Category: Cover

Diamanda Galás

Monday, August 4, 2003—11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Videotaped and transcribed by Randy Nordschow

Defixiones

EDWARD BATCHELDER: The first thing I’d like to ask you about is the current project that you’re working on. I know that you have two CDs coming out in November, and one of them directly relates to the issue of music and politics. Could you start by talking about it?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Okay. The project is Defixiones, Will and Testament. Defixiones means “curse.” Defixios were lead tablets that were placed in certain places, let’s say, on the graves of the dead to either warn people that if they touch the grave, their ancestors would come to a very bad end, or to put curses on, let’s say, circus performers, enemies of any kind, and all sorts of things. A person who has done a lot of studying on this is John Gager at Princeton. The purpose that I use it for is to discuss the graves that were decimated and desecrated by the enemies of the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Armenians living in Asia Minor, Pontus, and Thrace. These enemies were the Turks. I use this as a basic description of the overall intent of the work, which is that we will not die in peace.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: How did you come to be inspired by this particular project? How did you come to work on Defixiones?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Well, my father is from, I always say an Anatolian Greek family but a lot of Greeks object to the word Anatolia because the Turks use it a lot, but it means the “sun rising in the east.” It’s a Greek word. So, my father is an Anatolian Greek.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: From Smyrna, right?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yeah, he has people from Smyrna, from Pontus, and later Xios, where they went to, and Egypt, who were not actually Greeks, but where part of the family was Egyptian. As most Greeks do, he had family from all over the world. My mother’s family is Maniates [from the Mani region in southern Greece], so they were closer to Sparta. But he told me all the stories about his relatives jumping, running, rushing into the sea from the Turks, not knowing where else to go. He told me a story of one person who saw a boat coming and he didn’t know whether it was Turkish or Greek, and it was a Greek boat. He has told me stories many, many times. And he’s told them over and over again, and the reason he’s told them over and over again is because they’re very traumatic to him and they’re very traumatic to the person who told him, which was his father. Then I saw the book by Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate. I recognized it as being fraternal to the stories that I heard from my father, and this was about the Armenian genocide and the desert marches that they also went through, like the Pontic [Black Sea] Greeks. Then I felt very sure that somebody else understood what I was thinking about because I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I felt so isolated in knowing how I was going to create this work and so forth. I had some very nice talks with Balakian and also Marjorie Housepian-Dobkin, then eventually my friend Sofia Kostas, and many other people.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: So, in short, like your earlier work about AIDS, it grew out of a very direct, personal experience.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Which you then extrapolated on, the way you extrapolate with all of your work.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes. You don’t hear these stories for 20 years, and then forget them. You don’t.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: It’s part of the process of memory.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: And part of this process of memory seems to be remembering the dead and the way they died. Because even if the story is 100 percent factual, it also plays a certain role in the psyche of the people, regardless of the exact fact content. Hopefully it’s not totally unrelated to the facts, but psychologically, we all operate with a history that’s been passed down to us.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: That’s right. There’s also the feeling that I had experienced for many years, which is of course as a person who is a Middle Eastern Greek on my father’s side. Most people think of Turkey as Turkish—Ottoman Turkish or Turks afterwards or “Turkish”—they don’t realize that Turkey was the center of Byzantium, and the center of the greatest Eastern Orthodox cultures. There was a gigantic amount of sharing of music and literature among all of these groups of people. Then the Turks, wanting to purify the race and get the money off everyone who they felt were wealthier and more ambitious, decided to obliterate the population and take the wealth. We see the same thing happening just with the Assyrians. “Let’s get rid of the population and let’s take the wealth.” Nobody is interested in the Assyrians in Iraq, I can tell you. They are treated like garbage by everyone, by every “special interest” group in Iraq, etc. So you have these gigantic treasures that have been moved. Their legacy has been moved and obliterated. I have friends who are Assyrians who get horrible calls from other groups of people saying, “There are no Assyrians left. You’re lying. You’re not an Assyrian. There are no Assyrians left.” This kind of thing.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: You have a text by César Vallejo. You have a text by Paul Celan. You have texts by Armenian, Assyrian, and Turkish poets as well. There is obviously a deeper thread that links this than merely the topical issue of the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Assyrians; can you talk a little about that?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: The subject in common is that of being a person who is invisible to much of the population. For example, the genocide of the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Assyrians is something considered inconsequential to the major powers. So people try to cover it up because it just gets in the way of the more important, let’s say, business activities between the United States, Turkey, and Israel. Nobody wants to discuss it. So this is something that is buried constantly.

This is also very related to the idea of these poets in exile, whose texts I used, and obviously to Siamanto, the Armenian martyr and poet who wrote about the burning of the Armenian women in the desert by the Turkish soldiers. But it also relates to César Vallejo because he writes about being a poet in Peru and being somebody that nobody had any respect for, an unknown. He was writing to some degree about being a mestizo there. He was writing about being a person who had no identity there, but he was also writing about being a great poet and no one being able to recognize anything that he was talking about. So he writes this poem and describes himself as these kinds of animals, the most wretched of the earth, a person who is undistinguished in any way and wakes up in a little room, looks at himself in a mirror, and wants to blow his head off. Actually, so many of the poets that I work with did commit suicide or were people who were constantly on the move because they were treated like outlaws. Celan was not able to escape the tragedy that his parents experienced. Even with the amount of cathartic writing that these people did, it was still something that stayed in the brain—this feeling of isolation that is like a potential bullet in the brain.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: With Defixiones, and also to a certain extent your AIDS work, it also struck me that it might be possible to say that the work is less about the specific tragedy, atrocity, or whatever you want to call both AIDS and the genocide, than it is about the way in which the culture responds to it. In other words, there’s the issue of AIDS, which is in a sense kind of a medical and social issue, and then there’s the issue of how the government and people at large feel about it. There’s the issue of the atrocities that went on under Turkey in the ’20s, and there’s also the issue of how Turkey and the United States, and Israel to a certain extent, are reacting to it. It’s the machinery that again stifles the voice, keeps people in isolation even after that original catastrophe has taken place. If there is any political focus in your work, it seems to be addressing that issue rather than the original atrocity.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Well, I think all of the above, in other words, both. These voices are often stifled that you’re talking about, but often they’re not even heard. They’re often very loud voices, but they’re not heard. They’re not told to be quiet, they’re just simply not reviewed, they’re not in the press, they’re not written about, and they’re not published. There were many authors that were published that have been objectionable and have set up—I mean since the classic French literature—with their publishing house a kind of blasphemic receipt from the press to use it to con people into buying the book, you know, to get a lot of press. There has been a kind of manipulation, let’s say, of the public and the press, and then the liberal press. We’ve seen a lot of this crap, but they’re still published.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the people who are not published because they’re really saying something that people really don’t want to hear, and people are afraid to write anything about them—afraid to write anything negative, positive, or anything. That’s the position of a lot of the people I’m talking about in the Armenian, Assyrian, and the Acheulean genocide because of the relationship between, let’s say, Turkey and America, the relationship between Turkey, Israel, and America, and the providing of arms to both, and because of these very incestuous relationships. So, a lot of journalists who consider themselves to be pro-Israel or whatever, they’re not going to write anything against the Turks, or they’re not going to write anything against Israel, they’re not going to think of themselves, they’re not going to write anything. They’re not even going to discuss the issue except to tell the Armenians what they always tell them: “Don’t you think you should get over it?”

And my answer to that is, okay, what do you mean by that? I had everything taken from me, I had my property taken, my graves were dug up and my ancestors were buried in a hole. I don’t even know where to find the bodies to bury them properly—I mean these were mass graves. We certainly understand the meaning of mass graves from other holocausts. But this one should be anonymous! And this one should be unremembered. So, what are these people supposed to do? In the state of disgrace and invisibility are they supposed to go to old folks homes where they can comfortably lose their minds? Are they supposed to drink themselves to death? What are they supposed to do as people who are just human receptacles of nothing, and who are not heard? I don’t know. There is an expression that my friend Michael Flanagan and a friend of his, John St. James, used when addressing the AIDS epidemic: death by media. Which is that most of the media was responsible for actually killing people with AIDS, making them commit suicide, giving them a sense of despair. And with hepatitis, I must say, because the articles you read in the newspapers are just so not where the state of medical practice is now, it’s very discouraging. This kind of reception in the media that tells people to shut up and that their pain is of no importance to anyone is the kind of thing that can drive a person completely crazy. That means a number of things, but with no will to live, you know, there are very few options.

Isolation and the Artist’s Responsibility

EDWARD BATCHELDER: You’ve connected this sense of isolation…I was thinking about that quote that you sent me about your experience of being in the hospital…

DIAMANDA GALÁS: That experience was analogous to this. I talked to you earlier about being in the hospital with hepatitis C after a certain operation that I had and having no nurses come in to see me because it said on the door “Warning: Blood Disease blah, blah, blah.” All they were supposed to do was give me a glass of water and leave it on my nightstand. But they would leave the water near the door and I was not able to get up and get this water. And they wouldn’t give me the medicine that I asked for, sleeping medicine, so I was only on morphine. So, I was up all night. I couldn’t sleep. I was up all night in this complete state of isolation. I would ask people to help me by pressing a buzzer, and there would come down from the ceiling a loud voice saying, “What do you want?” I had just been stitched up, so I couldn’t scream at the ceiling for them to hear me. I’d say something, and they’d say, “Say that again!” It was as if I was a person locked up in a box. It was impossible for me to communicate with anyone, and no one wanted to communicate with me. I think it’s very difficult to understand unless a person had experienced it in one way or another.

But that experience reminded me again of the subjects that I constantly deal with in my work, because when you can’t sleep, and you’re in a position of isolation, then this means that you’re open to everything, but you’re in a situation that is completely closed. So your mind keeps racing, but you can’t escape. It’s like an animal clawing at the inside of a box trying to get out. You’re not stationary. They put you on these kinds of medicines so that you can’t move. Like in mental hospitals they use a drug called Haldol, or something, where the patient looks stationary—they call them patient management drugs. So they say, “The patient looks alright, the patient looks alright.” The patient is, perhaps, unable to form the words to articulate what he or she needs. But it’s fine, because to the nurses the patient looks alright. Everything’s fine, and nobody’s running down the halls or anything. And this is the horror that people like Dalton Trumbo have addressed, and so many other writers have addressed—soldiers who have had their limbs shot off and they’re keeping them alive, it’s this kind of horror. And I return to it clearly because it’s something that I understand on a deep level. So, this is the thread throughout this work and all my other work.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: In some ways what you’re saying is that you’re attempting, out of your own experience of isolation, to articulate the experience and give voice to all the people who didn’t have the possibility of speaking?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: People have said that. I don’t think it’s my right to say that or to even assume it. If people say that, it’s a compliment. That’s a very nice thing to say, but I’m not a folk singer and I don’t make those pretensions. I just do the work that I think is good, and if people relate to it, that’s wonderful because every performer wants an audience. Without an audience, I’d be in that chamber of isolation, just doing this all alone, all the time. I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent, which would really put me in isolation—I could live in some homeless place. I do support myself doing this stuff.

So, everybody needs an audience. But I never make any presumptions about who gets it. When I was doing Plague Mass years ago, I got a lot of flak for that: AIDS lady, diva of disease, and all this crap. Even in ’84 people were saying, “There’s no art about AIDS. You can’t do art about AIDS.” And I said, what aspect of the epidemic are you saying that I can’t do art about? Because, as with anything, when we talk about exhausting the materials and resources about AIDS, about this epidemic, there are many millions of subjects, many concerns about it. When, if you’ve started something like this, would you feel that you’re qualified to stop writing about it? When would you feel that you had exhausted all of the variables? I’ve only touched a small place about the epidemic, just a small thing, you know. That’s how I think about it.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: That actually sets up my next question, which is, do you have any sense of responsibility to those people that you might be speaking for? Which, obviously you’re saying, that because you don’t take on the burden of speaking for them…

DIAMANDA GALÁS: No, I don’t…

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Do you feel the sense that, “Well, I really should be doing music that they might like, or I should be doing something that they might recognize themselves in?”

