaborations, etc.—I would be interested in anything you might tell me that I might not know to ask.





MH You live in San Diego now. For how long?

WM About three years.

MH You were in Boston for about 12 years before that.

WM Yes.

MH I was for twelve years in Connecticut, and just moved back to the West Coast a year and a half ago too.

WM To Portland...?

MH Yes, back to where I came from. I recall reading somewhere that Boston was the sister city of Hangzhou.

WM Is that right? I didn’t know that.

MH I thought you might have chosen to move there from your home city of Hangzhou because of that.

WM No, I did not know that. [laughter]

MH What was the reason you moved to Boston then?

WM My family with my husband. He worked there. When I first arrived, it was actually not Boston; actually, it was Connecticut first, New Haven. My husband worked at Yale then, then later got a job at MIT. He’s a scientist.

MH Were you married before coming to America?

WM No, after.

MH I’d like to start at the beginning, with my first questions trying to get a sense of your background and roots in China.

WM I think you mentioned you were more interested in jazz...?

MH Right. So I won’t ask too many questions about composers that you’ve worked with, because there’s already much information about that online, and I think I know what I want to do with it. My book will be more about collaborations between people from different traditions from around the world who get involved with improvised music, and folk music, or roots music outside their own traditions. So I want to get a sense of your roots and background, and how that led you to or influenced your work as an improviser.

First, I am curious about your name. Do you know the history and the meaning of it?

WM Yeah. Wu is a pretty common family name in Chinese. Wu used to be a kingdom, and a king. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just like a first name. “Man” in Chinese means strong, wild, barbaric.

MH Was there some reason you were named that?

WM Well, also Wu means from outside of China. I think my parents gave me this name because my dad always felt that a girl should be strong to survive in today’s society, particularly in the Chinese tradition. So because my family name is Wu, in Chinese we have so many different meanings with different pronunciations of it. It can also mean “no,” or “not.” Different characters, so not the same word. So the suggestion is not barbaric, not wild. The combination of Wu with Man is very unusual—to use Man as a name; I may be the only one.

MH Good! Do you have brothers and sisters?

WM Yeah, I have one brother.

MH Can you tell me a bit about your life in Hangzhou as a young girl getting into music?

WM I was nine.

MH How did it come about?

WM Many people have asked me that.

MH You don’t have to tell me the same stories you’ve told many other people , especially if it’s in print somewhere. I am interested in why and how you came to be a musician, if you can think of a way to tell me that’s fresh. Before we get to you, let me ask you about Hangzhou, and the life and culture there. Was your family musical?

WM Very musical, but not musicians. My father is an artist, and my mom is a teacher. My father painted in both Western and Chinese traditional styles, and taught at a fine arts college there.

MH So both parents were teachers.

WM Yes, so I basically grew up in this very artistic environment, from birth, in this compound. All of my family’s friends were musicians or painters—something to do with arts. So maybe that’s the reason I started music. Both my parents really loved it.

When I was 12, I went to Beijing.

MH And from 9 to 12, was it always the pipa?

WM Yes. I started with a small version, which we call yue-qin. It’s a lot like a little mandolin. Smaller than the regular pipa, and you use a pick to play it.

MH Is it specifically for children?

WM No. Particularly in Northern China, local operas use it very often. At 12, I switched to regular pipa.

MH Did you go to Beiling to live in a school or something?

WM Yes, I took an exam. All Chinese know that in the late-70s/early-80s, it was the most difficult time to get into the Beijing music school in China. I got into the school then.

MH Was it normal for children that young to leave their family?

WM No, not at all. The whole educational system in China was very much like the former Soviet Union. They trained kids very, very young. They really cared about talent; they were looking for prodigies in the arts, music. I was very fortunate to be chosen by the Conservatory professors. They saw the talent; they saw me play, and they thought, yeah, that could work for her.

It was a great, great honor for any Chinese family, to have their child picked to go to the the capital city; anything in Beijing is the best. Of course, your parents don’t have to pay anything; the government takes care of it all.

So basically, if you’re chosen, they’re training you to become the great artist. At least that’s their wish. So I was one of those they picked, when I was 12.

MH Whe you got to Beijing, were you also the only one playing pipa in your age group then?

