Gunter Hampel
Web Site
September 1999

"I developed a concept of the voices and the beautiful clarinet of Perry and Mark Whitecage and my voice; we had a relationship, a tonal relationship with each other. We were using instruments which had colors and textures and I use all this to even play in the free music. In Germany everyone wanted to just play energy, but with Mark and Perry I could develop the concept more because these people were listening."

By Steven H. Koenig

“I was sitting with Paul Bley, sitting in the Westbeth and we were dreaming of how our future would be. This must have been around 1975 We had this vision that one day we would sit at Westbeth in our studio and perform, and then we could plug into the wall, and some club in San Francisco plugs into the wall and gets us via television, so we won’t have to travel over there, which costs so much money. At this time there were no computers. And I still think this is the way of the future.” As one of the foreparents of so-called free-jazz, Gunter Hampel has always looked forward, with strong peripheral visions. We’re sitting in his tiny East Village railroad flat, and Hampel speaks of our future, before we get down to the present and his past.

“My vision is that someone could listen to my website like to a radio station,” and hear all his music as it plays, available to whomever wants to download it. “I tape every one of my concerts, in whatever way I can, and I want to put all this on the Internet because this seems to be the best way. Every time you produce a CD it costs so much money. On the Internet it costs a certain amount to maintain that service, but not nearly as much as producing CDs.” He acknowledges the sound quality is not there yet on the ‘net. “This is what I’m waiting for. But if we can get this under control, it is possible to do it with higher quality We need better software, but is on its way. In this time when everyone is controlled by the big companies, we don't have the audiences any more. We used to play in the Knitting Factory; now we just fit in the AlterKnit room. In Europe, the situation is exactly the same.”

Gunter’s new quintet did a pair of exciting dates at The Knitting Factory this past September. Members included a pair of German horns and piano, and American bass and drums. Between gigs, they recorded a new disc, and after, Hampel played a duo concert with his saxophonist, Christian Weidner, in Downtown Music Gallery’s free Sunday evening music series. The bass clarinet and sax duos were the highlights of the DTMG gig, which was solid fun.

“This band is a real kicker for me. I’ve been travelling around the world a million times in order to find people like Marion Brown or Anthony Braxton, and this saxophonist, Chris Weidner is just amazing. I woke up one morning in my house and this singer had asked over a saxophonist who lives ten miles away from my home town of Göttingen; he was 17 years old. When woke up, someone was playing such incredibly nice saxophone I thought it was a recording, so I hired him on the spot. Chris now is 22. I already put out a duo record with Christian, Solid Fun; he’s another star.

“I was supposed to do a tour with Billy Bang, but he couldn’t go. I called up Christian and said, ‘Can you do it?’ and he said yes. I called the organizer and told him, because I don’t go to a concert with different people than I’ve contracted for. He told me, ‘No, come alone, we don’t know Christian. This is a little festival and we don’t want to disappoint the audience if you bring a young German here.’ I said, ‘This is Gunter Hampel speaking to you. If I tell you I’m, bringing someone who can make the gig, then believe me...’ When we came there they looked at this young guy, but once he started to play, no one ever mentioned the name Billy Bang; they were just so happy to have us both play there.

“Nils Wogram is the trombone player. He already has a couple of records out in Germany. He lived here in New York a couple of years ago a little while. He and I are playing together in a hip-hop band in Germany, so we are very close, but we never did a recording before. When I just did my recording with this band, I did one duo with Nils. It’s so fabulous that I told him when we get back home we’re going to go to Köln and do a duo record. He can play; he’s incredible. When a sixty year old and a twenty year old can get together to play music, crossing over generation...it’s all in your mind. I can learn from a kid as well as a kid can learn from me. So I have this incredible band. I’ve told these two that the future of jazz on Germany is on your backs; I will be long gone by then, but they will be capable to carrying the flame.”

American bassist Larry Rolland first came to my attention this year as a side player on gigs under various leaders, and he delighted me with his playing in and out of time, a buoy rather than an anchor. Hampel “met Larry Rolland through a friend, Garfield, a painter. He knows everyone; he’s my connection to the source. I did something I had never done in my life; I hired a musician without hearing him. I did the same thing with Sadiq, the drummer, who was recommended to me by Zane Massey. I knew his father, Cal Massey. I had in mind to ask Andrew Cyrille and Reggie Workman, but both of them are so busy. Larry and Sadiq, when I met them as people, I knew they were the right ones.

