Improvisation
One of the Various Artists of Guitar Solos 3 (1979) is Fred Frith, who’s represented by three short, improvised pieces.[1] The first, “Alienated Industrial Seagulls Etc.,” goes from – roughly – the sound of a motorcycle gang trashing the loading dock of a screen-door warehouse, to – more precisely – the sound of someone manipulating a tape of a motorcycle gang trashing the loading dock of a screen-door warehouse. Where’s a guitar in this music? For that matter, where’s a musician? “Song of River Nights,” Frith’s second cut, actually has three musicians, all playing one guitar. But unlike the dense “Seagulls,” this piece is delicate and transparent, coolly evoking the sounds of old timbers and ropes and water. What he still hasn’t evoked, however, is the recognizable sound of someone playing a guitar. The third cut, “Should Old Arthur,” is a brief, lopsided lullaby played on one of the guitar strings with a violin bow. You may not be able to tell how he squeezes this high bittersweet melody out of an electric guitar, but at least you can hear that he’s plainly playing something; there’s no mistaking this cut for electronic music or an environmental recording.
These pieces employ what Frith’s Live in Japan (1984) calls “the guitars on the table approach”: He lays the instrument down and attacks the amplified strings with a variety of objects. This approach unearths extraordinary vistas of sound, but it also has a catch: His albums can be rough sledding for newcomers, because they can’t readily identify what it is they’re hearing. Of course, unfamiliarity is one of the great joys of Frith’s playing (as in how the hell is he DOING that?!), but it can also make his music remote and hard to follow. All you know is that you’re hearing a live electric guitar – that doesn’t tell you what it is that he actually does. Records are therefore something of a mixed blessing for Frith, as they are for many free improvisers. His music is most accessible in live performance, where you can see the technique, the musical relationships between events which, on the surface, may sound unrelated. It’s also where you get to see the electric moments of inspiration and discovery in his playing. Frith’s humor, his surprises, his concentration and effort – they’re all right up front live. (They get on disc too, but you have to know what and whom you’re looking for.)
But even a live audience has its work cut out for it. People can go to a set, sit literally three or four feet away from Frith, and still miss the connection between what they’re hearing and what he’s doing. As Robert Ashley has observed, there’s “a trade-off between the newsworthiness of musical materials – how recent they are, how contemporary they are, how original they are – and the ability of those materials to be understood and performances.”[2] Audiences, says Ashley, are used to “materials that are so well known, they have no meaning whatsoever; the only meaning is in watching those materials being enacted. (For instance, there’s a strong argument for the experience of watching a great pianist play the C major scale as fast as he or she can.)” But Frith’s improvisations rely on (still sticking with Ashley) “materials that have so much symbolic meaning that you can’t even see the performer for the materials. The performer disappears. Because there’s no tradition for that kind of performance, because the materials are so unfamiliar, they so dominate the performance that it’s almost impossible to recognize the performer in the context of these materials.”
Ashley insists that this disappearance “is the ideal we look for in seeking spontaneity.” Spontaneity is the essence of Frith’s improvisations, which is where his music relies most heavily on the least recognizable materials. Of course, spontaneity characterizes all of Frith’s music: his studio albums, Henry Cow, The Art Bears, Skeleton Crew, his playing on other people’s records… Thus, Cheshire Syndrome (the tendency to dematerialize in public) attends almost all his music to one degree or another. Contracting CS just comes with the job, he’s too busy pursuing the sounds to project himself in ordinarily appreciable ways. (With Frith it may be congenital, in light of his characteristic shyness and reserve). So with all the other qualities peculiar to Frith’s first album of guitar solos, there is also, ironically, a certain anonymity: This unprecedented music doesn’t simply introduce yet-another new guitar player; it leaves you wondering what guitar playing is.
