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Western society places a narrow-minded if not cruel emphasis on monolithic career choices. At an early age, we're encouraged to aspire to a discipline we'll stick to. As adults, it's anathema to respond to the question "What do you do for a living?" with more than a one-word response. Where a "jack of all trades" once held some cachet, now it's a synonym for "unfocused." This can make art a troubling vocation, especially for those who operate outside mainstream, commercially viable arenas such as Hollywood screenwriting or popular music. Since he began playing guitar as a teen in late-'60s England, Fred Frith has never strummed the type of hooks or melodies that translate to dollar signs, but the avant-garde musician and composer is revered for his work in a variety of idioms--and he's eked out a respectable income along the way. "I've been living off music for the good part of 25 years," Frith says from the home he shares with his wife and children in Stuttgart, Germany. "People are surprised by that. It wouldn't be easy for me to make a living playing one kind of music. I make film soundtracks, I work for choreographers, I compose for ensembles, I improvise, I do songwriting projects, I'm in a rock band. There's a lot of different things going on, and when you add them all together, there's plenty to keep me going." The axis of Frith's orbiting projects is improvisation, and he's considered the expert in his field; the acclaimed 1990 documentary Step Across the Border effectively used him as a mirror into the world of free music. His first band, Henry Cow, mixed improvisational playing with complex and often minimalist composition, and in the ensuing three decades Frith has refined the art of split-second musical decision-making and applied it to rock, jazz, modern classical and film scoring. Besides paying the bills, improvisation has taken Frith on a fascinating musical journey from the seedy rock clubs of London to the forefront of New York's avant-garde scene in the '80s--"I used to play with John Zorn in his apartment in front of 10 people," he says--to the great concert halls of Europe today. Before embarking on his first tour in 10 years of the United States' West Coast to perform improvised pieces with Lawrence Ochs of the Rova Saxophone Quartet and Miya Masaoka, who plays a cumbersome Japanese string instrument called the koto, Frith was fussing with the details of a commissioned work for Germany's Ensemble Moderne. It's a requiem for the recently departed cellist Tom Cora, a close friend with whom Frith collaborated in a group called Skeleton Crew, which recorded albums and toured extensively in North America, Japan and Europe during the mid-'80s. At the time, Frith and Cora were part of a limited field of players who turned instruments typically used in rock, folk, jazz and classical music into devices for off-the-cuff expression. Now, they're seen as pioneers. "I play with musicians all over the world, and there's never been a larger number of great improvisers than there is right now," Frith says. "What's even more exciting is that it's become kind of mainstream for listeners. It used to be seen as a minority music that was very difficult, and only a few people would come and listen to it. It was an elitist thing." He cites a recent series of South American performances with drummer Chris Cutler, brimming with pride as he describes playing to an audience of 1,500 in Chile. "It reaffirmed what I've always thought, that this kind of music is not inaccessible at all," he says. Yet Frith seeks something deeper than financial reward or mass acceptance from improvisational music. "[It's] probably the most intense kind of communication that I have in my life," he says, "because it bypasses all the clumsiness of words. Words are a clumsy mechanism at best. You try to get something across, but you never quite say what you really mean.... It's kind of built into the limitation of what language is about. When you hear somebody who's really schooled at language, you're immediately suspicious of them because you think they're too slick." But what of the saxophone honks, prancing guitar riffs and seemingly random percussion bursts that mark so much of what we hear in improvisational music? To the untrained ear, such a form of communication can sound as foreign as a conversation between porpoises. That's precisely why, Frith argues, the best improvising artists develop an austerity, combining an innate sense of which musical direction to follow with an ability to let oneself go. "What happens when you improvise music is that you get into a refined state of intuition, where that is the predominant factor in your being," he says with a Zen flair. "So you're doing that in that moment with those people, and what's coming out is what's coming out. In the moment of doing it, if it's working, there's nothing conscious going on at all." |
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