Dressed in his standard all-black and scarf, Hampel began his second AlterKnit gig with his composition “Jazz Life.” The band was even tighter tonight, with the piano finally included in the mix by the room engineer. “Jazz Life” could be described as Blue Note/modal/Afrikanische, perhaps Randy Westonish. Polyrhythms over the bass riff, the two horns brothers: squabbling, fighting, tackling, wrestling, loving. Hampel goes off on a wild solo, so energetic the vibes keep trying to roll off the platform, his lanky body bent at the waist over his instrument, pumping the peddles, mallets invisible in rapid fire. Nils Wogram first plays one strong note, then his metal mute is like a wah-wah pedal, strong as anything from Sly’s Stone’s “Stand” album. The piano plays a different mood from the rest, adding another texture to this jaunty piece, with three horns (Hampel now on bass clarinet) slamming with and against the rhythm section.

“Who’s Controlling Who?” is jaunty with a rhythm which recalls Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man.” Chris glows, smiling at the gorgeous vibe, pun intended, and he takes another approach as a sax overlay: a post-bebop sound with a velvet tone. The third piece begins with interplay between the horns, starting with squiggles by Chris. The rhythm section joins in and Nils’ trombone roars and blatts. The rhythm suddenly drops out, the thee horns going primeval. The final piece of tonight’s set opens with a hard, strong vibraphone with trombone joining in a strong rhythmic dance. The vibe makes a strange bass line, the horns joins in with an anthemic feel, then Hampel’s switches to bass clarinet. The piece ends with an excellent vibrating vibraphone tone.

The first AlterKnit gig was freer and the second was a bit tighter. “Because we had been in the studio recording for two days,” Hampel enjoins. I remark that Nils and Chris play together as if twins. “I think so too.” Hampel observed. ”These are very gifted people. The two of them are like brothers.”

Horns. Hampel seems to have an amazing affinity for horns; I believe when he hears another horn he plays at his peak. “Yes,” he admitted, “ I like to have another voice next to me. It’s like I said about Willem Breuker, we’re like too little kids playing together. Christian still is a kid, but he and I listen to each other on another level. It’s important that you always have people who challenge you,” and so I’m compelled to ask him about some of the respected musicians he’s worked with all his life.

Mark Whitecage? “It’s about time people are listening to that man. When I came here in 1969, 1971, the original Galaxie Dream Band was me and Jeanne and Perry. That trio was going to Europe as a trio. When I came back to New York, there was this loft scene. We had twenty, thirty, even forty people play with me. We couldn’t have all these people play at the same time, and Mark was one of the first because he was friends with Perry Robinson. Whenever I brought these bands to Germany, Mark was always with us; he was one of the closest people to me. I always told Mark, Jeanne, Perry: put out your own stuff, you are great. You deserve to have your own records.”

Dialog is a recent duo CD with German saxer Matthias Schubert, who has a great Enja disc as leader, The Blue and Grey Suite. Hampel explains, “Matthias Schubert once confessed to me that I was the reason he became a jazz musician. He’s coming from the same town as Christian Weidner. He used to come to the Galaxie Dream Band concerts when he was just eleven years old. This made him pick up the horn and become a jazz musician. Years later, wherever he played, there was someone practicing the saxophone; it was always Matthias. One day I heard him and I was impressed what an incredible saxophone player he is; he is enormous. We even played in the old Knitting Factory about ten years ago; I have tapes of it. He made a little name for himself in Germany.