On the back of Guitar Solos (1974), Frith notes that it “was made in four days […] All the pieces were improvised, some completely and some to a roughly preconceived idea. No overdubs were used, the music is heard as it was played except for “No Birds,” which was made in two parts, and “Not Forgotten,” from which we removed two notes. The only sounds not produced naturally by guitar or prepared guitar are those of the fuzz-box used on tracks 4, 7, and 8, and echo delay used on track 8.” The fine print testifies to his astounding technique for abrupt juxtapositions of timbres, multiple rhythmic lines, subtle nuances in volume, harmonic densities… No matter how many times I play Guitar Solos, it always manages to pinch a funnybone of awe: Everything sounding right now is being done live, spontaneously, by one musician.
In “Glass c/w Steel,” Frith meticulously fades up, one after the other, four strands of sound, and overlays them into an eerie haze, out of which bounds a rubbery, animal-like line. As this critter bounces and jabbers, the backdrop continues to shift, eventually swelling into loud silvery bells, and then taking a protesting descent back into silence. In “Ghosts,” distorted chords expand and collapse with sudden changes of volume. Those ectoplasmic sounds, in a modified form, flit about “Out of Their Heads (on Locoweed),” a track that reworks the formula of “Glass c/w Steel”: A rich lively music suddenly has to share the stage with an alien event. And few events could be more alien than the roaring explosive line of “Locoweed,” which has all the contours of speech at its most Hitlerian – it’s like being harangued by an automobile accident.
As a solo improviser, Frith is fond of simultaneously creating two or more radically different sounds. That’s tough enough, but for him the real trick is to continually alter the lines without losing their essential characters. Of course, if he uncorks something sufficiently rich and strange, he’ll stick with it for a while. Sometimes he’ll even come back to it after having gone on to do something else, an approach that sometimes leads him into rondo patterns. That structure occurs twice on his first album, in “Hello Music” and “No Birds.” But no one could accuse him of repeating himself – these pieces are polar opposites, even down to their positioning. The acoustic “Hello Music,” the opening cut, is a brief (88″) dance of welcome; “No Birds,” the last and longest (12’38″) track on the album, is an electric tour through seething imaginary landscapes.
Every cut on Guitar Solos packs at least one knockout punch. But the album’s biggest surprise is the date printed on the record label: This lexicon of revolutionary sounds and techniques was made in 1974. As far as Frith is concerned now, the album is ancient history, and indeed it can be seen simply as the groundwork for the spectacular solos of his Live in Japan double album, recorded during a 1981 tour. Yet the originality and scope of guitar solos is still light years beyond most musicians. Which is so much the worse for them, because this album has the spoiler effect that’s characteristic of all visionary work: Spend some time with Guitar Solos, and you can find yourself falling out of love with guitarists who haven’t grasped the implications of Frith’s approach.
But when I say Frith spoils you for other guitarists, I’m not saying that everyone ought to play the electric guitar by dissecting it on a table. Certainly Fritz has never restricted himself to that or any other methodology. Refusing to be restricted, that’s the point. Frith’s deconditioned perspective, which sees straight through blockages of taste and convention, that’s what has to be adopted, and by audiences as well as musicians. Morton Feldman said, “For any music’s future, you don’t go to the devices, you don’t go to the procedures, you go to the attitude.”[3] Frith’s horizontal techniques are only one road, a ‘Pataphysical, Buster Keaton compromise with both the integrity of sound and the autonomy of the so-called inanimate.
Frith continually reworks the terms of that compromise, courting the unpredictable effects of every new clause. The saying goes, “stumbling blocks are stepping stones.” By forcing himself to cope with these complications, he becomes sensitized to new ways of discovering music and to ever more surprising releases of character. Frith could have gone on refining and polishing the techniques of Guitar Solos, but his imagination and musicianship are too volatile and extreme for that. They’re like a high-intensity light that melts and reshapes whatever it illuminates. When I asked him if he still did a lot of thinking about the guitar, or about himself as a guitarist, he replied, “At this point, in the sense that I think you mean, probably not at all.” These days he has set aside the electric guitar for his improvisations – the guitars-on-the-table approach has metamorphosed into his use of home-made instruments.
