sarma

Tony Vacca and Tim Wolf share the distinction of being musicians who not only have collaborated closely with dancers and theater performers for many years, but who have themselves investigated physical performance and discipline-Tony as a gymnast, Tim as a contact improvisor and performer with an improvisational dance ensemble in Hartford, Connecticut. Last summer, I collaborated with Tim on a duo concert in the World Music Hall at Wesleyan University where we presented some visions we share about native musics, sources of sound, and spontaneous performance. That month, Tim was also performing with his band at the International Music Festival in Hartford, which he produced, and in which Tony Vacca was also performing with his quartet. The opportunity for the three of us to talk was timely, for the Music Issue of CQ was coming up. Unfortunately, we were unable to talk as a threesome, so, taking the form of an interview, I spoke with Tony who spoke subsequently with Tim. Time spent passing the transcript back and forth took us over our deadline for the Music Issues and so the piece appears in this open issue. The percussion work of Tony Vacca combines African, American and World Music traditions with the ancient con­cept of drum songs and spontaneous composition. He has studied balafon and percussion composition in Mali and Ghana. His current collaborations in­clude World Music duets with Tim Moran, Winds of Change quartet, per­cussion duo with Samm Bennett, and Camara ensemble. Tim Wolf was the leader of the Hibachi Brothers Barbecue Big Band (a dance band with an international repertoire). He has been a producer of performing arts events in Connecti­cut and California since 1978-from breakdancing to Indian music. He is currently recording and performing original music with his ensemble Camara which includes Tony Vacca. (L.N.)

LISA: When I make dances I think about how long I'm going to have, the duration. Rather than thinking about what I'm going to do, I think about what I am going to bear. I think first about sound, volume and space. Re­cently, I've heard about a musician who visualizes the sound before he hears the sound. And I'm curious about what other musicians do. You've told me that you hear sound when you watch people dancing. So, what hap­pens when you're playing music? What's going on in your senses?

TONY: Oh, immediately it's shape, which then has movement counter­parts. There's a geometry, you could say. A composition. The raw material of what note and all of that is governed for me by what the personality of the piece is, and that comes in shapes. Within the content of the shapes is motion. That's very clear in my head. Then I ask myself, 'What does it feel like?' An example is a piece that I wrote for Winds of Change, the quartet that I work with. The piece is called "Confluence" and it's about the merg­ing of things, of moving things merging. There was a beginning shape; there was another shape over it. Two people played in 7-4, together basically, com­plementary but together. One person played in 8 beat cycles, while one per­son played a melody that really was in terms of the 7, but if you heard the melody by itself, it just sung longer phrases. It took the whole interaction to make sense. And the shapes would do things. I mean, the shapes are governing my motion and my choices, they're governing what's next; they are the answer to 'What do I do next?' It's a whole collage of motion. There's a picture in that. A changing visual image. But just when that picture starts to take shape, there can be one element that gets my attention, says here, when everything locks in and it just shoots off in a line. It just takes off in a line and I just go. I chase it as fast as I can, stumbling and flying and going after it till it's cleared up. It's as if you wake up and you say, 'I don't remember how I came to this place.' And then at other times I cre­ate something to describe what's hap­pening around me. But again, it's governed by my response to an imag­ined environment. My response is, 'Well, I guess this calls for new motion.'

LISA: You make another decision there.

TONY: Yeah. Because the shapes propel you. Like if you have an ob­ject on a string and you 're swinging it around, your action is describing a circle which is in itself an action inside of which all the action is happening. And then all of a sudden you let go of the string. That becomes the other element. The song "Confluence" is just like that. You get a whole aural kinesphere happening, with its own order, and motion and sub-motions. All of a sudden you let go and there's a whole new order that comes imme­diately after it and sets up a new reali­ty. That seems to be how I create music.

L: Your description sounds like a paradigm for a kind of listening, a kind of improvising mind. You're de­scribing it in terms of a visual and physical sensation that you're calling 'shapes.' But you're also including the associative images, memories or states that you describe in terms of pictures but feel in terms of shapes. You're not speaking directly about the sound, but rather the physical and visual sensation. I don't know if you're saying that because you 're talking to me ....

