Appreciators of William Eggleston’s art often have a fondness for music, and the renowned photographer’s been known to associate with more than a few musical artists himself. And, as Memphis Flyer readers may recall from our 2017 coverage of his debut album, Musik, he’s also a gifted self-taught pianist who’s played classical works by ear and improvised his own compositions since childhood.
That album, as we noted upon its release, was played and recorded by Eggleston on an instrument he was enamored of in the early 1990s, the Korg 01/W sampling keyboard. “It’s manufactured in Tokyo, but a hundred percent of it is a bunch of engineers in California,” he told us at the time. “It makes maybe a billion different sounds. When this model of Korg came out, I was so enchanted with the machine.”
And he was inspired, using the keyboard’s recording function to preserve many extemporaneous compositions in which he could command a variety of orchestral sounds at once, riffing out entire concertos in one sitting. Selections from those recordings formed the basis of Musik.
Now with today’s single, “Improvisation,” Eggleston is announcing another album, 512, to be released November 3rd on the Secretly Canadian imprint. Produced by TomLunt, 512 features four standards, “Ol’ Man River,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Over the Rainbow,” and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” along with the originals “Improvisation” and “That’s Some Robert Burns.”
In a departure from the free-wheeling soliloquies of Eggleston’s debut, Lunt invited musicians Sam Amidonand Leo Abrahams to collaborate on 512. This openness to collaboration led to Brian Eno performing bells on “Improvisation,” an introduction of sorts to 512’s piano-driven palette.
512, produced in one day in 2018, is named after the room where it was recorded, the Parkview apartment in Memphis where Eggleston lived for many years. The resulting 512 is a sparse, stark work that holds a mirror to music that Eggleston has internalized most profoundly. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” Eggleston notes in a press release. “It’s very modern.”
There’s a lot of laughter when Stephan Crump and I catch up on the phone, partly because long ago we played together in Big Ass Truck. Even then, both of us set our sights beyond Memphis. “For me, at that point, I knew that I had to be a musician, and I knew that I was going to finish school and move to New York,” he says of those days. His reason for making a hometown stop now has less to do with our old combo than what he found when he moved on to Gotham. For New York is where he’s truly carved out his own niche in the free jazz/improvisational music scene, and where he’s lived, composed, taught, and performed for nearly thirty years.
On Saturday, he’ll leave a little of what he’s learned along the way in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. And, as he confesses, the possibility of old friends and family distracting him is daunting. “It’s quite rare that I play Memphis. And it’s pretty intense, because there are just so many more dynamics at play for me personally. I could talk about going straight into and through the fear! I’m just recognizing that there’s all this stuff, that’s all wonderful and a blessing, but is a lot to deal with. It’s more distracting.”
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, diving straight into and through the fear is part of the do-or-die attitude that Crump and many other players embrace while improvising in the most unstructured settings. But while he’s often pegged with the free jazz/improv tag, Crump actually plays in a variety of ways across many projects, as he explains below.
Saturday’s show will focus mainly on his latest album, a selection of works for solo bass dubbed Rocket Love, and, as revealed below, Crump is relishing the chance to bring all the sonic possibilities of the instrument to the fore on his current six-city tour.
Memphis Flyer: In your description of making the new record on Bandcamp, you say making it sustained you through the first year of the pandemic, “materially and spiritually.” It sounds like that was a real life-saver.
Stephan Crump: It was, man. There were so many blessings in that period. We have two boys who are now 17 and 13. My wife’s a high school history teacher, so she was teaching all day on Zoom, and I was helping the boys manage online school. I started teaching music online, but having the album project was absolutely a lifeline as far as creativity. Having my Bandcamp fans support an aspect of it made it feel like a community was behind it. A modest community, but it still felt good. So that was great. Also, I had a home studio, and I could have just planned a record and made it and been done with it, but, as I usually do with albums, whether it’s at home or another studio, I wanted to do a different process with this and really take my time and build that community, and not feel like it needed to be a certain number of pieces. It could just be open-ended. I could experiment. It was a really good mode.
How exactly were you interacting with your supporters?