The most important of his home-mades are still essentially electric guitars – rectangular slabs of wood, each with a pick-up, bridge, and wire strings stretched on metal screws – and so his techniques with the home-mades are derived from his guitar playing. He’ll pluck and strum them, or stop the strings at various points to produce different tones and harmonics. He’ll saw the strings with a violin bow or coiled springs, or beat them with drumsticks, sometimes after muffling them with a blanket or scarf. (You can hear him giving a guitar this treatment in “The Changing of Names” on With Friends Like These.) He’ll rub them down with different brushes – something heard at the end of Live in Japan’s “Fukuoka I.” He’ll weave yarn or a string or a scarf or the shoulder strap of a guitar into the strings, and then violently pull it through. He does this with a chain and “Maeabashi I,” and it’s like hearing your stereo torn in half. He’ll angle chopsticks into the strings and slap them to get oscillating, slowly decaying sounds, as in “Fukuoka II.” When there are three or four of these going, he has a line that can be varied rhythmically or temporally, and against which he can play something: the violin, say, or his small, high-registered guitar (really a neck with strings, an instrument that he’ll also use to saw the home-mades’ strings). Sometimes he’ll loop a wire around one or two of the strings and hold it upright, grasping both ends in one hand. He’ll then expressively play the wire with a violin bow – as long as he keeps an expressive knee on the slab so it doesn’t fly off the table. Which also in originated in his guitar techniques, as “Maeabashi I” demonstrates.
But despite the many links to his earlier methods, Frith became justifiably reluctant to describe himself as an improvising guitarist. He used the home-mades only secondarily as string instruments; they actually seemed to interest him most for extending the percussionist techniques of his guitar playing. Pick-ups sensitize an electric guitar’s body as well as its strings, and Frith would frequently rub and drum the guitar itself. But he needed something that could withstand the occasional violence of his playing (or that could be replaced without a hassle). For practical and sentimental reasons, he couldn’t do to a guitar what he so musically does to his home-mades, such as driving nails or screws into them. Sometimes he’ll introduce a large screw with a sizable eye into a homemade, and then saw the eye with a violin bow, beat or rub it with a wooden drumstick, or rattle the stick inside the eye. Once I heard him play a lovely line on a long nail that he’d lightly hammered into one of the slabs: He bowed it with a metal bar, grabbing the body of the nail at various points to create different pitches – in timbre and register, it sounded like a contrabass.
It’s not just the richness of these amplified sounds which delights Frith; he’s also attracted to the homely nature of the equipment itself. The screws and nails, brushes and springs, hammers and screwdrivers, chains and wooden pegs and strips of metal – they’re the instruments of carpenters or superintendents, not musicians. And when he’s getting ready to play, Frith tends to come off as a no-bullshit workman: Usually unshaven, sometimes wearing a cap or a worn sweater, maybe sucking on a guitar pick as he removes his tools from their battered cases and plastic bags and lays them out.
That image, however, doesn’t really prepare you for the predominant quality in his playing: the spirit of play, of fun. Frith will place a candy-tin lid or a metal cup on the strings of a home-made and chuck marbles or coins into them. He’ll mic different-sized tea tins and drum them. He’ll thunderously knead a chain right over a homemade pick-up, or angle a tiny cymbal in its strings and wildly rub it with a violin bow. His enthusiastic noise-making with household items releases the feeling – and some of the substance – of children at play.
And like any kid who’s playing, Frith can easily get carried away. At one NYC set, he went on a jag of losing things. At first, he just accidentally dropped the particular implement he’d been groping for. But instead of ignoring the fumble, he listened to the sound when it hit the floor, and that got him into deliberately dropping things, building to a very funny height of flinging objects willy-nilly from the table, until all he had left were two home-mades and a bass. Inevitably, the first home-made was slipped over the side with a crash, followed just as inevitably by the second. The bass was the last to go, oh-so-coolly picked up and discarded. But no one expected him to rip away the tablecloth, with a magician’s flourish yet, and let it flutter in silence to the ground!
