Dennis Rea's adventurous guitar playing blends modern jazz, creative rock, experimental music, and world musical traditions into an approach that is uniquely his own, marked by haunting lyricism, enigmatic textures, agile improvisation, and the raw dynamism of rock. Over the years Dennis has led or been a key contributor to such innovative groups as Moraine, LAND, Iron Kim Style, Stackpole and many many more. His activities have spanned film, theater, radio, and modern dance, and he has appeared on more than two dozen recordings to date. Dennis' current and recent projects include instrumental avant-rock band Moraine, explosive improvisational jazz-rock quintet Iron Kim Style, processed thumb piano trio Tempered Steel, and Ting Bu Dong.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK had the pleasure to do the following interview with this great artist. Hope you enjoy reading it !!!
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: How did your adventures with music begin? Did you have any musical training or are you self-taught?
DENNIS REA : I first started playing the guitar at age nine, so I’ve been at it for 44 years now (gasp) and counting. Anyone who’s heard my recent work will no doubt be surprised to learn that my first inspiration as a guitarist was Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. It later came out that the band members didn’t even play the instruments on their early albums—the Monkees sound was actually the work of a group of anonymous studio musicians. So much for role models…
For the first few years I took guitar lessons from a series of rather uninspiring teachers, which left me with a lasting distrust of orthodox musical education. In general, I found reading music to be a chore and soon took to playing by ear, a decision that has since proven to be both an advantage and a liability—an advantage in that it enabled me to find my own way as a musician and develop my own style, and to grow comfortable with improvisation; a disadvantage in that it is sometimes challenging sharing ideas with musicians who are more dependent on the printed score. So in the end I would say that I’m largely self-taught, and that includes listening to a very wide variety of music and reading a great deal about music history.
As a composer, I often write pieces that involve fairly complex interplay between the various instruments. Most of my composing is done in my head—hearing how the parts fit together in my ‘mind’s ear’ seems to come naturally to me. If necessary, I will write out the parts using standard notation for the convenience of the musicians I’m playing with, but I find this method rather laborious and prefer to communicate through a sort of musical onomatopoeia, learning by ear rather than deciphering symbols
My formative musical influences included the Beatles, Hendrix, The Who, and other foundational rock bands, but by an early age I had already acquired a taste for “weird” music. I was fortunate to be exposed to experimental composers such as John Cage and Luciano Berio when I was very young thanks to my uncle, a classical music enthusiast who dumped unwanted record club bonus LPs on my family. Hearing their works and especially György Ligeti’s psychotropic soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey proved to be formative events in my musical development, as I learned to accept “nonmusical” sounds without prejudice. As my musical tastes continued to evolve, I quickly grew bored with basic blues-based rock and put in long hours tinkering with dissonant chords and unusual time signatures, influenced by progressive rock innovators like King Crimson and Soft Machine. I identified strongly with these groups’ adventurousness and willingness to embrace new sounds. Around the same time my older brother introduced me to the modern jazz of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, fueling my growing interest in improvisation. This was further reinforced through exposure to the British improvisers (Keith Tippett, Elton Dean, Harry Miller, et al.) who worked within the orbit of Crimson and the Softs.
As a teenager in the early 1970s I formed my first serious band, Zuir, with bassist Norm Peach and drummer Dan Zongrone, in my hometown of Utica, New York. With our lengthy explorations of psychedelic sound effects and odd rhythms, Zuir was quite the anomaly in Utica, where what I call “Budweiser rock” rock was the order of the day. While a bit amateurish in retrospect, Zuir’s music was nevertheless an important first step on the journey that led to what I’m doing today. Another formative experience was my membership in the Utica space music band Earthstar led by Craig Wuest, which recorded a series of LPs for Sky Records in Germany in the late 1970s.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: What music genres do you yourself listen to, and is there some kind of music that inspires you?