At times Hampel has espoused the term free-jazz, and at other times rejected it. “This is why I don’t like the term free-jazz: A lot of people think anything goes. Sure, that’s part of it, but if you want to get to such a spirit in music you have to work, and I found at that screaming horns is one thing, it’s beautiful, it’s fantastic, but when I played with Peter Brötzmann, we still play together, but he plays so loud that everyone has to play as loud as him. He says of himself, ‘I’m the loudest saxophonist in the world.’ I said okay, if that’s what you want to be be it, but I want to play music with you. I don’t want to fight the instruments. He’s wonderful, but he scares himself and everyone around him. He’s wonderful. I love him; we both love each other, but we can hardly play with each other. It’s either Peter or no one. I’m playing flute and vibraphone and bass clarinet; I cannot play as loud as Peter Brötzmann. Those instruments just don’t make that kind of noise, so I was thinking, I should surround myself my musicians who are listening to me, and I worked out a special way of combining voices together, because I learned Schoenberg and Webern, and they opened up a room, as space. Music is always time and space, and they went beyond the rules we have when we play standards.

“My parents didn’t want me to become a musician. My parents said to me, ‘You become an architect,’ because my father was a roofmaker. Actually, he wanted me to be a static engineer, and then he wanted me to study the law, and study engineering law. My father said that’s the big money. Little did I know at the time that Duke Ellington was an architect too. They work with modules, and that’s what musicians do too, so this helped me early on.

“Voices, and orchestration. I developed a concept of the voices and the beautiful clarinet of Perry and Mark Whitecage and my voice; we had a relationship, a tonal relationship with each other. We were using instruments which had colors and textures and I use all this to even play in the free music. In Germany everyone wanted to just play energy, but with Mark and Perry I could develop the concept more because these people were listening. So I took the music a bit further than maybe Peter or Alex because I came to the United States and found musicians who were ready for it. I changed the big bands into string and clarinets orchestras because I wanted to get more intimacy.

“Someone like Gil Evans, a master, there are super arrangers in this country. You whistle a tune you have a composition, but to arrange it, that is where mastery comes in. That is one of the reasons I wanted to come here. I studied with Frank Foster and a lot of others so I could learn from the masters first hand. I needed that craft in order to develop my music, but I’m more like Duke Ellington. I’m using people to play my music. I’m using the music to tune each other in and then using the inner light of the people to make the sound. I don’t care of it’s a trombone or the saxophone; I care for the person who plays it. To be with the person that close that we are family; I have to be able to stand the vibrations of that person. Then I can make great music and not just hiring an instrument.

“Christian and Nils, they haven’t played together before. That was the first time they played together; this is my real greatness. I’m sorry to mention my name along with Ellington, but it took me a long time to understand what I had there, that I’m not just a decent musician, but I’m a composer and arranger. Plus, I have the gift of being a bandleader who can craft a bunch of people to play something they wouldn't play on their own. Mark Whitecage is one who finally gets his own stuff out there, and I’m glad, because I told him so twenty years ago, but as a horn player it’s not so easy to succeed. I heard some on the radio. I wish Perry would catch up; he’s playing with Burton Greene and he’s playing this klezmer music. Burton is a beautiful being. One day I was in Amsterdam at Burton’s place. We played, and at the end he was underneath the piano playing the strings with his fingers and he said, ‘Gunter, I found it!’ He finally found out it was important to bring out what’s in you. To look inside yourself and to say, I don't hide anymore, I’m putting myself out there and that’s me. Since that time we are close friends; it was have been twenty-five years ago.

“Louis Armstrong turned me on to jazz when i was eight years old. I went through the whole evolution of playing all jazz styles until there wasn’t anyone more to copy. When you learn to speak, it expresses something about your point of view, and when you play music, your first learn from the great masters, but it’s not your voice. I think it was the drummer Philly Joe Jones who said about himself, ‘These are my hands which are playing, this are not the hands of Baby Dodds, or Max Roach. These are my hands.’ This is what musicians have to realize, because if they copy someone, they play with the hands of the other man.”