The pick-ups in the home-mades sensitize whatever surface they’re lying on, and when the need arises, Frith will play the table (or trunk or amp or box) upon which he’s arranged his equipment. If the spirit moves him, he can go from gently drumming with his hands or sticks to violently kicking or shaking the entire foundation. Consequently, lots of his stuff goes spilling off the table and is lost during a performance. (He also tends to lose smaller objects by walloping them with a drumstick or violin bow.) Whenever I’ve seen him improvise, he’s generated a fair amount of this sort of shrapnel.
Ordinarily, he gets back most of his implements while he’s playing, because the crowd usually passes them forward to his table. That’s really a charming thing to see: Audience Feedback at its most tangible and beneficial. Yet Frith can function perfectly well without it, and when he’s playing a space where the people are more than a yard away from him, he has to. Being willing to lose things is one more way in which he works without the safety net of fully dominating his sound-producing means. As far as he’s concerned, when something’s gone, it’s gone, and let’s just hope the going was worth the loss. When he loses or even demolishes (it’s happened!) whatever he’s been playing, he then has to shift gears and start doing something else.
And there’s always something else to turn to. The E-Bow has yet to wear out its welcome. One more survivor from his guitar improvisations it’s all over Live in Japan, especially on “Fukuoka I.” Frith uses this string massager to get the home-mades roaring and howling like sirens.[4] Another fave in his arsenal is a little handheld mic, which performs a variety of jobs. He’ll wave it toward a speaker and produce all sorts of high chirping feedback; he’ll use it to worry the strings and bodies of the home-mades; he’ll even turn it on himself, making joyous noises by rubbing it against his chest and stubbly chin, sometimes lodging it against his throat to produce bizarre vocals. I once saw him take an aural rubdown while he was simultaneously engaged in introducing a long thread into a home-made’s strings. (How many hands does this man have anyway?) The combination of the two operations turned him into a manic golem, growling and rumbling as it performed its weaving.
One of the secret pleasures of Frith’s improvisations is watching him generate these brief, weird personae. It’s a nutty precipitate that inevitably collects on the surface of his performances: his total involvement with what he’s doing, combining with his basic inclination not to get Serious when he plays. It’s also a naturally underplayed comedy – the man is enjoying himself out there, but he’s most definitely not onstage to clown around. But every now and then, Frith gets these weird flashes on what he’s doing, and sometimes he shares them with the audience in the form of spontaneous takes on the sounds and the physical choreography they require. The charming naturalness of his nose-pulling commentaries tend to resist transcription, but here’s one anyway: Frith set up some hummer on the strings, and in backing off to observe it he silently became Fred The Plumber, as in ‘Well, lady, this ought to do it.’ But his eyes bulged with horror as the device shrilly attempted an insurrection, and he forced himself to submit to actual physical contact with the little beast. After swatting it with a fast flail of his hand, he registered victory with a smirk of satisfaction over the carcass, now galloping vainly on its side, hurrying towards its expiration.
Incidental looniness occurs most frequently in Frith’s solos. When he improvises with other musicians, he’s exercising a little more self-control – after all, it’s impolite to catch flies while other people are playing. Besides, he’s got a lot more to do: He has to follow not only his own music, but also the musics of two or three or more people. A mind divided cannot stand on its head (not easily, anyway). But if his peers are on the right wavelength… Once Frith was playing a set with several musicians, including the percussionist and singer David Moss. Everyone had quieted down and the music was about to begin when Moss leaned over and began to whisper to Frith. He attended, only to discover that Moss was already vocalizing. Stifling a laugh, Frith turned to his equipment and began to play, his features clouded by a deep contemplation of Moss’ aria, which he punctuated with home-made blasts and nonchalant comments: “I don’t know about that,” “That’s an open question,” and similar profundities.
