By Keith Prosk
I interview Dave Dove, the director of Houston, Texas’
Nameless Sound
performance series, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2021
by diving into archives of previously unreleased sound, video, and
stories from musicians and related people with deep connections to the
series in a project named
20 Years Of Sound
. At the time of the interview, these thorough profiles feature
Joe McPhee
,
Maggie Nicols
,
Alvin Fielder
, and
Pauline Oliveros
and a module on the dialogue between
The Aural And The Visual
has since been published. Over video chat, we talk about the history of
Nameless Sound, the logistics of the project, its future directions,
the improvising scene in Houston, and how Nameless Sound is not just a
presenter but a cultivator of community through listening and sounding.
Dave Dove is a practicing trombonist and has released a couple of
things this year, including
A EYES ALWAYS ON YOU
with trumpeter and vocalist Jawaad Taylor and
The Very Cup of Trembling
with Alvin Fielder, saxophonist Jason Jackson, and contrabassist Damon
Smith. As becomes clear in the conversation, each of these
collaborators have deep connections to Nameless Sound.
Keith Prosk: Hey, how’re you?
Dave Dove: Hey, Keith, how’re you doing? Nice to see you in the flesh.
KP: Yeah, same. How’s your day going so far?
DD: It’s going fine. Lot going on.
KP: Are y’all getting a lot of rain that way lately?
DD: Uh, yes, always this time of year. You’re in Austin, right?
KP: Yeah, and I feel like we usually have a wet month in May and then
it super dries out and everything dies again around this time, so it’s
been nice to have a little rain our way and keep temperatures a little
cooler than they usually are.
DD: Oh, you're from San Antonio, so you know the region and all that. I
mean this time of year in Houston we’re always waiting for the big
hurricane
KP: Yes. Are you or
MECA
or Nameless ever affected by the flooding that comes with the
hurricanes?
DD: I have never been flooded. MECA has definitely… that building has
suffered a lot of damage, from Harvey particularly. Damage to the roof,
actually. And maybe some flooding... They have a basement, which is
very unusual in Houston, so probably some flooding in their basement,
I’m not sure.
KP: Man. Well, thanks so much for chatting with me a bit about the 20
Years Of Sound project that you’ve got going on.
KP: Of course. I guess, just to get us started - I know you go over
some of this in the different profiles and modules - but if you kind of
wanna give a brief intro to what Nameless Sound is and maybe how you
got started and some watershed moments along the way.
DD: Mmm, OK. Well feel free to direct me cause I might be a little bit
redundant with what’s already in the project there. But Nameless Sound
is an organization that works with experimental music, improvised
music, collaborative music, both as a presenter of local, national, and
international artists but also as an organization that has a very
thorough and active workshop program. We bring artists from all over
the world to perform in Houston in different spaces. We’ve never had
our own space, so we’re always moving around, collaborating,
partnering, setting things in different locations, curating things to
space, responding to spaces. But also we... you know everything that we
do is done with partners, so our workshop program is done the same way.
We’re going into different spaces and doing workshops with different,
well, embedding in different communities, and cultivating communities
in different spaces. So that program started a single workshop at MECA,
before there was a Nameless Sound in 1997. And then Nameless Sound
formed originally as a branch of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in
2001 and in 2006 we broke off and formed Nameless Sound. By that point
we had started to do these workshops not just at MECA - and the
workshop at MECA is an open workshop that anyone can go to - but we
started receiving invitations to go into different spaces like homeless
shelters, after school programs for refugee youth. We had already been
doing a lot of in-school work. And then the artists that we bring in
will often do work in those communities as well. Sometimes they’ll do
one or two workshops but sometimes they’ll do something more extensive
like a week or two residency. We have a staff of facilitators who are
practicing improvising artists. And through 20+ years of practice, a
pedagogy has developed, and that pedagogy outlines that what we are
doing is responsive and collaborative work. And, as practicing
improvisers, we are in a special position with our practice to be able
to immediately respond to the environments we’re in, to ideally work in
the most collaborative way with the youth that we work with, to go in
without fixed goals, without curriculum, but with our sense of
possibility. And to work from our own musical practice in those spaces
too. There’s a lot of detail about all of that stuff that I could go
into further so if there’s anything you want to zero in on we can…
KP: No, yeah, that’s great. I was kind of aware of the youth
opportunities that y’all had, not so much the adult opportunities, but
it’s been very clear to me - cause we’ve got
PG
in Austin kind of close to your practice as well - that you’re not just
concert presenters. You are more community cultivators. And pretty much
everyone you bring in usually works with the kids and does these
workshops. And of the four profiles so far on 20 Years Of Sound, that’s
what stuck out to me. That they’re not just there in the capacity of
musicians in this context, but they’re all teachers and mentors as
well, from Alvin Fielder taking on some of the young percussionists as
mentees to Joe McPhee considering them like his kids, and then Maggie
and Pauline’s more overt efforts towards cultivating spaces for
learning around sound. I know that’s a conscious mission with the
program, has that been a conscious perspective that you’ve wanted to
show people with these profiles?