It was through Bandcamp. They have a subscription-based thing that you can do. I wrote my subscribers updates and they would get two pieces a month: one cover or a standard, and an original piece. Then I also did a series of Facebook live concerts from my studio. Not only would I broadcast those to supporters and fans, from all parts of the world, I had all my microphones set up and I was recording it properly in my studio. So some pieces on Rocket Love were just me doing them in my studio in various moments, but some were recorded during those concerts. And that brought a different energy. Facebook Live is not like being in the same space with people, of course, but it’s still a performance and still creates a good kind of tension and energy to engage with. You do have to step up to a certain mode of performance that galvanizes your focus and energy. People would write comments, and I’d stop between tunes to respond. It felt good to me. I needed that.
Musically, it’s just you playing solo, right?
All of the pieces are just me on bass, except for one cool thing which was an experiment that worked out. The record is book-ended by this two-part piece called “Lament.” Those two pieces happened on the last two days of 2020. I wanted to try something different, so I said, “Let me do a piece channeling all my feelings about this year, all the complexities of it. And do a short piece where, instead of just one bass I’ll do three, with overdubs.” But on the first track, which I did on December 30th, I said, “Let me play one of the voices and then immediately play the second one and immediately play the third one, but without listening to any of it, with no headphones.” So I wasn’t listening to what I had played previously.
The next day, I did the same thing, but I listened as I overdubbed. And that’s “Lament, Part II.” I could hear what I played before. But on “Lament, Part I,’ I wasn’t. I love both pieces, but there’s something that is transcendent about the first one. It was such a learning experience because I realized I was playing along with what I had played before, because I was in the same zone, and I had just done it. Emotionally and spiritually, I was playing along with it. But the part of my brain that gets engaged when I’m listening and playing along, and interacting with something, was not a factor. So it remained on a less cerebral plane. It remained on a more spiritual plane.
I feel like it’s just a reminder to me that that’s where the real shit is anyway. That’s what we’re trying to get to when we are listening and interacting. That experimental way of doing it was just a more direct thing. Technically, if you were to analyze it harmonically and melodically, obviously there are things that never would have happened had I been listening and playing. But there’s something that gets communicated that’s so right, that whatever details on the surface that would be deemed to be dissonant or wrong or whatever, are totally irrelevant. That’s just surface information.
The stuff that we think music is about — notes and tones and chords and melodies and harmonic relationships — all of that is just the surface, the crust, of what it is. The real stuff that you need to make any of that worthwhile is living underneath.
Borderlands Trio, featuring Crump, Kris Davis, and Eric McPherson (Photo courtesy Stephan Crump)
Free jazz or improv is your stock in trade, isn’t it?
Yeah, like my project called the Borderlands Trio. We have two albums, and the latest one is a double CD called Wandersphere. It’s a piano trio, all spontaneously composed. It’s always evolving and always grooving. Playing that way is also a big thing that I teach. I love bringing people into that zone and clarifying for them how to be in that mode.
I also compose. I write pieces for my band, and for improvising ensembles. And that’s a whole other thing. How do you create an environment with a distinctive, powerful DNA that maintains its identity while also inviting people in to express themselves, and be as expansive as possible within that?
You write that you had planned the album even before the pandemic hit.
I had been thinking about it the year before, then in January I put the plan together, and February was when I did the initial outreach. I announced the process and planned to start in March. And then…[laughs].
I completed the year. I did it from March to March, which was my original plan. I completed it and had two albums worth of material, but this plan was never about being constrained by good album length. It was about using another forum to see what that brings, and not think about an album until afterwards. So I finished in March, but only later that spring or summer did I decide to curate an album from that whole body of work. And that’s what Rocket Love is.
The bass has so many sonic possibilities, yet it’s rare to be able to focus on that instrument alone.
When you’re talking about the acoustic bass, there’s so much to the sound of it that doesn’t speak through a traditional ensemble. There’s a lot of it you can’t explore and get to as a player, when you’re exclusively playing in those contexts. So it’s something I’ve been exploring in some of my other, less traditional ensembles, to try to make space for some of the expressiveness of the bass. Playing solo is an extreme version of that. You get to decide what your sculpture is, what you present to the audience. You can decide, this piece is going to be about texture, about sound. The next piece might be about melody, or groove. You can make those decisions, and by limiting yourself to the one instrument, you’re also expanding the palette of what’s viable as a piece of art.