DIAMANDA GALÁS: No, because a person who thinks like that is taking a thermometer and putting it up the ass of their audience, thinking that they can take their IQ. You can’t. You can’t know how smart someone is in the audience. You can’t know where they’re coming from, what their tastes are, what they’re going to like. People will say, “Well, the sick people who are very, very sick are not going to want to listen to the kind of stuff you’re doing.” Incorrect. I’ve had so many people come up to me who are very, very sick, or who came to Vena Cava over and over again because they were very sick, and because they were sick of hearing AIDS songs as a kind of tokenistic gesture towards them—”I care about you, and I got one song on my million-selling CD about you”—so they would come to some of my shows and I would be talking about the state of dementia or the state of depression that is similar to dementia, and they would enjoy it because they could relate to it.

So at first, when I received the criticisms about the work being too harsh to a lot of people, it did hurt me because I thought one day that I saw someone, a boy sitting with his mother at one of my shows, who looked really sick, and I thought, how can I do this music? He looks so sick, and how can I do this harsh music? Is there nothing comforting about my music? It really, really bothered me a lot. And then I thought, if I’m interested in doing therapy, then I should be a therapist. And if I want to be doing that, it’s a separate profession. As a matter of fact, I did do it as a separate profession. I did go into hospitals with groups of people that I knew. We would visit people and sing really pretty songs that they would request. I took requests from my fake book and everybody would sing while I played piano, everything from “Blue Moon” or “Bali Hai” to whatever… you know, everything. But that’s a separate gig, you see. And I’ll do that. I can play any fake book song—I played those gigs with my father—but I know the difference between therapeutic music and what it is that I actually do. One should know the difference. One could do both. You could do both… But I’m not here to lie to people either, oh yeah, I’ll tell you what some com
fort is. What’s the comfort, you know? What’s the comfort?

Empowering Music and Political Action

EDWARD BATCHELDER: On the topic of comfort, I was talking with a friend of mine about this, and one of the points he made is that he thought that empowering music—what you might think of as therapeutic or empowering music—would actually work against political action because it can give people a false sense of power, which then works against them actually seizing real power. The confrontation with the real despair and difficulties that people live in everyday, but don’t necessarily want to face, the confrontation with that actually reminds them of their powerlessness and that might be an effective spur to action. People might be far more likely to take action if they really recognize the circumstances of the situation than if they have a false sense of it: I’m empowered because I’m a woman, I’m empowered because I’m black, because I’m gay, any of the multiple viewpoints people choose to identify with.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: I had some woman’s group, I won’t name them, asking me to participate in a scream-out somewhere in the East Village. I wrote them and said, my dears, don’t you think at this time in history that we are capable of a little bit more sophistication in addressing these issues? I mean, I’m not going to get my Girl Scout outfit on and go over there and stand in my knickers and start screaming like some goddamn moron. Excuse me, I don’t mean to denigrate the Girl Scouts. My mother was a Girl Scout. But this is like …

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Now we’re going to get irate letters from the Girl Scouts of America…

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yeah, I apologize. I didn’t mean to say that …alright, the Brownies, what the hell. But I mean, it’s like, girlfriend, don’t insult me and don’t think I’m going to be a part of this kind of crap. Use your brains. Oh, we’re all going to scream about Bush. I said what are you going to do, get your sound from the latrine? I’m sure he’ll be listening. Koutamares!

EDWARD BATCHELDER: I went to a number of anti-war demonstrations in Nashville leading up to Iraq. One of the things that became clear to me was that an awful lot of the demonstrations were more about bolstering the emotions of the people who attended them than they were about disrupting the emotions of the people who were being…

DIAMANDA GALÁS: That’s true. That’s true. You know, fair enough, far out. If you want to have a party, right on! I’m just not …I may rail against the feeling of isolation; nonetheless I’m comfortable with a certain degree of it, and very uncomfortable in groovy scenes – [laughs] very, very uncomfortable!

EDWARD BATCHELDER: That reminds me of two things. One is: didn’t you experiment with isolation chambers at one point…

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yeah.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: …very, very early, actually, before your career?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: At some point in the very beginning, I knew that I was going to work with a voice. I guess I knew it at the same time that I started to work in anaechoic chambers. I worked in anaechoic chambers because I didn’t want anyone to hear me outside the door because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and I didn’t want anyone to know that. And I wanted to be uncensored. I didn’t want to be performing. I didn’t want to have to worry. I wanted to be free to say anything in a completely, some would say, musical situation blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it was like that. I was also experimenting with LSD and all sorts of stuff. I’d go in there in a situation, like an anaechoic chamber on LSD, and do these vocal things. Now, you know, I don’t know anything about what LSD did to my mind—I don’t know anything about that. The speed they mixed in it probably screwed me up more than anything else [laughs].

The situation with the anaechoic chamber is so interesting because even if you scream, you get no reverberation back. Just as people can’t hear you outside, you also can’t hear the reverberant sound of your voice in the chamber. It’s a very unrewarding circumstance in which to express yourself. It was purely so that no one would be able to hear, or judge, or know anything. I started the performances I did in darkness for that same reason, because I didn’t want anyone looking at me. And then I would do performances with my back to the audience because I didn’t want anyone looking at me. I’m much better than I used to be about it, but even now I’ve often used very dim lighting because I really want to be separate from the audience, very separate from the audience. I often get these comments like, “You don’t go out into the audience,” and, you know, “You don’t talk to the audience,” and all this. Well, if I were doing that, I’d go to Las Vegas. I mean, if that were my aim …As Kenneth Gaburo said to me a long time ago, “It’s not what you intend to do that is the issue, it’s that you’re able to go through with it, you’re able to realize what you intend to do.” It’s not for me to judge whether somebody is making a mistake by going to Las Vegas, you know what I mean.

Love Songs

EDWARD BATCHELDER: You said in one interview, “In America, they’ll starve you to death for not writing love songs.”

DIAMANDA GALÁS: [laughs]

EDWARD BATCHELDER: But it occurred to me that actually you sing a lot of love songs, that they’re all love songs.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yeah.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: And with something like “My World Is Empty Without You,” you take it to such an extreme of almost psychotic breakdown because of the abandonment of love.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Exactly.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: So, you turn those songs into, in some way, not political statements, but statements of the same sort of isolation?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Well, there is a line that I’ve used, but many other people have used permutations of it, obviously in their own ways, which is: An artist must learn to embrace his or her own limitations. And I embrace mine, [laughs] being that I’m clearly interested in only one subject, which is isolation, this horrible state of isolation that you get to going through the extremes of any experience. Even if I do a love song, I turn it into a song about bereavement, or an isolating, torturous experience. I like to take something and exhaust it…exhaust it! That’s another thing I had discussed a little bit—perhaps with Gabourel, I’m not sure, I think so, though—choosing the variables that you’re going to work with and then wasting them, just ripping them, using them, permuting them over and over again until you find what the essence is of that. And that’s what I like to do with a song.

Someone will say to me, “What are you doing something like Insekta for, or Schrei 27 for, or Plague Mass, and then you go and do “My World Is Empty Without You Babe,” and blah, blah, blah. “What’s your aesthetic anyway?” I say, what’s your fucking aesthetic! I mean, don’t you understand what I’m doing? You would never tell a filmmaker, you know, “Why did you do a film about the bad boys in New York and then you did a film about this, and then you did a film about this…” But musicians are asked to put themselves in these locked cases. On the other hand, you’d say, why did Xenakis write string quartets, then do computer music, and go back to writing string quartets? It’s the same kind of thing. It’s what you do with a song. It’s not that you do a song, it’s what you do with it. I feel that with all the songs I do—I’m working on Edith Piaf and even Marlene Dietrich, and all these songs—I like them, they become very cathartic, but not in an undisciplined sense at all. They become cathartic because I take them and master what the chord changes are because the chord changes alone tell you the story. You don’t even have to know the words, the chord changes tell you everything. Then I work very carefully with the words and perform it so many times that I understand the essence of the song. It’s the same thing, I think, as composing. I really don’t see any difference.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: In many ways, you rewrite the songs.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Well, let me just disagree with that because there are people who do rewrite the songs, and I don’t approve of that, actually. I feel that if they want to rewrite the songs, then they should write their own songs. And a lot of people who rewrite songs do it unintentionally because they can’t play the chord changes, let’s say, to a Supremes song, which are very sophisticated chord changes, like the Edith Piaf songs which were written by a lot of classical music composers who really were orchestral writers. She often performed with orchestras, as well. If somebody goes and does something like “Heaven Have Mercy” and then plays it with three chord changes when there are 20 chord changes in it, they’re not telling the right story. They’re not telling the same story. They can say the same words, but they’re not telling the same story. They’re simplifying something, they’re making it into something wrong. So, I don’t rewrite it. I obey every, every instruction of the composer—the person who wrote it—but, in the sense, I interpret it. But through interpretation you learn so much about composition, that’s what I mean.

Political Content

EDWARD BATCHELDER: There are two questions that I’d like to follow up on that go in totally different directions. What I would like to ask you first, because you’re talking about music and because when anyone touches on the subject of music and politics, it is often understood to be the text content of the song—that a political song is a song that carries a political message in the lyrics. Yet, I think at least from the ’60s onward and even before then in debates about other art forms, there is a sense that there is a radical form, which, in and of itself, can have a political message even if the text is not specifically political. Even if you’re not going out and singing the “Internationale” or singing songs about the workers at the barricades, there can be a sort of experimental form which liberates people’s minds from a certain way of thinking and can have a political message. When you talk about the chord changes telling the story in and of itself…

DIAMANDA GALÁS: That’s right. That’s precisely the right analogy. For example, Xenakis did political music, but the sound of it was also saying what the words were and the words were very limited. There might be a word repeated over and over again, or something like this. Many people have said to me a long time ago, “If you’re so interested in the AIDS epidemic, why don’t you write very simple songs about the AIDS epidemic so people can hum the songs?” I’m not interested in being the next Maiakovsky. I’m not interested in music as propaganda. I’m not employed by anyone. I’m not a politician. I’m not running for office. I’m not interested in any of that. I’m only expressing my opinion of a situation that bothers me, and that again puts me into that pit that I go into which allows me to create something I feel that I need to create. So, I’m doing it for myself. The scream that comes out of my work, it’s not possible for me to dilute, or do it any other way. I couldn’t. Again, the words are the same as the sound.

