Fred Frith & The Editors
Three Sensitive Skin
editors—Fluffy Schwartz, B. Kold and Sir Reginald Brathwaite—had a chat
with legendary musician and composer Fred Frith. We asked him some good
questions, and some (or so he apparently thought) pedantic ones. But
that’s how we roll. Fred’s answers were always interesting…
SS: Has having a psychologist for a brother
affected your approach to music? Has the study of psychology influenced
your understanding of composition, improvisation, performance and
collaboration?
FRED FRITH: I have not studied psychology,
though I did go through an extended period of Jungian therapy more than
20 years ago. Trying to understand oneself better seems to me a useful
attribute for an artist, or anyone else for that matter. My brother has
influenced my approach to everything, not by being a neuroscientist, but
by being a wonderful role model in the realms of music and art, and by
his intense curiosity and rich appreciation of life’s absurdities!
SS: In 1979, you wrote an article for NME,
“Great Rock Solos of our Time.” Have you changed your mind about any of
those guys, based on what they’ve done since? What rock guitar players
of today do you admire?
FF: I haven’t read those articles in many
years, but I’m fairly sure my subjects would hold up to scrutiny!
Current rock players? Nels Kline. Ava Mendoza. Alee Karim. Gilles Laval.
SS: Any other currently working musicians or composers you admire? Any special favorites in improvised music?
FF: Far too many to name all of them. But of
those you may not know: Annie Lewandowski, Katharina Weber, Lucas
Niggli, Bérangère Maximin, Eduard Perraud, Paolo Angeli, Camel Zekri,
Jason Hoopes, Jordan Glenn.
SS: Chamber or contemporary classical music?
FF: Not my area of expertise. But I like the animated notation school of composers, like Steini Gunnarsson and Ryan Ross Smith.
SS: At last count, you’ve played on some 410
albums. Which stand out as your personal favorites, the ones you feel
are most enjoyable and/or most important?
FF: Wouldn’t know where to begin. I’m generally more concerned with what I’m doing now! [Editor’s Note: If you’re not familiar with Fred’s ouevre, we suggest starting with something by Henry Cow, Guitar Solos, Gravity, and Step Across the Border. Check out the links to some of our favorites at the bottom of this article.]
SS: What are some of your favorite albums or
compositions, the pieces that were most influential to your body of work
and the history of music?
FF: The biggest influences on what I do are
the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with, whether they’re the
members of Henry Cow and Skeleton Crew, performers like Evelyn Glennie
or John Zorn, or the members of my current band, Cosa Brava. I’m often
very influenced by my own failures, and you don’t get to hear those!
I’m generally trying to wrestle with material
in a particular context with particular parameters and particular
players. What emerges is the result of a process. I guide the process by
trying to balance my original ideas with what the players bring to the
table. Luckily it isn’t always the way I expect it to be.
SS: Has teaching composition changed your approach to performance (or vice versa)?
FF: My approach changes all the time, based on
everything I’m going through, whether teaching, not teaching,
composing, performing, cooking, talking, arguing, watching birds, going
to movies, or reading books.
SS: Have you been influenced by any of your students?
FF: I hope so.
SS: Has your tenure at Mills College and later focus on classical composition led to any reevaluation of your earlier work?
FF: I don’t really do “classical” composition,
and I’ve been composing on paper since I was 14. Whenever possible I
compose what I hear for musicians who want to play what I write. Some of
them are classically trained, and some of them aren’t. I am constantly
re-evaluating everything I do.
SS: Do you see the earlier work as preparation
for this stage or as work with a completely different set of aims and
accomplishments?
FF: Not in any conscious sense, and not beyond
the general idea that everything that you do leads in some way to
everything else. In general, my aim has always been to make sense of
what I hear, and that hasn’t changed.
SS: You recently performed Gravity in its entirety. Was that enjoyable? Any plans to do it again, or something similar?
FF: It was wonderful. I can’t wait to give it another shot.
SS: Do you draw a distinction between your fully notated chamber music and free improvisation?
FF: Of course.
SS: Do you think of them as separate and compartmentalized?
FF: Of course not.
SS: Despite your early musical training and
experience, you graduated from college with a BA in literature and got
your MA in the same subject. Why did you choose that path, and does it
have a bearing on decision to write lyrics for what could easily have
been purely instrumental bands?
FF: It was the only path open to me at the
time. I failed in everything else, and I had no formal training in music
and would not have been admitted to a music program. Much as I love
words, I hate writing lyrics and usually try to find someone else to do
it.
SS: Moving to New York was greatly freeing for
you—what’s it been like to move to the Bay Area? Do you miss NY? Do you
miss England? Any comments on the Bay Area music scene?
FF: My community stopped being identifiably
centered in one geographical location a long time ago. I’m in New York
every year and still have deep personal connections there. London, too,
and many other cities. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time in
Copenhagen. I tend to go where I’m invited, and the community I feel
that I belong to is always evolving and mutating. The Bay Area scene has
always been vibrant and exciting and I’ve been coming here regularly
since my first concert in San Francisco in 1979, so moving here was not a
great leap into the unknown. There’s a lot going on here, though I’m
perhaps more drawn to the younger generation of creative musicians,
because many of them stay on in the area after they graduate from Mills
and I’m excited to see them develop. All I can say is that the scene is
as vibrant and exciting as it’s ever been, and yet has an almost
shocking lack of local media interest or support. If this were NY in
1978 or Chicago in the early ’90s, we would be the center of gravity for
American creative music right now, but the media are so unadventurous
they’ve never noticed, and there simply aren’t enough decent venues to
take chances and try to build up the scene. Thank goodness for the ones
that DO exist!
