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The following are a few interviews with Chicago area improvisors and audio artists. It was the beginning of a larger project to document ideas surrounding contemporary music in Chicago:

Interview with Carol Genetti (circa 2002)

Interview with Phillip von Zweck (circa 2002)

Interview with Kurt Johnson and Kyle Bruckmann of Lozenge (circa 2002)

[The following essay was initially written in July 2005 at Bard College. It details my conceptualization at the time of my main artistic project, performing improvised music on the banjo. - Woody]

July 2005

“We are all condemned to silence-unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create.  That is what composing is.  Doing solely for the sake of doing, without artificially trying to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them.  Playing for one’s own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication.”
-Jacques Attali, Noise

My main artistic practice is primarily concerned with the organization of sound into “music” and the various meanings and functions of this act.  This has manifested in numerous ways including previous work within punk rock, barely audible electronic music, guitar-based drone music, process pieces, etc. depending on what issues were being dealt with as well as which avenues were most pleasurable at the time.  My compositions often rely on a variety of tools from digital synthesis and processing to the electric guitar to realize specific ideas. 

Currently, my primarily musical practice is performing improvised music on the banjo as “Uncle Woody Sullender”.  My interactions with the banjo create a very personal metaphorical space where I symbolically deal with the world around me, whether these are economic, social, or cultural concerns.

Although I initially started playing banjo simply because I received a student model for Christmas from my father, I have always considered it a conspicuous choice for an instrument because of its cultural baggage.  While the general public memory of the instrument links it to a primarily white, Southern Appalachian culture, its actual history is quite convoluted and not entirely mapped out by historians.  Though enslaved Africans probably brought the banjo over to the United States as early as the 1600’s, the instrument was heavily popularized in the 19th century by white entertainers within minstrelsy [Gura, pg. 2].  The contemporary image of the banjo is largely rooted in this minstrel history.  However, this ignores numerous other lineages including the banjo’s transformation after the Civil War into a Victorian parlor instrument, ragtime music’s appropriation of the banjo’s syncopated rhythms, the inclusion of the banjo into more sophisticated jazz groups such as the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and many others.

The banjo is a quintessentially American instrument as it is an artifact of the interaction of two divergent cultures.  Its contemporary construction is a more European guitar-style adaptation of the gourd instrument utilized by African-Americans.  In some ways, I do buy into the “Southerness” of this instrument as it is an icon of Southern identity, but an icon heavily framed by external forces rooted in the North.  This makes sense to me as a native Virginian whose home state had adopted “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny” as the state song in 1940.  This extremely problematic song, which romanticizes slavery, was written in 1878 by James Bland, an African-American from Long Island, New York, but nonetheless was bought into by Southerners (more specifically, empowered whites) as emblematic of Southern culture.   

I was compelled to re-investigate notions of Southern identity after moving out of the South and had begun to re-examine what was considered the traditional music of my region.  How could I use this cultural symbol to make a music that spoke to my experiences in North Carolina?  I initially adopted the “Uncle” moniker to link me to a whole lineage of “traditional” musicians (Uncle Dave Macon, Uncle Bunt Stephens, Uncle Eck Dunford, etc.) while also mocking notions of authenticity surrounding “folk” music.  Recent academic examinations of the hillbilly music industry of the early 20th century frame it “as thoroughly modern in its origins and evolution as jazz, and like jazz, hillbilly music developed in a southern urban environment” [Huber, 6].  Hillbilly music historian PJ Huber states, “By the 1920s affordable Model T automobiles, mail-order catalogs, and the powerful media of radios, Victrolas, and Hollywood motion pictures had initiated southern workers” and the hillbilly musicians of these southern urban areas “into a broader American popular culture” [Huber, 10].  Artists such as Grand Ole Opry legend Uncle Dave Macon reacted highly to increasingly mediated culture and drew from a wealth of sources (a number of these sources being rooted in Northern minstrelsy but reframed as “authentic” Southern culture).

Locating myself historically, I am a product of an increasingly technologically advanced region of central North Carolina.  WXYC-Chapel Hill, the freeform radio station where I received a substantial portion of my music education as a DJ, was the first to simulcast its on-air signal over the Internet in 1994.  Many of these basic notions of creating and understanding music stem from my experiences there navigating and re-contextualizing the entire world of recorded sound and presenting it to my geographic community and the online world at the same time.  Early solo performances as “Uncle Woody Sullender” stemmed directly from these radio experiences, as I would often perform a pastiche of musical quotations and playing techniques on the banjo, even going so far as playing straightforward renditions of hillbilly-as-rube minstrel tunes within a larger improvised piece.