DENNIS REA : My listening takes in the gamut: 60s psychedelia, 70s progressive rock, early jazz-rock fusion, post-bop modern jazz, the ECM catalogue, free improvisation, contemporary classical, minimalism, field recordings, experimental (non-dance-oriented) electronic music, chance procedures, sound text, noise, Germany’s kosmische musik scene of the late 70s, and the traditional music of East Asia, Brazil, and North Africa in particular. In general I’m more captivated by instrumental than vocal music, though I have a special fondness for eccentric songwriters like Robert Wyatt, Annette Peacock, Nick Drake, and Roy Harper. It’s the tiresome solipsism and threadbare musical ideas of most singer-songwriters that puts me off. I’m also mindful of Brian Eno’s observation that words have the effect of limiting the possible interpretations of a given piece of music.
All of these various musical streams inevitably influence my own music, though I seldom set out consciously to emulate one genre/artist or another. One obvious exception is my latest release Views from Chicheng Precipice, an explicit tribute to the East Asian traditional music that inspired me when I was living in China and Taiwan from 1989-93. Iron Kim Style is clearly informed by jazz of the more adventurous sort. Many reviewers have likened Moraine’s Manifest Density to the prog-rock heyday of the 1970s, but that’s only partly the case—prog (particularly the RIO bands) is definitely in the mix, but so are many of the other musical inspirations cited above, from avant-jazz to modern chamber music. Then again, reviewers have also ascribed a lot of influences to Moraine that simply aren’t a factor—bands we’ve never heard of and such.
As a guitarist, my major influences include Jimi Hendrix, John McLaughlin, Ralph Towner, John Abercrombie, Terje Rypdal, Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith, Egberto Gismonti, and Ben Monder.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: If you should mention 10-15 records that have meant something to you and your music, what would they be?
DENNIS REA : I can’t begin to narrow my life list down to 10-15, so I’ll list some of the records that were most important to my early development as a musician:
· Jimi Hendrix (any)
· Ars Nova: Ars Nova (the U.S. band, not the Japanese one)
· King Crimson: Lizard
· Pink Floyd: Ummagumma
· Soft Machine: Six
· György Ligeti: 2001 soundtrack
· Miles Davis: Bitches Brew
· Mahavishnu Orchestra: Birds of Fire
· John Abercrombie: Timeless
· Ralph Towner: Solstice
· Egberto Gismonti: Dança das Cabeças
· Terje Rypdal: Whenever I Seem to Be Far Away
· Anthony Braxton: New York Fall 1974
· Stuart Dempster: In the Great Abbey of Clement VI
· Harry Partch: The World of Harry Partch
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: You are in my ears a musician who is in constant movement and going in many different directions from track to track and from release to release. Where do you get your ideas from and what is your secret (if you have one)?
DENNIS REA : I don’t know that there’s anything so mysterious as a “secret” behind the work I create. What I can tell you is that my music is shaped as much by nonmusical inspirations as musical ones. I’m not single-mindedly fixated on music to the exclusion of all else, and insist on living a well-rounded life and exercising multiple interests. This can only be of benefit to the music in my view.
Probably my greatest inspiration is the natural world—physical geography, geology, wildlife… Moraine actually takes its name from a geological term for the debris deposited by a glacier, though interestingly the name was suggested no by me but by our former cellist Ruth Davidson. I also take inspiration from literature, from my travels, and from various world cultures, as in the Views from Chicheng Precipice project, which is informed by East Asian cultures in general and by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist ideas about humankind’s place in the natural order of things—though I wouldn’t identify myself as either Taoist or Buddhist.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: Are you a full-time musician or is music your second job?
DENNIS REA : I have always had a day job alongside my musical commitments—in my case, as an editor of publications or as an instructional designer producing training materials. Frankly, I reject the widely held notion that being a ‘professional’ musician means having no other means of support. It’s more about an ongoing commitment to musical excellence, and putting one’s music in front of the public on a regular basis.
