Conversation with Karl Berger

TP: [AFTER PLAYING MARCH PIECE FROM CREATIVE ORCHESTRA MUSIC] Nothing like this had ever been recorded—in New York city, at any rate. A similar aesthetic had been expressed in the States in Chicago, and also in Europe, whence Karl Berger had moved eight years before this date. Karl Berger is no stranger to WKCR’s listeners. A few weeks ago, you were here with Ben Young for a six-hour retrospective of your work. Today we’re less concerned with your own musical production than the music that transpired at the Creative Music Studio.

KB: Yes. Well, this work was basically developed at the Creative Music Studio. Braxton had the opportunity at the Creative Music Studio to always have a large group with which to rehearse pieces, so a lot of the concepts of his orchestra music developed right at CMS.

TP: I have several questions to ask about that. But before, let’s paint the picture. Tomorrow, Friday, at Symphony Space, at 7:30, there will be a concert featuring Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso, Anthony Braxton, and Steven Bernstein’s Millennium Territory Orchestra. The proceeds will go towards the digitization and release of your capacious archive of tapes of concerts given on Saturday nights at Creative Music Studio between 1972 and 1984, featuring many of the seminal figures of jazz progression and creative music progression during that time. We’ll hear some selections from the 16 CDs they’ve done so far.

KB: We just started, basically. It’s a three-year project.

TP: How did the project begin? Did you get funding?

KB: Yes. We apply for funding in various places, for grants, and we received one grant from a German foundation and we received membership contributions towards it. So we are about one-fourth into the $120,000 we need. That gives us the first 9 months to work with right now.

TP: was documentation always an intention?

KB: No. I never thought of that actually. We did tape everything, but we weren’t really into history. We were into Now at the time very much. The reason why I think these tapes need to be heard, or at least digitized and preserved, is that in the ‘70s, as you all know, the record industry started to shift gears and started to produce records from the producers’ point of view rather than from the artists’ point of view, and a lot of stuff that started being...except maybe for Anthony’s and a few other fortunate ones... The artists didn’t get an opportunity to record their music the way they felt it should be. CMS was all about that. Like, people would come up and work on their newest works, and they would have the opportunity to work with larger groups and to develop ideas that they could not develop in recording situations. Therefore, what you’re hearing there has a lot of stuff that you don’t even know existed in the ‘70s and ‘80s...

TP: Unless you were on the scene in New York or had an opportunity to hear...

KB: True. But also, we were in Woodstock, not in New York where the scenes were quite separate. Up there, people started to blend more. People would get together. Let’s say Lee Konitz would meet Leroy Jenkins, or David Izenson would play with Harvey Sollberger—stuff that would never happen in New York, because the scenes were much more separate. People were more relaxed up there. They didn’t think in terms of the PR quality or the career situation or whatever it was.

TP: So through this archive we can find different angles or approaches or nooks and crannies of the musical production of even artists with substantial discographies which might not otherwise be visible.

KB: Yes, exactly. For example, Cecil Taylor could develop orchestra music. He never did that before. He spent ten days working with a 20-piece group and recording two evenings with that. This sort of stuff that just wouldn’t have happened.

TP: Working out strategies and so on. Before we talk about some specifics of CMS, what do you recall about the gestation of Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music project? You were there. You played glockenspiel and vibraphone on it.

KB: There’s a funny story, which is typical for Anthony and his way of teaching. I looked at the part, and some of the notes were not on the vibraphone. So I said to Anthony, “How do you want me, “How do you want me to play that?” He said, “Play as written.” So what do you do with that? “Play as written.” Ok, so I played as written. Some of these notes were outside of the instrument. Or Fred Rzewski playing the bass drum. What other record do you know where... [LAUGHS] So a couple of things like that were going on. Actually, I was already a little bit familiar with that music, because it had been happening among the participants at CMS before. But he was using professional musicians at the time of the recording.

