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Music Talks XX
Gerry Hemingway Meets HAYDEN CHISHOLM: In search of a place to belong

March, 29, 2011, Musik Forum, Luzern

‘I don’t just blow air through the saxophone, you are [instead] with every note, on this eternal search to make the sound as close to the voice as possible, to play with all of your body, that’s something that’s always driven me.’
Hayden Chisholm was here in March of 2011 for a master class at the Institut Jazz und Volksmusik, Hochschule Luzern Musik and also for rehearsals and a performance with the Lucerne Jazz Orchestra of his compositions and arrangements.

A self described ’white guy from the South Pacific’, now residing in Germany, is a musician not constrained by the boundaries of what music is or should be, Hayden is as fluent in linear jazz improvisation as he is with the high demands of interpretive composition, microtonality and the traditional musics of the world. He has managed to thread a personal meaning through his voracious appreciation and assimilation of a vast array of musical possibilities. The article below covers many of the topics surveyed in a very far ranging discussion, however it can never compete with the thoroughly engaging, witty, perceptive, diverse and freewheeling blog he regularly updates called “Soft Speakers” which I highly recommend to everyone.

Hayden Chisholm was born down under in New Zealand in the 70s and adopted by two amazing parents, a father (Doug) who was an engineer and a mother (Heather) who was a schoolteacher. His first few years growing up were in neighboring southern Australia along with his sister (also adopted) are infused with memories of intense heat, sand and nosebleeds. Before too long he returned to the west coast of the north islands of New Zealand to New Plymouth where the majority of his youth was spent in a more or less idyllic agricultural environment. His family came from a blended heritage of Irish/Scottish blood mixed together with the native Mauri people

Although his parents were not musical, his innate musical curiosity eventually led him to garage sales where he stumbled on recordings of Sun Ra and Art Ensemble of Chicago, along with early blues records. There was also an early recording of Duke Ellington which attracted his attention, in particular a recording of Johnny Hodges playing Culture shocked at first, having not experienced anything but his small town world, he used his new freedom and surroundings for focusing on practicing his instrument. at age 17 he was trying, and at first failing, to get into music schools, but Passion Flower”. It was enough to inspire him to ask his parents for a saxophone which they obliged him with, however at high school, music did not really take hold, as they were few opportunities to play with anyone. Instead he found more of his creative outlet channeled with English studies in writing and debating. On the side he pursued the saxophone with lessons and self-teaching, with a light sprinkling of playing opportunities (rock bands & Dixieland). In his last year of high school he met a Swiss girl, who was an exchange student from Winterthur, and with his parents blessing, he used this one European connection to fashion an exit from the isolation of New Zealand.

Culture shocked at first, having not experienced anything but his small town world, he used his new freedom and surroundings for focusing on practicing his instrument. At age 17 he was trying, and at first failing, to get into music schools, but finally he cracked the code and got accepted to the Köln conservatory. About a year and half after beginning his studies he met Frank Gratkowski who he referred to as his first real teacher, “the guy who really opened my ears up to a lot of music.” Frank shared his entire record collection with Hayden which is where he got his first experience hearing music such as Giancinto Scelsi and Morton Feldman, the former being his first time hearing microtonality. It was also where he first heard the throat singing of Tuva which introduced him to overtone singing.

Despite his reflecting that “the more you learn the tinier you feel” his expansion of knowledge was also helping him shape his own musical identity. I asked what it was he drew from his affection for the Konitz/Marsh/Tristano axis of linear improvisation and he remarked that it was “absolutely being in the moment, the search for a pure melody, not using cliché, not using licks, not using stuff that was just good on the fingers.” He also found a correspondence between this and the more ritualistic aspects of things like Tuvan music to be a kind of template to work from. He saw that the challenge of music was to play with all of the body not just put air through the horn, but instead to search deeply in the moment to find a sound resembling the human voice. This is what he meant by being in the present.