I feel that a lot of artists …especially there was this Jesse Helms period where people were drawing these gigantic penises to shock Jesse Helms. Of course he never saw any of them, but all these college students were drawing them, and artists were drawing them and putting them in art galleries. I was like, listen baby, you know, what is that? What is that? You think that that has any effect on anything? An artist is supposed to predict the future, they’re supposed to be a visionary. You’re not supposed to respond to an article you read in the Village Voice for Christ’s sake. You’re supposed to have a little more sophistication than that. I just feel that politics is never an excuse to make a simple-minded statement. If the work, as art, is not good enough, then I really don’t care what a person has to say to me because I’m not going to listen to it. You can put a message on anything. A person can make a painting that is completely yellow and say this is about hepatitis. And you can say, I can’t argue that. I can’t argue with the artist that it’s about hepatitis. But essentially it’s just a fucking yellow, boring-ass painting, you know. And there it is, so what? That’s no better than going to a mental hospital and seeing someone slam his head against the wall and say the same word 25 times—except they make a lot more money doing it.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: You’ve spoken some about your sense of form and you’ve spoken about some of your reasons for performing works which—at least in terms of subject matter—are political, but it’s clear that your motivations for performing it are not political in a conventional sense. Yet there’s a sense that part of your intention in performing this work is to draw people’s attention to some political injustice and to motivate them to rise up against it. You said to me once that you didn’t think that your work had anything to do with politics, and that you thought of political action as something totally separate. What conception could you imagine, or what definition could you give to politics, that would enable your work to be seen as political?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: I think, for example, if I wanted to have the most direct effect on the AIDS crisis, then I would be working with my friends that have been working in underground AIDS treatment organizations or raising money for AIDS research. I think I would be doing very direct work like that. No matter how good the art is and no matter how direct the art is in response to an epidemic per se, it certainly isn’t the most political thing you could do. It’s quite removed, as a matter of fact, from the most political thing you could do. I mean, I’m not a doctor who is spending time working with people with AIDS. That’s what I’m saying. That would be the most political work I could be doing. Doing this research that so many organizations have done. That’s why I always say, don’t call me too much of an activist. I might be an activist for an artist. I might be an activist because of the subject material, or by default. But I would never define myself as an activist in the sense that they are. I couldn’t, that would be erroneous. That would be completely erroneous.

Lyrical Content

EDWARD BATCHELDER: The other thing I wanted to talk more about is your choice of texts. We touched on it a little bit earlier with Defixiones. The first music I heard when I became aware of your work was Malediction and Prayer. As I looked through all of your other work I noticed you draw extremely freely from a wide range of styles. I’m wondering if you see any political importance in that alone? Is there a political repercussion in doing Ornette Coleman next to a rembetika song, next to a gospel song, next to a Pasolini song?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: I don’t know about that. I just know that for me not to do that music would be lying. For me that would be saying, okay, I can relate to Johnny Cash but I can’t relate to Ornette Coleman, or saying that I can relate to Ornette Coleman but I can’t relate to whatever. Rembetika, you know, I’ve heard it all of my life without always knowing what it meant when I was very young. People have to tell the truth. I have to tell the truth. That’s what I mean by being invisible in this culture. Not only the dead are invisible, the living are invisible, no matter what we do. “What do you mean you’re singing Ornette Coleman?” Or “What are you singing the blues for?”

Let me tell you something, if you don’t change or refresh the blues, then the blues is going to be a dead coffee table tradition. If you tell people, “You’re the one to do the blues, you’re not doing the blues, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing rembetika, and you’re not singing country music,” what’s going to happen to the music? It’s going to die. I sat with, I guess it might have been the Golden Jubilee Singers—some gospel singers—on a plane once and they said, “You know, people think that all we do is study gospel music and listen to other gospel records. We listen to country all the time and we get inspiration for our next songs through country. We listen to classical music, we listen to ads on the television, and we listen to this.” It’s the same thing, you know.

For me the Middle Eastern musical influence—the scales from the Middle East which are so different and so ornate next to the pentatonic scale—which is the West African legacy of the blues—is something that can be a great addition to the blues scales. You can’t just hammer down a fuckin’ scale for the rest of your life. That’s what you have in this country with all these rhythm & blues singers singing the same blues scales. I don’t care how many singers rip off Whitney Houston, she ended the line and they just keep ripping her off and ripping her off. It’s because they’re exploiting the same scales. They’re not going outside the culture. They’re not interested in the Middle Eastern culture except to sample it on a record because it’s tokenistic music—”They’re just a bunch of Arabs and Greeks” and whatever. That’s a mistake. So what I do is take these musics, and I don’t combine them to be interesting or to create a fusion, I just tell the truth about what I hear, and in that form make the music new. That’s why I’m capable of singing “Lonely Woman” by Ornette, because you gotta be a great singer to sing “Lonely Woman.” If you’re not you shouldn’t touch it. I’ve heard people touch that song before. I’ve heard hysterical versions of it—man, they should just be hippie anthems because they’re so ridiculous.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Do you have some sort of consciousness about what text and what music you select to illuminate a particular work? For example, it seemed to me as I listened to Plague Mass that you draw on a lot of gospel work, whereas in Defixiones you draw on Byzantine music.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes, that’s true. The Roy Acuff song “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” was the central song for There Are No More Tickets to the Funeral [a section of Plague Mass] and that’s one of the particular gospel areas that you’re talking about. That song was handed to me directly by my father because he had this gospel choir that came to the house. For many years he was a gospel director. They sang all these songs, all these songs. “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “There’s a Balm in Gilead,” and a lot of the songs I recorded. So I grew up with gospel, Byzantine, and flamenco music all at the same time.

Early Influences

EDWARD BATCHELDER: When you talk about that range of influences, and the way that you talked about the culture of the Ottoman Empire earlier, you talk about it in the way that people talk about America being a mongrel culture; a culture without a firm sense of division between different races, different ethnicities, and different religions. If you go to Memphis and you go to the music museums there, it’s very clear at a certain point that there was an incredible mixing going on between the early blues tradition, the early country tradition, the early folk tradition, that those things weren’t distinct categories.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: That’s right. Ray Charles, one of my heroes, did an interview and they said, “Well, what do you do? Gospel, blues, do you do country music?” He said, “Why do I have to make that decision? I’m a musician, I don’t make those decisions.” And since I was five years old when I was playing at the piano my father would put the fake book in front of me and say, “Okay, now you’ve seen the fake book, now I’m putting it away.” He’d take his bass out and I used to do gigs with him when I was 13, and I didn’t have a fake book. We just went through four hours every night of every song from, I’ve said this before, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” to “Kansas City,” to bam-bam-bam, to everything. I just had to recognize the changes, I couldn’t stop in a middle of a song. I never thought about it. Then he’d do “Volare” and then he’d sing a Greek song. Just like any real musician, I came up doing all music.

Again, when we talk about the categories it’s like saying to Leontyne Price, “You better not sing opera because you’re black. You better not sing Italian opera. And let me tell you something, you do not have the genetic predisposition to… ” That is just a bunch of garbage! One of the greatest singers of the Italian repertoire, an incredible singer! It’s garbage. It’s reflective of the same thing that we’re talking about that the Turks did, which is to try to sterilize a country with the objective of racial purity. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t tell a person not to hear what he hears. When a person hears what he hears, he plays what he hears. We have these idiots in New York like Wynton Marsalis and all these morons at the higher centers of culture like Lincoln Center who are playing the same old permutations, and they’ve screwed lots of innovative jazz musicians out of a living. They’re just recycling the same old trash and they’ve been doing it for years. Let me tell you, man, if they want the music to stop, it will stop. It’ll stop. They’ll be good for it. Maybe one of them will kick off soon and somebody else can take their place. Who knows?

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Can you talk some about your relationship to all these different influences?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: They are completely separate scales, and they have different temperaments and subtleties of emotions associated with them. If you’re going to sing the work “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” a gospel song written with a blues scale—what people correctly call Afro-American music, I would call it Afro-American operatic music, really—then you have to be consequent to what that tradition is, as I am and was. What I was doing by singing that song was to show the idea of a crucifixion as one of the most painful ways to die: showing the breaking of the spinal column slowly, showing the blood, and showing the body after days of decay. There was a word that was used called horripilation. It was a type of torture practiced by the Chinese. They would give the victim opium and start chopping off body parts one at a time—just ripping small parts off the body. I wanted people to understand what happens, instead of just seeing the song as: “Let’s discuss it ex post facto, let’s discuss it in a requiem sense.” This music isn’t for those who are standing by a grave and saying, “Oh well, I may not have been there when the person was suffering, I may not have been there when the person was in pain, but now I’ve come to his funeral and I’m so sorry he suffered but he’s no longer suffering.” Well, those of us who see someone dying can’t think like that. We certainly can be glad that the person is no longer suffering, but we cannot escape the remembrances of all those days of anguish that the person went through. It’s an inescapable nightmare. So, what I did with the song, what I do with all these songs, was to dissect it, the words and melody. You hear a lot of the multiphonic singing that I’m known for and so forth, but it’s part and parcel of how I consider the song to be sung, with this crucifixion in mind.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?
[Were you there? Or were you not there?]
Sometimes it causes me to wonder, wonder, wonder
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

So, I go into detail about this. It’s a dissection of the subject. Yes, that’s why it starts off with gospel, but “This Is the Law of the Plague” and a lot of the other work. “Sono L’Antichristo” is actually more Byzantine sounding, and certainly Cris D’Aveugle is…

EDWARD BATCHELDER: There are moments when I hear a foreshadowing of the Defixiones project.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes, that’s true. In a sense, an artist does tend to repeat him or herself in a way—also because of the Byzantine sound of the music and scales that are used in “Blind Man’s Cry.” I was often very much at a loss as to how to combine certain parts of the three or four albums that I did dealing with this subject because they struck me as very dissimilar, and they were dissimilar. So I eventually composed new work that united parts of the work that made sense and it became Plague Mass, not arbitrarily at all. A lot of new work had to be composed to write Plague Mass. I spend a lot of years dealing with the AIDS epidemic. I’d say from ’84 to ’91. I didn’t stop, because Vena Cava continued after that in ’92, which was more specifically about AIDS dementia and the depression that seems to look like AIDS dementia so people think that AIDS dementia has arrived before it actually has in certain peo
ple who are sick. Anyway, Schrei still calls back to that as well. I don’t see that as a project that is ever completed and I said that. It isn’t completed. How could it be completed? I said until the end of the AIDS epidemic, and we’re certainly not at the end of the epidemic. We are doing much better in the United States in many ways, but still the situation with protease inhibitors, a lot of people are exhausted by that. It doesn’t always work for everyone.

Reception

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Can you talk a little bit about how your work is received? I know that when you perform in Europe, you perform in much more of a concert hall situation than you do in the United States.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Oh, yeah.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: The perception of your work there is quite different there than it is here.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes. It’s completely different. There’s no comparison. I perform for very large audiences there compared to New York. I could not afford to perform at Carnegie Hall because I do not have the money to produce the concert. You need to produce these concerts. Many artists that perform at Brooklyn Academy of Music must produce their own concerts. They get on the bill, but they spend a lot of money producing concerts. I don’t have that money. So, in Italy these people produce the concerts. I perform a lot in Italy. I perform in Greece, Spain, and Latin America. A lot of the countries that are Latin based get it. They don’t see me as being too much. They understand the emotion because they’re cultures that are constantly screaming, raising their hands, and doing things …the English would call it “over the top.”

EDWARD BATCHELDER: But you also perform a lot in Germany, which of course seems to be the other end of the spectrum from that.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: I don’t perform a lot there. I perform there somewhat nervously. Not because I think anyone is going to do anything to me in Germany, but because the disposition of a lot of Germans just makes me nervous. It just makes me nervous because I’m not the way they are. They’re very contained as people, very contained. I find that very difficult to be around. I feel very inappropriate there. I just feel inappropriate. So I go on stage, I get my money, and I split. It’s kind of like that. I used to say that I felt like they were drawing my blood over there. Now, it’s not because of any kind of political sentiment that I would feel this way, although, many people have their political sentiments about Germany. It’s not that. It’s just a personality thing. It really is.

In this country, nobody knows really how to quantify Greeks, that’s for sure. Most people think the Greeks are a group of people who died long ago, that the original Greeks are all dead. They died in the Golden Age and left behind a great ancient literature and so forth. They’re not aware of Seferis, they’re not aware of Yannis Ritsos, Yiorgos Seferis, and C.P. Cavafy, they’re not aware of a lot of the writers and musicians, they’re not aware of Xenakis, they’re not aware of any of these people. They think that it’s a dead culture. This country, whereas it’s more and more scrupulous, let’s say, about recognizing other cultures, is very remiss in recognizing Middle Eastern cultures, which includes Greek cultures, and even knowing the real meaning of what Egyptian culture is.