DD: Definitely wanted to show people that with the profiles. We’re
moving away from… what you’ve seen so far are these editions centered
on specific artists and at this point we’re going to have editions more
focused on particular themes rather than specific artists, so there
will be one just about that, actually. That will just be featuring
different work that we do with youth and even sharing our pedagogical
work behind that. We’ve developed a whole pedagogy from the practice,
right. Much like an artist develops an approach from practice, we
develop a pedagogy from our practices - it’s a practice-based research,
right. So we will share essays of the pedagogical statement,
information about how we assess this work, probably we’ll share
information about work that we’ve done with a psychotherapist in being
responsive to trauma, which is very specific to a lot of the sites that
we work in. So hopefully you’ll even get to see that in more detail.
For us, this is not an outreach program. This program, these workshops,
predates being a concert presenter. So for a lot of non-profit
organizations, a presenter, you sort of do what you do on stage and
then you have what’s called an outreach program. For us, it’s kind of
the opposite. I Mean I wouldn’t want to put one in front of the other
in terms of what we do, our identity, our activity. Because they’re
both very active and oftentimes they don't overlap. We do have artists
that perform and don’t work in those workshops, and we do have kids
that we work with who never meet those artists also. Though they do
overlap strongly. And this is to say that in Houston, Nameless Sound
reaches a lot of different people for different reasons and in
different ways, and that even the people we reach don’t know everything
else that we do. I would like them to, but they don’t. It’s just too
much, or it doesn’t happen that way. We started… you know, I didn’t
have any plan to start a non-profit organization. I had an idea about
doing improvisation workshops with kids. And my background is I’m a
musician, I’m an artist. And back in the late 90s I had this idea like,
‘Oh I’d really like to work with kids doing music improvisation’
because i felt that music education was very conservative and that
growing up I’d never really had an opportunity in my formal education
to do something creative. You know in the school band, even in the jazz
band we didn’t really improvise. We weren’t composing music. We weren’t
experimenting on our instruments. It was sort of through my other
musical life, punk rock, that I learned like you go ahead and you don’t
wait to make your own music. Someone doesn’t have to tell you that
you’re ready. You can start writing your own songs and putting on your
own shows. I really feel that when I was 11, 12 years old, when I first
started getting into music, I had this formal education and I had this
other thing, and it was really important that I had this other thing.
And though that’s not the kind of music I do anymore, that thread
definitely runs into this period of time where it’s like I really wanna
work with kids and give them an opportunity to do something creative.
And me, my practice is improvisation so that became the way by which to
do that, but I also felt that improvisation was the way that you could
immediately start being creative, without waiting for anything to
happen. And that it was also a way of working that did not require a
common musical background, a traditional idiom, or language. So if I
were to compose for an orchestra, I would need people who know how to
read music. If I were to work with a jazz ensemble, I would need to
know people who could play the chord changes. In improvisation you can
have the punk rock kid next to the conservatory kid next to the
mariachi kid next to the kid who’s programming on the computer and
right away you can start doing something creative with them. So I
identified improvisation not only as my own practice but as this thing
that could immediately get the wheels turning and get kids working
creatively. Like many things in my life - and this is before there was
a Pauline Oliveros Foundation or Nameless Sound - Pauline was an
important connector in this. She was a mentor who I knew originally
through her mother, who was a piano teacher living in Houston, and one
day Pauline was in town visiting and she said, ‘Oh i have a workshop
I’m giving at this art school called MECA I was invited to give,’ and
she invited me and a friend to come along. We went with Pauline to do
the workshop and I thought, ‘Oh maybe these guys will let me do this
improv workshop. They’re having Pauline in here, so maybe they’ll let
me come in and do something regularly...’
Listen to Pauline Oliveros at MECA
here.