As early as 1960, with his colleagues Hampel began to create “some really free forms of jazz. In 1964 I had a wonderful quartet with Manfred Schoof playing the trumpet, Alexander von Schlippenbach on the piano; these guys have all made their own names in the meantime. Buschi Niebergall, a wonderful bass player from Holland. The drummer was Pierre Courbois, and we had, in Europe, the first unit which, so to speak, could play 'with our own hands.' That record was called Heartplants and that got the first wonderful reviews. It’s in print right now only in Japan. I had the chance to put that band together again. I was invited to a huge new music festival in Köln, and Köln has money, so they invited the Chicago Symphony, they got Pierre Boulez to play there, Stockhausen, and they had this program to invite people who contributed to some new forms on music in the twentieth-century and I was lucky enough to be chosen and it was just the same feeling as thirty-five years ago. These guys are still top. “That was the beginning of my music, and that band played all over Europe. We played the Blue Note opposite Kenny Clarke. We naturally mingled all the time with Kenny Clarke and everyone came by: Coltrane, Rollins, the Modern Jazz Quartet and who have you, because the Blue Note in Paris, that was the center of jazz in Europe. After that band, I moved to Holland in 1966 and I met Willem Breuker. I played in a festival in Holland with my group, which then had succeeded the Heartplants unit, and Willem just came backstage and said, “Hey, can I invite you to stay in my house in Amsterdam.” Willem and me, we just started to play from the very first moment. We were like two boys playing in sandcastles, because Willem is a very humorous person. He has a lot of humor in him, and I was the serious German, you know. Because we were so different, we were like two brothers playing with sandcastles where one brother builds the castle and the other comes and destroys it. So you have to build it up again, and it doing this, tearing stuff down and having to build it up again; that was our creative way of playing music.”

Chided about the stereotype he gave of Germans, Hampel smiled, “I’m very serious that way. Not that I don’t have humor and laugh, but when I think music, when I play music, I go as deep as I can. This is my fun, playing this music. You cannot buy this for money. You saw those two concerts in the AlterKnit theater. Even with the new players you could already feel the teamwork, and if you work in a successful team, and it’s happening, you lift off over and over. For a musician, this is the highest thing that can happen.

“I noticed that the Lower East Side, downtown thing is still working, but I used to work at Sweet Basil, the Blue Note and Carnegie Hall, Slug’s. Even then we put out a festival in 1972. My generation was the first generation that had to become producers as well in order to survive. I’m sixty-two. The image of the jazz musician, up to the ‘fifties, was this guy, this musician, comes in my house, empties my ice box be cause he’s hungry, and he’s drinking my beer because he’s thirsty. He’s playing wonderful music, but he’s making only forty dollars because he’s playing in a nightclub, so I support him. But our generation said there must be more to our profession than just hanging loose or being drunk and playing great. The business in the ‘forties or ‘fifties, even Miles Davis or John Coltrane, they gave drugs to the guys so they could play and they recorded it and the musicians didn’t even know.

“There was a time when no one had money, and the reason is, we were the first generation to try to take care of the business and now, Wynton Marsalis and those guys, they don’t come out without their lawyer, and that’s actually very good.”

Hampel mused about “not having money, and having to live in a dump like this, and you need more room for rehearsals. I have four musicians staying over here for two weeks.” There are a few chairs and one narrow bed in his tiny, narrow Manhattan railroad flat, yet his thoughts constantly return to the music and the friendships. “I had my whole big band in here, twenty people, from 'Smitty' Smith to Bob Stewart.” Their instruments too? “Yes, you wouldn’t believe it! Marvin came to the rehearsal. He just put everything in his bass drum, and he was just carrying the bass drum with all the gear inside of it, with another bag on his back with all the cymbals and stuff, and he put his little drum out here, i gave him the charts, and believe me, my big band charts are not easy. When he played them, he sounded like they were just written for him.

“I have completed almost a thousand compositions now, big and small, long and short. 'That Came Down On Me' was a piece I wrote in Germany. My son was just three or four years old, and there I was, just playing my vibraphone and after while we played this and (he sings “baba dudem bopbop, baba dudem bopbop,” the head of the piece) in our rooms, there was never enough space, and so there were some clothes falling on us, and when I was playing the vibraphone, my son was loaded with jackets and coats all over and they he went, ‘Ow! That came down on me.’ I took that title because anything from above can be very spiritual. It came down on me, and then I made an arrangement of that piece.

"See, we do ‘instant composing’ when we play. Every composition has a certain magic. In Indian music, they let the melody instrument just wait it out, and tune himself, and then when he’s tuned in, the tabla player joins him. They don’t just count it off the way we do. When you come from the road and have been driving eight hours to the gig, you are full of all that road stuff, so it’s nice to play a little tune and tune yourself in with the other person you’re going play with. If it’s only one minute, we are tuned in and the machine has been oiled and we are loose and we can play. Then I guide us through it, like that phrase ‘instant composing.’ The kids today make a big thing of it like it’s new, but I mean, Ellington used that phrase.