TP: Perhaps I can use your performance on glockenspiel there as a door for some remarks on your own personal history. Did you play in marching bands as a...

KB: No. I never played glockenspiel before this recording.

TP: I’m no expert on glockenspiel, but it sounded fairly accomplished... But you came to the States in 1966, was it...

KB: Yes.

TP: You’d met Don Cherry in Europe and came here as part of his working group.

KB: Yes. We had a working group, a quintet for two years prior to that in Europe, and we played pretty much every day except Mondays. It was a real tight group. Then we got the invitation to record Symphony for Improvisers and to do a Five Spot series, and to play at Town Hall, which Ornette had organized. So we came on that premise. So we came in August 1966 for the first time.

TP: I realize that you’ve related these events publicly on many occasions, but would you talk a bit about the path that brought you to Don Cherry?

KB: It’s quite a simple story. In the late ‘50s or beginning ‘60s, I was a member of the Hans Koller Quartet in Germany. Hans Koller was a top European saxophonist who was one of the few Europeans who played on international festivals. So we opened for Miles, or we opened for Mingus, and we would play in Antibes, and so on. We sort of got around internationally a little bit. I started to listen to Ornette’s quartet albums, This is Our Music and The Shape of Jazz to Come, and these things. It really hit me that this is the kind of music I want to play. The free music was so slowly developing, but it wasn’t rhythmical, and this had the powerful rhythm and it was free. It really hit me, like, this the music I want to play. Then the opportunity arose in ‘65, in March... We used to play in Paris a lot at the Chat Qui Peche with people like Chet Baker and Steve Lacy and other people, and in March 1965 Don Cherry came to Paris, and I met him at the Buttercup Club, which Bud Powell’s wife ran. I saw him sitting there, and I just walked up to him and said, “I want to play with you.” Don was a very intuitive cat. He looked at me and said, “Come to the rehearsal tomorrow at 4.” Then the same night, after the rehearsal, I played with the band, and from there on, the next three years, I played with that band. So this is how simple it was.

TP: Now, you had also an academic background in philosophy. So you were dual-tracking as a student and a musician in post-war Germany.

KB: Yes, exactly.

TP: In any way, did the philosophical teachings, your studies...how did it intersect with your musical production?

KB: I think studying particularly in the area of philosophy and aesthetics...when you study there and you go through the history of everything that’s been going on, it opens your mind to new concepts. It really does. It’s not so easy to get stuck in patterns. It’s a mind-opening experience. That’s the only relationship that I can see.

TP: So in other words, it allowed you to accept what was happening perhaps on its own terms.

KB: Yes, exactly. Particularly studying people like Schopenhauer or aesthetics by Kierkegaard or things like that, it gives you a real powerful intro into the philosophy of music and art.

TP: How did vibraphone become your instrument of choice?

KB: That’s also very accidental. I am a classical piano player, and as I was playing in a little club in Heidelberg called the Car-54, which was frequented by a lot of American players from the Air Force and Army bases around there... That’s where I met Carlos Ward, Cedar Walton, Lex Humphries, Don Ellis, and all these people. The piano was always in bad shape and out of tune, and there was a vibraphone player who came in sometimes, but then he left his instrument there. So I basically started playing it because the piano was so bad! The other reason was I could get up and move around. Because music makes me think of dancing always—and there I could do that, I could move around. But purposely, I never took a lesson on the vibraphone. So it’s my toy. Like, I played a vibraphone probably, because of that, like nobody else, just because I never learned how to play it classically. So piano is really the instrument I know everything about. Vibraphone I only use for my own compositional and improvisational purpose.

TP: was there a real separation for you between... Had you given up classical music during those years, and was there perhaps some desire to bring forth those ideas?

KB: When I played with Don’s band, often there wasn’t even a piano, or, if there was a piano, it was so bad that I would just play the vibes. Like, at Chat Qui Peche, the piano was terrible. Also, purposely, I didn’t play piano for two years during that period in order to get away from the licks, the classical licks, the way you learn to play classically. I wanted to re-translate back the vibraphone to the piano, which I now do. Now I understand the piano a lot more as a percussion instrument, which is what it is, and really go note-for-note.