For example, in this country we have this stupid film about Achilles with Brad Pitt. Well, no Greek looked like Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt doesn’t look Greek. Why do we have a movie like that? Then, on the other hand, in the black studies classes, they teach that Cleopatra was black. She was Nubian. No! I’m sorry, but she was Greek. She was from the race of Ptolemies. It’s a long road from Nubia to Macedonia, let me tell you that. So what people say is, “Okay, the Greeks are like the Assyrians, nobody knows who they are. They’re a souvlaki culture—you can get your souvlaki and your falafel down the street.” But let me tell you, that guy doesn’t know anything—all the original Greeks are dead. I’ll tell you something as a Greek, they are not dead! I go to Greece every year. They are not dead! And they know when they’re being ripped off and they laugh like hyenas when they hear that Cleopatra “wasn’t Greek.” In this country we miseducate people based on the proportion of their ethnic group to the population. “Okay, alright, you want to be a Cleopatra? Well, you’re X percent of the population, you get to be Cleopatra.” What the fuck it that? So what does that mean, we Greeks now only lay claim to souvlaki stores? So I fight that and get all sorts of repercussions from that, but I don’t give a fuck.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: On a related level of the reception, to get back to the issue of political music, do have any hopes for an impact for the work that you do? You made a comment once that your voice had been given to you for the torment of your enemies. Do you see this project, for instance, as in any way contributing some small amount of weight…

DIAMANDA GALÁS: …of torment to my enemies? Absolutely, and that brings me gigantic joy. I have always been more delighted by the misery of my enemies that my own joy in succeeding in something. I’m not really sure why that is, it must be a Greek inheritance because I really, really love that sort of thing. People will say that’s a very low consciousness and I would have to agree. But I have no reason to desert it. [laughs] I see no reason to desert it.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Do you see this, the Defixiones project in particular and the earlier AIDS projects, as adding any weight to a certain side of the scale in terms of contributing information and contributing to the public consciousness?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes, my Web site is already listed on one of the top Turkish hate lists, and I didn’t even try to get there. [laughs] I mean, they have all these people that they are convinced hate the entire Turkish population. That is not what I’m talking about. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the same thing these women are talking about, a lot of whom starved themselves to death to object to the prison situations in Turkey, many of whom when they go to prison get raped and tortured, many of whom go to prison because of having been raped and tortured, then telling the police and then getting sent back to prison. There are so many injustices. Turkey is really a frightening country if you try to raise your hand in a different direct
ion. It’s a very, very frightening country. These are the things I object to. I don’t object to the right of a person to be a Turk and to live in Turkey. But you know, if these people want to put me on a Turkish hate list, fine. The people who put me on the list, they’re the ones that I hate. No problem, no problem. I have no trouble discussing what I don’t like. None. After all, that’s American isn’t it?

Future Projects

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Do you have any visions of the next project?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: We’re almost finished with the recording of Insekta. I’d like to just get that released because we’re almost finished with that project.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: And Insekta is more or less about… ?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: It’s reflective of a person who is institutionalized. It had a lot to do with what I heard about many institutional experiences, but in specific, Willowbrook.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Willowbrook?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Willowbrook was in Staten Island. It was a place for the severely disabled: people born without arms and legs, people with cri du chat. People left them there and they did a lot of experiments on them. Experiments, let’s say, like infecting a thousand of them with hepatitis and just watching them die just to see what the progression of the disease was. It was shut down. But that piece was performed after very little rehearsal. It wasn’t ready at all to be performed but it was one of those situations where you got paid and you’ve got to perform it at this point. So we were able to go into the studio later and perfect it. But it was performed in a cage that went very high, up to the ceiling. There’s a lot of work we want to do on it.

In any case, after that another piece, Nekropolis …but I’ll discuss that when we get around to it. Of course in the meantime I’ll probably do another record with the Edith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich, and O.V. Wright or Hank Williams songs that I did recently under the title of Guilty, Guilty, Guilty which are homicidal love songs—yet more homicidal love songs. There is no end to my joy in doing those songs. I think it’s always going to be that way. It’s going to be both of these kinds of projects and why not?

EDWARD BATCHELDER: But presumably you don’t see Defixiones as being a project that has an ultimate conclusion date either. Isn’t that in a sense also on-going?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes. You’re right. That leads to the discussion of Nekropolis, but I’m not quite ready for that discussion. [laughs]

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Alright, I guess we can get to that some other date. My last question here, and I don’t know if you’ve ever answered this before, is: do you think that we have any political or ethical responsibility to the dead? As I looked through interviews with you, and as you’ve talked today, you talk about your sense of not being able to forget the suffering. “Fine, the person has died and they’re not suffering any longer, but for those of us who were there, those of us who in someway took partook vicariously, perhaps, we had our own experiences of suffering. That experience goes on.” Yet, at other points you’ll say, “There’s nothing glorious in being dead” and that your work is all about the living. Those seem to me to be two very opposing statements.

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Actually, that’s a very interesting point. Whilst they do seem to be opposing, they’re actually the same because of a line that I could draw from “Blind Man’s Cry,” when the person is on the cross but he doesn’t believe in God and he’s saying, “I wished I believed in angels, I wished I believed in God. The only thing I can believe in is death as the escape from this pain.” That’s the thing that I’m talking about. Looking at that and saying that the worst thing is not to believe in God, not to believe in an afterlife, not to know that there is any justification for your suffering except that you suffered—that there was no reason for it—to have everything stolen, to be raped, to be tortured, and there be no reason for it. There is no good reason for it. There is not martyrdom. That’s the person in “Blind Man’s Cry” saying that. There is no martyrdom here. I’m not going to be kissed by the angels. I’m not going to go to heaven. I’m not even going to hell. This is hell. And that’s where it unites with my saying there’s nothing glorious about death, and where I say the living, the living dead, or the dying alive is my subject. In the last breaths a person would draw, I can only imagine he or she would be thinking about a legacy. What have I left? Will anyone remember me? Will anyone remember me? Will anybody shed a tear for me? And that’s what I’m talking about.

EDWARD BATCHELDER: And that’s the basis for the political content in your work, so far as it has a political content?

DIAMANDA GALÁS: Yes.

A conversation at Bley’s home in Willow, NY on June 10, 2003 at 2:00 p.m

Jazz and Non-Jazz Musicians

FRANK J. OTERI: You are unique. I don’t know what to call the music you do except to say that it’s great. Is it jazz? Is it fusion? Is it classical music? Is it progressive rock? Is it cabaret? Is it avant-garde music?
CARLA BLEY: It doesn’t matter what it is. I’m just a person who writes for what it is. It’s written for jazz musicians. I don’t consider myself a jazz musician at all. I’m not spontaneous. I take a lot of time thinking about everything and when I finally get an idea during a solo, the piece is over. So, I’m really slow. I’m not a jazz musician; I wish I were. I’m just writing for them, as opposed to writing for classical musicians, or as opposed to writing for cabaret or the other things you mentioned. Those are not the people I write for.
FRANK J. OTERI: But you have. You’ve written for Ursula Oppens, for Speculum Musicae, the Houston Symphony…
CARLA BLEY: That was insignificant and a long time ago and unsuccessful.
FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve also written for Jack Bruce and Linda Ronstadt.
CARLA BLEY: Again, long time ago. But it’s true. I suppose if you went back there… God! Scratch everything I thought. [laughs] I don’t think I’m anything.
FRANK J. OTERI: But you’ve written primarily for jazz musicians, so that word does have a meaning for you. What is a jazz musician?
CARLA BLEY: You don’t have to write everything down. You can leave a huge hole and they just fill it right up. It’s more economical, time-wise… When I started, I used to write this tiny snippet of an idea and then they would play free for a half an hour and then they’d play the snippet again at the end. And that was my piece; I got the credit for it and the royalties and everything.
FRANK J. OTERI: OK. So you use this word jazz, but the music you write defies labels. Do you think labels ultimately mean anything to listeners?
CARLA BLEY: I could talk about that but I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say. It would be something like: Well, people use music to identify themselves. Someone likes to think of himself as a bluegrass-type person and so that person listens to bluegrass. But that’s not a musical answer. That’s just sociological and not my forte.
FRANK J. OTERI: So what would you say is the ideal listener for your music?
CARLA BLEY: Someone who likes something that’s not entirely correct. I’m not the listener’s cup of coffee or Coca-Cola. I’m more like the listener’s cup of pinhead gunmetal tea. And not a lot of people like pinhead gunmetal. So I understand that the coffee lovers are going to go somewhere else and I’m going to get this very small amount of people who like really weird things.
FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I haven’t had pinhead gunmetal, but I love Chinese special gunpowder tea, are they related? [laughs]
CARLA BLEY: [laughs] That’s probably why you’re here!
FRANK J. OTERI: You don’t consider yourself a jazz musician but certainly as a musician you’ve recorded numerous solos on albums on the piano, and on the organ; you’ve also played saxophone and you’ve sung.
CARLA BLEY: Those things happened one hour out of 25 years. Just because they’re recorded, it doesn’t mean I do them. When I played saxophone on my daughter’s recordings, I picked it up a half-hour before the session and tried not to get a blister or something and then played it and put the saxophone away for five years. It’s just a joke. And the singing thing was just a joke. The one time I sang on a record seriously was because the trombone player couldn’t play the melody right. I had this great track and there was no melody on top so I just pitched in. I didn’t realize that would make me a singer.
FRANK J. OTERI: Well, you sing all over Escalator Over The Hill.
CARLA BLEY: That was 35 years ago! I wouldn’t think of doing it now. When you’re starting, you don’t even know who you are at that stage. You’re doing everything. And you don’t know what’s dangerous and what you don’t want to be known as doing. You try everything. You do everything. And you’re very un-fastidious about it and that is what I was. Rock and roll. My God, I was in a rock and roll band thirty years ago or something, I can’t believe it, but just one, c’mon. It was six months. I just did it ’cause it was fun. It wasn’t really a musical thing. And I like Jack Bruce a lot. I liked his records. So I did it. But I wouldn’t do that today.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s great to hear you say “fun,” because that’s a feeling I get from all of your music, from the earliest stuff through to what you’re doing these days. There are a lot of really serious ideas going on, and often a lot of experiments going on, but it’s always fun to listen to.
CARLA BLEY: Thank you. I like that. I do like to have fun, and when I’m writing and something happens that’s interesting or humorous, I have fun. At that moment, I laugh and it makes me feel good and I think I’ll keep that in and maybe other people will feel good too.

