Gavin Bryars: “I always found jazz to be rather like a highly sophisticated chamber ensemble…” Interview by Bob Baker Fish

Gavin Bryars is something of the ‘can do’ composer, more often than not actively involved in every facet of his compositions. The UK based composer began his musical life as a jazz bassist, most notably with his improvised trio with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, though it was his work with John Cage in the mid 60’s that opened his eyes to more conceptual ideas. He went on to found one of the most iconic and ridiculous groups ever, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, where none of the members knew how to play their instruments. His most well known compositions are 1969’s The Sinking of the Titanic and 1971’s Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which featured an incredible recording of an unknown tramp. He has gone on to build up an impressive body of work including pieces for theatre, dance and opera, utilising a variety of techniques and instrumentation – often playing the bass himself. He also performs regularly with his own ensemble, which he founded in 1981 and has collaborated with everyone from Tom Waits to John Berger over the years.

Most recently he has composed a chamber opera based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, which he will be performing at the Adelaide Festival where he will be the Artist in Residence.
Cyclic Defrost caught up with Bryars early one morning while his son was still asleep and found an energetic and articulate 73 year old more than happy to reminisce about his career, but still very much focussed on future projects.

Bob Baker Fish: You’ve utilised some pretty unique or perhaps alternate compositional techniques in many of your pieces over the years. I wanted to ask you if the sense of discovery has always been important for you?

Gavin Bryars: It was probably a by product of the fact that I came into music via an indirect way. I didn’t study properly at university and so on. I was essentially a practical musician. I went to university and was going to study music but did philosophy instead and became a jazz bass player simply by taking up the bass when I was at university and when I stopped being a philosophy student I was always a jazz bass player so I simply carried on. So I essentially taught myself by trying things out and taking on projects and so on, so my solutions were generally those that I found myself rather than those I took from existing models. So in that way anything I’ve done comes from the quirks of my brain than from following an existing route.

Bob Baker Fish: I guess I wouldn’t normally think becoming a philosophy student is a route to become a professional jazz bass player.

Gavin Bryars: Well there’s not many jobs for philosophy students when you graduate. I think we were told there basically three. You could teach philosophy which was a little bit circular, you could go into the foreign office and become a diplomat or you could become a bishop. None of those I really fancied.

Bob Baker Fish: So what was your early interest in jazz?

Gavin Bryars: It started when I was a teenager, I always loved the sound of the bass, even when I was listening to rock and roll. I was always listening to the bass rather than the tunes or the words. I became interested in jazz and I found what I thought was a kind of freedom in jazz. It was a kind’ve bohemian thing. I’m talking about the late 50’s when you start to get the kind of early free jazz and Ornette Coleman, the whole kind of world of Jack Kerouac and the Beats, the kind of outsider feeling to it, and it was something I was attracted to.

Bob Baker Fish: And I guess the free jazz was almost a step beyond that.

Gavin Bryars: Yes, eventually later the free improvisation wasn’t even specifically jazz, it was something we moved into, this trio that I played with.

Bob Baker Fish: I’m aware that you were playing with Derek Bailey at that time. Yet eventually you found that to be somewhat limiting?

Gavin Bryars: Yeah, while I was playing this stuff I was also taking an active interest in other aspects of new music and I was especially interested in the work of Cage, the East Coast of New York, Morton Feldman and those people. I was especially interested in Cage’s music and his philosophy. In a way it was the polar opposite of what I was doing. What I found interesting about Cage was that it was a kind of cool detached objective way of looking at music kind’ve free of emotion, taste and choice, yet what I was doing as an improviser was completely opposite, it was in the heat of the moment, it was instinctive, it was fast and those two world were poles apart, and I was living two different artistic lives and eventually I felt one had to go.

Bob Baker Fish: Has that always been the way since then? Have you ever attempted to reintegrate the emotion, the seat of your pants stuff?

Gavin Bryars: Well to some extent I’ve done some work subsequently with jazz players. I’ve written a jazz bass concerto with Charlie Haden, I’ve worked with people like Bill Frissell. And I did still later play some jazz, and in fact 32 years after the trio we had disbanded we reformed briefly for a few months and we played again. Derek and Tony Oxley had been playing all that stuff all that time, but I hadn’t and it was interesting to get back into that world again briefly. But I didn’t really try too much to bring that world of speed of thought and so on into the compositional stuff. Though I do find having my own ensemble like that world, having a tight jazz trio where you know each others work and you listen and are very attentive. I always found jazz to be rather like a highly sophisticated chamber ensemble anyway.