DD: It was not… I mean, in a way everything Pauline does is a Deep
Listening workshop because I think she would identify Deep Listening as
something that all of her work is connected to. So, yes, but it wasn’t
really a Deep Listening workshop from my memory, it was more of an
improv workshop. I don’t remember it… this was a long time ago and I’ve
been in many Pauline workshops since… but I don’t remember it being a
capital Deep Listening workshop in the ways that many have been into
it, I remember it as more of a playing thing from my memory. And what
was important for me about that day is that it introduced me to that
building and I met the director, Alice Valdez, and she was open to me
coming and working regularly with those kids. At that same time, I had
joined an artist-advisory board at
DiverseWorks
which is a local art space here and they gave me some opportunities to
bring some musicians to town. The first one was Joe McPhee and Arthur
Doyle, which is told in that story there, and then I thought, ‘OK well
I’m gonna bring Joe to do a concert and I’m gonna also bring him to
work with these kids I’m working with.’ This became the seed of
Nameless Sound. Which is I had this opportunity to present a concert. I
was already working with these kids. And I thought, ‘Why don’t we just
mix it all together,’ you know. And I’ve often said it’s great… it was
really Joe who gave that workshop, and it’s great that… and I didn’t
know Joe at the time other than his music and it’s great that he was
such a wonderful, generous, sweet guy, because there are a lot of
people who I could have invited to do that might not have been so cool.
And I often think that if it had gone a different way I may never have
done it again. So there was a couple of years of doing projects like
that and then at one point Pauline said, ‘Hey, why don’t you start an
organization and you can be umbrellaed under us.’ She kinda poked me
about that for a year or two before I did it. You know, we’re both a
presenting organization and a community organization, but we were an
organization that worked with kids first. I think it’s important to say
that. And I don’t see the organization as two halves. I just see it as
different sides by which to do this work. It’s like people gather, they
have a listening experience, they participate in that experience, we’re
cultivating a space, I’m simplifying but the same thing… I have the
same priorities, generally speaking, that I do for sitting with a group
of kids and playing. Which is making a space where everyone feels
comfortable. Where you can have this experience. Where the experience
doesn't have to be defined for you, it can be your experience, where
you can learn from that, you can heal from that, you can be creative in
that space. And it’s important to say that one of our most recent
projects - recent meaning the last three years or so - and there will
be a future edition about this - is a series called
They, Who Sound
, and They, Who Sound is our weekly concert series. So in the past our
presenting was more like 8 or 10 concerts a year of international
artists. But we’ve added a weekly concert series, which is a little
less formal, it often has visiting artists but it always has local,
original artists on it, so the basis of that is local and regional
artists.
DD: Well some of these people you’re talking about, they’re all very
associated with Houston - maybe Bryan a little less so, I mean he’s
been here a lot and done great things here - but all of the other
people you’ve mentioned have lived in Houston and several of them don’t
live here anymore, unfortunately for me. But Maria, Sandy, Jawaad,
those three came out of our youth program. So I met Sandy when she was
a teenager. She was in the record store and she was buying Captain
Beefheart and Sun Ra records on vinyl and I was putting up a poster for
a Sam Rivers concert and I was like, ‘Oh, do you like that?’ And she
was like, ‘Yeah I read about this, it seems like it might be cool, and
I said, ‘Well if you like that you might like this - you should go to
this concert.’ And then she came to the concert, which was at MECA. And
I said, ‘Oh I met you at the record store’ and then I said, ‘I bet you
play an instrument.’ And she said, ‘Yeah I play guitar’ and I said,
‘Well you should come to this workshop that we have here.’ This is when
Sandy was still playing like this [makes traditional strum movement]
and I remember the day that she laid her guitar flat very clearly.
Similarly Maria, though she came to us a little older, in her early
20s, she started her practice as an improviser and a sound artist with
us. When I met her she was a DJ. And Maria came to one of our concerts
and she was doing a music business degree and she said, ‘I need to do
an internship’ and I said alright - we had only been around for a year
or so, I didn't have any apparatus to take on an intern - but I was
like, ‘You’re gonna volunteer, right?’ And she said yeah and I said
great. She sent me her resume and her CV all this, I didn’t even look
at it. We had a meeting and she was really upset that I didn’t study
her resume and I said, ‘Well you just seem like a cool person and you
want to help so that just seemed like enough.’ And then I invited
Maria… I said, ‘Well if you’re gonna help me out then you should come
to my workshop.’ And she said, ‘I don’t play an instrument.’ And I
said, ‘You’re a DJ right.’ And she said yeah. And I said, ‘Well, bring
your turntable.’ And she brought her turntable and I remember the
moment she played - and she tells this story in the edition i think -
she often says, ‘The moment I did that improvisation I realized that
I’m not going to DJ anymore, I’m going to do this.’ And there are
others too. Jawaad was not a teen when he came to us but he was maybe
in his early 20s. When Jawaad came to us he was… I might be
misrepresenting this but this is my understanding. He came to us as…
you know Jawaad grew up as like a rapper, who would like sneak out of
his house as a kid and go to rap battles and stuff. This is the story
he always told me. I might’ve been at some of those things, you know,
who knows. I mean, I know some of the clubs he was going to and I was
going there too. Of course he was a kid and I’m older than him. I met
him at one of our concerts and I don’t know how I got to talking to him
but he told me that he played trumpet and I said, ‘You should come to
my workshop.’ And he came to the workshop, playing his trumpet, and I
learned, ‘Oh you’re also a rapper, you know you can do that also here.’
