DERK—Obviously the theme of improvisation and the concomitant questions of freedom (its exhilarating joys, its terrors) and personal (spiritual) exploration deep beneath "the surface of their psyches" is a crucial thread in Tim's life (and yours) and the culture of the period. Where do you think we are today on that score vis a vis popular music and the culture at large?
I'm also interested in your opinion about the existence or absence of the Coltrane/Buckley-like "quest" in popular music and the general pop culture today, and whether you see any pop artists today who have the same sort of emotional depth and commitment to inquiry that Tim had.
—(Personal aside: Don't you sometimes wish — as I do when I read your stories in
Blue Melody, or when I read accounts about or from the Beats — that there was something we could do to jump start younger generations into an anti-materialist, questioning, improvisatory, compassionate mindset??!!)
LU: This question shifts the focus from Tim and me and the way I looked at things back then, to the present and the way I look at things now and to the kinds of listening I do today (compared to twenty-five or thirty years ago). I have a different perspective today. It's a great question, involving a number of different dimensions. Bear with me as I look into them as concisely as I can.
For one thing, I regard all generic
types of music as being valuable and worthwhile. Each type and level of music springs from whatever level of psychological and spiritual development the musicians are on in that generic musical zone—rock, country, jazz, classical, whatever. It gives voice to that level of development and its worldview, and addresses and awakens and expresses that same level and worldview in its listeners. That’s its function. That’s its value. I consider that a sacred value.
For musicians and listeners alike, each level and generic style of music offers a certain kind of artistic expression, emotional release, and socio-cultural identity. Each level serves important purposes. That is why, for me, all of the hierarchical domains of music are worthwhile, even if I do not personally care for this or that particular level, or generic style, or this or that particular artist within any given generic context. I am not talking personal"tastes." Tastes are egoic prisons. They lock us in to what we already know and like and feel familiar and comfortable with, and keep everything else out. They prevent us from opening up, expanding, and experiencing through music new ways of seeing and being. Tastes are profoundly anti-evolutionary. They stultify our own growth. Beyond egoic"tastes," I am speaking transpersonally about the full spectrum of music. Across that spectrum, all types of music perform vital psycho-spiritual functions and in my view are manifestations of the universal musical impulse. It is Spirit in sound. What we like and dislike is purely a personal matter. First, we should honor and connect with the full, broad scope of music’s Spirit Spectrum.
Pop music—say, urban funk, hip-hop, rap, country, and mainstream rock 'n' roll in its various forms—tends to be egocentric (personality-based) and ethnocentric (group membership, with shared values). It’s usually rooted in rage, chaos, discontent, desire, love, hate, and painful yearning. They have a heavy body orientation, heavy sexual content, powerful and explosive emotions. Business interests hand-pick charismatic stars who match the cultural values, distinguishing fad-oriented styles, age range, ethno-economic groups, and the ideals of beauty and leadership shared by that group. Its luminaries embody the values of their listeners. It’s easy enough to see that. In the pop domain, we don’t look for ways to change and grow. We look for mirrors that reflect and validate our egos and the circumstances of our lives.
On the whole, society pretty much lives in hell, and pop music reflects that. Look around. Today’s world is a chaos, riddled with violence, misery, death, destruction, ugliness. Most pop music reflects this accurately. As John Cusack said in the film
High Fidelity,"Do I listen to rock music because I am miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to rock music?"
This syndrome is obvious, isn’t it? The planetary commons is a horror show weighted with misery and anxiety, populated by threatening local, national and international madmen locked in mortal conflict. It's a local and global disaster, where all forms of human, animal and plant life are meaningless, where the values and images of violence, ugliness, sleaze, misery, pain, and death permeate ALL of the media. Turn on the TV, pick up a newspaper, read the front section of
Time magazine, go to a movie, turn on the radio—black funk, hip-hop, rap, country, and white rock reflect these horrific realities, give expression to them, and in fact celebrate them.