Stephan Crump plays The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Saturday, October 15, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20 advance/$10 student | $25 day of the show.
Memphis hasn’t offered many chances to hear music that’s completely spontaneous since the glory days of the ’90s, when the likes of George Cartwright roamed these streets. But that’s changing. Many improvisation-friendly fans were captivated and inspired by the Dopolarians’ set at the Green Room in pre-Covid 2020, and other groups dedicated to freedom in music have percolated up from time to time. Now, Goner Records is leaping into the fray, bringing storied saxophonist Jack Wright to B-Side Memphis this Friday with his trio, Wrest.
Wright, who one musician described as “the Johnny Appleseed of free improvisation,” has toured relentlessly since he began in 1979, and has scattered many seeds along the way in the form of “leaping pitches, punchy, precise timing, the entire range of volume, intrusive and sculptured multiphonics, vocalizations, and obscene animalistic sounds,” as his website puts it.
He’s also put a great deal of thought into what makes for great improvised performances, namely in his 2017 book, The Free Musics, and that must also count among the seeds he’s planted — all fostering an approach to sound that’s very different from our pop-music-obsessed conventions. And that’s where Goner comes in.
As Goner Records founder Eric Friedl describes it, Friday’s show arose out of the label’s fascination with another underground’s underground artist, Reverend Fred Lane, who first emerged from Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the ’70s and ’80s with his trademark mix of swinging jazz, country, and Dadaist lyrics. Reissuing his first albums recently tapped Goner into an entire parallel universe of free music.
“I was contacted by Evan Lipson, current bass player for Fred Lane about hosting a show for a group he was playing with, Wrest,” says Friedl. “I knew Evan was a monster on bass, and wanted to make something happen even before I heard this band. Then I checked ’em out. They were wild. I had not heard of the leader, Jack Wright, but was very intrigued by his playing and his biography. Community organizer, travelling the world, playing under the radar of most listeners — but obviously a master. Percussionist Ben Bennett plays a pile of self-made drums, stretched membranes, and other objects which are hit, rattled, and blown. What a trio!”
Pairing Wrest with an appropriate opener was the next challenge, but luckily there’s a regional free jazz Renaissance taking off under our very noses these days, centered on the Mahakala Music imprint in Arkansas, owned by a University of Memphis alum, Chad Fowler. He can often be heard with guitarist David Collins’ group, Frog Squad.
“Who to play with ’em? Some more straight jazz didn’t seem to make sense,” muses Friedl. “Some noisy whippersnappers could work. Our man on the scene Jimmy Enck brokered a deal with local horn heavy Chad Fowler, who brought his collective Deepstaria Enigmatica on board in their debut performance.”
That new group features Fowler and Collins with Jon Scott Harrison on drums and a certain Misterioso Africano playing the “mystery.”
Putting it in perspective, Friedl says, “I hope people come check this show out — it’s got world-class players on a small stage in Memphis, worthy of a large jazz festival in Europe.
“We had a great turnout for a couple of shows of percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, playing bowed gongs and big and small drums and percussion. I’m always very interested in bringing avant garde sounds to Memphis. People will enjoy the spirit and music even if they don’t think they will. It’s fun and alive, in real time. Bring an open mind!”
Wrest and Deepstaria Enigmatica play B-Side Memphis on Friday, July 8, 8 p.m. $10.
Weather Warlock at St. Maurice Church in New Orleans
This Friday, a slight chance of thunderstorms will give way to clear skies in the evening, with temps hovering around 70 degrees. While that’s not always relevant to club goers, studying the forecast before heading over to Bar DKDC this weekend will give you an inkling of what to expect from Weather Warlock.