So I think the way Jawaad tells it - and he can confirm that or
elaborate or deny it - I really think through the improv workshop
that’s where he started bringing these two practices together. I think
they were sort of separate practices for him. And I think Jawaad is
someone really special in that he really has integrated rapping and
beats and programming into a really flexible improvisational language
almost like no one else I’ve heard I think. Where one doesn’t have to
accommodate the other, they’re very flexible, they’re very responsive
languages in the way he does that. Some others ones who came up, maybe
you’ve heard
Jason Jackson
, he’s on our staff now. He’s a fantastic saxophone player, he plays in
The Young Mothers
. Jason was a teenage student of mine and now he runs the education
program. There’s a bunch of them. There’s a whole lot of them out
there. Who started as young kids in the Nameless Sound workshop and are
now… some of them are active experimental musicians, some of them are
active in other kinds of music, some of them are artists otherwise.
Other people in the Houston music scene that have been... not students
but who you may have heard of that are connected to Nameless Sound,
well,
Tom Carter
and
Christina Carter
,
Charalambides
. They’re very old friends of mine. Christina’s been a friend since we
were teenagers actually, so I go way back with them. Oh Susan Alcorn.
When I first started getting into this kind of music in Houston in the
90s Susan was living here and she was like the light for me in a way. I
was like, ‘Oh here’s someone else that’s into this’ and she’s doing it
at a very high level. So Susan has been a very important inspiration
since before Nameless Sound, just being around that level of artistry,
commitment, and individuality and talent, that’s just really big. A lot
of great music in Houston. We could take that conversation in any
direction. And it’s always changing. It’s a city where people are
coming and going, it’s a big city. I still find people… I mean we’ve
been in a pandemic so we’re getting ready to start concerts again. I
think it’s going to be… I think we’ll be learning to see where the
scene is now. But people are always moving into this town. You
mentioned Damon Smith, he was here for several years and he certainly
brought a lot of energy to the city when he was here. And yeah, so a
lot of good people here.
KP: Yeah, just to go back to Maria, I think that story in Pauline’s
profile really spoke to Nameless Sound, where - I guess Pauline was a
little more active in helping out with Nameless Sound or your
activities more than visiting musicians - but not just having these
people hang out with the kids or present their music to the kids but
actually helping them cultivate their practice and providing safe
spaces to experiment.
DD: You know one thing I realized, I learned as time went on. And I
learned from some of our people leaving Houston, and it’s a little hard
for me to see in the center of it. Is not only is it important that
like Maria had an experience with Pauline or Sandy when she was a
teenager had workshops with Keith Rowe or Jason when he was a teenager
he basically had workshops with every great creative saxophone player.
Like Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, John Butcher, Marshall Allen, Joe McPhee,
Kidd Jordan, Bhob Rainey, Sam Rivers, he kind of experienced the whole
gamut. He experienced a pretty thorough runthrough of who were really
great creative improv free jazz experimental saxophone players. I think
in hindsight what we see is that - and what none of us really saw at
the time (I mean these things are still happening) - and I think maria,
her story speaks to that - though she maybe doesn’t directly say it -
was that it was a very casual encounter too. So much so that these
kids, only later sometimes did they realize who it was that they were
hanging out with when they were 19 years old. I think Maria kind of
speaks to that. I don’t think she quite knew who was in the room with
her and who was encouraging her and then later you kind of realize… and
I don’t think it would happen it like that... I mean Houston is a big
city, and I wonder if it would happen like that in another big city.
KP: I don’t know, I feel like Houston, like San Antonio, has the
reputation of being more on the chill side.
DD: It’s a pretty chill scene. I think it’s hard for me, from my
position, it’s hard for me to assess that but I was talking to a couple
of other people about this recently, there’s a pretty serious scene
here, but it’s not very competitive. There’s not much to compete for,
actually. There’s probably a downside to that. Well, you know, maybe I
shouldn’t embrace such a capitalist framework about the value of
competition on quality but I think… there’s something to that but
there’s just as much to the opposite because people work together here.