“When I started to play my music, which wrongly was put into the free-jazz music category, that’s what we did. We jumped head over into a note and disappeared in one note and found out that in one note there’s so much more music. If I had to label my music, my music is the music if Gunter Hampel, the music of Duke Ellington, the music of Mingus, the music of Stockhausen. It’s as important as that and it means nothing. It’s just very personal and emotional music which the Lord filters through me.

"Did you ever read the book Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse? It’s about music. That book talks about how music is a big tree, and all of us composer are in and at and on and are that tree. We are just a little branch here and there depending when we join. When you master your craft, and you are capable of putting out your music, then you are part of it. When I played with Archie Shepp, he said to me, ‘Gunter, you’re playing from your heart.’ I don’t know what it takes; it takes endurance, it takes practice, it takes playing with good people who work hard. When I played with Kenny Clarke... he has such big ears. It was like he was carrying me. With all those German cats I had to count, and with Kenny I didn’t have to count at all. We just started to play the tune and I forgot all the mechanics; I just kept on doing, doing my dance. From that time on I always saw that I had good drummers to play with.

“The first concert I did with Marion Brown was Baden-Baden, the big Free Jazz Meeting, in 1967. The bass player was Barre Phillips and the drummer was Steve McCall from Chicago. I lived in Belgium at the time and I drove and we were very late. There was television, radio; everyone was waiting for us, and the band had never played together before, we had no rehearsal. I set up my vibraphone and Marion licked his reeds, warmed up his saxophone, and we already had to go out on stage. We still didn’t know what to play. We looked around at each other and Marion turned to me and he said, ‘You start.’ I started to play a vibraphone solo and I wasn’t even through with it, just into it a couple of minutes, and suddenly the bass and drums were playing with my vibraphone like no one had ever played before. they were just embellishing it and helping me, and Marion had this beautiful tone and his notes were melting with my vibraphone notes and we played through for about two hours in one set. We just played and listened to each other and that was some of the greatest things we ever did in our lives.

Asked to add some vibraphone solos to a hip-hop record, which sold heavily in Germany, Hampel said, “All of a sudden, I get known by the kids, because when you sell one hundred thousand records, you’re in one hundred thousand households. We went on tour, so all of a sudden I’m on MTV and I’m playing before thousands of kids and they’ve never heard a live jazz musician before; they’ve never seen a vibraphone in their life and they are as enthusiastic about me as I am about them, because their fathers don’t do this. And so I’m exposed to a new generation and bringing them the jazz. You saw how young my musicians are I have playing with me. A young rapper came to me and said, ‘Since I met you, I’m buying jazz records now. I just bought me Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Man, that’s some wonderful stuff,’ he says. ‘These people had fun playing together.’ He hears that fun. That means we should make education programs. Jeanne Lee and I have been doing that for thirty years; I’ve written a fairy tale which I used for my kids to fall asleep every night. We performed it at the Third Street Music Settlement down the street here, Steve McCall and Perry Robinson, Jeanne and myself. We made that as a play for kids to join; they make their own costumes and they perform parts of it. Jeanne lets them develop their own poetry....we involve them. These programs should be put out as software.”

The titles of Hampel's works are numbered as well as named, as are the works of Anthony Braxton. The two were early collaborators. “I’m close to a thousand, but I have at least another thousand unfinished works lying around. This is why I number them. This is the only way to keep them in order. The ones I have finished at least as far as I can perform them, these get a number.” He shows me the new Penguin Jazz Guide, and said, “They put my name in there. They finally got the idea that I’m contributing something. In one of these books, it says, after Anthony Braxton met Gunter, he probably got the idea to number his pieces. (He laughs.) We were very close; we still are. When we met, I was playing with Marion Brown, Steve McCall and Barre Phillips, playing all around Europe, and Steve is from Chicago. Marion called home and said, 'We are playing here, we’re making money, we’re making great, great music here,' so one day thirty-three Chicagoans came to Paris, with a Volkswagen, their wives and families and their instruments. I lived in Paris at the time, and they played everywhere. Wherever there was a pace for a musician to do a concert, in an embassy or a theater, in a club or marketplace.