At this level, music is a part of the ethos of people in their teens and 20's. Part of that ethos is rebellion against hippy-dippy Sixties flower power parents and grandparents. Part of it is simply the generally toxic climate the world lives in today. Rap, rock and country music are pop musics, Billboard chart musics, MTV musics. These are the quantitatively, and I dare say qualitatively, dominant music forms of contemporary life. It's an extremely narrow musical focus with enormous financial power.
The next level, say, jazz in its many forms from Dixieland to big band to bebop to fusion to today's amalgam of all of those, tends to be rooted in mental satisfactions as well as emotional energy. In its more sophisticated forms, it focuses less on vocals with their words and love songs, more on instrumental expertise. The music tends to be improvised more often, tends to explore complexities in greater depth, and appeals to more mature and musically advanced listeners, hence to fewer people. It used to be ethnocentric, but now all races participate. The worldview shifted over the years from black urban America, to white America as well, eventually including Europe and Japan. Jazz has since become a globally inclusive music to some extent, while its mainstream rhythms, harmonies, melodies and instrumental combinations remain predominately Western and American.
In every historical era, jazz was a great music when it was psychically potent. Once in a while, I still listen to music that was played in its original context as a vital and vitalizing expression of its own time—Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans and many others. Jazz was once evolutionary, innovative, brash, bold and exploratory, but it has since settled pretty much into a conservative, repetitive mode which is considerably less vital than it was, say, between 1945 and 1975, all exceptions noted and respected (e.g. Cecil Taylor, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, et. al.) Many of its most dedicated practitioners today are bebop musicians who came of age in 1957 and got stuck there. They were great then, but tend to spit on everything that’s come down the pike since 1965, conveniently overlooking the fact that the great Miles Davis concisely and accurately observed in 1970 or so,"Jazz is dead." Unfortunately, old beboppers who stay in that zone never evolve and they never die either. They just go bald, recycle cliches, and complain a lot.
Ellington was an artist. Miles was an artist. Coltrane was an artist. So were Tim Buckley and his son Jeff. They dared to grow, change, evolve. Music itself is alive. Music itself changes and grows. Musicians who tap into this vital life-current gain my unqualified respect, even if what they play does not suit my personal perspectives or predilections. I’m not a whining narcissist. They don’t have to be mirror images of me before I can tip my hat to them.
As I said, these are not personal issues. I am talking about the creativity and the health and well being of the total spectrum of music, not just this or that aspect of it.
Western classical music has been culled from centuries of European composers. The handful who survive (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. up through Tchaikovsky) speak from the highest intelligence and deepest most profound emotional centers of the Western psyche. It constitutes the musical peak of the Western entertainment and art pyramid.
At the broad base of that pyramid, we find cathartic, emotional-sexual, youth-based entertainment musics. In the center, we find more sophisticated perspectives, subtler emotions, greater intellectual content and complexity in more mature musical forms rooted in predominately (but not exclusively) non-vocal instrumental music played with considerable improvisational skill. At the very top, where relatively few musicians and listeners venture, we find art musics drawn from Western history, mainly up through Wagner and Tchaikovsky (with 20th Century avant-garde music being adventurous, but for the most part marginalized, specialized, and peripheral in its appeal and influence).
Beyond this Western classical domain, we leave the entertainment/art pyramid and enter another realm altogether: predominately nonverbal, non-entertainment instrumental musics rooted in meditation, serenity, and tranquility. Musics emerging from a globally inclusive worldview. Musics often rooted in ancient cultural traditions blended with ultra-modern vision-logic perspectives, performed on ancient and modern acoustic instruments, interlaced with hi-tech synthesizers. It’s a pan-global, transpersonal music, having little or nothing to do with flashy personalities and fad oriented entertainment values. Its purpose is not to stimulate, excite, and intoxicate. Its purpose is to elevate and illuminate the soul.