In a group improvisation, Frith’s concern is to contribute to the total musical event. I’ve never seen him try to outclass a fellow musician (not even in the rare instances when one of his partners was of modest talent). Rather, I recall him going out of his way to satirize that sort of inanity. At one of his many duos with John Zorn, Zorn kicked things off with a dramatic gesture on sax. Frith immediately mimicked him with surprising accuracy and then stopped dead. Spotting an opportunity, Zorn did something a trifle weirder. Again Frith rose to the occasion creditably. Then, as only he can, Zorn blasted out a wild idiomatic riff. He turned smugly to Frith, who clawed his temples in mock panic as he frenziedly scanned his equipment. He seized on something but could do little more than approximate Zorn’s rhythms. Frowning, Zorn turned to the audience, held his hand out palm down, and wobbled it. Frith accepted the fairness of the call, and then they began to play the real music.
Morton Feldman explained that, when he composes, “I’m involved with problem-solving, but I don’t know what the problem is. In other words, a piece starts to develop, and problems arise. I don’t begin with problems; if you begin with a problem, you’ll solve it. […] You have to develop your own paraphernalia to hold it together […] you don’t come with any kind of prearranged schema; you just find ways to survive. And the most important survival kit is concentration.”[5] Free improvisers are in the same lifeboat, and it’s stocked with the same survival kit. If Frith and Zorn are busy building an accelerating crescendo, they have to get out of it: a problem that arose as the music developed. If they’re really concentrating on what they’re doing, they’ll get out together, doing something that leads into a new area that they can sustain and explore – in other words, an area rich with new problems.
Watching Frith improvise, you can read various approaches on how to solve problems. He knows it’s pointless to try to force a situation to accept any particular stunt he may be gearing up to employ. In group improvisations, I’ve frequently seen him reach for certain implements, get ready to use them, but then toss them aside and go on to something else because the action around him had suddenly altered. The ability to be attentive to what you’re doing, as well as to what’s going on around you, is an essential talent in this music. (Comes in handy in the rest of the world too!) Frith is constantly aware of the implications of what he’s doing, of where something can go and where it can’t, even as he’s discovering new possibilities in his actions. If anything in his arsenal is too intractable or one-dimensional, it won’t make many repeat appearances. He’s always weeding through his materials, so as not to fall into repetition and cliché (a constant hazard with free improvisation, where the freeness can easily collapse into arbitrariness or gimmickry).
But Frith’s incessant revisions serve to make his instruments less familiar, not more ‘effective.’ His secret to remaining agile is to try to function when he’s in over his head. In this regard, Henry Cow was his basic training: “We couldn’t always play our own music – we used to break down in performances! You could feel the element of struggle in our music in more ways than one.” Since then, Frith has been swimming further and further into the deep end. He improvises with other musicians of different styles. He employs instruments that he cannot fully predict or control, and on which he never practices. In performance, he is perfectly willing to lose or even destroy whatever he may be playing. When any technique or implement becomes too familiar, he abandons it.
Like Feldman, Frith knows that a music is meaningless if it attempts to avoid problems – and that one method of avoidance is to give yourself one or two specific problems you’re willing to solve. Once a music opens the door to admit problems, it opens its creator – and its listeners – to think and grow. Its deconditioning effect permits you to see opportunities where before you saw only inconveniences or trivia or nothing at all. I remember a set Frith did with John Zorn in a tiny closet on New York’s Lower East Side. As frequently happens, the place filled up well beyond its limit, and to accommodate the crowd, Frith and Zorn had to keep moving back their tables of equipment until they were pressed against the very end of the narrow room. Frith wound up standing next to a sink that was filled with just what you’d expect to find in a sink on New York’s Lower East Side. The first thought that struck me was, “He’ll play the dishes.” And damned if he didn’t poke around in the sink, extract some small pots, set them up, sound them with a drumstick, smile at the results, and use them in the set.