Here in Seattle, if one chooses to play unusual, noncommercial music, there really is no choice but to find another means of earning one’s livelihood. I can count the non-mainstream Seattle musicians who actually make a living from their music on the fingers of one hand—people like Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Robin Holcomb, Michael Shrieve—and some of these people are heavily dependent on grants or teaching to fund their careers. A band like Moraine can realistically expect to play a local gig once every month or two; any more frequently than that and we’d quickly saturate the limited audience for this type of music. So in order to make a living wage playing music, I’d have to play more crowd-pleasing fare, or in cover bands, which I’m simply unwilling to do. I would much rather make my compromises in my work life than in my musical life; plus, it pays better and thereby enables me to fund my musical endeavors.
I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like to make music full-time if the opportunities were there and I was at liberty to play what I liked, but the best I can realistically hope for is the occasional short tour or festival appearance outside the Seattle area or abroad. I suppose I could join all the lemmings and move to New York City to try to ‘make it’ with the big names, but I strongly oppose the centralization of music into a handful of ‘important’ nodes, and would rather see greater commitment to the development of strong local and regional scenes. Plus, there are many other reasons why I choose to live in Seattle, beyond musical considerations—again, I have many different interests in life.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: If a new listener were about to buy his first recording with your music, which one would you recommend as the best introduction to your amazing music?
DENNIS REA : That would really depend on the listener’s orientation. Obviously, a rock fan might have trouble with, say, Iron Kim Style, while the same would probably be true of a jazz fan with Moraine. That said, I’d probably recommend either Moraine’s Manifest Density (or ideally, our forthcoming CD with the current lineup) or LAND’s Road Movies, because of its compelling blend of different stylistic elements.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: Is there a difference between recording experimental music and performing it live. It seems to me like a very different experience?
DENNIS REA : Absolutely. The obvious difference is that performance is a real-time undertaking, whereas the recording experience allows one to revise, edit, and reorder musical events. In my own output, good examples of the latter approach are the tracks “Three Views from Chicheng Precipice” and “Aviariations on ‘A Hundred Birds Serenade the Phoenix’” on Views from Chicheng Precipice, where I layered and shaped the music using overdubbing in a way that would be very difficult if not impossible to reproduce live. (However, other tracks on the CD, such as “Tangabata” were wholly improvised in real time.) This approach enabled me to carefully craft the pieces to achieve a desired outcome. But in other situations I’d rather not know what the musical outcome will be, hence my ongoing involvement in free improvisation, which brings its own joys and satisfactions. Iron Kim Style was the result of a sort of hybrid approach, where the entire album was improvised but in a studio setting, and we later selected the sections that we felt could stand coherently on their own.
One might say that ‘performing experimental music live’ is a bit of an oxymoron because it assumes that there is actually an audience for it ;) But seriously, for some types of experimental music, especially free improvisation, the live experience is often more satisfying than a recording because the audience is invited to experiencing the music unfolding moment by moment, a fascinating and all-involving experience that rarely translates to the recorded object.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: I have had the pleasure to listen to your release with Land. On some of the numbers I hear the sound of Miles Davis from his Bitches Brew/ In a Silent Way period. Was that a sound you were going for?
DENNIS REA : LAND was essentially the vision of its founder/leader, the electronic musician Jeff Greinke, though each of the musicians had a lot of freedom in contributing their own parts, and there was ample room for improvisation. I can understand the Miles Davis analogy but can’t say for sure whether Miles was a primary influence on Greinke, who was not very involved with jazz. I tend to think that the comparison arises because of Lesli Dalaba’s trumpet playing, just as it does for Iron Kim Style because of Bill Jones’s trumpet playing—so many reviewers hear a trumpet and automatically think, ‘Ah—Miles Davis!’ Personally I don’t hear much commonality between Lesli, Bill, and Miles’s trumpet playing apart from the fact that they all worked within the context of modern electric music. Still, we’re very flattered by the comparison.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: Your music is hard to put in any musical boxes, because it has so many different styles mixed with each other. In my opinion you belong in the progressive/rock/jazz part of the music world. Do you agree with that? And what are your opinions on that genre, and genres in general?
