By Matthew Duersten

Given his reputation as benevolent elder statesman of LA's avant-garde jazz scene, it's bit of a surprise that Vincent James Golia, Jr. can be quite the churl. "There was this recent LA Times piece: 'Exciting New Saxophone Players'--all from New York!" the 56-year-old woodwindist/educator/composer/bandleader grouses in his cracked kool kat whisper. "Not one fucking sax player from out here! That's bullshit! What about Chris Heenan, Nate Herrerra, Beth Shenck or Jason Mears?" He sighs. "In some sense I don't care; in the other, there's so much great music here that's being ignored--it pisses me off. If I get pissed off, I gotta put my money where my mouth is, and that's what keeps me runnin' the label."

Golia, a Bronx-born, sci-fi/monster movie-loving art student drawn to play jazz after sketching a Charles Mingus concert, had hindsight towards the future by starting 9Winds Records in 1977. He wound up documenting the strange new sounds of an art form mutating for its survival. His extended family of like-minded alchemists atom-smashed free jazz with classical, punk, fusion, world rhythms, electronica and progressive rock--deftly avoiding the cocktail-lounge dregs of the '70s and stuffy New Traditionalism of the 80s. They included Alex and Nels Cline, Wayne Peet, John Rapson, John Fumo, Stuart Liebig, John Bergamo, Jeanette Wrate, Tad Weed, Mark Dresser, Bonnie Barnett, Brad Dutz, Kim Richmond, Billy Mintz, David Johnson, Michael Vlakovitch, Jeff Gauthier, William Roper and G.E. Stinson. The indie spirit of 9Winds (and it's oft-shaky financial status) continues in vanguard LA labels like Cryptogramophone, True Classical/Transparency, WIN and Plug Research.

Golia finds this all sweetly ironic. First, he came late to playing music--at age 25. Second, he was better known for his artwork that adorned albums by Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Joe Henderson. (He bought his first saxophone with the $300 he received for Corea's Song for Singing.) "We were super stoked to meet him; he knew all of our heroes," says guitarist Nels Cline. "He knew Anthony Braxton, Holland and Barry Altschul when they first playing as Circle. He'd seen Tony Williams' first concert with Lifetime He was like a window into that whole East Coast scene." Golia, in kind, was in awe of what was happening in LA: his most pressing errand--besides personally delivering a painting to Joni Mitchell--was to catch Captain Beefheart at the Whisky.

During the 70s, LA had few consistent showcases for the turbulent new music coming out of New York, Chicago and St. Louis (not to mention its own backyard). The exception was a Sunday afternoon concert series at the 99-seat Century City Playhouse that ran from 1976 to 1982, where Golia and friends met and musically cross-pollinated with the modernists who made their little-seen LA debuts there: Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, Tim Berne, Walter Thompson, Sonny Simmons, Wadada Leo Smith, Andrea Centazzo, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, a just-out-of-college John Zorn with Eugene Chadbourne. (One prescient showcase featured Bay Area guitarist Henry Kaiser accompanied by an unknown vocalist named Diamanda Galas.) The CCP also featured established "locals" like Bobby Bradford, John Carter and Horace Tapscott and emerging associates like James Newton and David Murray (when he was a student at Pomona College).

In addition, virtually every musician who played at the CCP stayed at the West LA home of Don and Thelma Cline and jammed with their eerily singular twins--percussionist Alex and guitarist Nels--in the guest house out back where they'd had been working out their own brand of improvised music since age eleven. "Alex would say, 'I'm not working today, I'll be up at ten' so I'd go over there at eleven and we'd play all day," says Golia. Alex brought home free jazz pianist Burton Green, whom he met on tour in Amsterdam. (Green was booted out for outstaying his welcome.) John Carter would show up in his Porsche SC. The late Horace Tapscott would pop by and jam with the brilliant bassist Roberto Miguel Miranda, who lived next door. Jamil Shabaka would drive up from Compton with a Muslim conga player named Bashir, who in turn brought a sweet potato pie. Hemphill got into hot water for raiding the liquor cabinet. Bakida Carroll would sleep over and, starting at 7am, blast Miles Davis on the hi-fi for the entire neighborhood's benefit As for the younger members of this LA cabal, the guest house became an invaluable sweat lodge. "We essentially taught each other how to play there," says violinist Jeff Gauthier, who would go on to co-found the chamber jazz ensemble Quartet Music. "We learned how to our musical antennae and really listen to each other-something that's unique to the scene here. There are plenty of great musicians in New York who can solo their brains out and play beautifully, but the hallmark of LA is that people really interact."