WM No, no, they brought people in from all over China. People in my age group, 10-14, then numbered maybe 10 or 15 from the whole country. In the college level and the younger level, there were many more than that. You can’t imagine; out of billions of people, to only pick 20 or 15 pipa players. It’s really something.

MH This is each year?

WM Yes, but the number picked is not always the same. Some years, maybe it’s only five.

MH How many years were you there?

WM Twelve years.

MH So they take you from...

WM ...like Juilliard pre-school. I was in the pre-school session, then went on to college level. After that, I went into a Master’s Degree program.

MH Did you live in a big compound with a lot of different kids?

WM Yes. No parents around, but teachers assigned to take care of us in our accommodations. Sort of like a nanny, or a babysitter, whatever.

MH Is it a good memory of all those years?

WM Very good. Very tough. You do miss your parents, and your home, that kind of tough. But the good memory is that all the kids were very talented: living together, rehearsing, playing music, studying Chinese. We went on trips—that kind of thing.

MH Can you explain to me how the music culture of Hangzhou and your Pudong style of pipa playing...if all of that came from Jiangsu Province, how does it translate once in Beijing?

WM The tradition did start in that area, but that was 100 years ago. It was mostly in the Shanghai area, and Hangzhou is actually in Zhejiang Province, not Jiangsu. It was a very rich tradition for bowed string and pluck string instruments, especially pipa.

MH Silk and bamboo...

WM Exactly. Hangzhou is definitely silk and bamboo, and in China is considered one of the most beautiful cities.

MH There was also a local tradition of percussion, right? I’ve been reading the Steven Jones book...

WM Shifan gu and Shifan luogu are local traditions of percussion, drums and gongs. That we consider more like folk music; pipa is more classical.

MH But isn’t that recent too? The pipa didn’t start being taught in the Conservatory until the 1950s or so, right?

WM Something like that.

MH Before that, was it more in the folk category?

WM No, the history of the instrument puts it in the classical genre. But since it became so popular, it is sort of in between the genres. Before the 1950s, none of the traditional music was put in the academic area. It’s like here, you wouldn’t see a banjo player in Juilliard. But at that point the government decided it wanted to control the culture more and train new people in the way they felt proper, so they put it all in the Conservatory context.

MH During this time when you were a girl, you were still too young for the Cultural Revolution to really affect you, weren’t you?

WM Yes, I don’t remember much of it. I was in elementary school at that time. Basically, my experience was that a lot of pipa music teachers cautioned me not to play in public, especially not traditional music. In public you were only supposed to play certain revolutionary songs.

MH But there was no problem teaching it in private?

WM Right, or even in the schools; just not on the stage, or the radio.

MH While we’re on the subject of Hangzhou and the region and the genre, a couple of questions about some tracks on your CDs. One was “Ancient Melodies of Wu Lin.”

WM Yes, Wu Lin is the old name of Hangzhou.

MH And on another CD you wrote the “Hangzhou Blues.” So I’m curious about your relationship to the city. You left when you were 9 years old, so in a way you’re more like a Beijing person, no?

WM Half and half.

MH So you feel a strong emotional connection to Hangzhou?

WM Oh yeah. Old memories. All my childhood memories...and I still have friends there.

MH So you’ve kept in touch with them and your family, so you go back there regularly. Do you feel the same close connection to Beijing?

WM Very much so.

MH Can you describe for me the different characters of the two cities in your eyes?

WM Culturally, very different. Beijing is the capital, and it’s the oldest city. It used to house the Qin Dynasty, and the king lived in the Forbidden City. It’s more like Washington DC is here: economic, cultural, and political center of China. Culturally maybe more like New York, but politically more like Washington. People always want to move there, because there’s more opportunity there; if you’re successful there, you are successful in China.

MH When you were there as a student, did your parents visit you there much?

WM Once in awhile.

MH Did you get to go back home and see them much?

WM Oh yeah. Summer and winter breaks. Hangzhou is totally different. It’s elegant, quiet, like Kyoto, Japan. An older city, lot of poems, artists...

MH When you played this “Ancient Melodies of Wu Lin,” these six different melodies with these different titles, do you have any kind of emotional connection with those titles and what they mean?

WM Well, when you’re little, you never think about that. You’re just learning. As you and your music get more mature, you definitely start to feel that inner connection—especially when you play with the left hand, so many details changing: vibrato, harmonics...it makes you feel that way.

