Dan Kinzelman: Stream of Consciousness

AAJ: Is there overlap between the repertoire of Ghost Horse and that of Hobby Horse?

DK: Ghost Horse plays all new music, written for the band by Joe, Stefano and I, with the exception of one song I wrote several years ago for Hobby Horse. Getting the musicians we wanted wasn't simple because they are all very busy, but once we had confirmed their availability, we all went into a kind of writing frenzy. I ended up writing and arranging five or six tunes in about ten days. I knew Joe and Stefano's playing really well, and I just sat thinking a lot about their sounds and personalities enriched and surrounded by the sounds and personalities of the musicians we had chosen: Gabrio Baldacci on baritone guitar, impeccable taste and a vast sonic palette, together with Glauco Benedetti's amazing work on tuba and Filippo Vignato, one of the most interesting trombone players in Italy.

I think that in comparison to Hobby Horse there's a little less individual freedom, and this is for several reasons: First of all, there are a lot more voices to fit together, but beyond that, all the new instruments work in a fairly low tessitura and we all have big sounds. This means we are learning gradually how to balance everything. But now that we've had a chance to try out the material in a number of concerts, we're starting to find space and freedom within it, and the improvised parts are becoming really interesting...

AAJ: Is the music more organized and written out than what we're used to with Hobby Horse?

DK: Yes, the music is a lot more densely written and the first concerts were pretty highly organized, but this is also because we are in an early phase of the project: We had a lot on our plates just to learn to execute the music, but in recent concerts the training wheels are coming off, and each of us is beginning to find his own space. It's incredible how much richer the music becomes in this phase of the process: It's a delicate moment, because we have to balance composition, solo space and collective improvisation, but the general idea is that of blending things in such a way that it feels very organic, and the borders are not too clear where the composition ends and the improvisation begins.

AAJ: I was at your show at the Metastasio Jazz Festival in Pisa, Italy, a beautiful performance and interesting writing; but my personal impression was that the winds tended to blend together too much, so that individual voices were a bit hard to follow.

DK: I see what you're saying. The music is still new to us and we are still exploring it, but it's also a question of the approach we are taking and the goals we have in mind: We are trying to create sonic worlds here, and this means we need to concentrate on a collective sound. Individual solos in this context are not the main priority. That said, for the following shows we memorized almost all of the music, and this has had an incredibly liberating effect for everyone, creating a feeling of spaciousness that we didn't have before. With such a unique combination of sounds, we need to explore as a band to discover what forms of dialog are possible, and how to maintain balance with such a mass of sound. But the band is growing fast, and the last tour offered us some glimpses of it can (and will) become.

AAJ: When you compose are you inspired by something specific or do you just write without reference to anything?

DK: It's hard for me to answer this question because in a certain sense I actually have no idea what I'm doing when I write. I think Kenny Wheeler said something like 'I don't really know how I write, and I don't want to know because I'm afraid it might not work anymore.' I also prefer not to know how it works, but unfortunately I don't even know how to turn the part of my brain that writes on, which is why I often don't write anything for months or even years.

I think often when I write about the musicians I'm writing for, how to create a space that showcases the elements of their playing that I find most interesting. For example, I love Stefano's playing, but even more than that, I love how he thinks, and this emerges in his playing. So I enjoy imagining what he will do, and I try to create musical spaces where the aspects I love about his playing will emerge, like playgrounds for his imagination. Of course at the end of the day, he hardly ever does what I imagine, and it's usually much better that way. This is one of the things I think about most when I write: What do I most admire or find interesting about the musicians who will be playing my music, and how can I channel that aspect of each musician's sound, her expressive palette, so that I can hear her do things that only she can do?

At other times I may imagine a sensation or an atmosphere that I'd like to evoke, and I usually try to get their directly with music, often without delving too deeply into its origin, and usually without bothering to describe to myself verbally exactly what I am imagining. I often only realize what has occurred after the fact, when I've finished writing, and the result doesn't always go in the direction I intended. For example the music I wrote for Ghost Horse reminds me of forests, jungles, swamps, although I think I was hoping to write something a little more technological (it feels silly to actually say what I was thinking with words). Now when I hear that music, I think of these two worlds meeting, nature and artifice, and of the struggle between them and of the enormously superior force of nature. I imagine nature reclaiming abandoned human-built structures: streets, cities, empty parking lots with grass growing up through the cracks and trees taking root inside buildings whose roofs have collapsed. This wasn't something I'd expected while I was writing that music, but these are the images that come to mind when I listen to what we have created. And this is always how I discover what I have done: by listening after the fact.