TP: So you arrive in the States in ‘66, straight into the fray at the Five Spot. Not the same location where history had been made years before...

KB: The one on 8th Street.

TP: can you describe your first impressions of New York?

KB: The first impression was that I wanted to go back home. It was a shock, in many ways. The living situations that I saw...all these famous musicians that I knew from records, how they lived and what they did and how they operated. It was horrible. I thought, “My God, these people should be respected more.” It was a hard one. I would say that the man that got me to stay was Ornette Coleman. I started to have almost weekly conversations with Ornette. Ingrid and I went to Ornette’s loft all the time, and we discussed matters. He was the only one who made sense to me in terms of how he talked about music. But he also insisted that we should say. He said, “You’ve got something to say. New York is like a radio station for the world. You’ve got to do it.” So we did, and we sort of got used to it, slowly but surely.

TP: Did you intersect during those years, 1966 to 1972, with other artistic communities in New York? With filmmakers, with writers, with visual artists?

KB: there were a bunch of scenes that we oscillated between. We were always in Brooklyn, Williamsburg, where there was a scene... There was a loft building with musicians like Rashied Ali and Roger Blank and Archie Shepp, and everybody living in there, and there were sessions every day. Rashied must have a host of tapes, because he recorded everything. There was like 12 lofts, all musicians. Then a bunch of musicians who came there all the time. I was a lot in that scene. I went there all the time to play. Then, I was around Roswell Rudd’s scene. He had a band with Robin Kenyatta and Beaver Harris, so I played with that. Then with Marion Brown. Then there was another scene around Dave Liebman, who started out at that time. Dave Holland and Dave Liebman lived in the same loft building in the Photo District. While Dave was playing with Miles, he started playing with our quartet, with Carlos Ward and Eddie Blackwell. That was an ongoing project, and we recorded that a few times—and then trio music also. So there were these different, disconnected scenes that were not overlapping. As a matter of fact, I asked many questions about that, and I never got the right answers.

TP: What would the right answers have been?

KB: The right answer would have been, “Oh, gee, why not?” In Williamsburg, for example, one day, after like 6 weeks of going there and playing there all the time, I said to everybody in a break, “So what do you guys all think? I am the only white man here.” It was all black guys playing. They said to me, “You’re not white; you’re European.” So that was a distinction. Stuff like that was going on.

TP: Such ideas were also part of the zeitgeist (forgive my throwing a German philosophical term at you) in the late ‘60s. So those were musical scenes. Were you also intersecting with people in different disciplines?

KB: That happened actually later. What happened was, we were there in ‘66, ‘67, and then in ‘68, I went back with my own group, with Alan Blairman. We went to Europe and toured there; for about a year-and-a-half we stayed over there. We only came back then in ‘72, to Woodstock directly. I was here in ‘70 and ‘71, in order to start the Creative Music Foundation. I had discussions with Ornette. He introduced me to John Cage, Gil Evans, Gunther Schuller, a few other people, and we started an advisory board for the Creative Music Studio. I started to talk with Carla Bley and Mike Mantler, who had office space on Broadway with the Jazz Composers Orchestra. So we started to form the process of setting up the Creative Music Foundation. Then I went back to Europe, and a year later I moved to Woodstock.

TP: Why at the turn of the ‘70s did it seem important to set up the Creative Music Foundation?

KB: I had very egotistical reasons. I wanted to know what I was doing. We were all playing, playing, playing every night, and my academic training told me I needed to know something more about this. Everything was fine and perfect, and it sounded great, but I didn’t know what it was. I wanted to find out what it would be. So I wanted to meet more people. I wanted to get groups of artists together, have them talk about their music. If you have to teach it, then you have to know what you’re saying, so to speak. Also, what are methods I could use in order to tell the next generation how to loosen up their conceptual ideas. That was all in the back of my mind, to do that.