DENNIS REA : First of all, I don’t go into the process of composing with the conscious intent of mixing different styles; i.e., ‘What would happen if I mixed death metal with Brazilian choro music?’ What emerges is an organic distillation of all the music that has influenced me over the years, which I suppose is the definition of my particular musical personality. I don’t want to waste a lot of energy fighting ‘genre wars,’ nor am I very interested in the sort of ‘jump cut’ juxtaposition of musical genres practiced by the likes of John Zorn. As a rule I’m interested in music that flows naturally rather than forced mergers, and in my own music, melody typically dictates the form.
It’s a standard gripe of musicians that their music tends to be compartmentalized by critics and listeners alike. It is indeed frustrating being constrained by externally imposed definitions, and it can have the effect of alienating a part of your potential audience. For example, when Moraine played at the progressive rock festival NEARfest earlier this year, the organizers labeled us as ‘avant garde’ in the promotional materials. Compared to truly avant-garde artists, Moraine isn’t very experimental at all. But I heard reports of people avoiding our set simply because we’d been given the ‘avant-garde’ tag, so they expected something very noisy and forbidding, whereas they probably would have enjoyed much of what we played.
Genre labels do have their uses—how else are people going to locate the type of music they enjoy most?—but have become increasingly irrelevant in a world of dissolving boundaries. But if I have to place my music in some kind of bucket, I’m OK with calling it progressive jazz-rock. I don’t feel much affinity with symphonic prog or what I call “Dungeons ‘n’ Dragons” prog, but I can definitely relate to anything in the Soft Machine/Crimson/RIO axis, or Gentle Giant. As for fusion, I love the jazz-rock of the late 60s/early 70s, but not so much the slick stuff that followed.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: What's your best advice for young aspiring musicians, who want to make it in the progressive music world or any world for that matter?
DENNIS REA : One of my mottos is “music and money don’t mix.” If one goes into the endeavor of making uncompromising progressive or experimental music with any expectation of monetary gain, one is almost certain to be disappointed. Instead one should be prepared to take satisfaction in the simple of act of making music and collaborating with other musicians, and in the approval of like-minded listeners. That’s why I separate my music life from my work life, as it frees me from making unacceptable musical compromises and from the disappointment of unmet expectations.
Most creative musicians find that they sink far more of their own resources into their music projects than they’ll ever see returned, an unfortunate corollary of our contemporary ethos of ‘get something for nothing’ downloading. It’s foolish to think that anyone else will cover the costs of recording, manufacturing, and promoting your CDs anymore, so you’d better be prepared to shoulder these expenses yourself.
Other items of advice to instrumentalists:
· Learn how to play one note well, in all its myriad shadings, before plunging into complexity.
· Practice your instrument in complete darkness on occasion to sharpen your senses of hearing and touch.
· It’s far more difficult to play slowly well than to play with dazzling speed.
· Respect tradition, but don’t let it enslave you.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: Could you tell us a little about all your different projects: Moraine, Iron Kim Style and your newest solo project?
DENNIS REA : Moraine is an instrumental quintet (guitar, violin, woodwinds, bass, drums) that grew out of an improvising duo I formed several years ago with cellist Ruth Davidson. Eventually we started working on compositions and decided to bring in additional players to fully realize the potential of the material. Ruth has since moved on to obtain an advanced degree in mathematics, and our original drummer, Jay Jaskot, moved to New York City in 2008. They were replaced by saxophone/flute player James DeJoie and drummer Stephen Cavit, completing a lineup that also features violinist Alicia DeJoie and bassist Kevin Millard. All of the band members compose music. I’m extremely happy with the musical chemistry of the current Moraine lineup.