More recently, my interactions with the banjo have become much less about reflecting the fractured landscape of recorded sound and musical idiom, and more about creating new meanings musically and personally out of my contemporary situation.  This includes an attempt to enfold all music and/or sound that I have some personal investment in (and have encountered via vinyl, cds, live performances, radio, MP3s, etc.) into my practice while also trying not to simply recirculate or reenforce old tropes of these musical genres.  While elements of specific cultures, musical idioms, and instrument families do exist in my current music, these elements now seem to co-exist more cohesively, moving towards a singularized voice of plurality.  This direction is significantly different from a pastiche of appropriation that creates meaning by harsh juxtaposition while also erasing meaning and significance.  On one level, my banjo almost never ceases to be a banjo, and always carries with it the cultural baggage of the public memory of the instrument. However, I feel I am now enfolding entire worlds into this musical space, and creating a sophisticated, contemporary banjo music.

This creation of new personal meaning becomes much more significant while playing with other musicians within the free-improvised music context.  Organizing music often relies on the organization of musicians and this can symbolically represent large scale social organization.  More significantly, it IS social organization and is one way in which we define ourselves in relation to others.  In the free-improvised music practice, we tend to define ourselves as equals where participants are allowed to interact with the group on their own terms.  Although certain unspoken rule sets arise, the free improvised music space is inherently anarchistic, as players work together (or against each other) to construct a piece of music that has meaning for themselves and the audience.  Decisions about musical direction, cohesiveness, tempo, idiom, etc. are made in real time as musicians react against one another, introducing musical “ideas”, and playing with or against other “ideas” surfacing within the group.

As I am not the only instrumentalist coming to terms with producing art within a hyper-mediated landscape, how do I work with other musicians who are bringing their own historical trajectories to the playing field?  What are the tools of sound production and what histories do they imply?  Are we (re)enacting codes that point to specific histories, cultures, or ideologies and what is our relationship with these directions?  There are utopian social metaphors at play here, since in concept, the free improvised musical space seems to make room for the aberrant element.  As George Lewis pointed out after a duo performance by Pauline Oliveros and Miya Masaoka, “We all don’t have to think the same to play together.”  As I often play with young musicians coming from the free jazz trajectory, I attempt to put my agenda on the table by musically and directly asking, “How are you going to deal with the banjo player?”

My recent duo project with Kevin Davis, a classically trained cellist from Tennessee who now plays within the Chicago free jazz community, well exemplifies many of these issues.  There is the obvious cultural collapse occurring with the instrumentation of cello and banjo; a rare combination, as each instrument points to a very specific historical trajectory.  When we play together, we navigate a common ground where new meanings can emerge.  We tend to occasionally play towards the romantic, incorporating simple major/minor melodies intended to evoke the emotional, but these gestures do not necessarily point to “folk” or 19th century classical - they seem rooted in much larger cross-cultural currents.  Even as we search for mutuality, we discover our real differences.  We have to ask ourselves if it is possible to create a music where our similarities and differentiation can co-exist in the same musical space and if we are excluding anything within our natures (musical or personal), why does it not fit?

I do have some concerns about the failures of my work within this free improvised music context.  There are some tendencies to ahistoricize free improvised music.  Although it is a hard-to-define genre, there are certain tropes and compositional structures that seem to emerge, and I fear that in my attempts to create new relationships with the world, I am simply recycling the forms common to this quasi-idiom.  This partially stems from the unspoken rule sets that emerge.  Like a dinner party, we are free to say and do anything but there are real social consequences for certain behavior (one may be ignored, not invited back, etc.) although this largely goes unspoken.  What are these rules and what are their origins?  Is it desirable to just “play along” and not disrupt as we are attempting to construct and transmit something to an audience?  Am I being selfish if I attack these musical manners, per se, and play over others, do not play, disrupt, do not listen, etc.?  Does this make for a good or bad experience for the audience, is this important, and how do we even qualify this?

Citations:

Attali, Jacques, Noise: the Political Economy of Music, University of Minnesota Press, 1985

Gura, Philip F. and James F. Bollman, America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century. University of North Carolina Press, 1999

Huber, Patrick J., “The Modern Origins of an Old-Time Sound: Southern Millhands and their Hillbilly Music, 1923-1942.” Ph.D., University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, 2000.