But Frith’s intimacy with his surroundings goes beyond appropriating saucepans. When he says, “Fundamentally, I try to get a sound out of anything that comes to hand,” he couldn’t be speaking more literally. At a Skeleton Crew set, Frith, Tom Cora, and Dave Newhouse were busy doing what they do best. A very stoned kid was standing down front, right against the stage, and in the middle of a number he began to bang an unattended high hat with his hand. He wasn’t trying to work with the music; he just wanted to slam that cymbal. Frith, who was playing guitar at that moment, left his part, and as the others went on with the number, he started answering each cymbal crash with a guitar chord, rocking his body to the new rhythm and looking directly to the kid. But the kid must have been too fucked up to realize what had happened. Instead of turning to Frith or responding to his playing, he just banged the high hat a few more times and then drifted away from the stage.
Hannah Jelkes: “Aren’t you making a big point out of a small matter?” Reverend Shannon: “Just the opposite, honey, I’m making a small point of a very large matter.”[6] Some musicians would have been oblivious to what the kid was doing; most would have tried to ignore him, all the while seething internally; others would have yanked the high hat away (and maybe try to clip him with it). Frith recognized and went for an opportunity to grow and communicate and make something new. Speaking plainly, he met the intruder with love.[7]
This inclusiveness, the accessibility Frith enjoys with whatever is going on around him, is paradoxically the result of his fixed attention to the matter at hand. But the matter at hand isn’t simply what his hands (or voice or feet) are doing at the moment; it’s the total aural environment in which he’s present. The Live in Prague album includes the credit “4500 Czechs: ambiance and opinions,” and that’s no joke. The crowd at that 1979 set is part of the music, along with the onstage efforts of Frith, Chris Cutler, and mixer E.M. Thomas: The murmuring undercurrent of voices, the whistling, clapping, and crying out, all affected the musicians and prompted several of the things they did. (And as Frith’s solo albums demonstrate, the haze of unintelligible voices is a resonant sound for him, which he can use to all sorts of expressive ends.)
Unlike most musicians and composers, Frith isn’t in a perpetual fog, his inner ear tuned to his own music and his outer ears either turned off or set on Automatic. The only time he hears his music is when he plays it. Or, looking at it from another angle, you could say that he hears his music all the time. His inner and outer ears work together, and he actually can hear his environment, that enormous range of everyday sounds, with the kind of interest and respect that John Cage has been promoting for decades. (And I’ve seen Cage at one of Frith’s performances, plainly enjoying the music.) Random environmental sounds, both natural and technological, are in turn reflected in the shape and textures of his music. Listening to him play is more than a vicarious experience of that sensibility; it strengthens your own chops for hearing that way.
FOOTNOTES
1. The other guitarists are Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Cusack, Chip Handy, Akira Iijima, Henry Kaiser, Keith Rowe, and Davey Williams. (See Frith Discography in this book for further details.)
2. Nicole V. Gagné and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982, pp. 20–21. All other quotations attributed to Robert Ashley in this section are from this interview.
3. Gagné and Caras, Soundpieces, p. 174.
4. The E-Bow is a little electromagnetic device that sits on the guitar strings and creates a constant sustain. It’s available from Heet Sound, 611 Ducommun Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012.
5. Gagné and Caras, Soundpieces, pp. 168, 171.
6. Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana. New York: Signet, 1961, pp. 80–81.
7. Frith’s response to the kid was all the more extraordinary because he wasn’t improvising that evening: Skeleton Crew’s music requires the band to work with rather strict game plans. And if that isn’t enough, consider that this was also the band’s premiere performance (at NYC’s now-defunct club Armageddon in September 1982).
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Fred Frith Essay, part 4
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Fred Frith Contents
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents
For more on Fred Frith, see:
Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition
Music: KALW Radio Show #1, A Few of My Favorite Things…
Music: SFCR Radio Show #6, Postmodernism, part 3: Three Contemporary Masters
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 