MH What about the titles themselves? Since the music I write about is mostly improvised music, I’m always curious about how people decide what to call a track that was purely improvised. Obviously, something about the music inspires them to pick that title over another one. In Chinese music, there are a lot of poetic titles.

WM I think, though, originally there was no title. It’s just a local tune, handed down through generations. Later on, some poetic people decided to call it that title, so that when you play it, or when you listen to it, you have some direction. Most Chinese classical music is like that. The original is based on untitled improvisations on a tune, and 500 years ago during the Qing Dynasty [1644-1911], that’s when everything started getting titled.

MH As a musician, since you learned from 9 years old, has your experience then been just with the music and not so much with the words? I noticed you sang on some of your CDs. Have you done that much over the years?

WM No, it’s just a nice sideline.

MH In Steven Jones’ book it talks about the men being mostly the instrumentalists, but there seem to be more women instrumentalists here in the West, especially playing cross culturally, as you do. Is that true? Was there ever a question about you being a woman and playing this instrument?

WM Not at all. I had four teachers, and they were all men. I don’t think that is true. There are many men playing in both China and here; we just don’t know about them, or they keep a low profile. But I am noticing that in the younger generation, boys are playing the instruments less, because now there are more opportunities for them. The lifestyle has changed. There used to be no computers or a lot of other things we have now, so they have other options besides sitting down and practicing every day for four hours.

MH In the West, historically, the women have often been the ones mostly to play the piano, and also have sung a lot...

WM Yeah, it’s the same thing.

MH But the pipa is more like for everybody?

WM Right.

MH I noticed on your website there was something about a project for you to go and study some folk music in China. Was that a recent project?

WM Yeah, last year it started, and I’m still doing it. I’m interested in it because I come from south, from Hangzhou, even though I’ve studied and worked in Beijing. It’s an academic interest of mine. My idea was to go to the northern part of China, close to Mongolia and Central Asia, that area, in the west part, and to hear more authentic Chinese folk music. Just for myself, I wanted to hear, to learn...I wanted to feel their life. So last summer I took a trip with a group of musicologists, a field trip in that area. It has very rich music, all kinds of music; they have so many festivals. The lifestyle is still very poor; the area is very dry, no water, no electricity. It was really an amazing trip, so many bright musics, folk songs, puppet shows....

MH Was it actually part of China?

WM Yeah. Close to Mongolia, still China.

MH Your degrees are all in music, performance, rather than musicology. But I notice in your career that you have these interests in other world music traditions. Do you have some kind of connection with music scholars, either Western or Chinese?

WM A lot of the musicologists on this trip were Chinese.

MH But your interest in this was probably as a musician, right?

WM Yes, I was the only musician.

MH What about that CD Wu Man and Friends? That looked like players who also had academic jobs, no? Ethnomusicologists or something?

WM No. Only one of them was a professor, the African player, James Makubuya. He lived in Boston and taught at MIT. I just heard him play at his concerts there, and when the World Music Institute in New York had a gala fundraising concert invited both him and me to play, we decided to do something together. After the concert, we decided to do a recording project.

In Julian Kytasty’s case, he lived in New York, second or third-generation Ukrainian; I heard his CD, and just called him. I was drawn to his music, and his instrument, because we grew up with this Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish—you know, that kind of music...

MH Really? There in China, huh? Even the Jewish stuff?

WM Oh yeah. A lot of Russian songs are more Jewish than Russian. Also, the west part of China is close to Kazhakstan, Turkestan; that music is very familiar to me. It touches me, it makes sense.

Then of course, the banjo, the dulcimer, also familiar. Every time I play the pipa, people come up to me here and say “wow, it sounds like a banjo.” Lee Knight [the banjo player] is my fan [laughs]. He came to my concerts many times, and we talked, he sent me his CD, and I loved his authentic style.

MH Can you tell me how you first came to hear American bluegrass, and blues? Was your interest mostly because it was plucked strings?

WM Yes, of course. And then, a young musician fresh out of school, just arrives here and has no idea about any of this music—but every time I would play my music here, people would say, “you should listen to bluegrass,” or “you sound like bluegrass.” When I did start looking into it, I found it very exciting.

MH Did it remind you of music you already knew in China?