Early New Age music had enormous psychological and aesthetic potency (until business co-opted the name and produced Hallmark Greeting Card trivialities under its aegis). As Stephen Hill and others have suggested, Spacemusic is a much better name for what I’m talking about. The psycho-spiritual centers from which it emerges in the musicians and to which it is addressed in the listeners spring from meditation, psychological health, and higher-consciousness. This music has little or nothing to do with neurosis, rage, protest, race wars, Top-40 charts, Euro-American art biases, politics, economics, military destruction, or global chaos. They have everything to do with cross-cultural human interiority, spiritual unfoldment, self-respect, universal compassion, the integration of the entire body-mind-spirit complex, an awakening to Unity Consciousness.
These broad generalities about entertainment, art and higher-consciousness musics are relevant and important, because business interests focus almost exclusively on emotionally cathartic rap, rock and country entertainment forms. That is, nearly all of the music we see in record stores, hear on the radio, watch on MTV, and read about in the magazines is kid stuff, costume rage-rock, video game artificiality, and immature emotional catharsis presented in standard formal structures celebrating anger, fear, desire and gross ugliness in ten thousand diverse ways.
That’s okay for that level, but what about the other levels? Music itself, with its multi-dimensional vastness, is all but ignored. (Notable exceptions among record labels: Celestial Harmonies, Hearts of Space, ECM, and Soundings of the Planet.) Serious listeners need to be aware of this.
Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the business interests pick and choose artists in their teens or twenties who reflect the greatest numbers of people who purchase CDs. I don't condemn the artists themselves. They create and perform their own music, music that is natural and authentic for them, and do it as well as they can. Spirit sings through them at that level of psychological and spiritual development. But of all of the musicians who are doing what they naturally do, business interests select, record, and promote ONLY those few who naturally conform to the age group, the world views, and the generic styles of whatever is selling the most at the moment. They ignore, marginalize, and exclude everybody else.
Hence, innovators and brilliant eccentrics, visionaries and evolutionists WITHIN the pop-rock-rap-country fields are shunted aside, while mainstreamers whose "rebellion" conforms most closely with prevalent commercial fads are selected, signed, and championed in the marketplace. Hence, there is very little exploration in this commercial domain, very few "Coltranes" or "Tim Buckleys." And outside of super-commercial domains—in jazz or classical or Spacemusic areas, for example—there is almost no business support whatsoever. Britney Spears and her gorgeous clones are everywhere, but so what?
Generic musical characteristics are incredibly narrow and rigidly stylized in this commercial area. Longhair thrash rock, rap songs, country tunes, heavy metal bands, the whole MTV syndrome is a visual and musical cliche. There is a great deal of
talk about "innovation," "originality," "taking it over the top," and"the cutting edge," but basically there is nothing whatsoever conceptually new or original in it, only new names and faces and CD titles giving mainstream listeners more variations of the same old things. Not a lot of Picassos within this business-controlled Top 40 Billboard context.
However—and this is a big however—I feel sure there MUST be individual creators out there within the pop-rock and jazz domains who are pursuing new forms, new methodologies, new conceptual modes of expression.
I am sure, because I know the musical impulse is powerful and not to be denied. Creativity in all forms, including music, constitutes the interior energy of existence itself. I am sure innovators and serious artists are out there, but I am not aware of them, partly because business marginalizes them and makes them hard to find, and partly because I myself am in a different place.
Normally, don’t like to speak of my personal journey. However, because you asked—
As suggested at the top, I no longer find myself particularly interested in pop, rock and jazz musics. I love them, I respect them, and I have explored them
thoroughly—I’m not merely spouting opinions—but they tend to stay locked into the same emotional-mental zones, with only superficial variations in style (still the same old melodies, vocal screamings, trite lyrics, 4/4 rhythms, orthodox harmonies, the same keys, the same equally tempered scales, the same desire, frustration, sentimentality, etc.).
