LA Weekly du lieu suivant : Los Angeles, California • 36

LA. WEEKLY July 15-21, 1983 Skdetona Crews 'M From TFflne Fringe by L. Ron Coyote keleton Crew is Fred Frith (guitars, violin, keyboards, kick drum and snare) and Tom Cora (cello, bass guitar, kick drum and high hat). Seated each behind his own pared-down trap kit and hemmed in by an assortment of instruments and noise-makers, they create at times the impression of a two-man one-man band. Together, they approximate the absent drummer.

Fred Frith dates his career back to the English avant-garde music collective, Henry Cow. In 1978, he recorded the first of three Art Bears records with drummer Chris Cutler and singer Dagmar Krause, also former members of Henry Cow. The second of these records, Winter Songs on which Frith provided the Can-cum-Guillaume de Machaud settings for Cutlers sequence of apocalyptic meditations on our own Dark Age, suggested by some Dark Ages bas-reliefs at Amiens Cathedral in France was released in 1979 by Ralph Records, which subsequently issued two albums of Friths work with several different configurations of personnel. Gravity and Speechless (1980 and 1981). He travels, and plays and records extensively on what he calls the fringe circuit of modern music, a loosely knit network of composers and improvisers in the U.S.

and Europe, and publishes an occasional article in the small-scale music press, explicating the phenomenon. His association with Tom Cora dates back to recording and concert dates with fringe-circuit composers Eugene Chad-bourne and John Zorn. (Cora had worked previously on projects with trumpeter Don Cherry and trombonist George Lewis, and with percussionist David Moss has just put out an album. Cargo Cult Revival, on Rift Records.) They have been playing out as Skeleton Crew for a little over a year, on the East Coast and in Europe. Their Club Lingerie date (June 18) was the first leg of their first West Coast tour.

The interview took place right after soundcheck. Con and Frith: difficult is not on appropriate word. rhythmic feels, even when playing the same thing. Frith: One person has two different feels if hes trying to play bass at the same time. Cora: Yeah, well, I cant really play bass unless Im doing something with my feet Weekly: Does the drummer tend to fall apart on stage? Cora: He does fall apart.

Frith: Yes, on occasion, but we do practice pretty hard. One of the best ways of practicing, of course, is to do as many gigs as possible. We just came off tour in Europe, so weve played this material quite a lot. We like to be flexible about the kinds of material we Dlav. We do play folk songs, and weve been working on an acoustic set so we dont have to be tied to all of this technology all of the time.

We like going to a party occasionally and playing on a very simple technological level. In professional music you can lose some of the real primary aspects of making music, especially when you have a group name and you start making tours. It gets more and more commodity-oriented. Even though the show itself may be super-flexible lots of improvising and changes and so on you develop a kind of identity a market identity and begin to look at things only from this point of view. So the issue of being flexible enough to play acoustically at parties becomes important, becomes a way of rediscovering the kind of pleasure that you get when you are first learning to play an instrument, when youre not really bothered about audiences at alL Its very important, and professional musicians are the people who forget it first Weekly: It seems to me that youve been especially fortunate in that respect.

Youve established a network of relationships with other musicians that enables you to play all over the world in a variety of settings. I thing it takes a tremendous leap of faith on the part of a musician to realize that thats possible, that by continuing to get out and play and experiment and pick up new instruments Frith: Thats a very important part of our activity. Its also a fantastic pleasure because when youre playing out there you have real contact with real people; they become your friends and you look forward to seeing them again and hanging out. Its a different level from professional touring, of course. Weekly: Did you and Tom book your present tour? Frith: Yes, though I think from the point of view of getting a group off the ground its sometimes logical to go with an agency, if only to start doing serious work regularly and see something of the real world real audiences and stuff.

As long as you have a very clear head about how long its going to be for. I mean, it would be hypocritical of me in the case of a group like Henry Cow to pretend that we were out there and that by struggling we established this great independent network. What happened was we signed with a record label who put a lot of money into promoting us and whose agent set up tours for us in Europe. Through doing that we began meeting people separately from the tour organization, and realized also that we detested tour organizations of that kind. From that basis we built things up.

