Barry Altschul - Traps in the South Bronx

A Tribute to Peter Keepnews.

© Introduction Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following features as a chapter in my forthcoming Jazz Drummers A Reader Volume Two.

Barry Altschul came up in the music in the late 1960’s; my Jazz Baptism occurred in the late 1958’s. What a difference a decade made in the then-fast-moving Jazz World.

If you want an audio example of the changes in the music that took place over this ten year period, compare Miles Davis’ Miles ‘58 featuring Stella by Starlight with his 1968 release - Miles in the Sky.

I came from the music of the Swing Era which was first revealed to me in the stash of 78 rpms that my parents had left for dead in the cellar. Benny Goodman, Harry James, Woody Herman and the drumming of Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich and Davy Tough, respectively, was my first introduction to Jazz timekeeping.

Later, to use pianist Barry Harris’ phrase of “seeing out a bit,” California based drummers including Shelly Manne, Stan Levey, Mel Lewis and Larry Bunker, among many others, helped me make the transition to the more modern forms of Jazz.

But although I heard Paul Bley, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy in Hollywood, CA clubs before they transitioned to New York, the “Free Jazz” or “New Music” approach to Jazz that Barry Altschul describes in the following interview totally eluded me, both as a participant and as a preference.

And believe me - I tried.

To cite one example, Conference of the Birds released in 1972 on ECM under bassist Dave Holland’s name, drew the following praise in Richard Cook and Brian Morton in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD: “If he had never made another album as a leader, it would stand out as a classic and one of the finest things in the nascent ECM catalogue.”

After repeated attempts to “set my ears” to the music on it, I gave the CD away to a friend [along with, I might add, Coltrane's "A Love Supreme”].

If as Pops states - “The music speaks to you or it don’t” - then the “New Music” that Barry Altschul is so fond of is tantamount to a foreign language that I can’t understand.

But what I do find especially admirable about Barry in the following interview is the drive, determination, and dedication he exhibits to the form of Jazz that is near and dear to his heart.

You have to be very brave to be a Jazz musician.

A quick glance at his discography reveals that percussionist Barry Altschul had been on the scene for a while when this piece was written in 1975, and that he has spent that time in the pursuit of serious, progressive music. This was his first interview in the pages of Downbeat [February 13, 1975]. Aside from his regular work with the Sam Rivers group, Altschul, at the time of this writing, was studying ear-training, keyboard theory and harmony, and composition with saxophonist Lee Konitz, preparing for his first featured album [You Can’t Name Your Own Tune, Muse 5124, 1977].

© Copyright ® Peter Keepnews, copyright protected, all rights reserved, the author claims no right of copyright usage.

“Barry Altschul's skill and imagination as a percussionist are evident to anyone who has ever heard him—with Sam Rivers, in whose trio he has been the regular drummer for about a year; with Paul Bley, with whom he worked off and on for close to a decade; with the unique and remarkable collective band known as Circle, where he played alongside Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Anthony Braxton; or on a number of recent albums, including Holland's beautiful Conference of the Birds (ECM) with Braxton and Rivers. He is, simply, one of the outstandingly creative drummers working in what is often called (for want of a better label) “the new music.’’ He is also a listener always eager to be turned on by something new (or old), and a player thoroughly grounded in the basics of bebop.

His name is only now becoming known to a substantial number of American listeners. But in Europe, where they tend to be hipper about these things, he is both well-known and well-respected. (He spent the summer of ’73 touring Europe with Holland, Braxton and Rivers, performing in different groups led by each.)

And musicians know him. There are some, in fact, who have known him since he was a teenager in the Bronx, where he grew up in an atmosphere unusually conducive to the development of musical talent. "I always heard music. My parents were musicians, my sister’s a Juilliard graduate. The superintendent of the building that I lived in was a blues singer, and all his kids were into singing and dancing. Then down the block there was the Latin contingent of conga players and timbale players out in the street. There was always lots of street music. Jailhouse musicians, very knowledgeable cats, talking to you about music.

“I grew up in the South Bronx, where it was mostly black and Puerto Rican, but I never felt any racial tension until I got to high school. By that time most of my friends were black, so that was no problem, I just hung out with my friends. There were some undertones from the teachers, and the kids reflected some of it. I was singing in the hallways, or playing music somewhere. That wasn’t really encouraged, so my parents were always being brought to school and told. 'He isn’t doing any work, he’s only playing music with black people.’

“I first started picking up drumsticks and banging on tin cans and things like that when I was 11. I got a snare drum and a hi-hat when I was 13. Then when I was 17 I acquired a bass drum, and that was it. I started to get into it. I moved out of my house and I started practicing with musicians from my neighborhood, playing together and dissecting records.

“Jerry Jemott was one at the time, he’s now a studio bass player. Frank Mitchell, a tenor player who used to work with Art Blakey and Lee Morgan, he’s since passed away. There was a bowling alley where we used to have jam sessions, and a lot of people were there. Junior Cook was around that neighborhood, Charles Tolliver. At the time, Donald Byrd was living in the Bronx, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Cobb. Philly Joe Jones. Monk, tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, Jackie McLean, all those cats were around.