T: No, no. That's the way I think about it. If you come to a Winds rehearsal, I'm rarely talking about notes. When I look at any of my compositions now, they seem to have in common the purpose of, I guess if I had to say one word, transcendence. The purpose is not to get somewhere, but to get involved with pursuing something. One thought pursued takes you a thousand places, instead of a thousand elements trying to make one thing.

L: Do you find that the musicians you work with share your connection with physical, emotional, visual images?

T: When it works. Because, you've got to remember, they're trying to succeed at what I'm asking them to do, and I'm asking a lot of them. It's a demanding situation. Usually the musicians want to know what they're supposed to do and when they're sup­posed to do it; if it's a matter of notes, or if they're free to do anything they want; they simply want to know what are the directions. Once that's clear and the particulars are solved, then they've got to become involved with it enough to take chances in a way that I'm encouraging them to. Then the group is ready to respond to the shapes of the music. The sensibilities of the musicians and their responses to the music and each other are at their best once this intimacy with the material is established.

L: How did you get around to this way of working?

T: There was a lot of study. Like anybody else, I started with the usual sort of training when I was 12-drums and practice pads. The turning point, I feel, came when I got involved with theatre. Until then, I didn't think very much about the origin of a drum set and the evolution of its music. You know, there it was. I said, 'Here's the people, that's how they play it, that's how I'll try to play it.' I was strictly focused on 'What am I supposed to do?' Well, the theatre involvement started out very much like the music of my past-'Here's the book, open to page 4 ...' It was musicals. But the beginning of some new thoughts came during a stage adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass. (I was 15 and also in a dance band at this time.) They started asking me to do sound effects. I would ask, "What do you want me to do?" They said, "You just watch and then make sounds for it." Given that freedom, I started to make sounds for concepts as opposed to actions, and the more I did them for concepts, the more conceptual the actions looked. So it brought me to, 'I see ... so music can imply emotion­al states,' rather than 'Am I playing the right note?' We can be creating an experience. That's the first time I encountered that idea about music. So, for awhile I started to imitate emotions. I thought, “I’m going to make a sound for happiness.” I started to organize and box them off. Then it occured to me that I could put them together and make some new move­ments. But then I realized that these were all extrapolations of when I was feeling this, and when I was feeling that. They were observations of what I remembered of being something, shortened into a convenient expres­sion. So I said, 'What if I play how I am?' That was too much for me for awhile. That was the beginning of the idea of music being how you are, not 'What are the notes?'

L: In the theatre, were you setting environments?

T: They were interludes. Their pur­pose was to support the abstract elements behind the action of the play -subliminal environments linking the music and dance of theatre. This linkage refers to what unites the popu­lar music with the essential music, the popular dance with the essential dance. Through the essential you can project your meaning or reflect some common idea. It was a very important lesson for me at that time. So, then came gymnastics.

L: Gymnastics?

T: Yeah. I spent eight years being very involved with gymnastics: going to meets, training camps, all that. During the last four years of that time (1968-1972), I was on the University of Massachusetts gymnastics team. And the same kind of process came out of that. What's the basics, what am I supposed to do? etc. It took a long time again to make a similar kind of transition. I wanted to just get up on the high bar, or whatever it was and say, 'I know what I'm ·doing, and I'm going to enjoy what’s happening while I'm doing it.' It was very sensu­al on the inside of all this concentrated effort. Drumming was the same kind of thing for awhile until the transition was made. What was really happening was an additional physicality in the music, an additional internal feeling from the physical. In the beginning, I needed a thrill to propel me into a deeper (internal) level. Looking back from here I'd say the deeper level in music came to me from what I learned in the theatre (transmission of a story) and gymnastics (internal individual realities).

L: In the gymnastics training, did anyone talk about those experiences?

T: Only a few. Most people were really into 'What was the score?' The internal element came in later with more familiarity. There was a time in competitions when I couldn't look into the crowd. I didn't want to see them. That was a distraction. And then later, I'd just look and say, 'Uh huh,' like looking into a mirror. It was a different picture, a deeper channel.

L: So how did the music come back in?