TP: For how long before doing this had you felt this way? I’m curious about how your academic background and cultural background as a German led to some of the pedagogical concepts at CMS.

KB: What really got me going on this, I started teaching at the New School. John Cage had a course there, and he left, and I applied, and funny enough, I got the job, and I started an improvisation class there. I realized everybody had timing problems, so I started to get into time, beat-for-beat attention and all that. One of our mainstays at that time was a job with Young Audiences. There was a group led by the drummer Horacee Arnold, and there was Reggie Workman, Sam Rivers, myself, and Mike Lawrence was the trumpet player—and we would go to all the schools, playing for sixth-graders. This was all about what is improvisation; sing us a song, we’ll play over your song; we’ll just experiment with your music—and the kids got involved. That’s when I realized that people are not compartmentalized like we see them all the time, like somebody just likes this and the other one likes that. They liked everything. They were open. So I realized that the capacity of every person is really to be open, and to really get involved in all kinds of concepts and ideas. That really helped me to say, “you know, we can probably create a situation where we can help people to develop their own music.”

TP: When you arrived in the States in ‘66, it was maybe a year or so after the incorporation of the AACM in Chicago. That, of course, was on its own parallel track during the years you’re speaking of, and musicians from there started moving to New York right around the time you started CMS. Were you aware of the AACM in those years? Or did you encounter some of them when you returned to Europe? I think 1969-1970 coincides with the time those musicians were staying in Europe.

KB: Well, first I heard about it from Anthony, of course. Anthony lived in Woodstock... A lot of people moved to Woodstock during that time—Anthony, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Carla was already there. More and more people were following. So first I heard of it through Anthony. Then we started to bring AACM musicians in to teach at CMS. When CMS got bigger and it became a year-round institution, then we did whole summer sessions, whole so-called “New Year’s intensives” with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, or with Roscoe Mitchell and so on.

TP: But in the ‘60s, you weren’t so aware.

KB: No, I wasn’t aware at all. No. I’m not the type of person who is always keeping themself informed. I’m more focused on the stuff I need to do.

TP: We’re speaking with Karl Berger, who’s given us a compressed but admirable history of Creative Music Studio, which had a very good run, as far as such entities go, from 1972 to 1984, and produced, among other things, a sizable body of recorded work which Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso, his wife, are in the process of digitizing and creating a digital archive of. Towards that end, they’ve raised about $30,000, which is about a quarter of what is needed. Given the state of the economy at this moment, raising funds will not be easy, but the public has a chance to help the process tomorrow night when a benefit concert transpires at Symphony Space...

KB: This was a project of mine that was realized in ‘95 in Germany at the Donaueschingen festival. It has a mixture of American and European musicians on it. I wanted to start the session by introducing my own work, and then go to CMS. I’m not just an administrator. I want to show what I do. Here I’ll play piano. One of the reasons I’m playing this is that I like people to start off understanding that I’m a piano player. [MUSIC: “No Man Is An Island: Movement 2”; “Remembrance”]

TP: “Remembrance” is a tune you played with Don Cherry during the ‘60s, with a working group. That’s from a radio broadcast, with Karl Berger on piano, Carlos Ward, alto sax, Peter Apfelbaum, tenor saxophone, Graham Haynes, cornet; Ingrid Berger, vocals; Bob Stewart, tuba; Mark Helias, bass; Tani Tabbal, drums... How many of these concerts did you record?

KB: We recorded approximately 400 over the 12 year period, and the digitization process generates about 10 per month.

TP: During a given year, did CMS run on a semester system, or a trimester...

KB: In its heyday, it was year-round—two 8-week semesters in the fall and spring, and two 5-week semesters in the summer. Then there were intensives, a New Year’s intensive and another intensive around Easter-time.

TP: So about 30 weeks a year.

