Spontaneous Meetings: Adam Rudolph Speaks
Graham Haynes & Adam Rudolph. Photos courtesy of the artists.
by Sarah Thomas
Percussionist Adam Rudolph and cornettist Graham Haynes have a long history of collaboration through ensembles including Go: Organic Orchestra and Moving Pictures, bringing their shared language together as a duo that continues to evolve. We caught up with Rudolph to learn more about their collaboration and musical roots.
The Jazz Gallery: Can you tell me a little bit about your show on Thursday? What are you playing or what are you excited about musically?
Adam Rudolph: Well, I think that's a better question for Graham. Graham asked me to do it. But one thing I do know we're going to focus on is the work we’ve both been developing using electronics and electronic processing. I think we bring something really special to that in that we have decades of experience of a deep relationship with playing our acoustic instruments—in Graham's case working with breath, and in my case working with hand drums. So there’s that idea of the touch when you strike a drum, and you feel the vibration of the skin that sends a certain kind of vibrational information back into your body.
I think that over many, many years that sort of learning and being informed and responding to the instrument—and also, of course, the dedication towards developing your craft—brings you to a place that when we apply ourselves to these newer technological developments, we bring another kind of sensibility to it. In other words, if you've only learned music from pushing buttons, the hand is capable of more than pushing a button. Hands are capable of doing all of these incredible things. So I think we bring some kind of experience and depth and understanding about how vibration works to the use of electronics.
But I’m going to play percussion primarily, my orchestration of percussion that I feel like bringing on that day, and I use primarily electronic processing. Nothing is generated electronically. And I think Graham is pretty much the same. I think he's going to play his cornet, but using electronic processing. We're both orchestral thinkers, so using electronics is like an expansion of being able to think orchestrally even though we're playing in a duet. The music is going to be spontaneously generated that way.
Having said that, Graham and I have a long history—at least thirty years of having performed together. There's a certain kind of alchemy between us, and I think a shared philosophical stance about how we approach music. That is going to allow us to have a lot of freedom, but where the music will be very focused aesthetically and hopefully something of value for people to take away.
TJG: In what other contexts have you worked together? Are duo shows a normal thing for the two of you or are you usually working in other contexts?
AR: It’s funny, I think one of the first concerts I did when I moved back to New York after living in California for a while was a duet concert we did at the Rubin Museum of Art in 2006 or 2007—something like that. But no, we don't usually do duets. I've played in some of Graham's ensembles, but the primary context in which we've interacted is my Go: Organic Orchestra project which Graham has been a member of from the get-go—of the New York iteration of it, which is 2005—in the brass section, along with usually Stephen Haynes and Peter Zummo and others.
Then also my Moving Pictures group, which has been oftentimes an octet or a sextet. There's a great video on YouTube of us playing at The Jazz Gallery some number of years ago. So he's been in that project with me and has made maybe four or five records with my Moving Pictures group. So those two groups have been the primary context for our interacting creatively together.
TJG: So you’ve done different types of things together, but it sounds like it's been a little while since you've gotten to work together in this type of setting.
AR: That's right, because Moving Pictures is my compositions, which leave a lot of room for spontaneous interpretation. Moving Pictures is different than Organic Orchestra, but there's a lot of overlap in musicians and even repertoire. But it is my vision, which is hopefully open for a lot of the musicians to bring a lot to it. So in a way, the interaction that we've had in these groups is going to inform the spontaneity of what we do. In other words, there's a lot of shared language.
I consider Go: Organic Orchestra and Moving Pictures to be research and development projects in the sense that the musicians who I work with are studious and interested in developing and experimenting. So we've developed a lot of language together in terms of my work with intervals, and my rhythm concept that I call cyclic verticalism, and the certain kind of intervallic materials that I've developed—triple diminished scales and hexatonic patterns and so on. So there's that shared language that we can reference, or not, in part of our spontaneity of what we're going to do on Thursday.
TJG: In addition to your work with electronics, you both fuse jazz with different musical styles. I was looking at Graham’s Echolocation album from last summer and also listening to Go: Organic Orchestra, and it was really interesting to hear both the similarities in your work and some ways you go in different directions stylistically. It’s exciting to think about what that means you can make together. What do you find your different perspectives bring to the table in your collaborations together?