"That was when the sitting-in period was still happening. I sat in with anybody that I could. I asked everybody. I forced my way up. Lots of times I was stopped and kicked off the bandstand and told to go home and practice, but that was good. That’s just what I needed, I had to be kicked in my ass, to go home and practice, work. It was either that or not play anymore.

“I had made my decision about what I wanted to do when I was in my last year of high school, and after that it was easy, because my decision was made and I let absolutely nothing and nobody get in the way of playing music.”

At first, Barry’s parents had encouraged his drumming “because it was keeping me off the streets, and anything to keep you off the streets is cool.” As he got more serious, their resistance grew until, after graduating high school, he moved in with a friend. (“I didn’t storm out and say, I’ll never see you again. I just told them, This is what I have to do and I’m splitting.")

He also got a job at a recording studio as a "janitor, office boy, messenger, whatever it was.” He would work a few hours a day, come home and practice, and play somewhere at night. (“I remember all the cats used to come over to my house and we used to carry my drums for miles.”) He also played with a rehearsal big-band that recorded once a week in the studio.

ALTSCHUL STARTED taking drum lessons for the first time. “When I moved out of my house I got in touch with Charlie Persip. I knew him from Dizzy’s band and I had heard he was teaching, and at the time his name was out where I was hearing it. So I guess it was an ego thing and a prestige thing as well: here’s a cat I heard of. I think I’ll study with him. So I called him and it happened. I studied with him for about nine months.

“He stimulated in me the desire to find a conception. He outlined the conceptual approach to playing; instead of the technical approach. When I got hung up technically because of my conception — if I was hearing something that I couldn’t play — then he laid some technical shit on me, and said, Okay, this is what you need. Which is beautiful. Concept before technique. Let your concept stimulate your technique.

“I mean, to sit in front of drum books for ten years, and really get it down, and then put yourself behind a set of drums—a lot of people just don’t know what to play. Not only don’t they know what to play, they don’t know how to play it, I mean, emotionally. I don't want to mention names, but I hear that in some people’s playing. For myself, I heard things conceptually that I couldn’t play, so I sat down and tried to figure out how to play them. From that, I developed a technique, but it wasn’t technique for technique’s sake. It was just a tool, so I could use the vocabulary.”

Eventually Altschul began the transition from amateur to professional. “I don’t know when I started playing professionally. It just sort of happened. One day you get five dollars for a gig, a bar lays it on you for a tip or something, and the next time you ask them for 25 for the group. And it’s the same bread, so what’s the difference?” He remembers a series of gigs in 1962 with a pianist named Valdo Williams as his first work as a drummer outside the Bronx. (He had actually made his professional musical debut a few years earlier, when he briefly sang and recorded with a rock and roll group.) At about the same time, he first met Paul Bley at the studio where he was working. “He came in to do a record date with Paul Motian, Gary Peacock and John Gilmore.

At the time the music was very fresh to me. I thought, What is that! I was strictly into the hard-boppers until I heard this thing. I had never heard anything like it before except for Coltrane. I had followed Trane through his whole career, so his thing made more sense to me. This was abrupt.

“Paul and I started talking. I gave him my phone number, and one day out of the blue he called me up for a gig. He had never heard me play before. He was hung up for a drummer, I’m sure, and he figured here’s some kid. I’ll call him up and see what happens.

“It was a Sunday afternoon gig at Slugs, which at the time was a sawdust-on-the-floor beer-drinking place, just starting to experiment with a music policy. It was Paul, Dave Izenson and myself. So I went down, and Paul said, ‘Do you want to play some time music [i.e. standards], or do you want to play something else? [quoted in a later interview as “some stuff I’m into?]’ And I was a cocky kid, I said, ‘Play anything you want to play.’ He must have heard something, because I was his drummer from then (1964) until 1970 when Circle happened, and we still play together every so often. “When I first heard Paul’s music it stimulated my imagination. The music technically eliminated bar lines. It was waves and figures, it wasn’t just rhythm patterns.”

BARRY BECAME heavily involved with Bley’s music and with the Jazz Composers’ Guild, the forerunner of the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association. "There was this whole new kind of music being dealt with, which I was very interested in, and I was thrown in the middle of it as a very young kid. Archie Shepp was there, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry—all those people were involved with the Guild at the time. I was involved with that for a period from '64 to ’68.

“Then in ’68, I felt a certain non-freedom in my playing. I wanted to play freer music, to be spontaneously improvising as much of the time as possible. I felt that in order for me to be freer, I needed more of a vocabulary. If I only could play this one area of music, then I was not really free. I was locked in that one bag. I decided I really needed a better understanding of bebop, which had been the beginning of my playing.

“I went to Europe to freelance with the beboppers that were living over there. I couldn’t work here ’cause I couldn’t really play bebop that well. My time wasn’t very good. But I figured it was good enough to go over there and play.

“I really wanted to get that part of it together, so I went for ten months and I played with Carmell Jones and Leo Wright and Johnny Griffin, all those cats. It was a ball! I worked every day. I was living in Belgium, Holland, Germany, wherever the gigs would take me.