And I think they work together even across… they often work together
across the supposed subgenre lines of this music in a way that they
might be less likely to do so in more competitive music scenes. In
music scenes where people have moved to that city to be in that art
scene or to be in that music scene. But there’s some brilliant people
here, there’s some really brilliant people here, and I think that’s a
really healthy thing about it. I think there’s not really like a
dominant genre in improvised music here. It’s not like a free jazz
scene or an electroacoustic scene or whatever. There have been really
strong noise scenes in Houston, distinct from what we’re doing, but
they also have a healthy overlap with the improvised scene. As an
artist I’ve found it to be a really stimulating and healthy
environment. And the audience listens really well here. That’s
something I’ve learned over the years. Artists who are on tour come
here and they’re like, ‘Wow the audience really listens here.’ There’s
a real quality to the listening, they think the audience really
supports in listening.
KP: That’s good. I’ve only been to one Nameless Sound show; I drove in
for the Radigue quartet a couple years ago. But my impression was that,
at least what I thought were locals, were very in tune and very
enthusiastic and attentive to the music and that’s a music that
requires a lot of focus and attention as well.
DD: Yeah, that concert would have been a good test for that, wouldn’t
it. I think the the crowd stayed for the whole thing, do you remember?
KP: Oh yeah, maybe a person left cause a phone went off but I don’t
remember anyone just leaving...
DD: Yeah and that was a pretty intense one. That was not a short
concert. Yeah I’m looking forward to getting back to it.
KP: Just roping back to 20 Years Of Sound, you mentioned you’re going
to have a little stuff on They, Who Sound and your pedagogy, but
anything else you’re willing to share that’s on the horizon?
DD: Sure. What we’re planning - and it could evolve, it could shift
between now and when it happens - but there’s an edition that’s coming
out in the coming days, at some point, any day now, that is around the
theme of the aural and the visual. So dialogs, blurred lines,
intersections between the aural and the visual. This is around events
that we’ve had that speak to that. It’ll have audio of Keith Rowe and
Loren Connors each playing solos in the
Rothko Chapel
, not included just because it’s the Rothko Chapel but included because
of the place that Rothko figures in both of those artists’ work. Rothko
really hovers as a heavy influence over both of those guys. It’ll have
video and audio of a project called Film Noir by the pianist Ran Blake,
where he performs to these film noir clips. It’ll have a video of
Phantom Orchard, which is Ikue Mori and Zeena Parkins, performing a
concert with live video projections that they use. It’ll have audio of
Text of Light, which is Alan Licht, Lee Ranaldo, Ulrich Krieger, and
Tim Barnes performing to Stan Brakhage films - without the films, even
though the concert had the films. Those are those pieces, and then it
has a subfeature on
James Magee and The Hill
, which is a whole conversation unto itself.
KP: Yeah, the installation…
DD: James Magee is an artist in west Texas who has been building this
monumental work out in the middle of the desert, off the grid, with no
electricity or anything, since 1980. And we’ve done four concerts
there. So it’ll have audio of one of those concerts, of Peter Brötzmann
playing there. And it’ll also have audio of a concert of James’ with
Bob Ostertag that James… the titles of these pieces are these very long
poems that are very musically recited by James. And then it has another
subfeature about four of our poster artists over the years, three of
them writing about the process of designing the posters - three of them
are musicians and they’re writing about the process of designing the
posters and how they’re responding to music. I’m pretty sure we’ll have
an edition about They, Who Sound, which goes...see They, Who Sound is
only three years old as a Nameless Sound project, but it’s like nine or
ten years old as an independent project of mine. So They, Who Sound
used to be my own kind of weekly concert series that was just sort of
designed to put me and my friends on. And it was just very DIY and it
wasn’t Nameless Sound. And it really became this thing, it became very
important, it became like a meeting point for local musicians, and it
became an opportunity for touring people to collaborate with locals and
it just became really important. So at some point we took it on as a
Nameless Sound series officially, in partnership with
Lawndale Art Center
. So They, Who Sound will actually reach back in its pre-Nameless Sound
history, when it used to be held at a bar called
AvantGarden
. Then we’ll have one about creative music communities, our work with
the kids, including some media of visiting artists working with those
kids as well as those kids own projects from teenagers to little kids
and maybe some pedagogy about that. Hopefully some essays or some
voice, well, we’ll definitely have voice of those participants. And
then I’m thinking we’re gonna have an edition on Nameless Sound
Ensemble. Nameless Sound Ensemble is basically any local ensemble
assembled for a specific project, usually assembled to work with a
visiting artist. Can I speak to any of those pieces yet? Might not be
able to speak to those pieces because I don’t have approvals yet. I’m
trying to think of any of them I have approvals for and off the top of
my head I don’t think I’ve worked on that yet. But, you know, so and so
comes in and then sets a piece on the local ensemble, that’s the
Nameless Sound Ensemble. And then we’ll have a couple of editions that
they’ll sort of find themes within them, but they’ll just be kind of
like curatorial samplings of different concerts that we’ve done with
maybe a looser theme connecting them, or subthemes where we might write
about a particular venue as a subfeature in there that we use a lot…
KP: So you mentioned approval and these are super deep profiles, with
hours and hours of audio and video and multiple perspective from the
participants that it seems like are gathered recently. So what have
been some of the challenges of this project, cause I know you’ve had to
think on your feet a bit too and readjust scheduling along the way.
