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Borah Bergman: The Long Look

by Mike Heffley © 2000

(Thanks to Borah Bergman for permission to cite from his unpublished writing.)

Introduction

he liked to have lots of ammunition and the right guns. the ammunition would be his ideas. and the guns would be his hands. the hands would have to be ready to fire, whatever the situation. but the hands could not fire unless the fingers could respond immediately to any command.

the fingers were the soldiers. they would shoot the guns. they had to be in shape and trained to follow orders. once the decision was made there could be no hesitation in executing the order. no hesitation meant direct action. direct action was an ingredient for grabbing the moment. grabbing the moment was when the act had impact. the impact had the integrity of creation and could be devastating.

--Borah Bergman

"Spindell" is the name of the "he" above, the author's alter ego in print; this third-person voice is a way for a pianist to get outside the constantly spinning vortex of his music/himself and utter its/his truths somewhat apart from the floods of sound and time in music and speech. A spindle is that solid shaft around which things turn, that centered eye of the storm (my observation, not his). To hear and see Bergman play, to hear the pugnacious excitement in his speech, to see the restless energy of his body is to know clearly why he might need an alter ego so named.

One of Bergman's twenty or so CDs with (let us call it) post-jazz improvised music's legendary names, a duo with British saxophonist Evan Parker, isThe Fire Tale; it is named for and dedicated to Bergman's late father, David, who told him a story about a fire "that never goes out." Take that as the most telling general description of his musical universe--the fire of life-as-struggle, friction, contest, combat--and you have a hell of a handle. Realize that such images are as one-dimensional as they are pithy, and you can build on it with some brands of ice that won't melt. Like these:

The free improvisor, in fact, is seeking not an idiom but those universals of music which transcend idiom, and through them the universals of human relationships (Christopher Small);

 …it may be that nothing is truly universal except the human brain and the body it controls (Peter Jeffrey);

The mantel over Borah Bergman's musical fireplace might have such maxims engraved on it; this fire is more heat than light, groaning and flaming through and from his anatomy, from bilateral brain, with all its memories and dreams, down to musculature and nerves of hands and then back up. It is fathered by the piano's design and history in Western and American music; it is (like everyone's life) a solo more than a collective thing, at its core, for all its collaborations. Of most interest here, it is a thing of poetry in the raw, of words and ideas as much as sounds, fired in the player by the latter.

The Body as Analysis

A question German musicologist Ekkehard Jost asked back in 1987, in the first page of his book Europas Jazz--how do we analyze music that creates and defines itself in the moment of its sounding?--remains largely unanswered by those of us who muse over such things in print.

One of the players Jost referred to with his question, German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, is one Bergman has played with on four of his own CDs. My interviews with Brötzmann and Parker included their reasons for choosing to work with Bergman, what they got out of it musically, and expressions of friendly respect. For what it's worth, I too could write this whole piece based on nothing but my own points of interest in his music both as one who has played with him and who found much of interest, in several live performances and recordings, to discuss as a critical listener. If my words waxed poetic enough, if I really knew how to describe the sound and spirit of music with words, would I approach an answer to Jost's question?

Such testimonials by peers, many of which find their way into print, and equally anecdotal, subjective assessments by music journalists are what usually pass for "criticism" and "scholarship" (and always pass for press) of so-called "new-and-improvised-music," which isn't exactly a mass-pop affair, nor academic career fodder, nor a well-articulated tradition--nor, indeed, necessarily amenable to the Western literate tradition of analysis and theory at all. The most expressive such testimonials may pique our curiosity, as technical descriptions may satisfy it, but do they explain anything about the nature of the music? its highest value to its makers and devotees? its worthlessness to those many whose neglect of it ensures its marginal and minority status in the marketplace of music and the similarly monied ideas thereabout?

Here are some more such testimonials, from the recent press on Bergman, thrown in for the musical points they make and their impact in moving Bergman's private universe to the public realm.

• Gary Giddins for the Village Voice "Choice" blurb (4/27/99) on a recent duo gig with drummer Rashid Ali at New York's Dharma club: "…pianist Borah Bergman, who attacks the keyboard like a hurricane with one hand while exploring its center with the other…"
• Chris Kelsey for Jazziz: "Name your criteria, no one's more intense, no one has more chops, no one possesses a greater abundance of ideas…"
• The Penguin Guide to Recorded Jazz gives four of Bergman's CDs its highest review rating, along with these words: "Record companies insist that no overdubs, multi-tracking or tape-speeding have been used on their records only when something rather special is going on inside. That is certainly the case with Borah Bergman, whose initial impact as a player can be likened--however lame a cliché this has become--only to that of Cecil Taylor…What he has done is to break down any residual distinction between left- and right-hand functions in piano playing…[his] 'Webs and Whirlpools' must be one of the most purely astonishing piano performances of all time."

(Bergman himself sees what he calls his "ambi-ideation"--as distinct from "ambidexterity," which for him smacks of technical mechanism--as encompassing more than a stronger left hand; indeed, more than a technique at all.

"I like the way the Grove Dictionary of Jazz explained my ambi-ideation," he says. "To paraphrase: I improvise lines like a horn with both hands, sometimes crossed, in a contrapuntal and polyphonic, multi-layered dialogue that allows pieces to be turned upside down without loss of rhythmic intensity or aesthetic shape." However we describe it, it is something everyone agrees is unique to Bergman among his peers.)

Another telling source--its taint of authorial self-interest balanced by the comfort those authors obviously have with lending their good names to advocacy, for no very large fee--is the liner notes of Bergman's recordings.

"Bergman feels, with ample justification, that the present disk contains some of the strongest music he's recorded so far…Just as Bergman was struck by Ornette's determination to do what he wanted, regardless of what anyone thought, you're going to be struck by his,"

wrote Bill Shoemaker, for Eight by Three (with Peter Brötzmann and Anthony Braxton). Continuing:

And again, for Exhilaration (with drummer Andrew Cyrille and Brötzmann):

We could go on, adding the names of John Corbett, John Szwed, Nat Hentoff, Howard Mandel, Barry Kernfeld and others, but you get the picture: he's drawn and inspired the credentialed jazz critics to speak well of his work.