Bob Baker Fish: But I guess with your ensemble I’m assuming you’re playing some tightly composed material?

Gavin Bryars: Oh yes it is. There are some things like Sinking of the Titanic which we still do play from time to time, where there is a degree of freedom in some areas, certainly in terms of timing, and in the case of some parts where there is a choice of what they do. But what I write now is almost completely written out.

Bob Baker Fish: What I was curious about was that part of the program in Jesus Blood and I wondered how you feel about continuing to revisit the material? I know you’ve revisited it a number of time over the years, even with the addition of Tom Waits. I was wondering what you get out of continuing to revisit the material?

Gavin Bryars: Well its one of those things. There’s really two pieces from that distant past. There’s the Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus Blood. Those are the two pieces that I still do play and they’re both pieces that people still do want to hear. I remember that I used to have a manager who used to say its rather like the Rolling Stones and Satisfaction. You may have heard it a hundred times but it’s the first time they’ve heard it in that town. It’s a little bit like that. But rather than a sense of duty I genuinely do find interest in the music when I do it. This time I’ll be conducting the Adelaide symphony with Jesus Blood and when I hear that old man’s voice I still find things of interest in it and things new, and I must have played this piece so many times and heard that little fragment hundreds and thousands of times but it still is fresh to me.

Bob Baker Fish: How did you feel when your first heard it and decided to use it? Did you have any misgivings about utilising it at any time?

Gavin Bryars: Not really, because it was really a very gradual process. It wasn’t like a blinding light where I had this vision of this piece. I heard this voice completely by accident and was very struck by it given the context in which I heard it. I was listening to a tape that had been discarded from the sound files of a film recording. I had been given the tape so I could wipe it and use it, and I just happened to listen to it. In the middle of all this dross there was a jewel, this 26 seconds of a remarkable fragment, and I was just really struck by it. One thing led to another, and it was a period of days or weeks before I really thought about how it could become a piece. It was quite gradual. And over the years I’ve added different ensembles and different groups, its been played in different locations and different situations, so its still quite a living thing for me.

Bob Baker Fish: It’s really an evocative piece, it’s really beautiful with what you contribute musically, but also what he does himself.

Gavin Bryars: Absolutely. I find those first moments, those first three or four minutes where you hear the voice just gradually fade in and you just focus on that, and it’s quite remarkable. In a way once the first sounds of the solo strings start to ghost in, then you get taken to another world, but always at all times the focus is on the old man. I remember that when we did the version with Tom Waits I had a battle with the producer who always wanted to take Tom’s voice up. But I said ‘no you have to keep the old man,’ that’s the point of the piece. So there was a compromise in the recording I guess, but I made sure the piece was about the old man, not me doing something clever or something like that.

Bob Baker Fish: What attracted you to wanting to revisit it with Tom Waits?

Gavin Bryars: Well Phillip Glass started a record label in the 1990’s called Point. Phillip and I have known each other since 1970 or so, we’re friends, even though I don’t get along with all of this music. He knew the old recording which had been made on vinyl in 1975, which had underground cult success. People valued it who came across it, but it wasn’t a big thing. He wanted to put things like this out on his new label. But he wondered what else could be on the cd, because a cd is at least twice as long as a LP. I said ‘no we’ll just have the piece.’ And he was worried that it would just be long and dreary, because I suppose if he was doing a piece like that he would simply increase the number of repetitions and nothing much would change. But I said what I would do was make the first 24 minutes exactly the same structure as the vinyl recordings, so you have that as a kind of intro and then you start exploring some new worlds. So you have ensembles, choirs, different kind of productions, and dark brass and so on being added, so it’s as if this voice is being taken on a new journey.

I remember it was in the conversation with this executive at Phillip’s office, a guy called Rory Johnson, and I was explaining how the piece would work, I had this time plan of the whole thing, of when the different groups would come in at different points, I had a chart of all this, and then I remember saying and at 55 minutes I’m thinking about introducing Tom Waits and he almost fell off his chair. In fact I’d thought about it out loud on the phone. I mean Tom and I were in touch about other projects at that time, and I thought that in this new long trajectory everyone that has been accompanying the man at that point, and everyone is kind’ve repeating these harmonic accompaniments, even if they’re changing from time to time. Finally I thought if someone came along and the actually had a companion who sang along with him, and sang along not as a loop but in real time. And each repetition wouldn’t be the same. I spoke to Tom and he was very happy to do that.