The brainchild of Mr. Quintron, trailblazing auteur of the Hammond organ based in New Orleans, whose one-man shows are built around manic keyboard grooves and the rhythms of his hand-built Drum Buddy™, Weather Warlock is a custom-built synthesizer connected to multiple weather sensors. Its tones and filters are directly altered by signals from the sensors, translating the wind, rain, and sun into tonal impressions. It’s innovative enough to have earned a feature in Popular Science. But Weather Warlock is also the name of the band of improvisers Quintron has recruited to enhance the synth’s sonic responses with live human interaction. No two shows are alike, as each begins with the eerie, sensor-driven tones generated by Quintron’s machine, then takes flight into parts unknown. It’s a slightly unhinged drone-rock adventure that must be seen and heard to be believed.
Curious about the tour and this week’s stop in Memphis, I talked to Quintron about making music that’s wired to the sky.
Memphis Flyer: I fondly recall seeing Weather Warlock at the Brooks Museum of Art in 2016. It was a heavy, heavy sound.
Mr. Quintron: That was with a 100 percent pickup band. That was all Memphians.
It seemed very successful. You managed to draw a little thundercloud over the show. Any other experiences of affecting the weather while playing?
Last night we had a really successful rehearsal. When we opened the door to walk up to the corner store and get a beer, the sky was totally green. The sun sensors were going nuts, the wind started blowing, and the temperature dropped about 10 degrees in two seconds.
That Brooks performance was, like many Weather Warlock shows, at dusk, but this Friday you’re playing at night.
As opposed to sunset, yeah. I wanted to try it. I like boundaries and rules, but I also didn’t want to be ridiculous and basically ensure that this band never goes on tour. That parameter [playing at sunset] makes it incredibly difficult to get into the van and have a logical string of shows with the musicians I want to play with. These weather sensors are definitely very exciting during sunrise and sunset and electrical storms in the evening. But they’re still taking weather information all night long. So it will be receiving weather info and pumping it into the concert, just not with those sunset sounds. Basically it made the tour be able to work, doing it this way. It was my choice. I wanted to do it. And if in the end I felt like it was a total cop out, well then, back to sunset-only shows.
All the Weather Warlock purists might be up in arms.
I’m fully expecting to get some shit for that.
No!
You don’t even know how catty and mean electronics nerds can get! You know, I got a bunch of shit the first time I toured Europe without my real actual thousand-pound Hammond organ. One German man in particular was extremely upset and demanded his money back. He said, “Quintron, I think you’re being too convenient.”
And this was one of the first shows, so it was after a super hellish flight and all the stuff that you have to go through to get to Europe. You’re just totally exhausted and beaten up by life, and there’s this guy complaining and demanding his money back because I didn’t ship a thousand-pound Hammond Model D or whatever.
Looking at the video of Singing House, the prototype of what became the Weather Warlock, it seems like the kinds of parameters and the way they affect the synth have really changed over time.
Absolutely, yeah. That was prototype #1, and now I think this one I’m taking on tour is about up to Mark 5, and it’s still developing. Yeah, it’s been really refined. And my understanding of how best to tune the sensors and tune the circuit, so that they get the most variable sounds out of the sensors, has really developed over the years of building this. But that’s what this kind of thing is all about. Especially with this weather-controlled thing, it’s like you really don’t know until you stick it out there and live with it, how it’s gonna behave and what works best, and what you like best and what becomes annoying.
When you get a bunch of musicians up there jamming with the Warlock, is it a challenge to just let the Warlock speak? It seems like it would be easy to overpower.
Yeah, that’s the point. We just make it go away for a while. We take it as a jumping off point, as a kind of spiritual center, to be cheesy about it. And then we just wipe it out with volume for a while. But it’s always there. And then it has its moments in the set, where it’s back to just featuring those sounds again. And then it will kind of inform the tempo of the next thing we go into. ‘Cos it’s a musical instrument inside as well. Outside, it’s picking up all this weather, but I built it so you can really jam on it and play it, and change the phasing speed and move the delay around and mix the different sounds. So it’s a really playable synth as well as taking info from the weather. And I’ve done plenty of concerts where it’s just me and the synth. The new record that Third Man just put out (I just got ’em in the mail today) is a recording of just me manipulating the Weather Warlock synthesizer in Nashville during the total solar eclipse.
