Here is a trailer for my latest film, Black February. Black February chronicles an unprecedented series of concerts performed in New York City by legendary jazz composer and conductor Lawrence D. 'Butch' Morris. Butch put on the series in February 2005 to celebrate 20 years of Conduction, his revolutionary technique for leading live improvisations. More than a simple portrait of those 28 days or a biography of an enigmatic and complex legend of the avant-garde, Black February is a film about how music is made and what it means. It's about the struggle of artists trying to distill the purest essence of themselves into their work, and the scope of a musical theory that has the potential of redefining what it means to make music.__________________________January 30, 2013Postscript:
Butch Morris (1947-2013)
Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, a musical innovator of the first order, died on Tuesday, at the age of sixty-five. While little appreciated by audiences beyond avant-garde-music cognoscenti, his influence upon contemporary improvisers of all disciplines is profound. Morris was born in Long Beach, California, on February 10, 1947; he began his career in the Golden State but spent most of the last four decades in New York. For those lucky enough to see him perform, he was a memorable figure: an imposing man, with an expert baton and a cutting gaze, standing before an ensemble at rapt attention. At first, it seems a familiar sight to those who have watched maestros like Serge Koussevitzky or James Levine, until you recognize there is no sheet music in front of the performers. The group is as likely to contain a Japanese shakuhachi or a Turkish ney as a Western flute, or it might be a collection of poets or turntablists. And the sounds that emerge are sui generis to the moment, to the performers, to the audience, to the venue. An orchestral exploration of timbre and melody and rhythm that could happen with no one but the musicians at hand, that could happen at no time but right now.
Morris developed (and trademarked) a system he called “Conduction,” which he described as “a vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct a real-time musical arrangement or composition.” The academic wording disguises an idea that is both simple and radical. What Morris spent the last thirty years of his life perfecting was a technique to let an orchestra work together with one mind: courting the unknown, making something out of nothing, taking the basic challenge posed by African-American music in the twentieth century to its farthest logical extension.
The earliest recordings of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington eloquently and adamantly rid listeners of the notion that music needed to be wholly predetermined to be considered high art. This fresh juxtaposition of composition and improvisation fueled decades of American musical innovation, most explicitly demonstrated in jazz’s rapid evolution, but echoed in John Cage’s indeterminacy and Chuck Berry’s guitar, in Western swing and Nuyorican salsa. By the nineteen-sixties, artists across the jazz continuum, like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler, began to question the need to rely on composition at all, embracing the possibilities presented by “free improvisation.” This is a deeply misleading term, for any improviser worth his or her salt is continually concerned with structure, while recognizing that structure might be a mutable concept. But the sense of artistic freedom was real (and historically apropos in the era of the civil-rights movement and Black Power), as revolutionary musicians sought musical forms that existed separate from the Western concepts of tonality and song form.
For the generation of musicians following Coleman et al., the question was a familiar one of post-modernity: After freedom, what? How can one translate the euphoric intensity of total improvisation to other contexts and other cultures? How can one remain dedicated to improvisation’s ethos without being trapped by it? Butch Morris proposed a provocative answer: reintroducing the conductor, the ultimate figure of Western classical hierarchy, as a means to organize improvised sound.
Butch Morris first emerged in the nineteen-seventies as a cornettist of warm tone and high invention, performing on important albums by saxophonists David Murray, Steve Lacy, and Frank Lowe. In a period that prized musical fireworks, Morris displayed a subtler appreciation for timbre and effect reminiscent of earlier jazz heroes like Ellington stalwarts Rex Stewart and Bubber Miley, with an orchestral sense of register and dynamics that hinted at his future exploits. During that time, he worked with several musicians, including pianist/composer Horace Tapscott and drummer Charles Moffett, who introduced him to the basic idea of conducted improvisations. By the nineteen-eighties, Morris was regularly experimenting with the conducting techniques he later patented, in groups under his own leadership and in David Murray’s volcanic big band. Morris’s gestures and signals codified principles an individual improviser might pursue intuitively—repeating a phrase, harmonizing a melody, creating variations of a rhythm—but that an orchestra could not perform en masse unless its members possessed psychic abilities. At first, he used conduction to open up the improvisational sections of written charts, stretching the material well past the big-band tradition of riffs and vamps behind soloists. By 1985, with a piece at N.Y.C.’s The Kitchen called “Current Trends in Racism in Modern America” (featuring young artists like John Zorn and Christian Marclay before they became downtown avant-garde luminaries), he trusted his method enough to craft an entire piece from scratch, relying solely on his manipulation of spontaneous improvisation.
Morris eventually abandoned his horn and dedicated himself to conduction full-time. He became a virtuoso of nonverbal expression, gaining the ability to convey minute adjustments of articulation or dynamics with a twist of the wrist or an arched eyebrow. He performed around the world, leading European orchestras and Brazilian drum choirs, groups of Japanese traditional instruments and Lower East Side poets, discovering he had invented a language universal in its implications, carrying the potential to unite musicians of any genre or culture in a musical experience unique to its participants. Morris’s concepts were deeply rooted in the traditions of African-American experimentalism but far transcended jazz. (In fact, Morris often preferred musicians from other traditions; jazz musicians tended to bristle at obeying too many instructions.) Over his lifetime, Morris led over five thousand musicians into his sound world. For all of them, it was surely memorable; for many, it was transformative.
Luckily, Morris’s work has been well documented, including in the documentary film “Black February” and the epic ten-CD box set “Testament,” which beautifully illustrates the sonic diversity and global sweep of Morris’s art. But recording technology and improvised music have always had a difficult marriage; how can you truly capture the magic of creating something wholly new in the moment? I will listen to Butch’s recordings to be reminded of his genius, and I will see the influence of his ideas on countless artists. However, I will sorely miss experiencing his art live, watching him masterfully corral the creativity of a herd of musicians into a unified mass of unreplicable sound.
Taylor Ho Bynum is a cornet player, composer, and bandleader based in New Haven, Connecticut.
Photograph: Michael Nagle/The New York Times/Redux
