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Craig Taborn: Suggesting Textural Dimension
Phil DiPietro
Phil wishes he was a musician (well, he is one, but he wishes he were a good one) but he's not frustrated by it. He's frustrated with a lot of other aspects of the so-called biz. Therefore, he's excited by independently released jazz.AAJ: And there's a Clownfinger as well, with a bassist.
CT: Yeah. That was ..yeah, I see what you mean. Tim basically, if he changes personnel, that's a different group largely because it's based around the identity improvisationally of the group. Clownfinger has Scott Colley on bass and Herb Robertson on cello too. A larger group that's much different sonically. Clownfinger hasn't recorded yet.
AAJ: That'd be good, if they did I mean.
CT: Yeah (laughs).
AAJ: Has he intimated to you anything that's comin' up?
CT: I don't know exactly. He's always got schemes but I don't know what the final form will be.
AAJ: I noted you guys are doing a week at the Knitting Factory in March?
CT: Then we're going to Europe for three weeks.
AAJ: I wanted to ask, in terms of US touring, why you guys stay put in New York. No US mini-tour or anything?
CT: Well, we've played other places before. It's actually just a little harder in the states. It's getting better and people are trying but it's hard to mount certain kinds of tours.
AAJ: That's kind. Everyone I talk to says it's really bad.
CT: It's challenging. And when you can do it ..it can be really fun. There are great audiences everywhere. It's just the infrastructure isn't set up the same way it is in Europe in terms of how jazz and improvising artists tour. Once the infrastructure gets set up a different way here, it'll be easier to mount different tours like that. You have to create or trail blaze in that sense. In all these towns you have to get the venues and then you have to hook it up..make sure you can get there and'the money is definitely less because it's not as subsidized, but...
AAJ: I've seen such great players come up here from New York and play bad venues and get terrible doors ,with just a short hop up to Boston.
CT: It's hard, but I think there has to be some trail blazing done to create the network. It's not just going to materialize. You have to set it up that way and keep going to certain places to even develop an audience of people who are going to come out. I say that knowing people who've done that. Like Happy Apple in their region and the regional thing they've done in the Midwest. They paid a lot of dues developing that scene but now they can mount a tour and go through a number of towns and have a massive turnout. It's not lightweight when they gig live. It just takes time to develop that, and that's something that hasn't always happened. I think Tim did a certain amount of that with Bloodcount, definitely. Tim does a lot of little tours he does. Like Paraphrase, the thing he has with Drew Gress, he's done the southwest before. With this group we just haven't done it yet. It doesn't mean that we won't do it. With me, the electronics up the ante with the travel thing. We've got to figure out what we're going to take and how.
AAJ: So, your own thing. Your debut or your second cd. In fact, a lot of people probably look at your second record as your debut record.
CT: Yeah, in certain circles I think it is. The gap's so wide between them.
AAJ: Tell us about the concept for Light Made Lighter or what brought you to that point.
CT: The biggest thing I was exploring, on that, was dealing with that trio, the piano trio concept, and trying to, while staying true to certain conventions, to discard others. It wasn't that willful in that sense. I'm just always interested in the sonic space certain ensembles create and how you can exploit that'how much the identity of a certain ensemble is built around certain instruments, and how they play their role in the space.
AAJ: I know where you found Gerald. Where'd you find Chris Lightcap?
CT: I had known him for a while. At the time, he and Gerald were playing a lot with Joe Morris , and Mat Maneri was in there with that group. They had developed a thing and I had seen them play. I just really liked what had developed with them as a rhythm section. This is between 1998 and 2000. There are a couple records with them'one is live at the Knitting Factory, which is one of the gigs I saw. Again, Matt Shipp just threw that out as a possible rhythm section both Gerald and Chris, and I said, 'You know what? You're closer than you even know.' It was very fortuitous. Little did he know I was already there, in a way.
AAJ: Chris can really change his sound up from one song to the next. He gets that denser deep plucking sound and then he'll have a singing tone, like a different guy is in there.
CT: His technical thing is very evolved that way. He has a lot of control over his sound in that form. It's from the way he's playing and he uses it, which is why I heard him in the context of that project, because that's exactly what I was going for. Y'know, I didn't even talk to anybody'that's the beauty of that'that I didn't say that to anybody...I didn't sit down and say, 'I want to try to do something this way.' I just knew it would happen. But the way I was trying to approach the piano and the way Gerald was approaching his kit, and Chris...I wanted everybody to pull out all the stops with the sonic possibilities with their instrument and then still explore the material we played. It creates different possibilities. Instead of'a lot of piano trios go for a more focused concept, with everybody honing in on specific sounds with their instrument. I wanted to do the opposite in a sense.
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