Yeah, what effect did that have?
NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
The total solar eclipse of 2017
It was really great. I didn’t know… It was like, “Is this gonna be kind of nothing?” It was a very boring day. It was hot and there was no wind. Nothing was really active, it wasn’t raining. Thank goodness it wasn’t raining, ‘cos it would have been cloudy and you wouldn’t have seen the eclipse. But it behaved exactly as I thought it would in response to the eclipse. It was like a sunset in fast motion. It was like a time-lapse sunset, sonically. It was really really nuts.
Does the pitch vary according to the light?
Yeah, the pitch drops. It’s calibrated so that it’s beyond human hearing all day long, and then when the UV gets just reduced enough, a high tone will pop in to audibility, and then it will descend in pitch until darkness, when it goes away. And during a regular sunset, that takes about 40 minutes. During the solar eclipse it took about ten minutes. And then it rose back up, so it was like hearing a full day. Like hearing a very quick sunset and then a very quick sunrise paired up next to each other. But the power went off at Third Man before we could get the reemergence of the sun.
And the B side of this record is another solo synth recording of the Weather Warlock responding to a hail storm in Las Vegas, New Mexico. And I mixed in an audio recording of the actual hail. It was called a microburst hail storm. Have you ever seen one of those? I don’t know what makes a microburst storm different from a regular storm, but they’re very, very intense and really focused in a small geographic area. I didn’t realize until later that that’s what we had been experiencing. Hail big as golf balls. You had to get in the car or you’d get hurt, for about a half an hour. And rain and wind. Crazy.
It didn’t damage the sensors?
No, this thing’s been through several hurricanes. The most interesting times are during an evening storm when the UV is rapidly fluctuating up and down. It’ll activate the sky sensor and sort of go “whooroarrrghhuuh.” It sounds like a ghost, constantly moving around in pitch, going up and down, and then lightning jumps in there and that affects something. You can hear it on this record with the hail storm.
But this tour is as much about a band and this different mode of playing and working with musicians, as it is about the weather.
So you play with different musicians in each town?
Yeah, I’m touring with Aaron Hill on drums, who plays in EyeHateGod from New Orleans, and Kunal Prakash, an Indian guitar player who’s worked with tons of people, most notably Jeff the Brotherhood. He was their second guitarist for a while. And then Gary Wrong is joining us on some shows. But in every city we’re gonna pick up two or three local improvisers to play with us. It’s largely improvised music, though there’s structure and riffs and stuff. So Alicja Trout and Seth Moody are gonna play with us in Memphis. Seth’s gonna play sax and Moog and Alicja’s gonna play some kinda synth.
One video featured a guy playing a mouth bow. Is he on this tour?
Cooper Moore? No. He’s best friends with William Parker, who’s one of the OG free jazz upright bassists. He was very active in the ’60s and ’70s and is still playing his ass off. Cooper Moore and him are partners and play a lot together in New York. I played with William down here in New Orleans, and that’s how I met Cooper Moore. He played his diddley bow and I was totally fascinated with that, and he played with us the last time we went to Brooklyn. But he’s not gonna join us this time. I’m trying to make it different than the last tour, and play with different musicians. We’re playing with a classical sitarist in New York this time. And an Egyptian keyboardist, and Paula Henderson, who plays sax and the EWI.
Quintron Brings Weather Warlock to Bar DKDC
Do you give the musicians any kind of parameters, like “don’t play scalar music” or what have you?
I kind of conduct people in and out. Almost without exception, most musicians, if they’re just jumping in and improvising, want some kind of guidance and structure so it’s not just a free for all. Nobody should feel intimidated by rules or have too much to worry about. Improvised music got really structured and gamey, like the Knitting Factory stuff in the ’80s and ’90s, and it was interesting. This is more jammy, I guess, though it is very structured, and there’s riffs and changes. The hardest thing to do is to not play. But other than that, there’s really no rules. There’s times when you need to come out, and I’ll have signals for that, and times when you need to come in. In general, fly like a bird.
Quintron and Weather Warlock play Bar DKDC Friday, May 18 at 10:30 pm.
NASA/Aubrey Gemignani 