Despite his reflecting that “the more you learn the tinier you feel” his expansion of knowledge was also helping him shape his own musical identity. I asked what it was he drew from his affection for the Konitz/Marsh/Tristano axis of linear improvisation and he remarked that it was “absolutely being in the moment, the search for a pure melody, not using cliché, not using licks, not using stuff that was just good on the fingers.” He also found a correspondence between this and the more ritualistic aspects of things like Tuvan music to be a kind of template to work from. He saw that the challenge of music was to play with all of the body not just put air through the horn, but instead to search deeply in the moment to find a sound resembling the human voice. This is what he meant by being in the present.

Hayden is also notable for his time spent traveling and deeply experiencing other cultures and so I first enquired about his relationship to India. It started with his curiosity about Theosophy, whose center of activity is in Madras. However his visit serendipitously coincided with a Carnatic Music festival which ended up drawing his attention much more than his original premise for going. He stayed for months, taking saxophone lessons (in Carnatic tradition), seeing as many concerts as possible, living through what he called an “assault on the senses”, wading through filthy flooded streets in the monsoon season with his saxophone on his head to take sporadic lessons with a variety of Carnatic music masters. At first his experience was mostly overwhelming and hard to make sense of – it would take time to assimilate this information into his playing, composing and musical experience. Ultimately he felt he only scratched the surface of this rich culture, but its impact remains a part of him.

In encountering another area of musical treasure, the traditional music of Japan, in particular, Gagaku and Shakuhachi music, Hayden had another realization regarding sound. Up to a certain point his concept of sound was to achieve a certain purity of tone (one without the timbre of air mixed into it, as is often the case with saxophone). But in this musical culture he began to appreciate the natural artifacts and expressive palette of breath and air in playing his instrument and in music in general. Known as “Wabi Sabi” it is that element of cultural observation/perception which appreciates and incorporates the beauty and uniqueness of irregularity in the natural order of all things.

Hayden spoke longingly of the differences between the modern world to the richly natural resourced worlds emulated in these traditional music cultures. Gagaku is unique in this way as it is played more or less exactly as it was played in the courts of 700 AD. So in a way the music can act as a conduit that allows us to experience the nature of what now is mostly lost in our modern world. Gagaku also offers us a very slow, deliberate, transcendent sense of time and space, as Hayden put it, “beyond laid back.”

Hayden spoke longingly of the differences between the modern world to the richly natural resourced worlds emulated in these traditional music cultures. Gagaku is unique in this way as it is played more or less exactly as it was played in the courts of 700 AD. So in a way the music can act as a conduit that allows us to experience the nature of what now is mostly lost in our modern world. Gagaku also offers us a very slow, deliberate, transcendent sense of time and space, as Hayden put it, “beyond laid back.”

We listened to one of Hayden’s own pieces for quartet (w/Nils Wolgram) “Immaculate Conception” (listen to it in the interview mp3) based on the changes of “All of Me” but using a 24 tone scale. It was notable that the written thematic material went on for many choruses of the bar structure, stopping and starting in places not related to the original cadential structure of the standard, and including the additional material at the end (which kind of carries on where the opening material left off) occupied almost half of the length of the performance. Clearly a departure from the standard jazz practice of “head, blowing, head” !

Another wing of Hayden’s research and development as a composer began in his annual summer teaching workshops at a very small stone village on Mount Pilion in Greece where for the past 6 summers he has led a group of saxophonists though an exploration of tuning from different systemic (overtone, quarter tone) or ear based methodologies (detuning or as he called it “smudging”, random). In this situation Hayden realized both a methodology of teaching along with a stimulating exploration of the vertical possibilities of choral writing for saxophones. This has helped foster a new body of work for multiple saxophones that we listened to an excerpt of the extended work for eight saxophones “Density Köln” which on first listening appears to be a series of slowly (breath paced) atmospheric chords for a choir of saxophones. Hayden explained that the piece is made up of fifteen movements, each quite different in structure and content from the next. The section we listened to had eight saxophones divided in four autonomously moving pairs playing only overtone based tunings of perfect 5th’s, 4th’s, 3rd’s and 2nd’s, and as a result of the independent pacing if each pair the resulting relationships between each performance vary quite different from one performance to the next. The resultant harmonies teeter from a relatively familiar consonance, or as Hayden describes ‘monochrome’ harmonies that smoothly slides off the rail into these otherworldly fractional tunings.