Musical Origins

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to go back to the very, very beginning. What was your very first exposure to music?
CARLA BLEY: Well, that was before the ’70s! [laughs] My first exposure to music was my father. He was a piano teacher and he played the organ in church and he was the choirmaster. It was a sort of a non-denominational Christian church and all the music I heard were hymns. Not even gospel. It was just straight hymns from the hymnbook in four-part harmony. Not even classical music. “There’s Power in the Blood,” “Rock of Ages”… Those sort of things. That was my first musical experience.
FRANK J. OTERI: I can still hear that in your brass voicings even to this day.
CARLA BLEY: It’s really true. That sort of hung around. I found that jazz was pretty similar. The harmonies weren’t that much different from the hymns. So when I made the big leap from church music to jazz, it didn’t seem that much different to me.
FRANK J. OTERI: Let’s talk more about that leap. I want to know more about you being a teenager and winding up working at Birdland. Those were very heady times for jazz in New York.
CARLA BLEY: Oh, I was there! I saw it all, except I got there a little after Charlie Parker. Otherwise, I saw it all, I think. God, I can’t believe those days! I just wanted to hear the music and I didn’t have any money. So I thought I’ll just get a job there and that was so smart. That was my education. I worked at Birdland, Basin Street, the Jazz Gallery, and the Five Spot a little bit, as anything. As a cigarette girl, as a seller of stuffed animals, as a photographer with a camera around my neck… I would go up to a table and say, “Would you like a picture of you and your girlfriend.” And the guy would say, “No! God!” I think I maybe took only two or three pictures the whole time I worked as a photo girl. I would just stand next to the bandstand and absorb all the music. That’s where I learned everything.
FRANK J. OTERI: And you were really there at the dawn of the free jazz movement.
CARLA BLEY: I was right there. That didn’t last too long.
FRANK J. OTERI: But it had repercussions in the music that have caused rifts that have still not completely healed. Nowadays, there are some folks who try to deny that this is part of jazz’s history. It was a very contentious period, and you were sort of molded by that.
CARLA BLEY: I was molding it! I had the audacity to say, “Well, let’s do this!” And it never worked. I don’t know, we thought it was important to change. I can’t imagine why I wanted to change that incredible music that I had come up on. It’s just that I guess you’re supposed to take things a step further, and I thought I could but of course I couldn’t. Right now I think the music that happened before free jazz is the most beautiful music in jazz history. So it didn’t work. But everyone uses it now as an element. I use it. Even in “The National Anthem,” I set the saxophones off doing whatever they want to do for a couple of minutes and said just play. You can do that. Everyone knows how to do that. But it’s not very successful. We had to take like maybe four takes before we got anything that was listenable. Four guys that don’t know each other playing for the first time with no hint of what they’re doing could be very unsuccessful. One of the guys just said, “I’m gonna ruin this.” And he ruined it and then it was OK.
FRANK J. OTERI: Which guy was it?
CARLA BLEY: It was Craig Handy. All of a sudden he started playing his low D-flat in a destructive manner and, oh, I was so happy because before that everybody was sort of pussy-footing around on C major and all of a sudden he did that and all of a sudden it worked!
FRANK J. OTERI: That’s one of my favorite tracks on your new album, so we’re going to get back to that, but we still have a lot of ground to cover before we do. So, let’s go back. Here you were, a cigarette girl at Birdland. How did you get all these big important musicians to start working with you? How did you make the leap from being an onlooker of the scene to being in the center of the scene?
CARLA BLEY: That was slow. I had a gig at a coffee shop called the Phase Two—I think that’s what it was called—down in Greenwich Village, and I paid guys five dollars an afternoon to work with me. And I got a lot of guys. A lot of guys needed that five! And so I remember at the time, that’s when I first worked with Steve—my boyfriend, Steve Swallow.
FRANK J. OTERI: Wow, it goes all the way back to then.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, he was younger than me. He was a little kid almost, and I knew him before that because he came to Basin Street with his father to hear Gene Krupa and I was the cigarette girl. And there he was with his father sitting in the front row listening to Gene Krupa. And afterwards Gene Krupa came up and talked to little Stevie Swallow and I remembered it later when Steve talked about it. I remember that little kid sitting in the front row. But I played with him for the first time when he was about 19. He was playing with my husband at that time. Then I hired him for 5 dollars to play with me. So, that’s how I made the transition: money. You can buy those guys!
FRANK J. OTERI: Your influences as a composer. Who are the people you admired when you were starting out?
CARLA BLEY: Before jazz or after?
FRANK J. OTERI: Both.
CARLA BLEY: Way back, the first guy I liked was Erik Satie. Quite by accident… I had a tape recorder, a wire recorder—God, my father gave me a wire recorder… I turned on the radio and recorded the first thing I heard. It happened to be Parade by Satie. Then it broke. So it was the only piece I had. And I listened to it all the time.
FRANK J. OTERI: To that typewriter…
CARLA BLEY: It had a typewriter in it? You know I bought a CD of it recently. It’s wonderful. I still like it.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s a piece that contains the seeds of your anything goes approach.
CARLA BLEY: It was so different from what my father was doing, you know. He was playing Rachmaninoff and that kind of stuff all the time very badly at the piano and teaching. So I heard students playing scales badly and I heard him playing Rachmaninoff badly. I got to love bad music and the Erik Satie seemed like it was pretty awful and so that was my first influence. And then I think in the jazz world, I went to hear Lionel Hampton, his Flying Home Band. I just switched over right then. That was that.
FRANK J. OTERI: So many people have written that you were influenced by Kurt Weill…
CARLA BLEY: I never heard Kurt Weill until I was in my 30s. Isn’t that interesting?
FRANK J. OTERI: I hear other influences that people don’t normally bring up. I hear Charles Ives in a lot of what you do.
CARLA BLEY: You know, somebody just mentioned that to me last year, and I swear I didn’t hear Charles Ives until three years ago. But I think I heard it all sifted down through movie music. I must have heard some Kurt Weill. I went to The Threepenny Opera when I moved to New York with Michael Mantler. So I was in my 30s when I first heard that. But I must have heard some of it watered down. I think I was influenced by English Music Hall music.
FRANK J. OTERI: I can sort of hear that.
CARLA BLEY: I like that um-pah um-pah thing. I don’t know why.
FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of jazz things, I hear a Mingus influence.
CARLA BLEY: I went every night to hear Mingus. Every single night when he was at some club in the Village because my husband was playing in the band. I would sit there and my head would go down and would come up four hours later full of music. I didn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t drink anything. I just listened and absorbed like a horrible sponge.
FRANK J. OTERI: In fact, Mingus released Paul Bley’s very first record on Debut, his own tiny independent label.
CARLA BLEY: That’s true. I forgot about that.
FRANK J. OTERI: There’s another area of influence, of a musician forming an independent record label, which is something I’d like to talk with you about at length because you’ve not only had success as a composer but you’ve also had success as an entrepreneur, running your own record company all these years. It’s sort of a unique situation in this business. But we’re getting ahead again…
CARLA BLEY: OK. Go back to my childhood…
FRANK J. OTERI: OK. Other influences. I even hear some Albert Ayler in what you do.
CARLA BLEY: Absolutely. He opened the door. He said it’s OK to be maudlin. And I thought, “Oh, thank you, I so want to be maudlin,” and that was it.
FRANK J. OTERI: But also, he created music that squeaked and squawked and was really out there, but yet at the same time there was an um-pah beat or some other sort of steadiness that a listener could hold on to. He was not afraid of being fun at the same time that he was being out.
CARLA BLEY: And that totally opened the door for me. I’ve got to give it to him.
FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of orchestration, Don Ellis… Any contact with him?
CARLA BLEY: No contact with him except that I think he worked with George Russell. I never heard anything he orchestrated. He had a big band? I gotta hear that.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s great stuff and I think it’s very simpatico with the things you do.
CARLA BLEY: I did know of him through George Russell.
FRANK J. OTERI: George Russell, too, to some extent is also a kindred spirit; That “You Are My Sunshine” arrangement he did…
CARLA BLEY: That’s beautiful, isn’t it. I like that.
FRANK J. OTERI: The trumpeter on his first recording of that is Don Ellis.
CARLA BLEY: And the bass player is Steve Swallow.
FRANK J. OTERI: He sure is. And Sheila Jordan‘s singing.
CARLA BLEY: She sang that great.
FRANK J. OTERI: I’m glad we’re mentioning Sheila because everybody else we’ve talked about so far is a guy. Being a woman composer, and more specifically, being a woman composer in jazz, who are the role models? Who were the role models back then?
CARLA BLEY: I’ll answer that, but I thought you were going to say: “Everybody I mention Sheila Jordan to thinks she’s great!” Have you ever met anyone who didn’t like Sheila Jordan ever? That’s because she never got any measure of success like she should have gotten. She’s not threatening to anyone and she’s a wonderful person, so everyone adores her. But if Sheila’s on the cover of Time magazine, people would say: “She can’t sing” or “So-and-so sings better than that” and “My God, she’s 70 years old.” But Sheila is beloved in the whole community. Isn’t that wonderful?
FRANK J. OTERI: I wish she were more known than she is, though…
CARLA BLEY: But then we would hate her… So why don’t we mention women composers?
FRANK J. OTERI: Great!
CARLA BLEY: I haven’t been influenced by anyone for a long time, so we’d have to go back to Duke Ellington and all that stuff. Who did that tune for Dizzy Gillespie?
FRANK J. OTERI: Mary Lou Williams?
CARLA BLEY: No, not her. “Anitra’s Dance“… She was a trombone player… Melba Liston! That’s a pretty good arrangement. She just took a little bit of Grieg and added stuff to it, but I love that tune. It’s the only tune I ever heard. I never heard any Mary Lou Williams. I didn’t have a comprehensive education; I heard who was working at the clubs. I didn’t study jazz history. I didn’t know who was around. It was whoever was hired by the Mafia at Birdland, that was who I learned from.
FRANK J. OTERI: And in terms of training before you got exposed to jazz? Did you train in classical music at all?
CARLA BLEY: No, I didn’t. I never studied anything.
FRANK J. OTERI: So you’re completely self-taught!
CARLA BLEY: No, my father taught me until I was four, or five maybe, and then my mother tried and I bit her. I bit my mother at the age of five and they gave up on me. That was it. I never learned anything else.
FRANK J. OTERI: Did you stay in contact with them later on?
CARLA BLEY: You mean after I bit her? Well, they forgave me. [laughs] They said OK, don’t bite. Try not to bite!

Compositional Techniques and Methods

FRANK J. OTERI: So, your compositional techniques and methods as a self-trained composer…
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, as a composer, self-trained, not even trained. I didn’t train myself. I’m training myself now.
FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of the compositional process, you were saying before that the best inspiration for you is the bathtub…
CARLA BLEY: That was more of a joke. The desk would probably be better. But, if you’re stuck and take a long, hot bath, then it just might come to you. And then there’s that thing when you’re in bed and all of a sudden you can’t sleep and you’re going over and over that certain thing and you think, “Ah, that might work.” The next day it usually doesn’t, but in the garden you can keep singing something over and over again and maybe you’ll come up with something. The bathtub is good for not only music; the bathtub is good for all sorts of life situations. Like, what should I put on the cover? Or, when should I visit the lawyer? The bathtub is good for everything. I’m a firm believer in not thinking too hard.
FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of structures, you talked earlier about writing a phrase that musicians would first play then improvise on and then return to, it was a little tongue-in-cheek, but clearly in all of the records of yours that I’ve heard there’s a heck of a lot more detail in the compositions than that. What are some of the structures that you work in? Do you even think about music that way? How do you get from here to there in a composition?
CARLA BLEY: I do it like the train without railroad tracks. I just do it as I go. I have no idea how a piece is gonna go when I start. I have no idea how it’s gonna end. Right now I’m working on a piece that so far has two parts. First it had one part, but then it suggested going somewhere else and I thought, “Well, I gotta lighten up a bit; this is really too heavy.” So I wrote another part. I just finished it three days ago. But then I thought, “This wants to go back to the first part.” So I thought maybe Part One should be Part Two, but then I thought I’d need an introduction. I just ask myself all these questions as I’m sitting there or lying in the tub. I need a third part, but what could it be? How could I get a third part? You can’t have two parts. So this is my process: asking myself questions.
FRANK J. OTERI: So do you start something on paper first, or do you always start at the piano?
CARLA BLEY: Piano first. I tried writing without the piano, I tried writing on trains and those pieces are sort of short and boring. I think I like to be at the piano because I can’t hear as many notes as I want to. I can sing something to myself or tap my foot, but that’s not really good for an orchestra. So, it’s the piano.
FRANK J. OTERI: Handwriting or computer notation…
CARLA BLEY: I use the pencil and paper.
FRANK J. OTERI: Have you tried any of the computer notation systems?
CARLA BLEY: No. My daughter takes the finished score and puts it into Finale and prints out the parts. This is the last five years.
FRANK J. OTERI: But you don’t ever use it to hear back orchestration ideas.
CARLA BLEY: No, I don’t. The only thing I do at the computer is… I’m trying to learn PhotoShop so I can do my own album covers so I don’t have to farm those out to my daughter. But I don’t think I can stop writing music long enough to learn a computer program right now.
FRANK J. OTERI: Believe it or not, I learned Sibelius over a weekend.
CARLA BLEY: Oh c’mon. Really?
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s so easy. And it’s been the best thing that ever happened to me as a composer, since it’s not something I can do full-time. The ideas can get notated that fast and I can test them out, ear stuff back, etc. You say you’ve done these short pieces on the train and they never amounted to much of anything. How do you know when something is going to work? Is it when you present it to the musicians the first time?
CARLA BLEY: Oh, no. I know it’s working right there by looking at it on the page. I’m never surprised.
FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of the arrangement and who gets assigned what voice, you know it’s all going to work?
CARLA BLEY: Well, if it doesn’t work at first I keep worrying about it until it works. And then I play it with Steve. I make a piano reduction and I play as much of it as I can, and Steve plays the bass part. And then sometimes he changes some of the notes and gets a better groove. I really use him. He said, “Look, I’m on call 24 hours a day. Anytime you wanna play something and see if it works, just call me. I mean, I only have to call him downstairs now, but he used to be in Connecticut. That was quite a call. And then he will play it. Usually it’s OK lately, but sometimes he’ll change something and then I sort of hope that he will. Sometimes the bass part is not as finished as it would be if I had just an anonymous bass player. Steve will know what to do. I think that’s true.