But if we hadnt had the initial agency contact, it would have been harder for us either to have met these other people or to have established the kind of credibility where we could do anything with them. Weekly: But you were cautious at first about Frith: Sure. Never sign anything long term.D Frith: Actually, only a very few. Lindsay Cooper bassoon and oboe with Henry Cow) was conservatory-trained, but he dropped out He was disgustd with the way serious music is taught the competition, the total lack of cooperation between people who are supposedly working together, but who are actually anxious to climb on each others backs to get at a very few open jobs Cora: Theres a mystique generated by the conservatories that creates in musicians a fear of attempting anything more challenging than a set of chord changes and a melody. You dont have to be trained in a conservatory to be a composer, although conservatories may have some stake in promoting that idea.

Frith: Exactly the same syndrome as you find in the history of law, or of medicine. Both institutions have surrounded themselves with a language which ordinary people dont understand, so that it appears one needs professionals to get at certain problems. Its so stupid. It only wants translation. Cora: Theres an interesting phenomenon that we encountered when we recently played in Germany, at a jazz festivaL Most of the people who came to write about it were jazz critics.

One Swiss critic wrote an article in which he admitted to his readers that he felt jazz had lost some of its edge, the life it had, say, in the 50s and 60s. He described Skeleton Crew as a new jazz group. Frith: We were the fresh air, the high point, new energy coming in Cora: So, in a way, we were being coopted for the purpose of keeping jazz alive. Interesting phenomenon. Weekly: I suppose if they werent careful about calling anything they happen to like jaxz, theyd be an embarrassment to their peers.

Frith: Yes, if they mention anything thats not jazz or that is rock theyll be accused of selling out Another interesting thing is how for most musicians this is especially true of American musicians theres a kind of graduation that happens when youre learning an in strument The tendency when youre first playing is to play what you enjoy, and very often thats rock music. But when you get to be serious about it, you decide that thats no longer possible, and you graduate to important music; you become a jazz musician. This seems crazy to me because rock music already has all the things that are really creative and exciting. Ive always tended to think of myself as a rock roll musician, even when Ive been farthest away from it in some respects. And yet, most people feel scared of committing themselves to that when they get good at an instrument.

They want to start showing everyone that theyre good. Weekly: Well, vanity can be an issue no matter what you re playing. But you must recognize that some of the forms you've chosen to explore, or create, are pretty austere, pretty difficult. If not technically, then in terms of accessibility. Frith: I dont think the word difficult is appropriate to what were doing now.

There have been some things Ive done in the past which must have seemed difficult, even though I would have resisted the idea at the time, and would have denied it But I regard Skeleton Crew as being the most accessible group Ive ever done. We really enjoy ourselves. We have a lot of fun playing, and making discoveries while were playing, and cant help somehow expressing that pleasure in what were doing to an audience. Normally, audiences have been disarmed. They come expecting it to be difficult and then have the ground pulled out from under them.

Weekly: Tell me about Skeleton Crews drummer. Its rather like watching Moondog play in Times Square Frith: Thats the principle, really, and also why were called Skeleton Crew. Were obviously stretching ourselves in-strumentally, often taking on more than we can handle. It provides an element of tension in our music. Also, rhythmically, it throws up ways of playing that one person behind the drums just wouldnt be able to do, just in terms of coordination.

Cora: Two people have two different Weekly: When did you first pick up the violin? Frith: I didnt pick it up, actually. It was put into my hands, when I was five years old, and I had classical training until I was fourteen. Keeping that up for nearly SO years means, well, that Im an in-credibly good bluffer. But Im actually technically virtually incompetent. Weekly: Well, perhaps as a violinist.

But as a fiddler. Frith: Right. I tried to be a violinist and was a dismal failure. Falling short as violinist, I settled for fiddling. W'eeldy: You picked up the guitar, however.

When? In your teens? Frith: Yeah. What a relief! W'eeldy: How about you, Tom? Cora: Guitar was my first instrument. I grew up playing blues and country music, later jazz. Then, for some reason, I quit playing guitar. About six years ago, I picked up the cello.

It still feels like a new instrument to me; I consider myself a student of the cello. At the same time. Ive moved into a period where I look at the instruments I play as tools toward something, rather than letting them dictate the sort of music I play. Weekly: Have the musicians youre played or recorded with in past years been, by and large, classically trained?.