WM Oh yeah. The tone color, the plucking sound. Sometimes it reminds me of silk and bamboo music. Freedom, like folk music.

MH What about the blues? Your only CDs I haven’t heard yet are those with Sola Liu. I read about her and her interest in the Mississippi Delta Blues. I’ve noticed similarities between that American music and traditional pipa music I’ve heard. Did you work with her out of a similar kind of interest in the blues?

WM Sola and I are from the same school in Beijing. When she had this recording project, she invited me in on it. That was very early in my career. I did start to understand what the blues were then, but it was more contemporary kind of blues for that project. Later on, I listened to more of the older blues when I worked with other musicians, and did notice those kinds of similarities. Not just to pipa music, but some erhu music also. The sliding, the bending of the notes...very lyrical, but also deep.

MH What has your listening pattern been like since you’ve come to the West, generally speaking?

WM Nothing specific; I listen to everything. It’s hard to just go to a record store and know what to get just from looking at the cover. Mostly, I get led into new music through friends telling me about it. People I can trust.

MH Take me back a little. After your schooling, what made you decide to come to the West? You came to Boston in 1990, age 25...

WM Yes. I simply joined the wave of Chinese musicians moving here. The Chinese government opened the door to the West in the early ‘80s, and many of the younger generation of students then went to the West. Especially from my school, in Beijing, because we knew so many people who had visited us from the West. The Boston Symphony visited us, Seiji Ozawa, Isaak Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, the Philadelphia Symphony, chamber music groups, a lot of pianists, Yo-Yo Ma—they all came to visit, and it was quite a shock for me and many of my schoolmates. We were really curious about what the musician’s life might look like outside of China.

MH When you were growing up in the ‘80s, were you involved in any of the politics of the youth movement then or anything?

WM No, I’m no politician. I was still in school.

MH But it was close by, there in Beijing, right?

WM Oh yeah, you could see a lot of things going on in the street, but especially if you’re in the school...it’s very strict; certain times you can’t go out.

MH So when you came to the West, did you intend to stay here and live from the very first? Did you have a plan about what you wanted to do?

WM No plan. I just wanted to see if I could survive by my instrument, and the music, because most of my friends had given it up...maybe to become a computer person, or secretary, or some other day job. I just wanted to see if I could survive. My musical life in China had been very smooth. I got first place at all the competitions in China, got the first Master’s Degree in the history of the school for a woman. The school wanted me to become a faculty, the youngest professor...you know, TV, newspaper interviews. So I said, well, what am I going to do? play 20 or so traditional pieces for the rest of my life? When you’re young, you have curiosity and a sense of more adventure than that.

MH So that kind of success early on really set you up to be someone who would step up to the world stage and try something new?

WM Exactly, yes. And also my friends would say to me, what are you going to do? You play Chinese traditional music; how will that go over in the West? That’s the question I wanted to answer. So I say to my colleagues, okay, you guys play violin or piano, that’s fine; I play pipa, but I want to see how I’m going to survive.

MH Okay, so maybe there wasn’t a plan—but at least you had an idea, which was to survive playing Chinese traditional music over here?

WM Yeah.

MH Did you teach while you were trying to get this going?

WM No, I could barely speak English.

MH What was that like?

WM It was very hard.

MH Did you have any friends when you first came to New Haven?

WM Yes, I had a couple. Also, I already knew my husband from China. So I did have people I could talk to, and they helped me get around.

MH Did you make your first recording over here?

WM No, the first one was in China, in ’89. That was also a unique experience; I was 22, much younger than most Chinese musicians making their first recording. I felt quite honored, actually; I felt very respected by China.

MH Did it help you get your performance career going over here?

WM Not at all. None of my “first place” awards, or my Master’s degree—nothing helped me. [laughter]

MH How did you eventually get your playing career going over here then?

WM I started with a group in New York called Music From China, a small ensemble in Chinatown. They had heard that I moved here, so they called me up and invited me to play with them. So every week for awhile I took a train from New Haven to New York. It was a nice weekly thing to keep me going, keep my fingering in shape—good practice.

It took something like 5 years, though, to really get on the track. The opportunities to perform and record just came along gradually, slowly over that time.

MH Your website mentioned somewhere that you also played the ruan...can you tell me about that? or any other instruments you might have learned.