He related an interesting notion he has derived from his listening in particular to Japanese noise groups such as Merzbow, that one’s own ears have to make sense out of the seeming chaos of sound, that found a path that was unique to each listener’s experience.

I asked how he perceived the musicality of spoken word, another area of Hayden’s performative output, in an area such as James Joyce, to which he remarked “that it’s purely just the sound of the language, and I’m sure a work like Finnegan’s Wake finds it creative source and comes to life when spoken aloud.” We listened to a short excerpt of one his Bloomsday readings of Ulysses that includes an improvising duo of Frank Gratkowski and Nils Wolgram playing quietly behind him, and his tonal and musical sense of pacing and pitch to the reading give the text a very engaging listening.

We discussed briefly his engagement with other art forms, in particular his work with the visual artist, Rebecca Horn. He spoke eloquently about her use of space, how she engages with a local culture’s history, mythology and people in an effort to bring a local meaning to each of her works. In their collaboration Hayden engages in similar rituals to elicit a local sonic meaning, often collaborating in a workshop format with school children between 8-13 years writing down their dreams, teaching them overtone singing, in a kind of a ritualistic process whose goal is to seek an understanding to the question, “What’s the soul of this place?“

He mentioned as well the influence of his work with a Peruvian shaman he met in America, Don Oscar Miro-Quesada Solevo. His experience with this shaman is something that brought him closer to how music makes the connection, perhaps the passage between our seeing world and the world of the unseen. Hayden through his exposure to these more mystical experiences has come to believe that music has the capacity to heal. And its evident in his embracing such a diverse geography of cultural experience that his sense of this healing capacity is in part the result of embracing such a positive sense of the limitless possibility of what we call music.

Gerry Hemingway (december 2011)

FORMAL BIO:

Hayden Chisholm ( born 1975 in Otahuhu, New Zealand ) is a saxophonist and composer.
He was raised in New Plymouth, New Zealand, where his parents encouraged him to start with piano at the age of eight and clarinet two years later. His first saxophone experience came playing with the local school and Dixieland bands. At the age of seventeen he moved to Switzerland and soon after began his music studies in Germany.
Hayden studied saxophone at the Cologne Musikhochschule with Frank Gratkowski where he received his Masters in Saxophone at the age of twenty-two. At the age of twenty-three he received a New Zealand Young Achievers’ Award and soon after, the prestigious City of Cologne Prize for Improvised Music. He used these scholarships to continue his music studies in Japan and Southern India where he also recorded for Indian films in Chennai. He has continued to travel extensively, collecting musical information and studying the various thought schools.
He has toured and performed throughout Asia, Africa, North and South America and Oceana as a solo artist and with groups such as Root70, Pluramon, Jaki Liebezeit (ex-Can), and Flanger, The Embassadors, often with the support of the Goethe Cultural Institute. Between his travels he has written and performed music for the National German Theater in Hamburg as well as having compositions recorded by WDR and BBC radios. He founded the Subultra group which won the distinguished NRW Prize for Performing Arts in Germany and was composer in residence at the Muzik3 festival in San Diego from 1998 through 2000.
His saxophone influences include Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Art Pepper. He cites other influences as Japanese Gagaku music, nature sounds, Gilberto Gil, Anton Webern, Maricio Kagel, Olivier Messiaen, Pablo Casals, Yannis Xenakis, and many literary sources as inspiration behind his music.
As a teacher he fuses such areas as breath work, taiji, ear-training, meditation, and voice training (he is a master of overtone –singing) in his saxophone courses. He has taught at universities in Cologne, Hanover, Berlin, Lima, Novosibirsk, and gives annual Master Classes on Mount Pilion in Greece.
In 2000 he was commissioned by the City of Cologne to compose for the Doderer Literature Prize. The winner that year, Martin Mosebach then introduced him to Rebecca Horn. This was the beginning of a collaboration that continues until today. His work with her is wide ranging, from composing the music for major site- specific installations “Moonmirror” (Mallorca, 2003), “Lumiere en Prison” (Paris, 2002) , Spiriti de Madre Perla” (Naples, 2002), “Twilight Transit” ( NYC 2004), Heart Shadows ( Lisbon, 2005), Das Universum in einer Perle” (Berlin, 2006), to photographic work featured in her book “Notebook Samarkand”(2001) and Cosmic Maps (2008). He recomposed the music for her early performance films which was released on a complete DVD set in 2005 and in 2007 he created the music to accompany the Rebecca Horn show at the Samsung Museum in Seoul. In 2008 he worked as assistant director with Horn for the Sciarrino Opera “Luci mie traditrici” at the Salzburger Festspiele. I
During his study in Cologne he began exploring new tonal possibilities. This led him to a development of microtonal fingerings for the Saxophone using 24 tones for the octave and new scales which he called ‘split-scales’ in which perfect intervals are split exactly in the middle. These new fields were explored on his debut CD for solo Soprano Saxophone “Circe” (1996- Jazzhaus Musik) recorded in a Charterhouse Church in Cologne. In the years to follow he would write and record a whole series of micro-tonal etudes for saxophone.
Since 2004 he has been active as a speaker. The Berlin Literature festival invited him to read excerpts from “Ulysses” in 2004 and in 2007 he was invited by Musikfabrik to read texts by Cornelius Cardew and Marx within a composition by Marcus Schmickler.
In 2003 he began collaborating with Burnt Friedman and recording for his Nonplace label. He performs in a trio with Burnt Friedman and Jacki Liebezeit, drummer of the legendary group “CAN”. He is featured on several of David Sylvian’s new work including Nine Horses “Snow borne Sorrow” and the Blemish remix. He has co-authored for Cologne based electro-rock group “Pluramon” and toured extensively with the group featuring Twin Peaks vocalist Julee Cruise. His Jazz-based work is centered around the group ‘Root70’, led by German trombonist Nils Wogram, which has released five Cds and toured extensively world wide since their genesis in 2000. Root70 won the BMW Jazz prize in 2011.
In 2007 Hayden formed his own group “THE EMBASSADORS”, a music collective built around the core of Nils Wogram, Claudio Bohorquez, Gareth Lubbe, Matt Penman and Jochen Rueckert. Their debut was in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall and their first album “Healing the Music” , featuring the Kenyan singer Michel Ongaru, was released on the label Nonplace to critical acclaim. The second album “Coptic Dub” was also widely acclaimed
In 2008 he worked to launch the live music label Plushmusic.tv together with cellist Adrian Brendel. Plushmusic is also the name of a festival in Cologne curated by Hayden which in 2011 is running for the 3rd year with the support of the City of Cologne. The festival features many of Europe’s top improvisors in unusual combinations, streamed via the plushmusic.tv website.
In 2009 his new film with Rebecca Horn- “Fata Morgana” was featured in the Teatro La Fenice of Venice and was a highlight of the Venice biennale.
In 2011 the latest film of Rebecca Horn “Moon Mirror’s Journey” was premiered in Berlin and featured prominently at maker film festivals. The music was composed by Hayden and the film features over 25 years of work from this seminal artist. He also featured in a new documentary by German television tracking the origins of song in Germany, to be released early 2012.