KB: Yeah. It was pretty intense. It was just ongoing. From 1976 to 1984, we had a campus that was a former motel with five buildings, so about 50 people could stay there all the time. There was also a soccer field where you could have festivals and so on. So it was a pretty ideal setup.

TP: So using infrastructure from the former Borscht Belt... Woodstock and the Catskills has a preexisting infrastructure that could easily be used for this sort of thing.

KB: Exactly.

TP: What was your first facility? You come directly to Woodstock after a year-and-a-half in Europe. So presumably the gears were previously set in motion.

KB: We rented a big barn, and the upstairs of the barn was set up so we could live upstairs, and downstairs was one big room with a fireplace, and that’s where the workshop started. This is where we started. Then a couple of years later, we sort of grew out of that, and it was not big enough. We rented a Lutheran camp, where now is a Zen mountain center, all the way out in Mount Trempa, which was a big space. The only drawback was that the camp was on in the summer, so we could only use it in the fall and spring. That’s when we started looking for this motel, and we found that in ‘75, and so from ‘76 on we had a year-round program.

TP: Who was the faculty at first? You...

KB: At first, all the people who lived up there, which was Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, myself, and Ingrid. That’s how it started.

TP: How did you organize the curriculum and the pedagogy? Was it that Braxton wanted to teach in such-and-such a way, and Dave Holland would teach in a different, and Jack DeJohnette the same, or was there some organizing principle?

KB: It was pretty loosely organized. In other words, we gave the guiding artists the afternoons for as long as they wanted. Most people started at 2 and went til 6 or 7 or so, and just worked with all the people that were there.

TP: was it on technique, on workshopping their music...

KB: No. It was always about composition and improvisation. It was not about the instruments. We actually everybody that wanted to come, “You are not going to have training in your instrument.” It’s all about concepts. It was a conceptual situation. So in the morning I would do what I call “basic practice,” which was a rigorous rhythmic training, then a training in overtone awareness, like getting really into sound, so that you would get away from the idea of a tone and get into harmonics. Then the rhythmic training would be about beat-for-beat dynamics, so dynamics was a big issue. And I would do all of these non-stylistic, I’ll call them, exercises in the morning. There would be also body practice, body awareness before, at 9 o’clock. Some people wouldn’t make that! Then the afternoon was open to the guiding artists until dinner-time, and they could structure that any which way they wanted, whether they wanted to have a small group and people, or they wanted to have the whole group, or whatever they wanted to do. Then after-hours, the room was there for the students to develop their own works.

TP: What was the age range of the students early on?

KB: Early on, the first people that came, like Donnie Davis and these guys, they were probably around 21, 22...

TP: Just graduated from college or having attended college.

KB: Exactly, yes. Usually, we wanted to make sure people knew how to play their instrument well enough not to worry about that. So that was sort of our prerequisite. They had to send a tape or some kind of way of auditioning.

TP: Let’s hear a selection from the archive—Nana Vasconcelos.

KB: This is from a concert in 1979. [MUSIC: Nana-K. Berger]

TP: You spoke before about the rhythmic exercises that you gave to students, and you told me off-mike were saying that the information you garnered and transmitted to students you learned during your years from Don Cherry, who himself was distilling these lessons—through his own prism, I guess—from Ornette Coleman

KB: Yes, in a way you could say that. I received through Don Cherry invaluable impressions and information about music. He used to walk around with a shortwave radio on his head 24 hours a day—probably even in his sleep! I saw him sitting in the movies having this on. Anyway, we would not only play every evening in these clubs, because at that time you could play for months in one club (it’s not like today), but you’d also have a rehearsal every afternoon. In these afternoon rehearsals he would come and play on the piano the most recent stuff that he had heard on the shortwave radio. He had this amazing what Ornette calls “elephant memory,” where he could remember every note. He would bring in pieces and play them. He wouldn’t even know where they were from, whether they were from India or Egypt or wherever. We used some of those melodies in the concerts, and he would just like use them, not thinking about any stylistic considerations or anything. So that was startling for me. It was new for me that you can just go and take any music coming from anywhere, and look at it as if it was all the same.