Composing vs. Performing

FRANK J. OTERI: To go back in time again, back to the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild and subsequently the Jazz Composers Orchestra… From very early on in your involvement with the music, you identified yourself as a composer first. What led to that decision in your head? When did you know that you were a composer?
CARLA BLEY: Well, I never was a player. I’m still not a player. I’ve never had to decide between am I this or that? I’ve never been player. I’m working on it. I practice every day. I was always just a composer so there was no battle there to figure that one out.
FRANK J. OTERI: At the time having a collective for jazz “composers” was somewhat unusual. In jazz, the music was identified by who the performers are. It was a very brave entrepreneurial act as a composer.
CARLA BLEY: That wasn’t me yet. That was mostly Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon. Those were the guys who were the policy makers for the Jazz Composers Guild. I was just lucky to be sittin’ there. They had to let me in ’cause I was a composer and I had a band at that time called the Jazz Composers Orchestra, so that’s how I got in. But I just sat there and tried not to make a wave. Tried not to make Sun Ra get mad at me. It was after that that I started taking things in to my own hands, deciding I want to do this and that, but at the time I was just sitting there learning from Cecil and Bill how to do this. And I liked the idea of anarchy at that time.
FRANK J. OTERI: Well, certainly, one of your earliest exposures on record was not as a leader of your own group, but as a sideman and the arranger for Charlie Haden‘s Liberation Music Orchestra. You were writing music that other people played on their recordings. As a composer for the last 30 years, you’ve been working mostly with ensembles that you have led yourself. How is that different from someone else playing your music?
CARLA BLEY: If I’m present, there’s no difference. If I’m not present, it can be horrible. I know it’s an honor when someone takes a piece of yours and puts their own take on it; I’m seldom happy with it ’cause I’m a control freak. But if I’m there on some sessions, and their playing my music but it’s not my band, it’ll turn out the way I want it to turn out. It’s when I’m not there that I get worried.
FRANK J. OTERI: That’s an interesting corollary to what you were saying before about your decision to work primarily with jazz musicians who pretty much will have their own identity no matter what they’re playing. Whereas the goal of a classical musician’s training is to reproduce the composer’s intentions as faithfully as possible to bring out the composer’s identity rather than their own. Ironically, so often if you write a piece for a classical ensemble, they’ll rehearse it twice and maybe you’ll hear it and think, “Is that what I wrote?”
CARLA BLEY: Exactly. That’s happened to me too. Oh yeah! So it’s more than what’s on the page. It would be nice to study the page to be able to really figure out how to notate things so that people’s triplets would all sound the way you wanted them to… Or people’s eighth notes. In the jazz world, the difference between one and another person’s eighth notes is tremendous, and there’s a lot of snobbery about it. If you don’t have the right kind of eighth notes, you don’t belong at all. I’ve only dipped into the classical world, I wrote that Fancy Chamber Music album, and I’ve worked with maybe five or six different chamber groups around the world. And if I’m there, it turns out perfect. They play great. But if I’m not there… Why don’t they look at the metronome markings, give me a break! And even the jazz groups. I remember the Carnegie Hall Jazz Group whatever it’s called, it’s probably called orchestra…
FRANK J. OTERI: Jon Faddis‘s group?
CARLA BLEY: Yeah. They played a piece of mine. Two pieces. And I was too cool to be there, you know. I wasn’t gonna go. It was called “Women in Jazz.” I wouldn’t think of going. (I forgot to answer your question!) I wouldn’t think of sitting in the audience there as a woman and hearing a “Women in Jazz” concert. So I didn’t go. I was only at one of the rehearsals for a half-hour; I couldn’t be bothered. And I heard a recording of it after. The tempo was like forty markings off and the guys all got lost in the middle of one of the pieces and it was the just awful, the most horrible, horrible thing. ‘Cause, obviously, I left and he never rehearsed it again… He rehearsed the music of the smart people who stayed and said, “Wait a minute, that’s not right.” or “My piece, my piece, c’mon!” I didn’t do that. I just left. I always do that. You can’t do that no matter what kind of music you write. You have to be there, ’cause notation isn’t a sure thing yet.
FRANK J. OTERI: So…
CARLA BLEY: …I’ve got one more thing to say! I’ve just heard a collection of player piano music where the player did not have to be there. And exactly where the player played those notes, the holes got punched in, and it sound like the person’s there. So that’s the answer. You would never believe what this is. It’s the Zelinsky Collection from the Cliff House in San Francisco. It’s not just player piano…
FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, the Musee Mecanique. I love that place. And you’ve titled one of my favorite records of yours Musique Mecanique.
CARLA BLEY: That’s where I got the idea. I thought from my memory was that all those machines were broken. You’d put in your nickel and the bow wouldn’t go across the strings. It would go across the wood at the end instead. And the cymbals: the two hands would miss. And that was what I loved about it. That it was totally wrong and broken. But I just got this CD from my cousin who remembered that I used to go there all the time, and I played it all the way through and the music is excellent. It’s like some human being played that music. Do you know the mechanical process?
FRANK J. OTERI: I saw a whole demonstration of how mechanical instruments work when I was at the Nationaal Museum in Utrecht, which is one of the world’s largest collections of musical automata. So this is interesting that you say that you’d like to get your music across this way. You’ve never worked with electronic instruments that much. You’ve used a synthesizer on some of the early records, though not in a long time. You’ve never done an album by yourself alone in the studio. It seems that for you it’s always about people.
CARLA BLEY: Oh, I don’t like people. That’s not why I do it. I use people ’cause I have to. They add so much to the expression. I wouldn’t want to be that expressive on stage. I prefer to keep a low profile. My trombone player could play five notes I wrote on a page and give it 5000% more importance than I could if I played it.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s so funny to hear you say this. I’ve never heard you live and I really want to. But from all the albums I’ve heard and your record covers and promo photos and all the photos you usually include of the recording sessions in the booklets that come with your recordings, I’ve always gotten the sense that you exude so much personality when you’re playing or at least you seem to be always having such a good time.
CARLA BLEY: No, isn’t that strange. Maybe if there are a lot of people on the stage. I’m listening to them and they’re knocking me out. I’ve got a great seat right on stage. But I don’t feel that I’ve creating that excitement, it’s the guys I choose. It is me in a far-fetched way since I chose these guys and their playing their hearts out. But that’s not what I look to do. I like to be quiet and be by myself and sit at the desk or the piano alone.

Enjoying Independence

FRANK J. OTERI: Let’s get to the entrepreneurial stuff…
CARLA BLEY: That stage.
FRANK J. OTERI: WATT Records… First of all, what does WATT mean?
CARLA BLEY: My second husband called it WATT. That’s the meaning…
FRANK J. OTERI: But what does it mean?
CARLA BLEY: It means three different things. The Watts Towers in Los Angeles. It meant Samuel Beckett‘s novel WATT. And it meant “Watt the hell was that?” WATT! It meant three things and so he called it WATT.
FRANK J. OTERI: I’m glad I asked ’cause I thought it had another meaning altogether. I was totally wrong.
CARLA BLEY: What did you think?
FRANK J. OTERI: Watt is a unit of electricity.
CARLA BLEY: Oh, isn’t that great! Yes, that too!
FRANK J. OTERI: O.K.!
CARLA BLEY: Four meanings…
FRANK J. OTERI: And now Steve’s stuff is on a label called XtraWATT.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah. Xtra. My publishing company is called Alrac. I sorta like those rude sounding words.
FRANK J. OTERI: What does Alrac mean?
CARLA BLEY: It’s Carla backwards.
FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, of course.
CARLA BLEY: But it’s got that Al-rac! It’s not “Celestial Harmonies” or something. And WATT is sort of a short stubby word. Xtra is a cheap word, misspelled. I sorta like that. I don’t like anything too fancy.
FRANK J. OTERI: OK, so the first record you put out on your own is the massive, massive three-LP “Chronotransduction,” as you called it, now that’s a big word. What on earth does that mean?
CARLA BLEY: That means time travel. I didn’t make it up; it was made up by a scientist.
FRANK J. OTERI: That is such an unusual recording. I listened again last night. It’s amazing. But I don’t know what to say about it. There’s so much stuff going on in it, so many different kinds of music. One minute you think you’re listening to a jazz record and then it turns into a field recording from somewhere in the Caucasus or it’s a rock record or a Broadway musical…
CARLA BLEY: Wow. Yeah. Well, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do so I did whatever came up. Anyone who wanted to be in that opera, I said “Fine. You can be in it.” I wasn’t picky about the kinds of music or the people.
FRANK J. OTERI: You consider it an opera but it existed for years as only this recording. About 10 years ago there was a stage production somewhere in Germany.
CARLA BLEY: There were 5 productions. Afterward we toured in France and did the whole summer festival circuit with the live Escalator Over The Hill.
FRANK J. OTERI: Is there a video of that anywhere? I’d love to see it.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, I’ll give you one.
FRANK J. OTERI: Please, it’s fascinating. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the theatre works of Richard Foreman, but it strikes me…
CARLA BLEY: Oh! He is so great. I just love him!
FRANK J. OTERI: Maybe it’s the musical sensibility of Richard Foreman? It’s so out there, but it’s fun.
CARLA BLEY: I could never hook up with him. He’s not a very friendly guy. [laughs]
FRANK J. OTERI: No [laughs].
CARLA BLEY: Once I cut my fur coat in two and gave him half. We both had the same kind of a strange fur coat made from an Australian animal. Maybe it was a wallaby or something, I forget. I got mine at a thrift shop and I’m sure he did, too. It was the ugliest fur coat you’ve ever seen, but it was really warm. We both had one. Every time we met at a cultural affair we just looked at each other sideways. Once I saw him without his coat and I said, what happened to your coat? He said it just totally fell apart. I loved him so much that I cut my coat down the middle of the back, put half of it in a box, and sent it to his studio. Then I never heard from him. Next time I saw him he never mentioned it. But when I was thinking about Escalator Over The Hill, people where saying to me that I have to do it with this director; they’d name one after the other. I said I want to do it with Richard Foreman. He probably wouldn’t want to do it. It’s unrequited.
FRANK J. OTERI: That is so interesting. I heard the connection immediately.
CARLA BLEY: Wow, that’s so clever. You’ve caught on to a couple of things that I didn’t even know about. Strange.
FRANK J. OTERI: So that came out, which predates the WATT label but was also a self-produced thing. You have a unique position in the record business. You’ve got your own independent label, WATT. It’s distributed by another independent label, ECM, which in turn is distributed by a major conglomerate. I mean, they keep going from one to another: BMG, before that Warner Brothers, now they’re with Universal. They keep hopping, but they always have a major distributing them, which means they’ll be at every Tower Records, Blockbuster, or where have you. You get to have your cake and eat it, too.
CARLA BLEY: Tell me about it!
FRANK J. OTERI: You’re an indie within an indie, distributed by a major. It’s a very envious position to be in.
CARLA BLEY: And I’m totally protected. I never have to meet those guys at the top. All I have to do is be nice to Manfred [laughs].
FRANK J. OTERI: Many of the members of the American Music Center, which puts out NewMusicBox, and a lot of our readers are composers—classical music composers, jazz composers, composers of all types of what I like to call “dot org” music: non-commercial music—most of us are self-published. We put out our own scores. We’re self-producing in terms of making recordings because that’s the way it is. The majors aren’t interested in this stuff. They’re interested in something that they can sell in 2 weeks and milk to death, but they’re not interested in something that has an independent voice—as you said, the gunpowder tea of music.
CARLA BLEY: How long have you been doing that?
FRANK J. OTERI: The Center has been around since 1939.
CARLA BLEY: Oh! I was going to say that this was in the last 30 years that this has been happening. Before then I think if you wrote something that a label or whatever didn’t want, you would disappear from view.
FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, it’s very true. Sun Ra was one of the earliest people putting out stuff on his own label. Mingus…
CARLA BLEY: Mingus, Stan Kenton…
FRANK J. OTERI: Stan Kenton, and Harry Partch.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, Harry Partch. Isn’t that amazing that nobody wanted that? Wow!
FRANK J. OTERI: Now when you look back on it, everybody wants all of those people.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah.
FRANK J. OTERI: And a lot of people who where put out by the majors at that time have been completely forgotten. How many people listen to Curtis Counce at this point?
CARLA BLEY: I don’t even know who that is.
FRANK J. OTERI: This is the stuff being put out by major jazz labels at that time.
CARLA BLEY: Oh, I remember at the time, when I was with New Music Distribution Service, going to all the executives at the major labels and saying, “Look, we’re your work for you. It’s like a farm. We’ve got these young, weird looking forms of life. We’re distributing them. Why don’t you give us some money to help us do it? Because as soon as they’re ready, you can take them away from us for no charge whatsoever. Just throw a little money in the fertilizer.” I never got a cent from any of them. Yet now, luckily, all those weird looking trees survived. Not all of them I’m sure, but most of them. Turns out they get them anyway. They can discard them or cut them down—to continue the tree metaphor—chop them down and burn them…
FRANK J. OTERI: Turn them into McDonald’s paper hamburger wrappers.
CARLA BLEY: Exactly!