“You’re treated as an artist when you go to Europe, especially if your music is good, because they’re very aware of the people who are jiving and those who are playing what they believe. A wider percentage of the people appreciate the art form coming out of America—jazz music—whereas Americans tend to not even recognize it because I feel they don’t want to admit there’s an art form that sprung up from black culture.

“But for me, New York is where it’s at. For inspiration, for stimulation, for keeping yourself musically sharp—not only musically sharp but keeping yourself sharp. In a sense, if you go to Europe or someplace else, you’re liable to relax and neglect your own potential, although the musicians there were sounding beautiful.”

After returning to the States, there was a period of renewed study. “For about nine months I studied with Sam Ulano who just gave me book after book. I just came in there and read all this, and read it at all different speeds. I did that every day for six hours and it really helped my chops.”

Circle had its genesis shortly thereafter. Although it was to be a totally acoustic band, Barry’s first contact with Chick Corea came about largely because Corea, who was playing electric piano with Miles Davis at the time, was interested in checking out a synthesizer, and Bley had just recently bought one. After a session at Bley’s house, with Chick on synthesizer, Barry, Chick and Dave Holland played a gig opposite Freddie Hubbard at the Village Vanguard. “The first set was okay. We sat down after the set and talked a little bit, and on the next set everything clicked. We recorded an album, The Song of Singing (Blue Note), four days later.”

The three decided to get together on a permanent basis; the next time they played at the Vanguard, they acquired a fourth member, saxophonist Braxton.

“A lot of musicians were there opening night, and for our last set we invited anyone who wanted to to come up and play. Anthony sat in with us that set, and he and Chick somehow got into talking about chess. Chick invited Anthony over to his house to play chess and discuss music, and we got involved with Anthony that way. We were going to California, and we decided to ask him to join us. He was so radical; he posed so many interesting musical problems that it was a gas. He was a Gemini and Chick was a Gemini, and they were always at opposite extremes. It was very stimulating.

“We all wanted to get away from electronics, but electronics had an influence on us, soundwise. I started adding percussion instruments. Chick started to do little different things with the piano. And Anthony came in with his array of instruments, and what we had was a real electronics. It was coming from the air, instead of plugging into a wall. All the sounds, but spontaneous, without having to turn a dial first.

“We got good reactions, especially from college audiences. If we worked in a club, the first night, the people who didn’t dig the music left. The people who dug the music stayed and came back and were very enthusiastic. For a period, we were able to play this music, and learn from it as well. Then the musical and philosophical direction started to change in the band, so eventually we split up.” Barry won't elaborate further on the reasons for Circle’s demise, except to say, “It happens to every band. Eventually bands break up, and that's what happened to us.”

The group’s extraordinary chemistry can be felt strongly on the ECM album, Paris Concert.

There followed a brief period of freelancing, and then Barry got into teaching. “It allows me to be choosy, both with gigs and with my students. My students turn me on a lot, I learn a great deal from them, and I make enough bread so I can afford to only play the music in which I can involve my full self.”

That has included Conference of the Birds and some concerts with Braxton and the others on the record, culminating in his current stint with Rivers.

“We started practicing together and he asked me to join his band. I guess we're very stimulating to each other musically; he certainly stimulates me.

“The music is 100% improvised, which is fantastic. Instead of relying on a chart or a form of music, we rely on each other. Sam is drawing on all the experience he’s had in the business, so to speak, which I think is 35 years, from Dixieland all the way up to Cecil Taylor. He uses all that vocabulary in the music, at any given moment, at any time.

“Sam is a youngster, but in Planet Earth time he's not a youngster any more. He’s been through most of the shit that people growing up go through. He’s just playing pure music at this point. It’s very recognizable to anybody who comes in contact with it, so there’s really nothing anybody can say. They can say I understand it or I don’t understand it, but they can’t say it’s good or it’s bad, because it’s got that thing to it. The music is happening. There’s a part of it that relates to everybody. It’s very free, very chaotic at times; there’s very swinging things at times, there’s very pretty things at times. It just all flows from one motion to the next. Whatever there is out there in the world is hopefully what’s being put through the music.”

Altschul’s contribution to the music is broad, not just because of the playing dues he has paid but also all the listening he has done, especially in a recent trip around the I world.

"I had to expand my vocabulary so that whatever I hear at the moment musically, whatever impression I get, I can draw on any kind of music to play it. So I started studying African music. Indian music. Brazilian music a little bit, music of the Caribbean. I took a trip around the world to trace the history of drums and it was very instructive.

‘‘There was a period before that when I got into playing the sounds of the street. I started digging the sounds of every day, street noises —trucks and rain and trains and crashes and sirens and horns. I started listening to the ocean, too. I started to hear these sounds as music, and they began to have a place in my music.

“Now I feel I'm really starting to learn how to play. A certain maturity is starting to happen more in my playing, a certain consistency. It’s nice. I’m progressing, but at the same time I’m starting to see how much more there is to be done. I'm learning to have more patience and just be aware of the things that I have to get together. I’m not in a rush. It’ll happen when it happens. But I do feel it’s gonna happen.

"Another 50 years and maybe I'll have it down!”