WM Pipa is the main one. The yue-qin when I started playing; and the ruan I learned at the Conservatory, and I was actually pretty good at it when I was in school. It is also a four-string plucking instrument. The body shape is different—rounder, bigger body, so much lower range, more like a viola.

MH Is it something you still play over here?

WM Occasionally, for a recording project, but not on the stage.

MH Do you play any other instruments?

WM Of course, in music school, you have to play piano.

MH What was the piano training like there? Russian style?

WM Yes. Classical repertoire. Haydn, Bach.

MH Can you tell me more about the Pudong style of pipa playing you were trained in? I read in your press that it was one of the most prestigious styles in classical China. Can you tell me what exactly that means as compared with other styles of playing?

WM There are five main playing styles in the older tradition, but they’re all clustered around the same area, which is Shanghai—East Coast, and Zhejiang, where my home town is. They’re all very similar, but some are more dramatic, some more elegant. The same piece would just be interpreted according to their differences. The Pudong style is probably the more elegant. A lot of left-handed details; a specific kind of technique.

MH You were telling me about your exposure to Western classical music in Beijing, and I read how so many young music students around your age then, especially the composers whom you know, and play their work, were very influenced by the most avant-garde and modern music, and that their work emerged as a whole new school of composers, such as Tan Dun and others. Can you give me a sense of how that influence of new music impacted your traditional background and orientation and training, when you started engaging it? For example, John Cage, or anyone else—do you recall your first exposure to music like that?

WM Well...yes, Tan Dun is from the same school. He’s the most successful Chinese composer from Beijing working in the US. We already knew each other in Beijing.

MH And Zhou Long, and Chen Yi...

WM ...yes, and Bright Sheng, from Shanghai.

MH From what I’ve read of them, they were all greatly influenced by contemporary Western composers. How would you describe that influence?

WM When I was in school, I was already working with them. I was already learning their new compositions back there. I was very open to that, because as I said, the traditional repertoire was just limited.

MH What I’m trying to understand is whether all the new music was like a shock to the traditional music culture over there, or if it was more a relief to everyone, as to you, to get into new things. Because I notice that some of the techniques of the traditional music seem to translate over pretty well into new music.

WM Right. I think particularly for pipa, it’s a rich tradition because we have the lyrical style—elegant, slow, lot of vibrato, meditative—and the martial style, which is at the other extreme, very dramatic, very percussive. So composers can easily draw on the things this instrument can do. They can use the same language for their new music.

MH So when you were first getting into the New York scene, commuting from Boston, can you tell me what your interest in or exposure to mainstream jazz, or more avant-garde improvised music was during those years? I was especially curious about Henry Threadgill, because he’s in the area of music I know the most about. I noticed that the CD you were on with him was fairly orchestrated, and your part not that extensive...but I wondered from it how much a part of your musical life that area of the music has played, either as a player or just a listener. Improvisation, experimental music...

WM I came to it later, but in the last few years, I’ve been doing a lot more improvisation in my music. I think Henry heard me on CDs; I think we were doing Sola’s project, and he also played saxophone on that. He heard on his headset my playing—I had already done the track, I wasn’t there—so through that we got in touch. I went to his concert, he came to mine, so one day we decided to try something with his big band.

It was a great experience, because—this was 10 years ago now—I had never really heard jazz in China. I heard a little bit through Sola; she had left China for Europe earlier. It was really great to have my first experience with any kind of jazz in Henry’s big band.

MH Did you go on from that to any other similar things? You say in recent years you’ve been more into improvisation. Do you mean you’ve been listening to more of it, and getting more into it as a player yourself?

WM I’ve just been getting into it more, gradually, over the last 10 years. Later I worked with Tatsu Aoki. I worked with the San Francisco Asian American group, with Francis Wong, Jon Jang, with Fred Ho.

MH So that was your further education into that area of improvised music out of jazz...?

WM Yes, exactly. In the traditional Chinese music, improvisation is actually a big part of its history. But my generation lost out on that; we did not improvise. Everything was written out. Even the silk and bamboo music...it was tea house music, much improvisation.

MH So they would have a core melody, and all the various instruments would play around with it together in their different ways...?

WM Yes, right. We’d say “putting the flower around it.”

MH But you didn’t do that?