DD: Yeah.. The challenges for me are just total… the approvals for me
have been very smooth. The thing is, my practice, I’m not like wired
towards documentation or putting things out. I’m wired towards making
the next event. I’m wired towards what is happening in this space right
now, that was great, let’s go on to the next one. That’s been my
driving thing my whole life really, so this project really stretches me
because it’s very much not that. Part of it came up because of the
pandemic, what are we gonna do this year instead of putting on
concerts. That this pandemic coincided with our 20th anniversary. And
also the reality that we have all this fantastic material. And that I
have a few very dedicated videographers and audio engineers who have
put a lot of work into it and I think they’re very happy to see it come
out. So it’s, you know, it’s been a scramble to get it together and we
have a fantastic team but the challenges are just going through that
material. One is that you actually have to go through that material,
and what you’re seeing is only a slice of what there is, right. I
couldn’t possibly even go through all the material we have. And in the
case of the video, a lot of it isn’t ready until Don the videographer
makes the edit so there’s a lot of coordinating of waiting for an edit
to come through, or waiting for an approval copy to come through of
audio or video, of getting it to an artist for approval, of maybe me
seeing it, of figuring out whether it fits into an edition or a theme.
And then my fantastic editor Veronica Salinas, her being able to lay
this out and to frame it and to be the editor of those essays and help
me shape that. She’s really the one helping me shape this, she’s the
one shaping it really. In a way I worry that we’re getting into the
most challenging phase of it. (1) because we’re getting back to the
work that we do when we’re not in a pandemic, so I’m still doing this
this year but I’m also getting back to what i was doing before. And (2)
because what we have left is - we have a lot of fantastic stuff left -
but now I’m like… the process of waiting for those approval masters,
getting them to be approved, us seeing it, Veronica and I working with
it, everyone is working their butts off to make all of this happen.
It’s just like a chain of tasks and protocols that are quite intricate
and that’s not normally the ones that I’m working on. You know, that’s
the thing about music, time-based art… I mean I know this from
releasing records, it’s like yeah that concert took an hour to play but
I’m gonna listen to it like 30 times before it comes out. So you have
to actually go through the material in real time many many times.
Definitely my video editor has to do that. That’s part of the challenge
of it.
KP: Yeah, have you had staff throughout the years recording and filming
or are these pulled from the community?
See Maggie Nichols at The Silver Slipper
here.
DD: The videos have almost all been pulled from two sources. One is a
videographer named Don White, who is really like the head of video on
this project. The credits are on them but he did all these multi-camera
ones that you see. There’s certain years in our history where he caught
a lot of them, and certain years where he caught fewer of them. But he
has been with us since not the first day but quite early years. I think
Don is thrilled to see these finally coming out because he did a lot of
work and they were just sitting around on hard drives, you know. Then
another person who videoed a lot of them but in a more casual way was
Pete Gershon, who used to work with us. Pete used to be the editor of
Signal To Noise
magazine and he lives in Houston now and he worked for Nameless Sound.
He worked with us for a couple years, and it wasn’t his job but Pete is
an archivist and he’s writing several books now about the history of
visual art in Houston and other topics, so unlike me he’s a real
documenter. So when he was working with us, he would always throw a
camera up. And some of those videos, he was also working the door, so
he couldn’t man the camera, so he would just find a spot, throw the
camera up, and work the door. So some of those videos are more
appealing than others I think, just in terms of they’re not
professionally done. Some of them are gold. Some of them are like like,
‘Oh this is just a side camera of the stage and it doesn’t quite
capture this thing.’ But we’ve used a lot of his. And we have a few
videos from a guy names Chris Nelson, who is a board member of ours and
is a professional videographer and he’s caught some key ones also, just
a few. Like between him and Pete they caught the Roscoe Mitchell, Alvin
Fielder duet. I mean, you know, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all
these people cause like I told you I’m sort of the one making the thing
happen and I’m just not thinking about documentation. But wow this is
one of my most proud concerts, to get those guys together. You know
that Alvin is very important to us and to me and to our org and you
know Alvin was on the very first recording of AACM music which is
Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound and they hadn’t played together for forty years
before the concert. So to bring those two together to play duet. Of
course we want to capture that and document it. So I owe a huge debt of
gratitude to all these guys for doing that. And then some of them, like
the little things in the workshop, there’s a few little camera phone
things in there. Not of like whole concerts, but of just little moments
that we want to include. For example Maggie Nicols singing at the
Houston blues club,
Silver Slipper
. You know, the Silver Slipper is this fantastic blues club that’s been
around for sixty years in Houston in the Fifth Ward - well actually
it’s technically in a neighborhood called French Town, Kashmere Gardens
- and we brought Maggie there and she got up and sang and sat in with
the band so I just got my phone out. And there’s like two minutes of
that in there which is a fantastic camera phone video. Or there’s a
video of - is that in there? I think it is in there. Yeah it is in
there - there’s a video of Maggie doing a workshop with these kids at a
program called Kijana Youth that we do. And Chris videotaped that
workshop though he kind of like, yeah, he was sort of videotaping it
more for like little one minute bits that could be used for maybe grant
purposes or something but I was like, ‘Chris we have to put all of
these together because this workshop is a really important document.’