In fact, let's do just go over the top with this approach and put it behind us with a comment or two from Bergman and me.

Bergman:

Me (to get us back to Jost's question about analysis): If technical analysis can only reveal so much about anything, and nothing about some things; and if the praise, however informed and insightful, of seasoned critics and journalists will always be as subjective as their pans, or their selective neglect; and, more often than not, mean nothing to the artist's prospects for financial and professional comfort…how are we to speak and write about this (freely improvised) music in a way that will both respect and question it--AND serve its need for support and understanding from the larger culture that turns to writers and speakers for information upon which to proceed?

it wasn't something that he decided by thinking. he had no choice. it came to him from an experience, something he had almost forgotten except for a remnant, a touch of insanity some might say. but he said different and that's what counted. it was going to be done anyway. it was too late to hesitate. he had a scar in him. it couldn't be seen but it was there just the same. he felt it at moments when someone might say don't do it. and then he had to do it.

So speaks the still, small voice, after the storm and fury of the press, of the music itself, has faded. The question it begs: what makes one such compulsion only a private affair, a surefire public embarassment, and what one that will find an audience? why Bergman and his music? how do we know it matters? why Van Gogh, Cézanne, Manet, and not others as ridiculed as they were, unto perpetual obscurity? and why now, and not when they lived?

The Universals of Human Relationships

Bergman grew up in 1930s-40s Brooklyn in a Russian-Jewish family tradition of left-wing radicalism from a working-class perspective. Jewish cantorial music and African-American blues and jazz both loomed largest in his youthful musical landscape; in both he heard the expression of sorrow and pain, resistance and liberation, of the life force struggling against oppression and repression. He heard neither as locked up in any one ethnic-cultural voice, however unlocked by it; both he heard as American parts of the sound of the masses of the world trying to rise, in keeping with his own worldview and experience.

Now he lives in Manhattan, in a building near the upper West Side that has the feel of an old hotel, and has become something of an artist's community, one where his constant practicing causes no problems. His own apartment is Spartan, housing his body and his instrument and relevant peripherals (computer, sound equipment, books) as primal, even primitive, as can be.

I've known him for several years; as he has many musicians in the area, he's invited me up often to play informally, to talk and visit, and has always been a generous host and, over time, friend. But trying to interview him the way I usually do others has been like trying to grab greased lightening; he has a fierce resistance to being framed by someone's words, I think, even his own, even if he trusts the person's intentions. If he always talks like he's trying to pick a fight, or shout someone down, even at his most friendly and open, it seems most like an assault on the impersonal threats and treacheries of language itself, like a musician's constant reminder that even though it is a necessary one, verbal communication is indeed an evil.

"Art to me is a fight," he admits. "I think of my background in the radical leftist movements as workers massed, with their fists up in the air, organizing like an army, marching to get what they want. And the piano for me is the same tradition of struggle, dire struggle for survival and basic rights. It goes back to Beethoven; he was struggling all the time."

(Watch out--here comes a leap.)

"And you notice something interesting: people talk about the libido as the life force, and of music being charged by sexual energy, especially a vital, healthy art--and a lot of these great men started out in their youth as only shadows of what they became later on in life, like Beethoven, and Picasso, which suggests the libido as something that might struggle most in youth and come on strongest in old age, which is the opposite of how we usually see it. "

That leap from the political to the erotic (which typically leaps next to race, or gender, all roiling in the talk as they all have and do in the history of the music we've called jazz, and the jazz we've called free) conveys a sense of the way Bergman's talk also reflects his music: a mind is churning with several lines at once, a man is constantly working like a demon to thread them into the unity they constantly clamor for, and that as old ones pass and new ones enter. Feel free to jump in with him, but be ready to hold your own and either lend him a hand, or fight with him--even for that which you feel you shouldn't have to fight for--or get out of his way.

"I grew up when war was going on all over the world," he says. "I remember the excitement people around me had over talking about the Spanish Civil War, the whole Hemingway passion; the adults around me were working class people, intellectuals, revolutionaries--no businessmen. They knew the details about these things, the Lincoln Brigade, whatever. And it certainly wasn't like they had any special love for their fellow strugglers, or even each other--but you grow up in this great excitement from this struggle they share.

"A lot of the time I think of my way of playing with the right and left hands independently as an example of the old joke that says take two Jews and you got an argument. This never-ending dialectic, nothing's ever good enough, it's got to be correct, and give 'em half an ear and you'll get all their wisdom. But when the rest of the world's against you, you stick together even if you'd be at each other's throats otherwise. This is true of any oppressed people; you keep your dirty linen between you, and put on a united front to the outsider.

"I was brought up in combat, no doubt about it. But combat can be very nice; I think the human nature has a combative element, so let's set up rules for it. Art is one place that is improved by combat. Show me cooperation, and you see the art going down; you get artists together to decide how they want it to go, and you're in big trouble. Art is a weapon, but it's becoming less so in the hands of the jazz purists who want to establish it in high society.

"The Germans had this great thing about spreading their art around the world--and there's no reason why America shouldn't be able to do the same thing with theirs. But how do you do that? The only way is to codify it; and sometimes you have to take out the angles, the abrasions, the corners; round it out, make it accessible…then it might not really go anywhere for two or three generations. [Wynton] Marsalis's music is not memorable--it's adequate, he plays his Baroque and he plays his bop, and there's nothing wrong with it--but I think what is wrong is when the motivation is more about politics and social things than musical. You go look in Europe; the Dutch have their composers, and other countries have theirs, and it's just a nationalistic point of view; and when one country dismisses what another country wants, it's not about whether the art is better or worse than someone else's, the Dutch just want Dutch art. That's natural. My point is that there are a lot of other reasons than musical ones behind a lot of music that goes on.