AAJ: That's interesting, because in a certain sense, you just closed the circle you opened when you talked about your admiration for Garbarek and Wheeler, two musicians who in some way feel this connection between music and nature. At the end of the day, although your own musical production is esthetically distant from theirs, this common element still unites you. Can you talk to us for a moment about Dan Kinzelman's Ghost?

DK: Dan Kinzelman's Ghost is a wind quartet, my only project as a leader, which I founded in 2011. Our first and only CD Stonebreaker was released in 2013. It's a very special project for me, and I'm excited to be playing again this summer after a long pause, but it's always been difficult to find contexts which fit the band and where our music can be heard at its best. Some of our requests are a bit extreme, so we've probably refused at least half of the requests we've received, but it's crucial to me to preserve the purity of that experience and the concept behind it. In order for that to occur, our performance space must respect very specific conditions which are not easy to find.

AAJ: Can you explain the concept and the conditions you are talking about?

DK: Our performance is conceived as a sort of collective ritual: We play in a circle facing one another, around a small central table covered with percussion instruments, and the audience is seated around us on all four sides, as close as possible. Of course performing with the audience on all sides is nothing new, although for us it was indeed a new experience. The idea is to remove the barrier between audience and stage, with the hope that in this way, we all participate more deeply. The audience can't see all the musicians' faces, nor can we see all of the audience members' faces. There is a lot more interaction and eye contact than usual between performers and listeners because of how close they are seated, but they also see and exchange gazes with the other audience members on the other side of the band, and this is another source of interaction. Each of us then is both an observer, and the subject of observation, blurring the lines between the roles of everyone present and in some cases creating a vague sense of uneasiness. But this same vulnerability makes everyone much more sensitive and open to what is happening in the music, and the intimate setting makes the connection between gesture and sound, and the evolving relationships among the musicians acutely visible.

Musically it is conceived in a very collective way, a mix of writing and improvisation, but without much in the way of traditional solos, and the combination of all these factors means that it is most effective if it is brief. And finally, because we play without amplification, it works best in spaces with long and beautiful natural reverb like churches, warehouses, abandoned industrial buildings etc. Although the music is definitely strange, I don't think it's hard to listen to or unpleasant, but it only works if the conditions are correct. When everything clicks, it's extremely powerful both for us and for the audience—we can feel something magical happening and people usually talk to us about this same feeling after the shows. My goal is to do something that goes beyond the concept of a concert—not a display but a participatory experience for musicians and audience alike.

AAJ: Again this seems emblematic of the creative concepts which emerged while we were talking about Hobby Horse, but it also leads to your work with dancer/choreographer Daniele Ninarello: you discover your music as you create it, and thus the result cannot be separated from the experience which produces it.

DK: Exactly, this is something I have been learning a lot about since beginning my work with Daniele, and as a result I am much more attentive to the importance of this unity between an authentic experience and its musical repercussions. And this heightened awareness or sensitivity is helping me understand my own reactions and tastes as well. For example, a few days ago I saw a show by Tim Berne's band Big Satan here in Florence. I haven't felt so emotionally involved in a concert for a long time, and I have been thinking about why, because it's not a musical style I particularly love or listen to regularly at home. But I think that, beyond the obviously incredible musicianship, there was something about the honesty and transparency they shared that captured me. They went on a journey, one that was rendered possible because they were truly present, in the moment, and we came along for the ride. The intensity that we felt in the audience was the result of the fact that they were not faking, or reenacting something, but rather actually doing it, creating that music in that way based on their immediate sensations specific to that day, in that place with that audience. If any of these details had changed, the music wouldn't have been the same. This kind of honesty and presence is a goal I aspire to, but I can't get there by imitating Berne, Garbarek, Speed etc. because it would be contrary to the goal: that of immersing myself in a real experience, avoiding the temptation to imitate a past experience or simulate something I had planned ahead of time.