SS: Did you ever feel lonely having a bookish
background on tours with bandmates trained purely as musicians? How did
the study of literature affect your approach to music? Did it affect
the way you communicated with other artists?
FF: Are you kidding me? My study of literature
has been almost entirely irrelevant to my social life as a musician,
and the people I work with are frequently some of the most well-read,
articulate, open-minded, inquisitive and fascinating folks I know. The
only time I feel lonely is when I’m traveling by myself, which seems
logical to me!
SS: Sometimes your approach (and that of your
musicians) seems to change from album to album. How would you prep a
new player for work as diverse as yours?
FF: I work together with musicians to realize
specific projects. The diversity of my work is not something we discuss.
I generally try to work with players who are able to handle all the
angles. It’s more a question of how I prep myself to work with them.
SS: Over the course of your career, you’ve
played with an incredible variety of musicians—Zeena Parkins, Mike
Patton, Brian Eno, the Ensemble Modern, Ikue Mori, Tom Cora, the
Residents, Bill Laswell, John Zorn and the Arditti Quartet. Did you
change your overview and approach drastically to work with any of these
vastly different musicians? Which collaborators stand out as your
favorites?
FF: I like to challenge myself by working in
situations where I can learn something I didn’t already know. Maybe in
order to really get a sense of that it would be good to add a few names
that are maybe not so much in the Anglo-American new music “mainstream”:
Babazula, Stevie Wishart, Keiji Haino, Concerto Köln, Wu Fei, Mart Soo,
Daniela Cattivelli, Lucia Recio– I’ve learned so much from working with
musicians like these, and I take any opportunity I can to seek such
collaborations out.
SS: There’s an unusually diverse range of styles and approaches to writing, arranging and improvising in your body of work, and yet it all sounds like you somehow. When collaborating, do you switch between stylistic palettes or approaches in your head, or do you believe in the idea of musicians staying in character? How mutable is your idea of contrast between players in an ensemble?
FF: Why wouldn’t it sound like me? It IS me!
I’m generally trying to wrestle with material in a particular context
with particular parameters and particular players. What emerges is the
result of a process. I guide the process by trying to balance my
original ideas with what the players bring to the table. Luckily it
isn’t always the way I expect it to be. Choosing the right players is
the single most important decision. Sometimes they choose themselves,
like Kaethe Hostetter, who wanted to play violin in the Gravity show and
“presented her credentials” as it were! That was awesome!
SS: Zeena Parkins’s work on Cosa Brava’s The Letter (Intakt Records) is very different from that on Traffic Continues II.
Do you tend to ask your musicians to try different approaches? Do you
prefer them to enter into the work without preconceptions?
FF: I’ve known Zeena for more than 30 years.
She was in my bands Skeleton Crew and Keep the Dog in the ’80s and ’90s
respectively. I’m well aware of the vast range of her talents as
harpist, pianist, accordionist, experimenter, composer, inventor,
improviser. I would want to work with Z in any situation that required
flexibility, a broad skillset, a fabulous work ethic, and a strong
intuitive understanding of what’s required. When the Ensemble Modern
commission came along, it was a chance to invite her to play her first
instrument, an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. It was
also the first time that the EM had featured women soloists (Ikue Mori
being the other). As for different approaches, we try different
approaches if what we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working. And I prefer
players to “enter into a work” in whatever way seems productive to them.
SS: How conscious were the folk and Celtic elements of The Letter, especially in the violin parts?
FF: I was awake when I wrote them, if that’s what you mean.
SS: What about the elements of pastiche that
seem to hearken back to Henry Cow (such as the baroque sequence of
fifths in For Lars Hollmer)?
FF: Owes as much to Victor Jara or Kurt Weill
as it does to Baroque music. And in any case what I love about Lars
Hollmer’s work is that he made melodies that seemed like you’d known
them all your life, but which were also personal enough that they were
obviously his. That was the quality I was looking for, not so much
imitation as invocation. Lars was a dear friend and a huge influence and
I miss him.
SS: You’ve collaborated with Iva Bittová in
the past, who shares your background in Eastern European folk music as
well as classical music—do you seek out that sort of background in
collaborators and performers of your music?
FF: I like working with collaborators who
share a broad sense of the possibilities and are not bound to a single
approach. And I like improvising with musicians who don’t define
themselves as “improvisers”.
SS: Your early influences included many kinds
of world and Eastern-European folk music—a rare set of influences for a
Western musician in those days. How directly did your early interest in
world and folk music impact on your accompaniment to her voice?
FF: No idea. I wasn’t thinking about it particularly.
SS: Do you think of it as accompaniment or something else?
FF: See above.
SS: There are lots of unison lines performed
by voices, guitars and violins instruments. This suggests you might be
aiming for a verbal but not necessarily a vocal sound: The voices of
verbal instruments. Is there a connection between the voices of
instruments and the content of verbal expression?
FF: I’m not sure if I know what you’re talking
about. Which lines are you referring to? The best example that I know
of understanding instruments as voices (outside of the blues) is René
Lussier’s Trésor de la Langue. More than simply a masterpiece, it changes our understanding of the musicality of language.
SS: On The Letter, but also on many
of your other albums, the use of accordion, and of pitched and higher
sounds in the percussion and synths, gives the violin and guitar a
magical sound that reminds me of Lick My Decals off, Baby. There’s a glow to the parts. Do you think of certain sounds as shimmering, glowing, or nacreous?
FF: I had to look that up! And no, not particularly. We’re just trying to make it sound good.