"I sometimes think Cecil Taylor, for instance--who is a genius and impeccable in a certain sense--might have stopped playing a long time ago if he'd been white, if he'd started to play at all. It's impossible to separate the racial dynamics from the musical fruits. He had a reason to make the particular music he made, and apart from the American context of black-white relations, what would that music mean? I know this is true for Jews. The artist shouldn't be bound by some codified version of what 'black' or 'white' are supposed to mean, or any other aspect of identity, male or female, whatever; the artist should rather define and redefine those things through his art. I define what swing is--because the idea that one people can swing and another can't is absolutely ridiculous. Originality is the great equalizer, and that is a healthy thing. When white people and black people can get together and work out their differences in the context of their common interests and not worry about what they don't have in common, that's what the future is. And even the experience of being a minority is one they have in common, if you're talking about Jews, or any white people removed from their own milieu."

And, of course, "freedom" is just another word for "nothing left to lose:" "Speaking of lefties and all that nonsense," he quips, "I saw the one-handed pianist Ravel wrote for. I couldn't even tell he only had one hand, he had this long cape on and was gyrating all over the piano. Then when I was 18, I wanted to be a writer, and I wrote this story about the left hand reaching up to the stars, saw it very much as symbolic of the rise of the downtrodden people in the world."

Cue to the left-handed signature of Bergman's style.

The Body as Universal

Musica Jazz (out of Italy) editor Arrigo Polillo wrote the liner notes for Bergman's early solo recording, A New Frontier:

The first time I listened to the American pianist Borah Bergman…I leaped out of my seat. I had never heard a pianist so 'advanced' and gifted with so dazzling an instrumental technique since Cecil Taylor. What Borah Bergman had done was to completely restructure the piano--he had developed the left hand to be the equal of the right. It was astonishing."

Francis Davis wrote, for Reflections on Ornette Coleman and the Stone House (duo treatment of Coleman tunes with drummer Hamid Drake),

It's impossible to talk about Borah Bergman--or to talk with him--without his left hand coming up sooner or later. Its strength and independence--its swinging, levitational power--make Bergman unique among contemporary pianists. Yet his left hand also links him to jazz tradition. Why should a pianist's left hand be relegated to grunt work? Why must it be a surrogate bassist or drummer? Why can't both hands be horns? If the piano is an orchestra in miniature, shouldn't it be capable of polyphony? In posing these questions, and attempting to answer them, Bergman has internalized an implicit goal of both free jazz and hard bop--that of gaining parity between hot soloists and their rhythm sections.

This was the first buzz, then, this liberated left hand--but it is only a part of a more comprehensive stretching of physical roles and boundaries, and of a veritable body-based mythology, which associates the left hand with the unconscious mind, the realm of Freud's Id, Jung's collective unconscious, and also with the grassroots people of the world chafing against the yoke and agendas of the powerful, trying to shake them off, both historically and now.

Bergman came relatively late to the piano and music as a profession, releasing his first recordings on European indie labels in the mid-1970s. On record, he's been busier as a player-with-others than as soloist throughout the '90s. But to imagine what is loosely called the improvised music scene to be an idiom--a genre served by players who shape their styles within its conventions, and that best in group situations--misses its pithiest point, certainly misses the thrust of Bergman's work.

Again: the buck starts here, in the single body alone, engaging the instrument and the world of sound and the ideas and histories it evokes, draws on, works and lets work. It starts here after schooling by an idiom, perhaps--call it "jazz," or "composition" (as indeed he does, distancing himself from the rootless image of "freedom"), or any kind of traditional/conventional context--but school is out soon enough, and inspiration and maps must be generated along with everything else, out of the raw potential of the "only true universal," the mind embodied, the mindful body.

As we've glimpsed, Bergman's rap sheet may draw attention for the names better known than his, if such knowledge comes through the international jazz and new-music press (which hasn't covered him as much): Andrew Cyrille, Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, Hamid Drake, Rashid Ali. His CDs with these and others--on Black Saint/Soul Note, Konnex, Knitting Factory Records and other American and European labels--have mostly been his dates, his initiatives, many live.

To understand what he brings to such sessions, we have to look into what we do have on him: the press and p.r. we've seen; one article he co-authored for Keyboard on his technical strategies; and his first four recordings, as a soloist, for what they reveal about his innovations' beginnings. Those first four solo recordings were as spaced out in time as the couple of dozen collaborations of this decade have been condensed in it (except for one release of John Cage's music): Discovery, Bursts of Joy (Chiaroscuro Records 1975 and 1977, respectively) and New Frontier and Upside Down Visions (Black Saint/Soul Note, 1983 and 1985, reissued on CD in 1996 and 1997, respectively) laid down the new ways with the piano Bergman would bring to the table in this decade's more prolific output.

The Body as Map

basically speaking the left hand has its own force. it's the demon. it's the golem. it's the incredible hulk. it's the frankenstein monster. it's the unconscious.

it was gaining in power. the power was that it could sing. it could sing about the people. it could sense their humanity.

"The stride players in the '30s had a great sense of elegance," says Bergman. "Earl Hines, who wasn't really in with the other guys at the time, told me once there were two pianists he liked very much: one was his right hand and one was his left hand. There was a critic at the New York Times who criticized Bud Powell for not having that quality, of the right hand playing like a horn against a solid rhythmic left; but bebop was a different kind of music, and I think it made the rhythm section much more important to the overall sound than it was before.

"My next CD will be a solo again," he says, establishing a logic. "Looking back, all these duos and trios I've done since 1993 was a good move, in terms of developing me. But I know it's time to do a solo, or a trio with drums and bass; the bass works with me if it's played in the high register, against everything I'm doing with my left hand; it doesn't have to play the rhythm or anything, just hit high on the strings. I won't say a trio would legitimize my way of playing, exactly, but it would frame it in that authority of the piano trio sound, if I could get the bass to play in a way that works with me. I've never had that kind of worry for drums; they fit in more naturally with what I do, the only problem maybe being the volume. I've found that if you have a good rhythmic vocabulary, other people's rhythmic vocabulary should excite you. I really think rhythm is the survival factor, and if it's a strong impulse in you, you can engage with others in whom it's strong and get inspired, without fear of losing your identity. If it isn't so strong in you, you end up fighting it; but then you find that it's a part of yourself anyway, and you didn't even know it.