AR: Well, one of the core values of the so-called jazz tradition is to sound like yourself. So part of the process is moving towards developing your own voice and your own approach. So, of course, we have separate experiences. Graham grew up with his father, who was one of the great drummers of the twentieth century, Roy Haynes. And I grew up in the South Side of Chicago in a very pluralistic and interesting musical environment.
We're in the generation before this music was taught in school. It's what we would call an oral tradition, wherein the younger musicians are mentored through playing in the groups of older musicians. Of course I can not speak for him, but I know of Graham’s experience with Ed Blackwell, Jaki Byard, and Bill Dixon and others, and my own experiences with my mentors going back to Fred Anderson and Charles Moore, and then the more famous people—Don Cherry and Yusef Lateef, who I worked with for twenty-five years, and many others too.
That idea of transmission gives us a rootedness and a groundedness from which we are able to push the boundaries and explore. The generation we came up with and what we valued is what I guess I would call pushing the boundaries and always looking to experiment, try new things, grow, evolve, and be what I call an evolutionist.
That's what I love about Graham. Not all musicians, even great musicians, are evolutionists. They find their voice and their milieu to work in—I'm talking about improvisers, now—and they refine that throughout their life. Some musicians, like my mentor Yusef Lateef or one of Graham’s, Bill Dixon, are what I would call evolutionists. And that's what we try to be. I feel like that's something that we share. But to have the rootedness—I mean, it's amazing. Graham doesn't need to prove anything for his so-called jazz credentials that he can “play” changes and all that stuff. Because when you have that rootedness, that allows you to grow and expand and experiment.
TJG: Shifting topics a little bit, are there other projects that you have coming up? What's next for Go: Organic Orchestra?
AR: There's actually a lot going on. The first and foremost thing that I’d like to mention is that I have a new book that was just published called Sonic Elements. The material is an expansion of the work I've been developing with Go: Organic Orchestra and Moving Pictures and in my personal research. There's no Western notation in it, but there's a lot of intervallic material—what I call matrices and cosmograms. In the rhythm part of the book, there's what I call Signal Rhythms and Ostinatos of Circularity. And then there's about twenty-one philosophical essays that I wrote about the nature of music itself. It's coming out on September 16th. My first book, Pure Rhythm, which is a rhythm compendium, also without any Western notation, was published by Advance Music and has come back into my ownership, so I decided I would go ahead and publish this one myself.
There's a lot of information in it for the kinds of musicians who wish to do research of this nature, especially musicians who are interested in improvising but trying not to be confined by, for example, having to play jazz. One of the things with the Go: Organic Orchestra is that musicians from any background can play in the orchestra. There's musical material for them to latch onto, so it's not just either play a jazz tune or you're on your own. There's all of these intervallic and rhythmic material elements that are there.
The second thing is my newest record which just came out a few months ago is a duet with Bennie Maupin. He's a great artist—from Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock—one of the great woodwind players. The record is called Symphonic Tone Poem for Brother Yusef. It was created in honor of Yusef’s 100th birthday. By the way, Bennie is from Detroit, as is Yusef. You were asking about electronics. I composed this music, and I did it entirely electro-acoustically in my studio at home. Then Bennie played on it and I processed and edited and worked with his sound using these newer technologies.
Then the concert I did almost exactly a year ago with Dave Liebman, the NEA Jazz Master, and Tyshawn Sorey—we did a trio concert at The Jazz Gallery about exactly a year ago, and that CD is coming out now. The guy who does sound there did a good multi-track recording which we later mixed. There was a wonderful chemistry between Tyshawn, Dave, and myself. So that record is called New Now, and that's also coming out soon. We will be back at The Jazz Gallery in December with that trio to do a CD release concert.
Go: Organic Orchestra just got invited to the Sons D’Hiver festival in Paris, so we're going to go to Paris and also start performing with this group in Europe. And then I’m composing and writing. I just finished another Hu: Vibrational record. Like for everybody, it’s sort of weirdly busy. It's a different kind of busy than years of being on tour performing. I'm still enjoying performing, but doing a lot of this other work has been really satisfying and challenging and fun, too. Also, I draw and am working on another book. You bring your creativity into everything you do, right? So that's always the spirit I try to live in.
Graham Haynes & Adam Rudolph play The Jazz Gallery on Thursday, September 15. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. EDT. $30 general admission ($10 for members), $40 cabaret seating ($20 for members). Purchase tickets here.