"In ‘68 there was this big revolution in this country as well as in Europe, where I define it as the revolution of the spirit. People say it was the time of sex and rock and roll and drugs, but that’s stupid. That was there too, but it wasn’t the main thing. The main issue was that finally, after all these centuries, the spirit came out. I recall one time Steve McCall and I had just come from the studio and all of a sudden we couldn’t walk down the street because the French police were running down the street fully armed, glass helmets and all, and I was standing there with parts of my vibraphone and Steve was standing there with his drums and this policeman came and started hollering at us, he wanted to hit us down, so we ran back into the house. People were turning over cars and picking up stones to throw, and we went back into this hotel room upstairs, and Steve was playing me all the tapes from the Chicago brothers up there. Braxton and Leo Smith and Muhal Richard Abrams, and all these guys, and this is how he introduced me to them, and when I heard Anthony, I said, well I have to meet this incredible musician. That was some very rough and tough times, but then a year later the Chicagoans came to Paris.

“When Anthony and Leo Smith and the Art Ensemble, Roscoe and Joseph came, we became very close friends because we were friends of Steve’s. All of a sudden we realized we were working at the same point; we were bringing grace back into the music. At that time, it was all very stormy, but the Chicagoans and myself, somehow we had something more to give. I was playing with Jeanne and Steve with the AACM and I was standing behind a tree and Anthony went over to Jeanne and said, 'Where’s Gunter!' because Steve had told him about me. When we met it was like, wow, it was like I had a brother, like a spiritual brother. We brought our music, we practiced, we played a little here and there with flutes and I said, 'Anthony, you have to be on my next record,' and he said ‘Ya, Let’s do it.’ Marion had already gone back to America. In Paris was the BYG company, but they didn’t pay anyone. When I saw that this was a sell-out of musicians, I called up Willem Breuker in Holland and said I’m coming over and I want to record. I brought Anthony and Jeanne and Steve to Holland because there was this engineer I’d met who was fantastic, someone who really listened to our music. We taped. On that trip Steve’s wonderful cymbals got lost, and so we called up Han Bennink to get his cymbals for the recording. That became the recording The 8th of July, one of the greatest. I was lucky to meet all those people who were capable of having a music to unite us into a recording, because we never did a live performance.

"After I had done this recording I did my solo record. I dared to put out a solo record in 1969. You should have seen the jazz critics. They said, ‘Jazz music is not playing alone! It’s playing together with other people!’ I just had the idea and did it; I didn’t think about it. I was the first one to put out solo record which was not a piano record, a record called Dancers. This was even before Gary Burton’s. When I had those two records in the can, I moved to New York, 1969. I used to live in The Bronx, because Jeanne lived in The Bronx. I got along with the people; they didn’t rob me, steal; my instruments. The kids wanted to know who I was, this crazy-speaking German with long hair.

First I went to Bernard Stollman from ESP Records. Yes he would be interested, but he wouldn’t have any money or a contract to give me. Sunny Murray told me he took a gun in his pocket and he got something from Bernard Stollman, but what I got was copies of my record. He said to me, ‘You can have as many as you can carry,’ So I loaded myself up. The thing with Bernard Stollman is and was he liked the music. It was his fatal error; becoming a producer and liking this music, because he wanted to put out all the music of records he liked. He had seen a television show with Benny Goodman in which I took part. I was playing in Belgium in this big festival, with my band including Willem Breuker and Peter Kowald. An incredible set of music there, and I had a whole hour to perform. Benny Goodman came on stage when he played with his television crew. While we were playing, a voice said, ‘Can we tape this?’ When Benny heard these two guys, me and Willem Breuker, both playing the bass clarinet, he flipped. He couldn’t help taping it for his show; one of his rare performances, in 1966. He played right after us. I found a record later on with Benny Goodman playing the bass clarinet with Red Norvo.”