"The survival instinct is important. I would rather have a true adversary than a false friend."

In the Keyboard article, writer Kyle Kevorkian's "Want A Monster Left Hand?" (February 1991) sets the reader up for instructions written by Bergman himself on his new techniques. More of the iceberg of which the liberated left hand is the tip appears here: not only is the left hand developed beyond bass line and chordal functions into a contrapuntal equality with the right in improvisational playing, the balance of power and importance between each finger on each hand is distributed more equally too, by redesigning classical fingering concepts from patterns of "weak" and "strong" to "every finger for itself (and the music)," "one finger for all, and all for one" (my words).

In other words, hierarchy is systematically deconstructed and reconstructed as teamwork between these members of the society of the single body--hands, fingers, even the left and right sides of the brain used to govern them. Schönberg did it between chromatic pitches, and between those pitches and the unpitched voice (with Sprechgesang); later composers did it between all noise, silence, and pitches. Bergman is doing it on the level of the source of it all, the body in musical action.

The mechanics of this leveling as mentioned in Keyboard are as simply symmetrical as the anatomy they engage: (1) mirrorizing, (2) crossed hands, and (3) exercises designed for each finger. None are really inventions of Bergman's. Pianists have been crossing their hands (switching the left and right positions on the keyboard), playing scales and other exercises in mirrored patterns of intervals away from a central tone in opposite directions and in a variety of tricky fingerings, for centuries. Bergman has simply chosen to take seriously their implications for a free/jazz improviser's pallette and needs, both technical and expressive--and, again, mythological--and to expand on and run with them.

The mirrorizing is a way to start getting the left hand more facile from within the common conventions of classical technique. Bergman has arranged Chopin études and other pieces so that the left hand's line mirrors--inverts--the right's. The goal implied here for improvisation is to be able to play contrapuntally at will, to have both the control and the chops to do so as facilely as, more typically, one plays rhythmically and chordally with the left hand.

In other words: let the right hand be the right hand, and let the left hand be the right hand too. This move begs questions about Western musical discourse in America.

The Body as History

spindell had to develop the left hand. whatever diversions he would engage in when things got rough he would always return to the left hand in the bass. each return would be characterized by a clearer more emphatic sound. stronger articulation, accents, inflections, syncopated rhythmic lines cascading all over the place.

--Borah Bergman

When did the conventional division of labor between the hands come about? Foundationally, when polyphony began to develop as layers over an original deep--male-voiced--melody line. The cantus lost its free flow to firmus, something fixed in time and told to stay there, so other, higher voices could stand on its shoulders, dance on greater heights. In time, the heights towered and the depths sunk out of sight, until one Frederick Schenker came along and unearthed them as Urlinie--and until, again, one Arnold Schönberg dismantled the whole hierarchical house of cards. And, of course, until African-American geniuses got into Western music with their own rocket-science toolkits.

Bergman sees his left hand's natural province, the piano's lower register, as a kind of archetypal maleness, more deeply so than a male tenor, that is earthy, grounded, not "nobly" ethereal at the expense of someone to be stood on.

When did the left hand's work become so rhythmic, so static, so melodically simple and so chordally rigid? Roughly, when Northern European dance music and Protestant church music came to dominate over Mediterranean vocal polyphony, starting around the sixteenth century, solidifying with the rise of commercialized secular music, spreading to America through German music culture to Emancipated slaves…

When did it come to represent the lower levels of a social hierarchy? Roughly, when the piano (as Francis Davis touched on) came to reflect the orchestra, which had clearly evolved as such a hierarchy, with the upper classes residing in the strings, and the lower in the winds and percussion. (Scholarship on this abounds. The nineteenth-century aesthetician Eduard Hanslick reported disturbed amazement when he first heard saxophones played well. He saw such virtuosity as an upstart move by the coarser, lower orders of the orchestral society to leave their rightful place and usurp that of the more refined violins, flutes, and oboes, where such virtuosity legitimately resided.)

The exercises Bergman designed to develop all ten fingers as equals are equally elegant and simple: start by improvising with only one finger, going through all ten; then hold a key down with one digit while improvising with one other; then with two, three, then all four others, using each as the anchor in turn, on each hand.

"Do you notice what happens every time you change from one set of fingers to another?" he writes. "It changes the way the melody--the sequence and layout of notes--unfolds. You find yourself creating shapes that are rather angular at times and going in directions you wouldn't ordinarily choose."

The crossed hands are not just a temporary vehicle for such lines to cross for a moment; they are a permanent inversion of the more natural parallel position itself, a reconfiguring of the bones of the music, in several senses. Let's start with the mythological one. It, after all, is the one that motivates Bergman, brings meaning to the music he makes with the method.

Think of the two parallel hands as a single creature, with its strength and pivot in the middle: a spine made of the two thumbs, supporting its two sets of four limbs on each side. However close together or far apart the hands move--and, indeed, their widest-open stretch suggests no limit in either direction--whatever tangles thumb and fingers dance through, that central spine is the resting position, the point of return, and that spread of the limbs, like wings (left wing, right wing) taking flight, out from it.

What this means is that the fingers that play the highest and lowest notes--traditionally, melody and bass--are the weakest, getting progressively stronger as they approach the thumbs. Bergman got intrigued by the possibilities of getting more power with less work if he brought the thumb and two neighboring fingers of his left hand up to do the work the outer three on his right had been doing, and to send the strong half of his right hand down to the bottom notes.

Now the creature with spine and wings designed to spread and open wide becomes something more like a soft-bodied thing in the middle of nodes of strength and support on its outer reaches--like, say, a crab, or spider, with its ring of legs scurrying sideways across the keyboard. The range is more constrained, and the crossed hands suggest inwardness, contraction, teamwork, as the parallel/opening ones suggest separate (and unequal) functions, expansion and reaching out (and polarization, between the ascending-superior high and the descending-inferior low).