But there’s also a part of that where I was recording it with my phone
and one of the kids said, ‘Hey can I take that’ and I gave my phone to
one of the kids and she’s walking around recording it. So there’s other
little bits that get in there too. Hopefully they’re the right bits
when they’re lofi, hopefully they transcend the medium. I mean another
lofi bit that’s in there that I hope transcends the medium is the
recording from the very first concert I ever presented, and its of Joe
McPhee and Arthur Doyle playing together. The only time they ever
played together other than the next night in Austin. And this was long
before... well we did not record that concert, but there was someone
who comes to our concerts who always records these concerts, I see his
little recorder, so we reached out to him and he was like, ‘Yeah I have
a cassette of that.’ So I thought that document was important enough to
like say yeah this is a noisy cassette but these two guys meeting on
that night… I’m amazed at how much is documented, calling around. Or
things that I didn’t realize. The recording of Joe and Susan Alcorn
playing together. You know like I’m very disorganized around here and
part of this process is just digging through old shoeboxes of CD-Rs and
looking at them and going, ‘Joe McPhee, Susan Alcorn? did we record
that concert?’ I pop it in. ‘Oh, wow, we did record that concert. It’s
like a really good recording and it sounds really great.’ So it’s been
a trip. It’s been a trip. It’s very good that we’re doing this. And
it’s also very good that it looks like we’re handing over our archive
to the University of Houston’s special collections, so that Nameless
Sound will actually properly and professionally be archived at the
University of Houston.
See Alvin Fielder and Roscoe Mitchell at Contemporary Arts Museum
Houston
here.
DD: Yes, yes I’m real excited about that. So that way all these CD-Rs
sitting in boxes in my house will be protected and backed up and cared
for and if someone wants to dig into them for research purposes they’ll
be there.
KP: That’s all that I had prepared but did you want to go in any other
directions?
DD: Be careful, I could go into any direction you send me in. I just
hope people dig into this. I know it’s a lot of material. And I hope
that we present it in such a way that the casual viewer can go in and
skim through and maybe find the media materials that they want, or that
the person who wants to go really deep can go in really deep and read
it all. I hope it’s laid out in such a way, Veronica and I are trying
to do that, lay it out in such a way so that it’s friendly. Maybe
someone is seduced into it by a certain Joe McPhee video or a Pauline
Oliveros video and that they learn about the organization because I
feel like we’re a real unique organization, I feel like we’re very much
of our city - I don’t think we could have happened anywhere else. We’re
trying to share fantastic documents of fantastic artists who have
shaped the organization through their involvement with it. And as you
mentioned put in various voices. Nameless Sound are these artists,
they’re the kids, they’re the people in the audience, they’re the
volunteers, they’re the staff members. We’re trying to have all of
these different voices in there because Nameless Sound means something
different to any of them. And what we try to do is be a responsive
organization, and I think we’re a really unique organization for that
reason. And I hope that people will sort of learn a little bit about
Houston by reading that maybe. And learn a little bit about the
organization by diving into it.
KP: Yeah, I think that came through super clearly. That this is not
just an opportunity to present archives about musicians but really to
present a model for cultivating community through sound.
DD: Well if it inspires someone to do that, that’s great. That would be
the ultimate, you know. And I believe in sharing information. You know
I’m not really into… when we present these concerts and when we do
these workshops with these kids, for me the idea is to make a space
that anyone can feel like they can be part of and that the work and the
community and the space will evolve from anyone who chooses to be in
it. And also particularly the work we do with kids and the community
work we do - and that work is also with adults as you mentioned, we
have workshops that adults can go to - that anyone who is interested in
that can draw some information and inspiration and do it in their own
way somewhere. I think we have to… I think that this is a kind of
musicmaking that’s really powerful because… well, let me put it this
way, I feel like most movements in the so called avant garde have like
a ten- or generously twenty-year period where they’re really vital. And
the thing about collaborative experimentation, not just improvisation
but creative collaboration in music, is that I think it’s openness to a
diversity of voices is what keeps its edge, its what keeps it evolving,
and hopefully keeps it out of its complacency. You know I’m speaking
out of an extreme bias, as someone who does this work, but I still hear
all kinds of improvised music that to me really excites me and is
really interesting - and I hear a lot that bores me too, cause I’ve
heard a lot, right - but I still hear lots that really excites me. But
the problem of the activity that anyone can do… well… the problem is
that it’s not enough just to go like, here’s the space, anyone can do
it, anything goes. That if you really want an inclusive, diverse, and
equitable space in every sense, you have to cultivate that actually.