T: Well, during that time I listened a lot. To Coltrane and such. I was feeling this was the thing. And that feeling began to physicalize. I could look at the record go round and round, I could read the album cover, or I could see what I was hearing. So I started to see what I was hearing. First, I saw them playing. Then I'm looking at them (in my head), imagin­ing what they were doing. So if I was really looking at them, the next thing I would say is, 'What are they trying to do?' And the pursuit is, 'What are they thinking about? What are they after, what is it like to be them, what does it feel like? What does the music feel like? What does it feel like to be me?' And feel, feel, feel, feel, feel. So the feel was shape, the logic of the music-which isn't often even on the performers' minds-is coming into me because I'm listening. I was soaking it up like a sponge. Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Pharaoh San­ders, Art Ensemble of Chicago. And I was following whomever was playing with those guys. Listening and listen­ing. I gleaned the results of the logic that they had first, and used the results to take off on. It was a pretty precar­ious sort of take-off, which I filled in with my own experiences and then went back and fleshed out in technical terms. So it was more a propulsion by passion than it was intellectual.

L: Can you say more about the link­age between your physical activity and how you're hearing sound when you're playing it? How does that process work with you?

T: My choices are governed by what my purpose is. I work hard at having a fluid integration of thought/action/sound/response. As I progress, the separate functions are just tools, essen­tial elements whose chemistry follows the purpose of the music. Playing re­quires you to follow whatever takes you to the next sound. But, in a mu­sical sense, the sound and the physical activity, well, they're distinct, but not separable. There's a dance to what's going on and the dance has a shape and purpose; that's what I'm learning with Milford Graves now.

L: Can you tell me about Milford?

T: Oh, this is hard to say. What I'm learning from Milford is how the body has its own sort of eternal memory. Much of dance, in a traditional sense, is about communicating the revelation of discoveries known collectively or individually. So, you're working with Milford, he jumps up and he says,

"This rhythm from the Jula people of Mali, look at the dance that goes with it." And he shows it. Then his ex­pression, his gaze, sends the deeper message. It may correspond to the kundalini system of body awareness, or to his own sense of human experi­ence. He is a very powerful commu­nicator. So you get the secret knowl­edge of the dance and its music. Mil­ford is talking about how movement-­oriented, how movement-purposed the accompanying music is to incite the motion to take place in a way that the people who are simply witnessing it are excited by the vibration of the music; they become prepared for the reception of the story and the secret knowledge. From there, he talks about particulars enough to give you a sense of ancient practices. And then he has his own way of assigning mo­tions and sound. They're interacting in infinite possible ways. In the 60's, he played traps while dancing with other parts of his body ... face, torso. People thought he was just being strange. But there was a very particu­lar dance to his motion. He'd be thinking, 'This music is about a certain organ.' And he would focus on this body organ and its hook-up with other parts of the body. Organs music.

Milford has taken these traditional things that have some ancient applica­tion and re-applied them in ways that make sense to him. He's very creative in the confluence of ideas. He treats them not so much as liberties, but as responsibilities. He has tremendous insight as a teacher. He's helping me to take advantage of the stuff I was telling you about-the dancers dance and I feel something. So he's dancing it and I'm feeling it, now he's got me feeling what he thinks should be going with the music, so now I'm feeling it. Now all I've got to do is put my hands to it. Now I'm dancing and playing. I'm getting it from both sides and he's dancing in front of me. He's gotten me into the sensual to get me into the practical to the physical 'Do it.' So Milford's approach is putting into con­temporary language the obvious stuff that's been going on all the time.

L: Yes, I've seen Milford play and I've felt I was hearing dancing, seeing music. And I've noticed that sensation while watching you play the balafon.

T: I want that spirit to be a unifying presence, an intimacy with the audi­ence. I like to feel and see that hap­pening. To act out our connections. And that's a very delicate thing. Not that we all have to get up and dance. Still, I've been frustrated in not getting the right setting to bring out as much theatre as I think there is in all this music.

L: What do you see as theatre?

T: Theatre is about revealing, making sure you're revealing whatever you're feeling. Instead of fooling yourself and thinking, 'Well, I'm a performer and I'm going to stand here and per­form and however I stand is incidental to what's passing through me.' Be­cause it's not. If you're standing like a musician, then the theatre of your activity is standing there like a musi­cian, or like you think a musician stands. I don't think that that's enough. The theatre and dance of music depends upon the willingness of the musicians and audience to risk and enjoy themselves, and to act out the stories of our interconnections. Only the wholeness of the picture will present the particulars of your message.