On its face, the awkward change may not seem an improvement. But if you do happen to see the left hand, and the right brain that runs it, as a force that has been undermined both subtly and grossly throughout cultural evolution (two of many examples: the devil and his minions were always put at God's left hand in old Christian mythology and painting, the "good guys" on the right; and parents used to tie the left hand of a child who favored it to his or her side, to force the right one's development); if you do feel a connection between that biological bias and the subtle-to-brutal power plays of left-brain rationalism over right-brain intuition in society; and if you do see the roles of the pianist's two hands reflecting this bias, and the power plays and social matrix it spawns--with the right hand standing for rational, waking consciousness, even transcendence (through melody, free time, high notes), and the left for subconsciousness and earthy grounding (harmony, metered time, low notes)--the reversal of that situation is an improvement.

Heaven (right) comes singing down into earth and earth (left) up into heaven, in the strongest fingers on each hands; and the two are never allowed to move very far from each other, to drift apart--no polarization between haves and have-nots, no abyssmal gap. If you see this move as a subversive solution, however modest, to a big, longstanding historical and social problem, as well as a liberation of your own personal psychophysiology, you feel inspired to make it sing.

The actual musical effects of this retraining of the body can be heard scattered throughout Bergman's duos and trios, but they're hard to discern there unless you've heard them enough in a slow, relaxed solo to know what you're looking for. His as-yet unreleased solo CD "Seven Variations" is the perfect example of them. The technique has been developed enough by now to sing in his hands, and what we hear, in the voicings of chords unaltered through their octave switches, is indeed, once we do know what we're looking for, a recitation of reason and power rumbling at the bottom and the voice of wounded humanity, healing and freeing itself, singing at the top.

I've heard up close the way Bergman plays for several years now, have gotten to listen to him in the intense and intimate engagement of a fellow player. I mention that because it often takes that long and that much to really "get" what a musician is doing, thus to talk or write about it properly. Think about it: if the name of this musical game is to create your own universe, it will no more be revealed in descriptions of your technical concerns and innovations than the nature of God is by the letters YHWH, or of the universe by E=MC².

But that isn't to say it's beyond words altogether. It may not be beyond poetry, myth, or story; many of the greats in this music themselves seem to think that it isn't. Think of the lifelong cultivation of words artists such as Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, or Steve Lacy have put to the service of their various projects, especially in their more ambitious and mature work. Think of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, who grew out of the formal-technical language of their disciplines into prose that was more like poetry than professional philosophical jargon.

The Body as Poetry

Like all close human relationships, [free improvisation] is a risky business, of all forms of musicking the most dangerous; the musicians show themselves to one another, and to whomever is listening, technically and emotionally naked, without any outside constraints to mediate their relationship (Small, 306).

Jazz is the sound of life being lived at its limits, dangerous as an element that can burn.

--Frederick Turner, in Small, 320.

"My image of the river of sounds has been an image of death for me, lately, and the struggle with it is a struggle against death," this energetic elder says. "I'm playing along, I think I'm playing the river of sound, but then I get confused, and I'm not playing it, it's playing me, and I've got to figure out all kinds of maneuvers, to combat this thing. Coltrane, Interstellar Space? Anyone that practiced as much as that guy is as in control of his playing as anyone you'll ever hear, as I want to be too--but there's something out of control, too. You think this is something you just pick up? No, it's something deep in your body, you can't not do it, it forces you, you can't stop. I think people are starting to realize the importance of this more lately, the primacy of nature over nurture in many cases, through studies of genetic twins separated at birth and raised differently, things like that.

"But in my case, I'm not just talking about being born with a talent for music. I think of how my father was, how he would get up every day and make a lot of fuss and noise about the new day, get all excited and get us excited, no matter how he felt, no matter what the situation was, just to be alive and to get going. I don't know if it's a Russian peasant background, an immigrant background, how much is in my blood and body or how much I got from his example, but it's a certain survival instinct, to Take Care of Business, above all else. And his father, too, was a real stalwart guy; strong, tough. I remember in the synagogue there was this huge book there, and my grandfather was the only one big enough to open and close it. This Russian-Jewish background for me is about keeping your connection with the earth--which is what I see in African American culture too. I think great jazz is a thing of shapes, expresses a knowledge of shapes and textures, something tactile; African art show this too, a sense of space and spatial connections.

"The quality of the earth and being grounded is very important to people who have been oppressed. When you have to fight your way up and maintain your identity, your sheer will to survive becomes a very important thing. It's even more important than love of family--the life orientation, survival, doing what's necessary, never giving up…that was a big thing in my development. No matter how bad you felt, you weren't going to lie down, you were going to get up again. Why? because you have to. It's the opposite of being brought up in the majority culture. I heard someone say something on TV about George W. Bush, that he inherited third base and thought he'd made a triple!" he laughs.

I suggest that this devotion to the survival principle seems like a paradox, though, because it seems to lead to a life of obscurity and poverty, not prosperity.

"But again, your fight to survive isn't something you choose for the benefits it brings. When I get an idea, it takes me over. And the sad fact is that the art can take all you've got to give, and not leave over anything for other areas of your life, like business stuff, or relationships. And beyond that, the survival impulse is proven in your ability to keep doing it somehow even though the social system or whatever is more about putting it down than rewarding and supporting it. That's where it shows itself to be more than something called art, but rather the sheer will to survive; I think it's been a healthy thing to do. I never fussed around with pretentiousness, or intellectuality; whatever I was, whatever my environment and background was, that's what I did. And I think if the idea of art, or high music, or intellect gets you away from something that's alive in your system, in the blood, that's just not for me. I was an underachiever in many ways in school, and this thing I found in the music didn't lead me into the life of a family man. That's another aspect of the survival impulse--the loner figure, who isn't so much a hero these days as in times past, either. So there you are. I wasn't brought up in a success-oriented family, my values don't run in that direction; if anything, whenever I've felt like I might be getting close to that fate, I've had serious reservations about it. So a lot of this is my own doing. My father came from a very religious background, and my mother's father was a cantor. Everybody was very musical. But none of it was imposed on me; I was never bar mitzvahed, so whatever might be there in my playing from any of that is more absorbed than programmed from above, you know what I mean?"

