Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.
You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.
When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated.
We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.
To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect.
Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records.
There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin...
There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.
The HotHouse was packed with a very enthusiastic audience, and it seemed to me that Roscoe was very inspired. It was great for me to play with him.
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time...
So what starts is ad hoc and you never know where it's going to lead, so it's important to keep an open mind about those things.
So in the sense that we were all dealing with that freer approach, yes, it was certainly one of the first contacts, perhaps the first contact, when Peter came that summer. So it's a very pivotal...
So I'm looking to the saxophone as a resource which has its own unique set of possibilities. I'm looking to exploit them and develop them and have the fullest range of possibilities of the...
Of course when people are as talented as Jim O'Rourke or Gene Coleman, pretty soon you know that they're going to be part of the bigger scene anyway.
Of course I knew the work of Roland Kirk and Harry Carney and the specific uses they would make of circular breathing, so I knew it was physically possible.
It's not like, I don't know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market.
In my mind these two instruments speak to me in different ways, and the solo stuff seems to be easier to do on the soprano.
In a certain sense, aspects of my solo playing were developed in order to test the theory about how long particular elements could be, as parts of so-called free improvisations.
Improvisation is a compositional method.
If I think about the way I was drawn into the music, it was much more by recordings than by live performances.
I've never been one that thinks that the function of an instrument is to approach the purity of voice or the structure of a beautifully sung line.