WM No, that was more the older generation. Especially in Conservatory training, I never heard the word “improvisation” in China. So basically I came here and re-learned, re-thought my own tradition...

MH But if you never learned it to begin with...

WM Yes, but it’s in the blood.

MH Did you used to hear older musicians playing in that more spontaneous way?

WM Yes.

MH I’d be curious to hear what your impression of the Asian-American guys was, because they have their own distinctive kind of movement and community in the music here...

WM And Jason Hwang...

MH You’ve played with him too? I played with him in Anthony Braxton’s groups in New York and Connecticut. The whole idea of the Asian American guys getting together with these new players from Asia that have been coming over more, such as you—that’s a new thing to me, but it’s connected to people I already know, and things I know. What was the experience like of connecting up with Chinese-, Korean-, Japanese-Americans playing jazz?

WM I think I was just pumped up to be working with this group, but I didn’t know anything about their music or their scene here. It isn’t like I was aware of them and then joined them. It was a wonderful new thing for me too, because they are looking for their roots...but to me, they just seem like Americans.

MH Yeah, to me too. But then Fred Ho writes these operas based on Chinese themes and music...so what does that look like to you?

WM They’re just trying to find their own language. They aren’t African Americans; jazz isn’t their original tradition, they’re Asian. So they had this opportunity to turn the music around and use it to explore their parents’ roots. They found a topic, a story, material, from Asia. At that same time, we who grew up in China show up; we’re not American. So it’s great to come together and actually to learn from each other, to understand.

MH How has this ten-year shift into improvisation in your music gone? How is it fitting into the rest of your musical life?

WM I enjoy it very much. Every day I learn something from improvising. It makes me feel much more comfortable to just sit down with any kind of musician and say, let’s play something together. I couldn’t do that ten years ago.

MH Is that one reason you’ve been able to branch out into all these other projects of world music and so on?

WM I think in a way yes; and also, it’s not only the improvisation, because I also play new music by people like Terry Riley, Glass, the whole composition scene. It all adds up to a general growth of the experience.

MH Your Orion project was kind of a world music piece by Philip Glass. Chen Yi’s piece, Points...can you say something about the relationship between your fingerings and the calligraphy mentioned there?

WM Most pipa pieces, even those by Chinese composers, don’t really come with fingerings figured out for you. The composers will ask me for suggestions about fingerings to make the playing work best for me. We work closely together on that part of it, because pipa is actually a difficult instrument to write for.

MH Do you have physical problems with your hands ever, like typists sometimes get—carpal tunnel syndrome, or anything that you have to do certain exercises or therapies to avoid?

WM No, that’s the benefit of the Conservatory training. If you do it correctly, you don’t strain your hands.

MH I noticed from the liner notes on the CD with Martin Simpson where he talked about watching your right hand going in opposite direction from his own as a guitarist. Your notes are plucked by the fingers going out, rather than curling in.

WM Yes, the fingernail side plucks.

MH And the thumb too, going out?

WM Yes.

MH Amazing. When you hear it, it sounds so strong.



Thanks again for the good interview, Wu Man. I thought of a couple of more

questions when we hung up.



MH I know Mei Han, a zheng player who lives in Vancouver. She said she read an interview with you in a Chinese magazine when you performed in China some years ago. You told the interviewer that you were invited to play all over the world, but this was the first time you had been invited to play in China. I'm wondering how your CDs and other work in the West is seen and received in the Chinese music world, now that you've done all the different kinds of projects with pipa over here.



WM It was almost 10 years ago, I did that interview. Chinese normally are not used to inviting Chinese artists who have moved outside China. They consider you are a family member, not a guest; coming back home to do what you should do is a normal thing.



Well, things changed quickly, I was just having a concert in China by invitation then. I am very happy to see my colleagues and younger players learning and performing all the new works which I commissioned or premiered.



I also saw my CD on the Chinese Internet; it seems they are excited and interested.

MH Do you know other players, such as Mei Han, Min Xiao-Fen, or anyone else living in Europe who do similar kinds of things? Any one of them you talk to about collaborating with?



WM I know very little about others, except through their CDs. I did meet some Chinese musicians in Europe. Wonderful players, enjoyed their music very much. No plan to collaborate now; if there is right time and right project, I would love to.

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.