Does he think this is something he started in youth, but wouldn't have started in old age? Is one road to wisdom truly the fool's persistence in his folly?

"Well, whatever got me started, at this point it would be foolish for me to turn back. I couldn't have foreseen how frivolous American culture has become since I started. I accept a certain amount of responsibility. There have been people interested in helping me in my career from way back--Orrin Keepnews, for example--but it's been my pattern to be so single-mindedly focused on my playing that I'm not much good for anything else until I've reached the goal I've set for myself with it. And then, when I see I'm about to reach it, I see I never will, really; it's this whole quest of always needing to be better, never being good enough. I haven't been a social pariah, but I haven't stepped back from it all enough to be businesslike with it.

"Who knows why this mission in my life carried me away so? I can tell you one thing; now, when I play with someone else, I feel good. Not exactly better than before, because I'm older, and the excitement in the newness of what's going on is not there. But the craftsmanship is there, and if you stay in touch with your emotions and your health is good…I get along with certain people on a deeper level--like Andrew (Cyrille), whom I like as a person just as much as I do his music. I know now that whatever the situation is I'll make the best of it at the time. There's a confidence and relaxation there that wasn't there before. It helps with the rhythmic components; if you don't have that, you tend to shy away from stronger partners. If I didn't have my left hand built up as much as I have, I wouldn't know what to do with some of Andrew's rhythms.

"For me, that's about the future of America: the conflict of ideas, without violence, in a freedom that tolerates it all. Everyone can get their message out now, with the new technology, but the frivolity of the culture has come about through that increase in access, not its enrichment. Which tells you that this kind of music is really a very formal art; if it works, it works. But it's a group effort; you don't see painters having to consult with anyone else about what works, they just stand there and make their decisions, without having to worry about all kinds of other factors that have nothing to do with the work. Solo playing is something like the lone painter, but even so, Keith Jarrett, for instance, has said that he doesn't like listening to some of his early solo work, because what he did then isn't necessarily what he would do now. A painter has a chance to step back and be objective and work it over until he gets it where he wants it. A solo player approaches it…but then there's the question of whether you can really ever convey as much solo as you can with other players, especially a rhythm section.

"You do have to be ready to make quick and sudden changes, in this music; like in life, to survive, you have to be spontaneous, ready for anything, and able to move at a moment's notice. Especially if you're in a minority group. Sometimes the ability to surprise an attacker, or oppressor, can save your life, and the person on the top doesn't understand this. Quick moves, changes, backward, forward.

"I never would have played the way I did if I wasn't conscious of the social conditions, and how to survive in them. It's about perpetual political struggle and perpetual sexual struggle (which isn't to say there are never victories); the struggle to stay vital, healthy, alive, you know? I see it all as one struggle, the political struggles of the oppressed peoples of the world and the struggle of the healthy libido that Reich and others have been so concerned about, and the struggle of the artist to create.

"I can sit down now and do things so easily that, when I first started, people would say, first off, that I'm out of my mind to even try it; everything was so hard I didn't even want to talk about it. And now I just whip it off like it's nothing, like on that CD with Oliver Lake. So there's this gap; once it's become easy to you, you want to forget about how tough it was to get there, and you say it's just nothing.

"The younger person can't feel the intensity that comes with the building of intellectual, conceptual, and physical chops; all he feels is the tenseness, and the overwhelming impossibility of the thing. The outsider doesn't know this. The intensity comes on with the struggle, and a greater hunger and capacity both. And you can't simply assess this situation and decide to undertake it, like a career path or something--it chooses you, not the other way around. You have to struggle, you can do no other, and then later on you can look back and reflect from a position of what you've attained in the fight.

"The great players in jazz have had a wonderful mastery of musical vocabularies and connection with instruments, but you have to understand too that much of their greatness lay in the fact that they knew how to play so well the very thing they thought, and not being able to play anything else. Someone like Charlie Parker had his technique so geared to what he heard in his head, that he was playing every phrase in his head before he played it on his hown. Yet he never lost the connection between that kind of perfection and the vitality and intensity that comes with the struggle. That for me is transcendence. I can really understand why younger guys would come along and want to play bebop, for the same reason they like playing Bach, for the form and structure and elegance; it's absolutely fabulous. And I don't think that kind of high art happens from nothing: certain social conditions come into play to bring it about; same with the free movement in jazz, it wasn't just an arbitrary noodling, but was all tied up in what came just before it, and with the rise of a new black consciousness that came out of that.

"As a player, I made my musical decisions out of a sense of this. Why did I favor the blues, and jazz? Part of it was youthful rebellion against my parents, no doubt, but basically it was the empathy for the struggle against oppression I identified with. Coming up in the radical leftist movement, you'd be surrounded by white people who might have ignorance and prejudice going on in one part of themselves, but who also looked with great interest invested in anyone who was struggling for justice anywhere in the world. Then when I went to Europe and got a sense of what it meant to be a Jew in, say, East Germany...

"It comes down to taking care of business, having a job to do. You get up in the morning, like my old man, no matter how you feel, if it's your responsibility, you go to work. If you know that about someone, that you can have faith in them and count on them, whatever else might go on between you, that's what counts, and that's what I loved about these duos--that I loved the people I did it with, even if we had all kinds of problems with each other. We did something together that was worth the problems and the shit, and we can be proud of it, and know that it's there. This is what life's about. You don't have to be bosom buddies to have a common purpose, a common goal, and you get the job done. That's what America should be about. You might bring nothing to the table, or feel terrible, not into it at all, but after ten or fifteen minutes, if you have faith that something will happen between you, it does. If you've both been practicing ten or fifteen hours a day, like you should."

