By Lazaro Vega

Trombonist Jeb Bishop formed the Jeb Bishop Trio in December of 1996 in order to explore the possibilities of composing for the minimal but extremely versatile trio format, and in order to have a vehicle for improvising at length within looser compositional frameworks.

On February 3, 2000 Jeb Bishop spoke with Blue Lake Public Radio's Lazaro Vega.

Lazaro Vega: What were you doing tonight, what was going on with the recording session? Was that you or another band?

Jeb Bishop: It was a project we've been doing for about a week now, this thing Ken Vandermark organized called The Territory Band, which is a nine-piece band with Chicago people. Basically the Vandermark 5 line-up plus Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello, and plus two out of town guests, Axel Durner on trumpet from Germany, and Paul Lytton on drums, the legendary English percussionist now living in Belgium, actually. But, we did four days of rehearsal, and then we did a gig last night at the Empty Bottle and today and tomorrow we're recording a CD for Okka Disc. It's five extended compositions by Ken that we're doing. It's pretty ambitious in terms of structure and length of the compositions: we're really taking advantage of all the textural and compositional possibilities in a nine-piece group.

Vega: That's one thing I thought the Vandermark 5 did a good job with at the recent Tribute to Lester Bowie.

Bishop: Oh yeah! Were you there? Oh, I didn't know that.

Vega: Your version of "New York is Full of Lonely People" was, like you said -- Ken marshals the forces at hand.

Bishop: Yes, I think Ken as a composer has really gotten more and more ambitious in terms of his thinking about structure and, yeah, arrangement.

Vega: I remember when I first heard him he was with the NRG Ensemble. The UICA brought Hal Russell's band up here to Grand Rapids when Hal was alive. Then I heard Ken with the band and he just seemed to be primarily an energy music improvisor. So when the Vandermark 5 first came to Schuler Books and Music in Grand Rapids, that blew me away, that aspect of writing.

Bishop: Yes. I think his sense of composition, I mean you'd have to talk to him about it, has gotten progressively more and more complex over the last years.

Vega: Let's talk about the trio that's coming to Grand Rapids with Kent Kessler, bass, and Tim Mulvenna, drums: That for you musically seems to have a great deal of the same elements that you're talking about. It is an improvisational setting but seems to have a lot of cues for rhythmic shifts.

Bishop: Yes, I see the trio thing as special to me as this thing where compositionally you can approach it in a really minimal way. When you're doing compositions for a trio the goal, for me anyway, is to have something that uses a minimal amount of structure but still manages to create a distinctive context. You know what I'm saying? So you want to have something that has material that is stripped down in a way that corresponds to the stripped down nature of the trio structure, but still establishes a distinctive framework or context for improvising.

Vega: It's not necessarily just a melodic fragment, like a head.

Bishop: No. That's one element; certainly, some of the tunes are based around that. But also I try to think in terms of the different combinations of duos, for example, that are possible within a trio, or the different textural possibilities that are open to us with the particular backgrounds of the players. You don't have to just deal with melodic stuff. I can tell these guys to do certain kinds of a textural approach and they can respond to that. We've worked together, Kent, Tim and I, have worked together a lot in the last few years so we have a shared basis for talking about that kind of thing.

Vega: It seemed to me that "Nomads," for instance, was sort of like the Ornette Coleman ballad "Beauty Is a Rare Thing."

Bishop: O.k. I can see that.

Vega: Maybe you weren't thinking about that, but it sort of has that ebb and flow.

Bishop: I wasn't thinking of that in particular. I was actually thinking when I wrote it, that was a while back, when I came up with that melodic thing and that kind of slow, stately rhythmical thing without being in a definite pulse I was thinking of certain late Coltrane things, as late as "Expressions" for example. That's the kind of melodic stuff you find on that.

Vega: I've really been enjoying the CD and in fact for this Saturday morning 's radio program I put "Big Stubby" on. That's on my promo for this Saturday morning's show. That's a little more hard hitting.

Bishop: Yeah, that's more hard driving, a free/hard-bop kind of head. That's a tune we like to take and extend more in performance a lot of times, more than is evident on the CD actually.

Vega: It's interesting to hear this trombone trio. The only other I can really think of right now is the Barry Altschul record with Ray Anderson, "Brahma."

Bishop: Yes, I've heard some of that. Ray Anderson has a number of trios and things out. Yeah, it's a lot different.

One of the models I tend to think of for this group is another contemporary group is Ab Baars Trio, the trio of the Dutch saxophone player Ab Baars, the trio with Martin Van Duynhoven who's on percussion and Wilbert De Joode on bass.

Vega: Is this a group you encountered when you were going to school in Europe?

Bishop: No, I didn't hear them until later. I heard of those guys from hanging around Chicago. They're part of the Dutch scene. There's an awareness of that stuff here in Chicago. I have just one CD by these guys, but I've gotten to see them in live performance also. They came here probably a year and a half ago.

There's just something about the way he approaches the composition for that group. It's similar to the concept I was talking about: having a minimal amount of information that sets up a space, the composition.

Vega: So when you're talking about a "minimal amount of information" could you give me a for-instance with that? Is that just like a modal scale?

Bishop: No, it varies according to the tune. In some tunes it's instructions for the kind of space that we're going to explore, and in some tunes it's a melodic fragment, and in some tunes it's a rhythmic idea with some minimal melodic information. It's hard to explain it without going more into the details of the particular tune, which is hard to do if we don't sit down with a piece of paper and I show you what it is.

But, sometimes it's a little more complicated, but it is never as complicated as the stuff we do in the Vandermark 5, for example, that's much more about complicated arrangements of material.

Vega: And a lot of unison playing.

Bishop: In a trio the trombone can play unison with a bass, and that happens sometimes, but even when that happens it has a more stripped down feeling than when it's within a quintet context.

Vega: You mentioned the Dutch scene in Chicago a moment ago, and it really is striking to me how Chicago was instrumental in the development of free jazz. The birth of it through Sun Ra and his presence there, and eventually the AACM, which seems to be a form of musical exploration that was picked up in Europe. But I've interviewed Paul Lytton and he said, No man, that had nothing to do with what we did, we did our own thing. So maybe that seems to be an overgeneralization. In any case there seems to be a similarity in attitudes about expressing music without necessarily having to be beholden to harmony, rhythm and melody.

Bishop: Yes. Well, it's just trying to find something new. Harmony, for example, was thoroughly explored by certain figures and then you come along and you feel like people who came before have done what can be done with that. And you don't want to ignore it, but you also don't want to just repeat what other people have done, so you try to find a different way.

Vega: Absolutely. I've spoken to Roscoe Mitchell about it before and he'll say, Let's build a piece on contour, or something to that effect. Texture is always a way, and another thing is just the acoustical properties of a room.

Bishop: That's true: in particular the acoustical properties of a particular instrument in a particular room. Each instrument as played by a particular player has it's own acoustical properties. Part of what you are doing in dealing with the general musical area that we're dealing with is exploring the acoustic properties of your instrument and then being aware of the properties of the space in which you find yourself playing in.

I certainly have a different experience playing the trombone at the Empty Bottle, for example, as opposed to playing at Airwaves, the studio that we record at. Those are very different spaces to record in. Or at Schuler Books and Music: I've played there a couple of times. That acoustically is a very different space than the typical concert hall or rock club.it's a good space to play in, and I like playing in a space like that that is not like a bar.

On to part 2 of the Jeb Bishop interview