TP: I guess he was beginning to incorporate these principles right around the time you started playing with him, around 1965-66.

KB: Exactly.

TP: Then he really developed them at much greater length in the ‘60s, culminating with pieces like Relativity Suite and other...

KB: Exactly.

TP: You were associated with him all through this time, or sporadically...

KB: Off and on. I recorded the Art Deco album with him, and a few other places. But I wasn’t playing consistently with Don Cherry any more after ‘68. I started doing my own projects. But we kept in touch all the time. He was one of the major people at CMS. He was there every term, in each semester.

TP: Now, you were just mentioning that he would grab themes from everywhere that he heard on the shortwave radio, without knowing where they were from, in a decontextualized way, out of the function in which the music was created. How important did it then become to recontextualize this within the framework of CMS... In other words, to do full justice to the actual music. Was it a kind of balancing act?

KB: I basically didn’t go there. What I did is, I used some of this information, particularly all the additive rhythmic stuff that comes from Turkey, Egypt...the Middle East...from India... All this additive rhythmic stuff intrigued to a point to create a practice system called the “gamala taki.” Those two words came from Don Cherry, but he wasn’t thinking of them it a rhythmic system. He just had heard them on the shortwave radio. They are part of the tabla language in Pakistan, for example. So I would take it out of that context altogether, and just create an additive rhythmic training. Because you go into that kind of place where you’re no longer thinking bars or forms of that kind, but you are just adding odd and even, and you use language as a tool rather than counting, you’re going into a new world of...you create a sense of freedom for yourself, for beat-for-beat attention, as I call it. That led me also to the fact that we not only could study something for the reason of learning new material, but also to train our mind. Like, to train our mind to listen for each beat

TP: But on the other hand, for instance, on the prior track with Nana Vasconcelos, or the piece we’re about to hear with Trilok Gurtu, these are musicians who are deeply trained within the folkloric music of their own cultures. How did they respond to moving outside the notion of idiom? Of course, Nana Vasconcelos was involved in many transcultural projects with Don Cherry and other people.

KB: Trilok and particularly Nana and others that came there, these percussionists were there because they wanted to go beyond their traditional culture. They wanted to move beyond that. So therefore, we had people who were eager to absorb information like that. I just met Nana at a festival in Sardinia that we were playing on about a month ago, Sant’anna Arresi, which was dedicated all to Don Cherry. Nana sang all these gamela taki practices to me. He still has them in his head, and this is still fascinating material for him, because that’s not what you do in Brazil—additive rhythm of that nature. So he actually enjoyed that to a point, because it sort of opened him up in his playing. Trilok is the same way.

TP: So you found one system that would enable musicians to look for that universal language that seems so appealing to musicians, because it’s a language of notes and tones.

KB: Exactly. There you go. So that you go there, and then from there you can go back to any style in which you play, and you will be a lot more open around it. You can go back and play tones and play forms of any kind, but you will have another beat-for-beat attention in your mind, and also a sense of harmonics about every note you play. Don Cherry would tell me things like, “there’s no such thing as A. There’s A in the context of whatever harmonics there are.” Once you go there and practice that, you open up a whole territory of precision in your tuning. For example, like, a trumpet player who plays a G, he can basically, with that one note, determine whether it’s in C or in G or in A or E-minor

TP: Now we’re hearing the Ornette Coleman root.

KB: There you go!

TP: Next is a CD of Trilok Gurtu, a sextet with Nana Vasconcelos, Ismet Siral, Steve Gorn, Ted Orr and Karl Berger, from 1980.