The Body as Anarchy

At its best, free improvisation celebrates a set of informal, even loving, relationships which can be experienced by everyone present, and brings into existence, at least for the duration of the performance, a society whose closest political analogy is with anarchism--anarchism, that is, in the real rather than journalistic meaning of the word, a society in which government is not imposed from the top or from the center, but comes from each individual, who is most fully realized in contributing to the wellbeing of the community--the polar opposite, one might say, of the symphony concert (Small, 307).

When you're a novice trying to break in, you think your life will be fulfilled once you develop your style and make CDs and attract critical and peer attention to the degree that Bergman has--but ask him or anyone else in a similar position whether such dreams-come-true have awakened the millions to his art, to beat a path to his door and fill his life with riches and acclaim, as if he were some Van Gogh whose paintings had been recognized for what they were, and started selling to the highest bidder, while he yet lived.

If you're a novice in this particular art form, you might have found, only a few years ago, that such expectations were a lot less naïve in some countries than others; you may have found that in America they were the most so, but in, say, Germany, or Holland, you would find that the information coming from professional intelligentsia to ministers of culture counted for something in terms of getting work, support, a life by your art. Now, as the Americapitalist culture and criteria spread more and more in those lands, you'd likelier find such information and such interest drying up. The war is over, you lost, go change your style, or move closer to the margins in Europe, too.

In case it's obscure, here's the implication: if anarchy is your game--meaning self-rule, self-definition, not "running with the right crowd (or pack)"--you recognize your fellow players immediately, through their work; you don't need a technical blueprint, or a word from on high in the "art world," to recognize Van Gogh, and to tell his work from an unformed child's. You collect your Van Goghs--not that painter's paintings, but all the people you can find working at the height of their potential and powers, for its own sake, whatever the cost--and then you have a community based on the ideal of a thousand flowers blooming, and it grows in uncomplicated solidarity, attracts the attention of the rest of the world, which welcomes and cultivates it for the thriving garden it is, and you and your fellow responsible anarchists live happily ever after, having improved (by improvising) the world.

NOT!

"It's love, but love is not cheap. It's not about touchy-feely, but real commitment to bringing out the best. People have more in common than not, and it's more than either one of them. That's what happened with Roscoe Mitchell, with Oliver Lake, and everyone else I played with.

I know America has all these racial problems; the point isn't to try and like everybody, but to respect everybody, let them have their own lives. If you are fighting for your rights and survival, you don't expect people to like you. They have to respect you, and the two things don't necessarily go together. I feel like in all the sessions I've done with other players, as different as they all are, there is this one thing, which is pure human nature. And a fundamental trait of that is that people vie with each other, whether they're in business, or are artists, or scholars--there's a contestive, competitive thing going on, to deny that is stupid. And the more people goad it out of me, the more I'm able to get something out of myself that would otherwise be locked up inside. Because in the end people do have more in common than not. But this engagement takes me out of sticking with myself all the time; you do that all the time, man, it's just--[laughs]--how long am I gonna live, what am I gonna do? It's stupid."

 sometimes i get very anxious. i don't know if i can handle the situation. and it seems easier to think in circles. it's relieving and produces energy.

i feel this about my concept. there is a spinning feeling for each note in those phrases which are fast. everything is in the present tense. moment to moment. i feel better and creative things are going on. i am making use of what bothers me. this is a hangup for good purposes. i wonder if i didn't have the anxiety, or almost panic, or maybe PANIC actually, would i conceive this circular motion?

If anarchy, as Small writes, is love, it is equal parts war--both of which "all's fair in." What really happens if anarchy is your game is that some people love what you do, others hate it, others can take it or leave it, or sometimes take it and sometimes leave it, sometimes hate it sometimes love it…and you feel the same way about them and their work, as well as your own.

(German-American liberal-of-the-last-century Carl Schurz said of Karl Marx that the reason his brilliant countryman's ideas weren't more accepted was due more to his disagreeable personality than to his ideas. It's a truism to say that revolutions, religious and political and artistic, begin to fall apart moments after their success, through the egotism and infighting of their architects and followers; and, of course, that great artists and thinkers can be stunted, damaged, and damaging human beings, even so much so that whatever was initially impressive about their work fails the tests of time [add, for an example picked at random, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich's to Marx's name]).

If you were really lucky, if anarchy were the social game, if art of genius and originality were immediately apprised as such, as objectively as a diamond; if more derivative and shallow art was apprised so too, and if each were rewarded with money and respect according to the worth of each…then all the years of work and dedication and self-development and self-sacrifice you put into mining for your diamonds would be well paid and worth it, not something done for some exploiter of your labor after you've killed yourself in those mines (believe me, the Complete Boxed Set of Borah Bergman may someday be someone's cash cow; could be now, with the right packaging and promotion).

Realistically, if you are really lucky, you'll get at least enough press and work and money and respect and real gratitude for what you do to keep you afloat, keep you busy at it and off the streets, redeemed from a Van Gogh's near-total isolation and neglect and the effects thereof.

The Body as (a Piece of) Work

he was very upset with me. he said my fast pieces weren't going anywhere. i said i didn't want them to. which is true.

the intensity increases but everything is so circular and the images are going by so fast that the listening cannot be anything like a guided tour, in which we go from place to place, point to point.

What's my position in all this? Am I some Van Gogh's Theo, too much the brother to take seriously as the art advocate/broker/critic? Or is this kind of art one that, as Small said, unavoidably makes families out of people in its process? Is that why I grew up with the other jazz fans calling Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman, people I'd never meet, by their first names and nicknames? Is that why people with reputations as sons-of-bitches (like Miles, Mingus, so many others) and saints (like Coltrane and a few others) both have been members in good standing in this family? why people who have proven themselves continue to be part of it if they later break down and lose it (like Monk and Bud Powell), as well as if they grow old gracefully with it?