The tale continues. “Stan Getz was playing with Gary Burton. He borrowed my vibraphone from me; they got my music for nothing, they took my instruments,” Gunter laughed, “but I got on American television because Benny loved it. they put ten minutes of it on the air and Bernard Stollman heard it and said ‘I have to get these guys on my record company,’ so I got a phone call from Stollman: ‘Tape it! Tape it and give me the tape!’ so I went to Holland and taped it and sent it to him. I never got paid for it. Even the engineer didn’t get paid; he paid nothing. He probably just had enough money to put out the records and that’s it. But I understand him now, because I’m sometimes in the same position. I can put out the record, and can give a little money to the musicians, but we all have to wait until the money is coming back.”

With so many Stollman stories going around, I had to ask if he said he was going to give Hampel money? “Oh yeah, sure, sure. I had a contract with him. I had a percentage deal with him. First it was reissued on Phillips. Then it was sold to the a German company, ZYX, and then it came out in Japan, because I got copies. So this is why I tried to get money from them, but I’d have to get a lawyer, and the lawyer would cost me more than the money I could get out of them”

Then came other famous producers. “In 1969, I gave my 8th of July and my Dancers to Bob Thiele. Birth Records 01 and Birth 02. I was lucky; see, Marion Brown had some record out through Bob Thiele on Impulse! Marion Brown said I have to get this band (Brown, McCall, Phillips) to the United States because nobody plays music like this. Bernard Stollman didn’t want to put it out. I went to CBS, but they sent it back to me, and I remembered Bob Thiele and I went to his office and left it with his secretary. I was on my way out, and Thiele came out and took me in his office and said, ‘I’ll listen to it over the weekend and call you if I like it.’ I went home and the next morning he already called. He said, ‘Please, some to my office. This is great stuff. I want to do a contract with you. I want to make a contract to put out two records a year with you as long as you want’ so I rushed to his office, and he gave me this contract. When I read this contract, I called it a Hollywood contract. I said okay, wonderful; we’ll do it but let me go to my lawyer with this contract. He said ‘Change whatever you want to.’

“The lawyer explained that if I signed the contract as it was, I’d be signing everything over to him. I mean everything: my likeness, my name, everything. With the lawyer I changed the contract, but Thiele signed it. He thought I was smart to do this, because all the other artists who were with him, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, signed it, so I at least could sleep. He put it out on Flying Dutchman and sent it to all the radio stations. It already had gotten a review in Downbeat, but now he supplied everyone with it, which I couldn’t afford to do, and so the record got around and people heard for the first time Anthony Braxton, Jeanne Lee and Steve McCall, even in this country, because the Delmark record, not everyone was so hip to buy. Just a few Chicago people.

“The first time I saw Jeanne on German television playing with Ran Blake, on a barstool, and she was singing “Laura.” But this voice! When I did this recording for ESP, Jeanne and her husband David Hazleton, who was a poet, and her little daughter Naima, were in that studio while we were doing that recording. Naima was two years old. She happened to kick a beer bottle while we were recording; I had to cut that out, to cut a note short to cut that sound out. But Jeanne had heard out stuff and this is how we met. A couple of weeks later Willem said he could do a concert together with Jeanne. She had done some free stuff with Ian Underwood, a great sax player from the Mothers of Invention. Jeanne had not really had the chance to play with a whole free-jazz group. She really looked forward to performances with us because she felt there was really something going on. We cut a record for a German label, Wergo. They can’t seem to find the tapes. I still have some copies of the tape, and I already talked to Willem Breuker about it, and we both have record labels. The same with another great record on MPS, a quartet record with Perry Robinson and Jeanne in New York. It sits with Polygram. I wanted to buy it back, but they said they bought the whole MPS catalog and they don’t want to rip it apart. Albert Mangelsdorff called me up and he was crying, ‘Gunter, all my work is lost because that motherfucker sits up there and he doesn’t want to publish it.’” Eventually Mangelsdorff’s three MPS LPs were reissued in on a double CD. “What I want to do is sell my Birth label to a larger corporation so it gets better distribution. I need to make tabula rasa so I can start with all the current projects I am doing. I’d like to get a lot of money so I can start new recordings, so if you knew anyone with money...”

Gunter is excited: “I just got back from the Knitting Factory, because they are going to put both of our concerts on the Internet and you can download it.” Years ago, sitting in a room with Paul Bley...