AAJ: A few years ago you talked to us about your experience with Ninarello, but can you take a second now to talk again about your work together?

DK: When I was first contacted with the proposal I was very curious, but also a bit cautious. I'd seen a lot of improvised performances involving dancers and musicians, and they almost always seemed a bit sad and superficial, and the handful of experiences I had had myself in that field gave me the same feeling of being the naked emperor. And there are good reasons for this: Usually this kind of project has almost no budget and no time for rehearsal, so the tried and true recipe consists in calling a dancer and a musician, giving them the space, and saying 'Go!' The result is that each performer tends to act alone, or seek interaction in obvious ways. There is no time or chance to talk about why and how such an interaction should occur, and what kind of new creative possibilities it may offer if explored more deeply. Luckily, both Daniele and I were eager to go deeper and invest some time and energy to create something we believed in, and I think that Corrado Beldì and Enrico Bettinello (who curated the project for Novara Jazz) may have chosen us because they knew us individually and artistically and had some idea of the way we liked to work. And so, shortly after being put in contact, we decided almost immediately to make this project a priority.

AAJ: In what way?

DK: When the proposal first arrived, we had each received information about the other performer, and in particular, I had a number of video links so that I could see what kind of work Daniele did. I knew almost nothing about contemporary dance, and had never felt particularly interested in it up to that point in my life, but I also felt like I was getting a chance to start fresh in a moment when I was a bit frustrated musically. I was excited to have the chance to explore a new field, meet new people, and learn new things, so I immediately began going to see as much contemporary dance and theater as I could.

Once we received confirmation from Novara Jazz, Daniele and I started exchanging emails to begin narrowing down the concepts we were interested in developing together, mostly just lists of keywords. Almost immediately we found a number of concepts which interested both of us: physical and mental endurance, risk, and the ritual as a collective experience. The next step would be to meet face to face and begin to develop the material which would eventually be used to construct the performance.

I was accustomed to rehearsals being quick, sometimes hurried, and often superficial, but in contemporary dance, projects are developed during residencies which take place over several days or even weeks in which artists often live together and work all day on exploring, developing and refining material. Daniele did a great job of finding and organizing residencies, and our first meeting was for a residency at Bassano del Grappa in northern Italy. In the space of a week, we came up with the vast majority of the material which ended up using for Kudoku. The following residencies were used to develop a form or structure which allowed us a lot of flexibility to improvise (Daniele prefers the term 'instantaneous composition'), while still maintaining an overall sense of form and balance. As the residencies progressed, it gradually felt less and less like we were following each other and started to feel almost as though both of us were following a third element, or walking on parallel paths which intersected in ways which were not always predictable, but always seemed right. In any given moment, we had a great deal of individual freedom, as long as we respected the structure, and perhaps this is another key for me to successful improvisation. Improvising without any rules seems almost inconceivable to me—I wouldn't know where to start, or even why to start. I like to think of improvisation as problem solving in real time, but if there are no limits, there are no problems to be solved, and any solution becomes equally valid.

AAJ: This reminds me of a quote by scientist Wolfgang Sachs, an important contributor to ecological theory, who spoke positively of 'limits,' comparing them to picture frames. He went on to say that a great painter can only express his ideas artistically within the limits of the frame; if there were no limits, he could only imitate reality.

DK: I agree, because limits are the things which force us to make a choice, and these choices are the things which give value and specificity to an artist's work. I often find myself more moved and attracted to the poetic and creative aspects of musicians who either have limited technical facility, or choose to work within strict limits. In any case, these limits force them to work harder, and this struggle is something I find beautiful.

AAJ: Last question: do you have any projects in the works we haven't yet spoken about?

DK: I do have something in mind, although I'm not sure how or when it will see the light of day: A number of years ago I played a show with Italian pianist Fabrizio Puglisi. At the time both of us were eager to continue the collaboration, but we didn't find an opportunity immediately, real life intervened and both of us returned to our own projects. A few months ago I found the recording of that concert on an old computer. We were playing mostly jazz standards, swing and a few originals, but it felt really fresh and exciting to hear it again. I hope to find a way to return to a stage with Fabrizio again. He's a musician I deeply admire, and I think it would be interesting to play duo again after nearly ten years.

Photo credit: Stefano Galli

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