That's anarchy, that's how it works at its best. You have to be and believe in yourself to get in and stay in, no masks allowed; the human things masks cover up are hanging out, best and worst, neither demonized nor valorized, but worked with the flow of the life and art; you stand or fall only by your desire to live that way, there, or your lack of it.

My job is writing; it's too hard to do about subjects that don't grab me and keep my interest, take me somewhere I want to go. Bergman's job is to make a music that consciously unearths the unconscious by rewiring his body from his neural to his muscular levels, and that sings to and for the people of the world he'd like to see delivered and uplifted.

the most important thing is articulating, playing the notes. and if you have something called talent and have something to say, then you concentrate on the act of doing and let the emotions be part of you which is in the unconscious. it helps to consider it a job so that the purpose, being there and doing is clearly defined.

Mike Heffley is a musician and author of The Music of Anthony Braxton (Greenwood, 1996).

BORAH BERGMAN Discography

LPs

Discovery, Bursts of Joy (Chiaroscuro Records 1975 and 1977, respectively)

New Frontier and Upside Down Visions (Black Saint/Soul Note, 1983 and 1985, reissued on CD in 1996 and 1997, respectively)

CDs

"Inversions" - Muworks Records - 1992
"The Human Factor" - Black Saint/Soul Note Records - 1993
"The Fire Tale" - Black Saint/Soul Note Records - 1994
"First Meeting" - Knitting Factory Records - l995
"Ride into the Blue" - Konnex Records - 1995
"Reflections on Ornette Coleman and the Stone House" - Black Saint/Soul Note
Records -1995
"New Frontier" - Black Saint/Soul Note Records -
1996 (reissue to CD)
"The October Revolution" - Evidence Records - 1996
"Blue Zoo" - Konnex Records - 1997
"Eight by Three" - Mixtery Records - 1997
"Vision Vol.1" - Aum Fidelity - 1997
"Exhilaration" - Black Saint/Soul Note Records - 1997
"Upside Down Visions" - Black Saint/Soul Note Records - 1997 (reissue to CD)
"John Cage - Works for Piano and Prepared Piano Vol. 4 - Virgo Records - 1997
"Ikosa Mura" - Cadence Records - 1998
"Geometry" - Leo Records - 1998
"Blind Pursuits" - Einstein Records - 1998
"A New Organization" - Black Saint/Soul Note Records - 1999
"The Italian Concert" - Black Saint/Soul Note Records - 1999 (to be released)

Works Cited

(Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue, 306)

(Peter Jeffrey, Reenvisioning Past Musical Cultures, 53-54)

(John Blacking in John Shepherd, "Music, Culture and Interdisciplinarity: Refelections on Relationships," Popular Music 13/2: 138)

Keyboard article, writer Kyle Kevorkian's "Want A Monster Left Hand?" (February 1991)

Bergman press clips

outtakes

"People don't get together as artists because they like each other, any more than many family members may do. They rather have a common purpose, that may or may not coincide with their personal lives."

On European reception: "My attitude is that it's what I feel toward the other person that is important, not what the other person feels towards me. This is the only way to survive, to respect other people. In terms of fighting for your rights, stop worrying about how many people like, just worry about how much respect you get.

"So when I go to Europe, I have to have an attitude about what I feel toward Europeans, not what they feel toward me; if you let that into your consciousness too much, you're in big trouble. If you have the right attitude, then whatever happens you have a sense of well-being.

"Europeans might sometimes have some suspicions. There are some things that I do that I don't understand. When I get up to play, the minute I sit down, everything's out of my mind. I take care of business, and it either works or it doesn't. Same with collaborations, either they work or they don't; it has nothing to do with who's better or worse, or right or wrong, past a certain skill level. Someone like Peter Brötzmann is a perfect duo partner when he's on, even though he's not always what others might call a perfect player. Perfection isn't what's called for, so much as genuineness.

[On run of recordings from 1990]: "The first one was Evan Parker, after I had been playing with some of the other Europeans, like Connie Bauer. He came to my place in NY, we played for three days, then recorded. Snowballed, thru Bonandrini's interest, other players."

[Looking back, favorite CDs/partners?]

"I love what's happened in my own playing, as a result of my own practicing through them all. My ideas started coming out of the keyboard much better than they did before. I think it was Anthony [Braxton] who said something about driving someone through the wall--meaning playing so hard it brings new things out of someone--which I told Evan I would do to him. That's what I look for in a duo, is that mutual goading on to new heights.

"I come from a very confusing background--stride, blues, Stockhausen, it's all in one big barrel--but I have a certain sense of propulsion that no one else has, including Cecil, who's a genius; anyone who doesn't hear this needs more education in some way. A lot of writers who review records don't mention rhythm at all these days, or put it right at the end, or know nothing about it--yet they're all so in awe of new music concepts. I feel I can and do play with those myself, but there's this other thing going on in my playing.

MH I know what you mean…but your new recording with Roscoe puts a lot of that propulsion in the background, goes very meditative, interspersed with shots and surges of it.

BB I do go in and out of both worlds, and that was a bit more in one world than the other; I have no problem with that. It's just that the piano is such a tricky instrument to get to swing; it wasn't developed like the other instruments. Some of the great, great saxophonists can sit down at a piano and try to swing the way they do on their horn, and doesn't sound like the same person. You have to really work at it.

MH Have you ever been in Russia?

BB No. And anyone that has a big problem with America as compared to any other country has got to be out of his mind.

MH I always ask musicians who have been at this as long as you have how they've stuck with it for so long. What's your daily practice routine?

BB There's something you've got to understand. I heard something about Picasso. A lot of it is chemical, it's in your bloodstream, or your genes, and if you weren't doing it in music, you'd be doing it in something else. You don't think that if Cecil Taylor had decided to be a writer, or a painter, that he couldn't have done it? There may be some self-destructive elements in the mix, but there's this physical survival aspect too, whether it comes from a peasant background, or the Jewish survival over three thousand years, I don't know what that is; it's a survival instinct that I don't really have control over, or even foreknow its existence; I didn't choose it, it chose me.

[return to blue zoo]