While I was with Tim and moving into the Seventies, I loved the funk and rock musics of the day, and steeped myself in them. What incredible intoxications! When I had explored those genres thoroughly, I moved into jazz—astonishing virtuosity, extraordinary intelligence, brilliant performances (not only by the established classic jazz greats of old, but by emergent new talents such as John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Chic Corea, Weather Report, Terje Rypdal, Ralph Towner, John Klemmer, many others; see my Bio). By 1979, I had interviewed dozens of older and younger jazz musicians, listening intently for hours to their music, talking at length and in-depth with them about their work and the broader jazz contexts. I then wrote about them and their musical perspectives, thoroughly absorbing virtually the entire century's wonderful jazz permutations along the way.
I then left pop, rock, and jazz behind, and entered a new level of music. As a listener and a player, I started exploring musics that delved into transrational and transpersonal levels of being. They had little or nothing to do with the conventions of mainstream commercial entertainment and art. Unlike pop and jazz, they were not devoted to celebratory egoic vanity, cathartic release, emotional intoxication, flashy sensationalism, technical virtuosity, and escape into pre-conscious oblivion. To the contrary, they took me, not out and away from myself, but into myself, into the depths and up into the heights of my own interiority.
My personal favorites became globally inclusive composers such as Peter Michael Hamel, Henry Wolff (Tibetan bells), David Parsons, Kevin Braheny, Steve Roach, Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and a treasure house of musics from around the world—particularly India, Japan, China, Tibet, and Morocco. I still listen avidly to all of Keith Jarrett’s solo piano concerts, which are immortal. I also plunged into Western classical music, and still hang out with Bach, particularly Glenn Gould's performances of Bach's keyboard pieces. Those who condemn Gould as"ego, ego, ego," might want to read his biographies, liner notes and essays (as I have), and listen more carefully to his brilliant interpretations of Bach’s keyboard works.
Also important and relevant to this question—other than Keith Jarrett and Glenn Gould’s Bach, I spend relatively little time listening to music these days. There's a stream that runs all year in front of my modern cabin's workroom window. The forest surrounds the house, and I hear the wind in the trees and the music of the tumbling waters. Nature's music plays a significant role in my life. I honor every level of music’s spectrum, which is the spectrum of consciousness, and at the same time find myself listening more and more to the stream and birds and wind—and to my own inner silence (which is radiant).
Coming back to a crucial point in your question: for the most part, business excludes innovators and dedicated visionaries. But that does not mean they are not there. We just have to look for them a little harder. Homemade CDs and the Internet seem to be the best sources.
Because I am no longer deeply involved in orthodox funk, rock, rap, jazz or other mainstream psychological levels and aesthetic forms, I am therefore not aware of who the new Bob Dylans or new Tim Buckleys or new Miles Davis's might be, but I am confident they are out there, listening to music's voices within their own hearts and minds, following their own muse, doing everything they can to be seen and heard. I am sure you know better than I do who these people are, because you’re a radio DJ and you’re in touch with new releases.
I believe in music. I believe in the strength and dedication of musicians. I believe in the capacity of listeners to seek and find higher and higher levels of music as they themselves evolve from one psychological domain to another. Not every listener (or musician) does that, of course, but some do, and those who do will seek and find and listen to the musics and musicians who speak to them from those higher levels. In this way, music grows. Music helps receptive listeners transform themselves from one state of being to the next. Music, musicians, and listeners work hand-in-hand. Those who serve psycho-spiritual evolution serve life itself.
The fact that you bring fresh new music to your audience, even as you present familiar artists, gives adventurous listeners nourishment, inspiration, hope, and courage enough to keep on searching, learning, trying out new forms and sounds, growing within themselves, even as Tim and others have done. We all serve music, don't we? You, Derk, are an important part of that process. I've seen one of your play lists, and am confident that all of your listeners thank you from the heart for what you are doing on your show.
Lee Underwood
November 25, 2002
Derk Richardson has written about music since 1978 for many local and national publications, and hosts "The Hear & Now," a free-form music show every Thursday, 10 pm-midnight in Berkeley, CA, on KPFA 94.1 FM.