Bob Baker Fish: So the old man is not alone anymore.

Gavin Bryars: Absolutely. It’s almost like a companion and they can drift away into the sunset. It’s almost like the end of an old cowboy movie or something.

Bob Baker Fish: That’s beautiful. So tell me about performing with your own ensemble.

Gavin Bryars: I get a buzz out of it all the time. One of the things as a composer I prefer to do is have a practical ‘hands on’ approach so the audience gets to see the whites of the eyes of the guy who wrote this stuff. Playing it is part of the whole social act of playing music. I think it’s important not to just sit in my studio write some stuff and send it off and some orchestra somewhere plays.

Bob Baker Fish: It seems quite rare that the composer is actually involved.

Gavin Bryars: Well for example the opera of mine we’re doing, Marilyn Forever, there’s a jazz trio and I’m there playing the bass on stage. I’m not just sitting there in the audience taking praise for this performance.

Bob Baker Fish: Were you commissioned specifically to do a chamber opera based on the life of Marylyn Monroe?

Gavin Bryars: Yes, I had the idea of this chamber opera. I had a number of ideas for possible subjects, and I worked with this particular group in Cananda, because I live on the West coast of Canada for part of the year. I live on Vancouver Island for maybe three months a year so I know a lot of the musicians there and I worked with them. There’s a writer Marilyn Bowering who has written a lot of poetry on Marylyn Monroe and we thought about it and the producer Bruce Linwood who runs this sort of thing put in an application to have a workshop period in Bamph in Canada and just see what we could make of the piece. That was in 2010. He raised the money for the commission, the whole thing.

Bob Baker Fish: I’m interested too in your collaboration with John Berger.

Gavin Bryars: That was a radio piece about the correspondence between John Berger and John Christie on the nature of colour. They were doing that as a conversation piece on radio and I was asked to do the music for that. This was 10 years ago or maybe less, and John and I became friends.

Bob Baker Fish: When you were making this music for the correspondence what was it you were thinking about?

Gavin Bryars: I try to make pieces somehow have a different tonal quality. Some were rich, and dark, some were lighter and airier. I wasn’t trying to be literal to the exact topics they were doing, but have a kind of counterpoint to what the conversation they were having. So it wasn’t like doing the music to a Walt Disney cartoon where the one to one relationship is a kind of weak relationship. There were thematic things that would come back and a dark orchestration that would come in at certain points. So it was fairly complicated thing to do and partly instinctive as well.

Bob Baker Fish: So I guess that leaves space for the listener to discover the connection.

Gavin Bryars: And it takes away from the starkness of the voice, and takes it into a different sound world and into a different space. It gives it a kind of colour. We do use this word colour when talking about music as well.

Bob Baker Fish: I noticed that the Sinking of the Titanic was released again this year.

Gavin Bryars: That’s because in 2012 it was the centenary and I did a kind of tour, so I recorded that ensemble tour.

Bob Baker Fish: I noticed Phillip Jeck was on it.

Gavin Bryars: I met him in Italy. There was a group there who wanted to do the Titanic and wanted me to play and they had Phillip there as well. I’ve used him in the piece since and I’ve used him in two or three other things as well. I did a ballet in Bordeaux with a full orchestra but actually I had these little interludes by Phillip. So he and I work together from time to time, next year we work together in Finland where someone is doing some choreography to it.

Bob Baker Fish: You seem to have quite a few collaborators. You seem to be constantly searching out new people.

Gavin Bryars: Exactly. I’ve just started working on a chamber opera for two years time with Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, who’s also an interesting guy too. Those kinds of collaborations you think not just your own ideas but their ideas, and the two things together give you a kind of third option.

Gavin Bryars is the artist in residence at the Adelaide Festival 27 Feb 2015 – 5 Mar 2015.

Part 1
Howard Skempton: Lento (1991) – full orchestra
Bryars: The Porazzi Fragment for 21 solo strings (1999)
Arvo Pärt: If Bach had been a beekeeper – orchestra
Bryars: Ennelina’s aria from G – Anna Fraser, soprano
Bryars: Epilogue from G – Alex Knight, bass
Part 2
Bryars: Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet – full orchestra