Even in this group, Vinny Golia cut an imposing, contradictory figure: thick stevedore arms, pickle-barrel chest, shagged-out Prince Valiant hair, often playing onstage in jeans, tank-tops and a Self-Realization Fellowship arm bracelet. He had two of the most forceful lungs on the West Coast ("The breath thing came naturally to me") and walked with New Yawk swagger and talked in gruff jazz lingo. He often wore longshoreman's caps and smoked a pipe--a trope gleaned from Anthony Braxton. He was old school Italian (bassist Ken Filiano dubbed him "Guinea Golia") yet meditated and had a whimsical sense of humor with an accompanying giggle that made him sound like an extremely hip child in a man's body.

"He was so different from anybody we ever met," says Lee Kaplan, who booked concerts at the CCP and worked with Golia at Rhino Records. "There really wasn't anybody in town interested in being multi-instrumental-a local equivalent of Anthony Braxton. Every three months he added a new instrument to his repertoire and a year later he was really good on each of them. Everything he played went like that!" John Rapson remembers watching, dumbfounded, as Golia picked up a ney, a Turkish instrument he had never played before: "Within twenty minutes, Vinny found the perfect tone. The guy who built the instrument said, 'I've never seen that before; most people labor three or four years before they do that!'" "He'd work construction jobs until he couldn't move his fingers," recalls Nels Cline. "By that time he'd built up enough money to stop for a while. When he could flex his fingers again, he'd practice from eleven in the morning till about 7am the next morning. Then he'd get some sleep, get up at ten and do it all over again." Once he awoke with the horn still in his mouth. "Nice image," Golia says, "but not the best to greet the morning with."

While this meant honing his craft to a laserlike degree, it also meant a lot of frustrations--namely, unreleased recording projects with bassist Larry Klein and the celebrated Indian violinist L. Subramaniam. Golia decided he was ready to self-produce. According to him, "9 Winds" had both spiritual and literal meaning: "It's the largest single digit you can have; and I had nine woodwind instruments when I started." (Now, it should be renamed "20 Winds and Counting.") For his first record, he modeled his ensemble after Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds: two horns (himself and Carter), bass (Roberto Miranda) and drums (Alex Cline). Golia rehearsed them in the Cline's guest house (where Nels still swears the late Carter's high-frequency clarinet runs killed his plants), played the CCP and recorded Spirits in Fellowship in one evening at Spectrum Studios on the Venice Boardwalk. NW#0101 was financed by Vinny's then father-in-law and released in October 1977 to an unexpectedly strong critical response. "He was very smart to have John on the first record and Bakida on the second-because it drew attention to the rest of us," says Alex Cline. "It wasn't just a business move, it made good musical sense: the meeting of these four minds created something far beyond anything Vinny had imagined." Spirits was eventually reprinted three times. Vinny, characteristically, is low key about the experience: "You might as well do your first record and take a stand if you think you're ready. I thought I was ready-although having John there made me play way over my head."

Largely because of 9Winds there is documentation of little-heard musicians in different configurations; not just from Los Angeles but Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego--even Vancouver and Mexico. (It's best seller to date was the New Klezmer Trio's debut Masks & Faces, which Vinny recently licensed to John Zorn's label.) 9Winds catalogue has swelled to 250 releases despite its piss-poor distribution. Not all of them are classics--some lean fractiously close to New Age noodlings and Golia's ambitious Large Ensemble is not for all tastes--but one still hopes for lavish reissues of Spirits in Fellowship (with a 17-minute performance that has never been heard); Elegies with Nels Cline and the late bassist Eric Von Essen (the first non-Golia release); the first two Quartet Music albums; anything by the late Richard Grossman; or pianist Wayne Peet's Down In-Ness. Nope. Not gonna happen. "Vinny's never been one to reinvestigate the past," says Alex Cline. "He's interest in Now. That's the way it is, we all have to get used to that." This includes Golia's own early records like The Gift of Fury and Slice of Life. "They're gone," he says. "I really don't like listening to myself-it's like going to the dentist. Besides, [the label's] always been an artist collaborative to showcase the people I have interaction with. Luckily, that happens to be the whole West Coast of North America."

Visit the 9Winds web site.

Selected reviews from the 9Winds catalog:

NWCD0189: The Vinny Golia Quintet, Nation of Laws (1999)
NWCD0203: Steve Adams & Vinny Golia, Circular Logic-Music for Woodwinds (1999)
NWCD0204: Susan Allen/Vinny Golia, Duets (1999)
NWCD0210/220: The Vinny Golia Large Ensemble, Oakland 1999 (1999)
NWCD0211: Oddbar Trio plus Trombone, Lost Art Cafe (1999)
NWCD0221: Barre Phillips/Bertram Turetzky/Vinny Golia, Trignition (2000)
NWCD0252: John Rapson, Water And Blood: The Billy Higgins Improvisations (2002)