KB: That was a Turkish folk melody called [tk], and Ismet Siral is a saxophonist from Istanbul who is very revered over there, and came to CMS to teach a week of Turkish music, and ended up staying for two years. He was just insistent. He just didn’t want to leave. I realized very quickly that particularly Turkish music is ideal for studying additive odd meter. It is such simple structured, melodic work that is actually perfectly structured in the gamela taki fashion. So these are all actually exercise pieces for students to learn Turkish music pieces, and it was an eye-opener for everybody and a real practice. He just kept one house, put a fire in front of his house, and taught in the evening after hours when everybody else was finished. He would just stay and continue to teach. Then something tragic happened. He went back to Turkey, and he was so influenced by the American way of life and the style of playing that his Turkish colleagues would not accept him any more, and he actually committed suicide. But the Turkish energy is such a fervent energy. I don’t know how to describe it. But there is now a group in Turkey, if you go to a site that’s called IS-CMS, that’s Ismet Siral Creative Music Studio—there is actually a page on the Internet. They created a summer session two years ago, and brought Trilok, myself, Steve Gorn, all these people there to do a summer... They want to continue in the honor and memory of Ismet Siral.

TP: In 1972, I guess the notion of field recordings had been undertaken since the ‘30s and ‘40s, and more systematically in the ‘50s and ‘60s with the UNESCO series and so forth, but in American jazz, these influences were considered somewhat exotic. Of course, Dizzy Gillespie incorporated Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and Max Roach as well. But it seems that beginning in the ‘70s, and perhaps in some part through developments in CMS, and perhaps other reasons, the assimilation of rhythms, melodies, and scales from around the world began to be incorporated more into the mainstream vocabulary of jazz and creative music. Do you have any observations about these developments?

KB: Strangely enough, we were not really in the middle of that. We were less concerned with how materially jazz as a style was developing, for example. I was more interested for people to open their minds for their own music, so there would be influences but not material influences in the sense of stylistic influence, but more to get more flexible, to be more attuned to differentiations that you might bring into your music, and not being hesitant about expressing yourself just because you’re not sounding like everybody else. As you know, when we hear our own voice for the first time, we think the tape recording is wrong. This is how different we are in terms of sound and rhythm, in terms of timing and all that. To get there, to go there, and to do that by way of studying all these different things, not so much by taking in Turkish music or taking in Indian music and incorporating it into your art... I wasn’t really that interested in that. It happened, of course, automatically, and a lot of that is going on now, and has been since then. But that was never really our focus. Our focus was to see the music as one, and to begin to learn to get more specific about your own music. What is it that you like?

TP: It’s been 24 years since CMS dissolved. In your own musical production now are following pretty much the same path? Is it more a process of consolidation? Talk about the impact of CMS on you, Karl Berger?

KB: Oh, yeah, of course. I’m the lucky one. I was there all the time, and I got to meet all these musicians and to play with all of them, and it opened up my way of playing like never before. Actually, I took myself out of the scene, so to speak. I didn’t record as much as most of my colleagues. I am actually happy about that, because now I know every note to play. So when I go into my studio, now things are beautiful. I am not worried about anything any more. It’s not almost. It’s not any of that. So that’s the great thing about it. We’re even playing some of these pieces. “Zenibim(?),” this piece that you just heard, we’re still playing that today. I’m using that with the orchestra. I have the Creative Music Studio Orchestra, of which a lot of the members used to be at CMS, some of whom still live in Woodstock, too. The orchestra is about 15 players, and we’re playing a lot of these materials. We’re playing Don Cherry’s pieces. We’re playing Ismet’s pieces. We’re playing Ismet’s pieces. We’re playing Nana’s pieces. But in our own way, of course.

TP: Coming up is a portion of a longer piece from 1979 in which Lee Konitz and Jimmy Giuffre perform with Karl Berger, Dave Holland, and Edward Blackwell.

KB: That’s a whole other area right there. You are going to hear something that you would not expect Lee to do, which is that he starts out playing this piece called “The Song Is You,” but we then only use it motifically—we don’t use the structure of it.