Moraine never thought of itself as a ‘prog rock’ band, though progressive music is certainly in my genes, much more so than the other players. But once we linked up with MoonJune Records, a label with a reputation for releasing high-caliber progressive rock by new and veteran artists, we seem to have become a ‘prog’ band in the minds of many by default. One could just as easily term Moraine art rock, avant rock, post-rock, jazz-rock fusion, whatever. But we’re very pleased to have been embraced by a lot of prog-rock fans, and to have had the good fortune of taking part in the world’s foremost progressive rock festival, NEARfest, earlier this year.
Iron Kim Style is an instrumental quintet that plays wholly improvised jazz-rock. Apart from our new drummer, Tom Zgonc, who replaced the departed Jay Jaskot (also formerly of Moraine), the lineup has remained stable since the group’s inception: myself on 6-string electric guitar, Thaddaeus Brophy on 12-string electric guitar, Bill Jones on trumpet, and Ryan Berg on electric bass. While our music is completely improvised, it is unlike most specimens of free improvisation in that we have no qualms about playing melodically or using repeated rhythms, though we can get plenty abstract, too. Some general signposts for Iron Kim might be Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, James “Blood” Ulmer, the Decoding Society, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell, and mid-period King Crimson at their most improvisatory.
My recent solo CD Views from Chicheng Precipice was a special project that I see as one of the two end products of the years I lived and performed music in the Far East, the other being my 2006 book Live at the Forbidden City: Musical Encounters in China and Taiwan. I conceived the project as a tribute to the East Asian traditional music I so enjoyed, but instead of trying to faithfully reproduce my musical sources, I chose to reinterpret them in fairly radical ways in terms of arrangements and instrumentation. It’s easily the most ambitious project I’ve undertaken to date, and much of the credit for its success goes to the 13 amazing musicians who contributed, including legendary trombone virtuoso Stuart Dempster and koto master Elizabeth Falconer.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: Where do you see yourself in 5 years, still making music for the masses?
DENNIS REA : Most certainly, if I live that long ;) I’m happy to say that hooking up with MoonJune Records has been a life-changing experience for me in the best way. Though I’ve been continuously making music for nearly 40 years and have had the great good fortune of playing with some of the finest instrumentalists anywhere, my public profile has been relatively obscure until recently. It goes without saying that I’m extremely gratified at the mostly very positive responses my records have been getting. My hope is that the increased visibility will lead to more opportunities to perform in interesting places around the world and to collaborate with like-minded musicians, and that my present body of work will serve as a springboard for undertaking more special projects.
JAZZ/PROGNET DENMARK: Finally, what are your plans for the future and what will be the next release from your many projects?
DENNIS REA : Several new releases are planned at this time. The next Moraine release will likely be a double CD/DVD package, with a studio CD of all new material featuring the current lineup, plus a DVD of our June 2010 NEARfest concert, also featuring the current lineup but with a blend of new and older material. Iron Kim Style also recently recorded a CD worth of new material, again entirely improvised. Both CDs will be released by MoonJune Records. I’m extremely pleased to have formed a relationship with MoonJune as the label has been incredibly supportive of my work; label head Leonardo Pavkovic is a fount of knowledge about all varieties of creative music and has unerringly good taste—his label is definitely one to watch.
Another forthcoming CD is by one of my more unusual projects, in which I don’t play guitar at all—Tempered Steel, a trio (with Seattle musicians Ffej and Frank Junk) that performs improvised music on amplified, electronically processed thumb pianos. I can assure you that it’s like no other thumb-piano music you’ve ever heard.
Many thanks for taking an interest in my music and for introducing my projects to your readership in Denmark, a country I’d love to visit again sometime. All the best to you and your readers!
http://www.dennisrea.com/www.myspace.com/dennisreaPurchase Dennis Rea's book and music online at:
http://astore.amazon.com/dennreaguitco-20