It’s not enough just to say like, ‘Freedom.’ You have to cultivate
that, you have to be conscious of that. And that’s a statement that’s
as complicated as can be. But I also feel like the vitality of artistic
movements are doomed if we don’t make that effort.
KP: Yeah, I’m super behind that. I think you see that in the safety and
support of extended family versus the nuclear family, or cooperative
models, or biological ecosystem health, the more diverse voices you
have, that offers a certain resiliency, just because you can be
adaptable, changing, open. That’s definitely the key to longevity.
Which is why it’s important that organizations are cultivating it. But
it does take work. It’s not something like you can just say, ‘Hey this
is a community now.’
DD: That’s right. And if you go out and work with kids - and the reason
I work with kids is not to recruit musicians, in spite of what I just
said - the Nameless Sound pedagogy identifies that if you do this work
in a secure framework and it’s collaborative, then it has the potential
for healing, knowledge exchange, creative work, and play. That being
said, as you know, there are musicians that have come into this field
through our workshops. And I’m thrilled about that. And my life has
benefited greatly from that. Most of my collaborators are these people
who I knew when they were kids now. Maria, Jawaad, Sandy, Jason, etc.
But the thing is you also have to go into that space trying to let go
of your idea of what this music is or should be, and ready for the new
voice to be part of that evolution. And that’s a really hard thing. I
mean it’s inevitable that a teacher of the arts - and I don’t consider
us teachers, but just to put it in that framework - it’s inevitable
that a teacher of the arts is going to bring the heavy weight of their
own style or aesthetic into the situation. And the thing is to be
conscious about that. Just like to be conscious about everything about
oneself. Like being conscious of yours biases - you don’t lose your
biases, you just gain consciousness of them. You know I think if we
want this artform to thrive, we have to listen to what potentially is
coming into it. I don’t know if that makes sense.
DD: Yeah. And you know, the obvious becomes more and more clear to me
with time. Pauline was visionary about this stuff. I owe everything to
Pauline in this work, but there’s also a certain tendency of mine to
distinguish it from Pauline’s work. And Pauline would support that, and
she did support that 100%. And of course I am my own person and I have
the way that I do this. But Pauline was a real visionary when it came
to that. You know In the early 70s, she could have just continued on
being a great electronic music composer, all these great works that she
did in the 60s, Bye Bye Butterfly, Alien Bog, I of IV, all these
fantastic electronic music pieces. And the thing about that kind of
work - and I don’t do that kind of work but I love that music - the
thing about that kind of work is like... it is where the composer
really comes closest to being a studio artist. Meaning they don’t
really need a performer, they don’t really even need an audience. They
work in their studio, alone, and they make this piece, they make their
opus or whatever it is. So much so to the degree that we have this
confusion now between experimental music and sound art - ha ha ha,
we’ll set that aside, that’s another conversation - but she could have
continued to do that stuff and in the early 70s she really embraced
working with communities and working with people who did not identify
as musicians or have musical backgrounds. Originally it was a group of
women. And that was a radical shift, I think, for her. And it was a
really important moment in the cultural history of experimental arts
and experimental music, because she knew that through listening, the
type of listening that she was cultivating, and through sounding, that
there was so much more to get from this experience than just to make a
great piece of art and have an audience that enjoys that piece of art.
That there’s community building, that there’s healing, that there’s
research, that there’s consciousness expansion, that there’s play,
also. I mean Pauline was fantastic at just play. You see it in her
titles and stuff, funny little plays on words, humor is in there also.
Obviously Nameless Sound owes everything to Pauline, but I realize that
more and more as time goes on that she really, before I was born, she
laid a groundwork for this kind of work. And she did it so… to me,
there was no pretense and it was so inclusive and so open. I don’t know
where I was going with that except just to float around on the future
of our communities and none of us know where they’ll go, we have to be
open to where they will. Cause the kids are alright, huh?
See Tom Bickley, David Dove, Juan J. Garcia Jimenez, and Lisa E. Harris
each sound the cistern
here.