New Music Distribution Service

FRANK J. OTERI: Let’s talk about New Music Distribution Services. How did that get started?
CARLA BLEY: That got started because Mike and I had made our own recordings, two for JCOA by that time. Mike’s album was called the Jazz Composers Orchestra and mine was Escalator Over The Hill. What do you do with them once you have them? Do you pile them up in your living room or something? You’ve got to get them distributed. We quickly found out that you have to get these things distributed. How are we going to do that? No distributor is going to want them because we don’t have any reputation. So we got together with 10 different labels that we knew about. I believe they were all European at the time. In England it was Incus. In Germany it was FMP and ECM, Futura in France. It was all these people like us: weird people who got their own money together and made their own strange recordings.
FRANK J. OTERI: And it wasn’t just jazz. It was also contemporary music. Lovely Music was a part of that early on.
CARLA BLEY: That was later. This all started with jazz because that was the only people we knew at that point. There were maybe 10 of us, and we distributed each other’s records. We did this for a couple of years for free. If we have a new record we would send it to all these countries. If they had a new record out they would send it to us. We would each try to distribute them as best as possible: to stores or to friends, take out ads, whatever. We did this for no money, but we soon realized we couldn’t do it. We were losing money. We weren’t in the position where we could lose money. The musicians can’t lose money! So we started charging a quarter for every record we distributed. And then it when up to 50 cents. There was a lot of theft going on. The people who would store our records stole them and sold them to other people. By the time NMDS finally collapsed, we were charging $1.80. We kept saying how much do we need to cover ourselves?
FRANK J. OTERI: I haven’t heard this version of the demise of NMDS. The version I always heard when I was a teenager, when Tower Records had just opened and I went down to the New Music Distribution shop in SoHo a few times—I bought my first Alvin Lucier LP there, might have bought some of my first free jazz albums there—and I was told that NMDS fell apart because of the rise of the CD. All these people turned around and returned the LPs, they were flooded by product that they couldn’t get rid of, and that killed them.
CARLA BLEY: No, I never heard that. I could tell you more about that but it wouldn’t be interesting to your readers.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s completely interesting.
CARLA BLEY: Really?
FRANK J. OTERI: Oh yes, it is.
CARLA BLEY: You know, Timothy Marquand, who was the head or president of JCOA, was just here 2 days ago, and we talked about all this, so it’s fresh in my mind. I think it started going under when our office manager got sick. We didn’t fire him because he was really sick, and then he died. During the time that he was sick he didn’t pay the New York State taxes. By the time we found out about it, the taxes were big—more than we could handle. So when the board that we had gotten together to help NMDS found out that the taxes weren’t paid, everyone quit within one second. I was there at the meeting… I quit, I quit, I quit, I quit, I quit, get my coat, my umbrella, out the door. It was just like bam! I think it was hundreds of thousands of dollars…
FRANK J. OTERI: Who was liable?
CARLA BLEY: The board members! That’s why they had to quit!
FRANK J. OTERI: So once there was no board, the State never got the money?
CARLA BLEY: Yes, we’ve been paying it back ever since, along with the musicians and everyone else. So the illness of our office manager was one of the things that happened. After him we got another office manager who was really not the right person. That person was more into world music than into jazz and classical music. They would say, let’s take the money from the sale of the Chick Corea album and buy 20 recordings of this African tribe that nobody ever heard of, or something. And I said wait a minute, we’re looking after our own first. We can’t look after other kinds of music, you know. By that time we were even doing rock ‘n’ roll. We were doing anybody that knew about us, who needed us, and was doing—I guess it was called—new music.
FRANK J. OTERI: New, independent…
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, new music. We wanted to stick with new music and not do world music. A lot of it was traditional. I think that was the excuse. We just couldn’t get bigger. But this guy was just mostly interested in that. We’d get salesmen who would call and say if you take 10 of this, I’ll give you 20 of those cheaper. By that time we were charging $3 an album or something—like whatever Sam Goody would pay or something. We were no bargain. The only thing we were the bargain to were the musicians because we accepted anyone. That was what set us apart. You have an album that you want distributed… sure! Whatever it is! It doesn’t have a cover? No problem! We don’t need a cover. It doesn’t have a number? Can you put a number on it? You don’t want a number on it? Well, okay! Then we took all these…
FRANK J. OTERI: You took the earliest Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth records.
CARLA BLEY: Yup, and Philip Glass. We were his first distributor. We did Laurie Anderson, Gil Scott Heron. Whenever someone had a hit we’d just fire ‘em. We’d say you don’t need us anymore. Come on, give the other guys a break.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s kind of like Moe Asch‘s philosophy of Folkways. Once he had a hit record he’d say, some other label take it off of me please, I’m not interested!
CARLA BLEY: That’s exactly what we did because we couldn’t be swamped by things. Like Chick Corea’s Return to Forever: we said that’s it, we can’t do it.
FRANK J. OTERI: So you did stuff on majors then because that was Warner Brothers.
CARLA BLEY: It wasn’t at that point. No, it couldn’t have been.
FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, earlier on his stuff was on ECM.
CARLA BLEY: It must have been on ECM. Yes, it was on ECM. We did ECM. We were ECM’s distributor in the early days. And now they’re my distributors.
FRANK J. OTERI: That is so interesting. How did that change happen?
CARLA BLEY: Oh that’s too long! My life is too long! We could never fit this in. Ay ay ay.
FRANK J. OTERI: This is an important piece of the puzzle.
CARLA BLEY: Okay, ECM was one of those original 10 that we distributed—we, as in we all distributed each others’, we were all equal. ECM had a couple of big sellers, which was the problem with ECM.
FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, the Cologne concert, Keith Jarrett.
CARLA BLEY: No, we didn’t do it by then. I don’t think we were distributing them at that time. Anyway, Michael Mantler, my second husband, and I decided that we were too big for the New Music Distribution Service. We were selling too many records. We needed another distributor because it wasn’t fair. It seemed like we were doing NMDS for our own purposes. We were very high-minded, noble people, you know. I wasn’t just that we wanted to get famous or something. We were at a studio in London doing overdubs with Julie Tippetts for my album Tropic Appetites and Richard Branson came by. He wasn’t a big-time back then, just some rich kid.
FRANK J. OTERI: He didn’t have the airline yet?
CARLA BLEY: [laughs] No, he didn’t have the airline. He did have Virgin Records and he came by and said that he would like to distribute Escalator Over the Hill. I said, okay. You know I’ll distribute yours, too, if you want. And we said, okay. We were sort of thinking that we were going to have to leave NMDS. So, we were distributed by Virgin for about 3 years. I started getting interested in business at the point. I would go to the sales meetings with all the salespeople there and I’d give a little speech about the whole ECM catalog and the WATT catalog because I think he was distributing ECM at that time. But then Richard fired me. I don’t know why. I got really mad at him and I said, you can’t fire me, or something. I chased him around room. I remember I chased him up into the rafters of his house. He was crouched on the rafters up in the attic and I was screaming at him from below. Finally, I realized he was serious and no longer wanted to distribute JCOA and ECM anymore. He was more into the reggae stuff at that point. So I felt terrible. Within one hour ECM picked it up and said, we’ll distribute it. I don’t recall how ECM fit into all this, but within an hour they became our distributor and JCOA’s distributor, too.
FRANK J. OTERI: Terrific! Now your situation, which has been successful for you over 30 years, versus being signed to, say, Sony, or being signed to Verve, or being signed to Blue Note—would you want to be on those labels?
CARLA BLEY: Oh, not now, but of course I did at that point. I used to go around to Teo Macero at Columbia, or Nesuhi Ertegun at Atlantic, or Frances Wolf at Blue Note—I had my presentation together and my tapes together. And they said, look, there’s no market for this, we can’t do it, very sorry. Finally we had to start it ourselves. We started the Jazz Composers Orchestra and Escalator Over the Hill. We fundraised ourselves: made every penny, put ourselves deep into hock, and made rich people give us money. That’s how we did it. After that point I got interested in that and I didn’t want to leave the outcome of my life up to anyone else. I though I’d rather be my own director. I wouldn’t want to be dropped. A lot of people have been dropped. If I were to be dropped! I would be horrified if I got dropped from something. That time I did get dropped—the distribution by Virgin—that was a horrifying moment, but that was the only time that has really happened.
FRANK J. OTERI: But now you have a product that is completely yours, and no one can take it out of print.
CARLA BLEY: No, ECM just keeps it all in print. They could put it out of print.
FRANK J. OTERI: But you have your own label, you could take it somewhere else.
CARLA BLEY: I would take it somewhere else.
FRANK J. OTERI: You own it.
CARLA BLEY: Boy, am I in a good situation, huh? It’s really great. Wow!

Some Great Records

FRANK J. OTERI: Getting back to some of the music, I want to talk about some of my favorite things of yours. I know we’re jumping back into the past again, but then we’re going to jump back into the future. I love Musique Mecanique. That album features an extremely young Eugene Chadbourne. He’s really made a name for himself with electric rake and all his crazy country experiments.
CARLA BLEY: Shockabilly.
FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah. But I think that record with you is his earliest recording.
CARLA BLEY: No, we distributed one of his records at NMDS.
FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah?
CARLA BLEY: He put out his own record.
FRANK J. OTERI: So that’s how you found him.
CARLA BLEY: No. I found him at a concert in Toronto. A painter friend of mine, Mark Snow, said, you got to hear this guitar player, you’ll just love him. I went, and I just loved him. It was at a gallery. It wasn’t even a club.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s a very, very unique record on many levels.
CARLA BLEY: Terry Adams… wasn’t that amazing? I met him because he came to a Jazz Composers Orchestra session and said, I recorded one of your tunes. He was this weird, wonderful guy from Kentucky. I was really surprised. I just put in everybody I knew at that point.
FRANK J. OTERI: Soon after that record you put out a whole series of records with a pretty much consistent group of people. Getting back to an earlier thread we were talking about, how do you get the sounds that you want out of a group of people? Your response was you have to be there. But you had a pretty tight regular group—Roswell Rudd and Steve… There was a definite group of people who played together. The people who where on the Europe ’77 tour album.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah.
FRANK J. OTERI: That’s a very, very tight sound.
CARLA BLEY: Well, that had nothing to do with me. They had their own sound. I used them. That was the end of it. My choice to use them was the creation of the sound because they wouldn’t sound like anything I would want them to sound like if they didn’t sound like that in the first place. Those people wouldn’t do that or they couldn’t do that. You just choose. You hire the sound that you want.
FRANK J. OTERI: How big of an ensemble can you have sound that tight?
CARLA BLEY: Escalator Over The Hill—I’ll give you a video of the live concert—was great!
FRANK J. OTERI: How many players total?
CARLA BLEY: I used about 35 something.
FRANK J. OTERI: That’s big!
CARLA BLEY: They sounded perfect!
FRANK J. OTERI: I know on the recording that there are different people on each track. It wasn’t the same consistent group.
CARLA BLEY: That’s true, and it was recorded over the period of years—many different sessions, many different locations.
FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of a touring group, a more recent record that I love is Big Band Theory. In that group you have something like 9 horns on there: 5 trumpets, French horns—maybe 10 horns—trombones…
CARLA BLEY: No, that was Fleur Carnivore with a 10-horn band. The others are standard big bands.
FRANK J. OTERI: There’s a lot of brass.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah.
FRANK J. OTERI: There are voicings on there with moments that feel like that entire brass section is moving like a single line. I think the only other time I heard brass sound that tight was on Willie Colón salsa records from the early ’70s.
CARLA BLEY: Wow!
FRANK J. OTERI: I mean I love how tight that group is!
CARLA BLEY: Thank you! I didn’t know that was unusual at all.
FRANK J. OTERI: I think it is.
CARLA BLEY: I’m so thrilled. Wow, it’s great. I’m just sitting here thinking about it. [pauses] Mmmm. I don’t know why.
FRANK J. OTERI: Did you tour with them a lot before it was recorded? Or did that happen in the studio and then you toured with it? What’s the process?
CARLA BLEY: The process has been, until this last album, to do a tour and record sometime during the tour. Two thirds of the way through is usually best because it would cost a fortune to go into a New York studio and hire guys—like I just did. So I always did these things either live, or at a studio when we had just a couple days off. There was not much that I could control with planning that. I had the band together so I didn’t have to worry about someone not being able to make it, or having to go home early or something. I had those guys. They were in my band. They were in my bus and in my hotel. I got to do whatever I wanted with them for the duration of the tour, so that how I made all my albums.
FRANK J. OTERI: Do you record all the gigs on the tour?
CARLA BLEY: No, definitely not. Well, if it’s a small group maybe we can record—like the duo things where we recorded 10 different gigs. But this last album, Looking For America, I said, I want to make an album with the best New York musicians, I want to make it at the best New York studio, and I want to have a rehearsal in advance, which is something! God, who gets rehearsals? You know, I want to rehearse! Maybe I’ll have two rehearsals. I’m going to save my money and do it. And I did it. So, finally I have a studio recording with great musicians. But I think it pretty much sounds like my other albums.

Looking for America

FRANK J. OTERI: It does! I want to talk about Looking for America; it’s what put you back on my immediate radar again. I called Tina Pelikan over at ECM and said, I have to talk to Carla Bley next week! This record is just too good!
CARLA BLEY: I bet she likes that! [laughs]
FRANK J. OTERI: I think it’s so exciting because this album is so deceptively mainstream. Yet, it’s so out there if you really listen into the details of what’s happening. In a way I think it’s the most—hyperbole again but I can’t help it, I love this record—amazing political statement, and there are no words. I adore what you’ve done with “The National Anthem.” Here you have the National Anthem and then chords change and it goes off-kilter: it’s like something has gone wrong with America, and you can hear that! I think it’s funny there is a disclaimer on the record.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah. [laughs]
FRANK J. OTERI: I don’t know, am I right? Is this a political record?
CARLA BLEY: I don’t know what to say but thank you! [laughs]
FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs]
CARLA BLEY: I started writing this 3 years ago and it wasn’t a political record at all. In fact by the time all this stuff happened with this country and George Bush got elected, this record was half-way finished. So, it wasn’t a political record. On the other hand, was I ever happy with anything? No, I always though America needed a little bit of work. I mean it was a criticism of America, but it wasn’t about what has gone on recently. I think if I had written about that it would have been a horrible, deadly serious, sad album. I was still poking fun and waxing sentimental.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s interesting because the album harkens back—you’ve played around with the National Anthem back in 1977…
CARLA BLEY: Oh yeah, all the time. I was always a troublemaker, being politically provocative in someway even though I didn’t know what I was talking about. I always did that. The day Reagan got elected I quickly wrote an arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner on the bus in a minor key and we played it at the concert that night. I was always criticizing and complaining.
FRANK J. OTERI: There are some other things on the album that I think are so wonderful: your use of the brass to sound like a traffic jam…
CARLA BLEY: Oh, wasn’t that great? I must admit, I think that was so good! Ah, I can’t believe that was so good. I originally thought that I’d ask the percussionist to bring some child’s toys—I need horns in this. I wrote the piece first without horns in it.
FRANK J. OTERI: Really?
CARLA BLEY: Yeah. I mean not without horns, but without the traffic noises. It was just [sings]. It was just this fast piece.
FRANK J. OTERI: Almost Bebop sounding.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah. Then the horns came in a bit later and I thought, oh, I have to get some horns and sirens from the percussionists. By the end of the tour I was telling them to layout because the brass sounded so good. I think that was one of my best moments—making the brass be horns—that was really nice.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s pretty great. Also the Latin tinges all over the record are really interesting. At times it grooves. It almost feels like there are montunos.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, thank you again. But you know that’s because America is more than half Latin. I mean this is huge two-continental country. Latin music is so pervasive. When I was a kid in Oakland, California, my best friend was Mexican. In New York, there are all kinds of Latin music things. It’s a big influence in jazz in general. It’s American music!
FRANK J. OTERI: Of course, having Don Alias on there is just amazing.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, he’s worked with me for a long time.
FRANK J. OTERI: Upcoming projects?
CARLA BLEY: July 1st we’ll be at the University of Minnesota.
FRANK J. OTERI: With the quartet?
CARLA BLEY: No, with the big band.

Promotion

FRANK J. OTERI: This is one of the things I want to say about promotion. In the classical music world, and similarly in the jazz world, with these large ensembles you’ll be rehearsing stuff, then you’ll be touring it, and then you’ll record it when it’s hot, then the record is out and that’s it.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah.
FRANK J. OTERI: You know a rock band will do an album and tour to promote the album. How do you promote the album once it’s the past?
CARLA BLEY: You play the same music.
FRANK J. OTERI: But the groups don’t normally stay together. It’s rare.
CARLA BLEY: You think?
FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, it’s rare in both classical music and jazz. They’re already onto the next thing.
CARLA BLEY: Maybe the people who are listening to it aren’t listening to the individual musicians. Maybe they’re just listening to the composer, or listening to the music, or something. As long as you play the same tunes…
FRANK J. OTERI: Even if it’s a different group.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, but it wouldn’t be that different would it? I mean in my case I’m bringing the Iridium band to Minneapolis, with the exception of 4 guys.
FRANK J. OTERI: So the Iridium band is going to be the big band, not the quartet you were talking about earlier, right?
CARLA BLEY: No, no. That’s next. We’re going to be doing the same thing. We’re going to record the first tour of the quartet, and then we will tour the following year to promote the album.
FRANK J. OTERI: Great.
CARLA BLEY: See, this is how we do it in this world. It’s nice.
FRANK J. OTERI: The ideal way to get this music heard—this stuff doesn’t get played on the radio a lot, radio is afraid of this stuff…
CARLA BLEY: Well, I don’t blame them. I listen to NPR a lot. When there is a music show I have to go do something else for a half an hour. I’m really not crazy about listening to music because my head had music in it already. I might listen to a talk show or something, but I don’t know if I would want to listen to music on the radio. So I don’t blame them for not playing…
FRANK J. OTERI: So how do people find your music?
CARLA BLEY: They read about it in the magazines; they maybe hear it on the radio [laughs]; they know about other albums the artist has made and want to check out the artist’s new album because they think it might be interesting to revisit that person again—all of those things.
FRANK J. OTERI: One of the most amazing tools that you have—I don’t know if it’s so much a promotional tool because it’s so tongue-and-cheek and so funny—is your website.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah.
FRANK J. OTERI: That website is amazing.
CARLA BLEY: Thank you.
FRANK J. OTERI: It’s like no other website I’ve been to for a composer.
CARLA BLEY: Thank you. It’s not serious. We try not to sell things on it, but lately we have been stooping to that.
FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs]
CARLA BLEY: When my daughter and I originally stated it, we wanted it to be hard to find and that my name would not occur—people would just stumble upon it. We wanted to make it difficult. And when you finally find it, you can’t do what you want to do.
FRANK J. OTERI: You have to go to the receptionist first. [laughs]
CARLA BLEY: Then if you don’t type in the right thing you can’t go visit me in my cell, oh no.
FRANK J. OTERI: You wind up in the showers or somewhere.
CARLA BLEY: Yeah, we tried to make it hard for everybody because we were so tired of the sales game. Why sell something all the time? Why not give people something they can’t have and refuse to sell it to them. Maybe we backed off of that a bit now with all that music for sale in the library. Otherwise, all the lead sheets can be downloaded for free. We didn’t want to make money off of it. Strange.
FRANK J. OTERI: That’s tremendous. It’s a beautiful thing.
CARLA BLEY: And you still can’t find it, right? How did you find it? Oh, someone told you about it.
FRANK J. OTERI: If you go to Google now and search on your name it’s one of the first things that pops up.
CARLA BLEY: Really? I have to change that.
FRANK J. OTERI: [laughs] You can’t!
CARLA BLEY: Argh!
FRANK J. OTERI: I have to confess that we have a link to the site that is online every May 11th, on your birthday. We put composers’ birthdays on our homepage.
CARLA BLEY: Oh, wow. So, a lot of composers have websites now?
FRANK J. OTERI: Tons.
CARLA BLEY: Do you have one?
FRANK J. OTERI: Not as a composer because I’m so busy doing NewMusicBox, but I probably will in the not so distant future.
CARLA BLEY: Watch out because it’s a time eater.
FRANK J. OTERI: I know. Is there anything we missed here that you want to talk about?
CARLA BLEY: Nope. No [yawns], I’m tired of talking!