Getting It

GETTING IT

INTERVIEW WITH STEVE

Last week we talked to Mark Lampert and Steve McKay, two-fifths of the Carnal Kitchen, Ann Arbor's killer new/jazz unit, about how to relate to the new music. Mark Lampert is the Kitchen's drummer; many of us will remember Steve as the Stooges' sax player on their second album. Since leaving the Stooges last year Steve reformed the long-lived Carnal Kitchen, which is now a totally collective band, intent on kicking 'em out for a long time to come, (As it turned out, space in this issue only left room for Steve's comments, but a full story on the Kitchen will appear here soon.) Here's the interview:

SUN: A lot more people are hearing jazz lately than ever before, now that musicians like John and Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Miles Davis are being played on the rock and roll radio stations quite a bit. But, still, for most people jazz is a hard thing to get into and understand right away. There's a lot of killer high energy music there to get hip to--how should people go about doing it?

STEVE: Well, most jazz being played right now-- it's rock and roll. It really is, you know? I remember last summer I was sitting around my place and I turned on my FM radio, and it was WABX. And they put on this cut from Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" album. I listened to the drums and they were going "boom, pa pa, boom, pa pa, boom, " just a standard rock and roll rhythm. . . so it was really nice, and interesting that Miles is into rock and roll. Then after it was all over the DJ says, "Wasn't that incredible, folks? It's just amazing. There was absolutely no rhythym in that piece." The DJ couldn't hear it!

The thing is, if you're listening to jazz, you've got to take it apart. Just look into it a little bit further. In other words, if I don't really know what's happening, just let me listen to what one person's doing, for starters. Let me listen to the drums. Listen to the drums and bass player--listen to the rhythm section. I remember hearing stuff like four years ago, like some of the first Coltrane recordings, and I said the same thing as that DJ -- "Wow, this dude is completely beyond the rhythm pattern." And I know after I got familiar with listening to it I can hear it, the rhythm, one, two, three, four; one two three four.

SUN: What is a jazz tune?

STEVE: OK, you can take any standard old tune - even something by, like, Frank Sinatra that would just make you wince, it sounds so put-on. Then give that tune to a bunch of jazz musicians to play. They'll play the melody, but they'll change the rhythm. That's step one, change the rhythm. Then they change the song to an instrumental, in which the melody becomes what you call the "head." You play the head or the melody once or twice, and all the people who are going to take solos take solos, one after the other. Maybe go back to the head in between. After the last solo, you really build it up and you come right back into the melody. Just like a lot of rock and roll songs, It's the whole idea of going out and coming back.

That's the jazz from pretty much the beginning right through to 1950's jazz, what they call be-bop, or bop. Then Coltrane took it all beyond that, -- and took everybody with him -- in just, like, the high energy freak-out. That's not bop, that's like, space-energy music. SUN: How did you first get turned on to that, space energy music.

SUN:  How did you first get turned on to that, space energy music?

STEVE: Actually, I'm really resistant to picking up on a lot of new sounds a lot of the time- - I don 't want to expose myself to them. But when I heard Coltrane I had to realize. . . It wasn't until I got to Ann Arbor that I heard it. I started out really liking bop, and stuff like Dave Brubeck that I had been exposed to. Then one night I was over this sister's house and we were sitting around really getting blasted, and she pulled out a Coltrane record.

SUN: Do you remember which one it was?

STEVE: Yeah, it was the blue one, "Out of This World"- Coltrane 1965. I heard him do something and suddenly flashed on the fact that that's exactly what I would do! Like I'd do that if I could, but I had never done that before. Like one of those flashes, and from then on it just irreparably changes what you've done.  It puts all into another context.

SUN: A lot of people have come into contact with that music through the efforts of John Sinclair. Has he had any effect on you?

STEVE: John turned me on to the Jazz Composers' Orchestra.

SUN: When was that?

STEVE: A couple of years ago. He was one of the first people to get the record and played me this cut by Pharoah Sanders called "Preview. " He said, "Dig this!"; he knew I could play the horn and I could get into it. I heard it and it was killer, it had a lot of energy. I had heard high energy music like that before, but never on that large of a scale!

SUN: How would you explain this music to people? You know, what is it, and what should they pick up on?

STEVE: Well, like I know if the Carnal Kitchen play a tune that is really together, a lot of people are going to feel just like I did four years ago and say, "Wow, that's far out, there's no ryhthm there!" All you can say to those folks is that this kind of music is really very, very together, and it's just as basic as rock and roll. It just has more rhythms going in different directions, but they're all still on the beat.

SUN: It's just a little more complicated.

STEVE: Yeah. Chances are if you listen to the bass player, if you're lost, you can follow it. And all the time the cymbal, the ride cymbal on the drums is a killer indicator. In rock and roll it's the bass drum that carries the basic beat all the time. That's what the difference is right there. If you listen to most jazz records, the time is kept most often on the cymbal as opposed to the bass drum. So it's a different sound a lot of people aren't hip to that happening.

SUN: But that's not all. . .

STEVE: Oh, no. The biggest thing about jazz is the freedom of improvisation you've got.  Rock and roll, blues, and country and western are all designated by their own structures, structures defined by the guitar. In rock and roll the forms are more set up to start with; so it goes to a certain point and it's still gonna be far out, in that framework -- but it's still gonna be that, because of the rhythms and because of the structures of the tunes.

And with jazz, you can be as structured as any country, blues, or rock and roll type tune. But you've also got a leeway, you can make up stuff as as you go along to such a degree that it isn't any other thing anymore. A jazz tune can be completely improvised; it can have improvised solos over a set chord pattern, which happens most of the time; the chord pattern can be improvised; or the beat can be improvised and the melody can be the same.

In other words, you're given the power to play something, and then destroy it. We used to do that a lot, play some tune for about five minutes and then just go off completely in the energy ozone and then come back in a different beat altogether. . .

SUN: It's fun to do that with old honky tunes like "My Favorite Things," destroying super-tightly structured Western Muzak.

STEVE: Right. That's a perfect example of how far you can take it. If you think of the whole connotation of "The Sound of Music" it kinda makes you wanna puke. But John Coltrane heard it and said wow, there's a nice little tune, and he took it and turned it into a whole different thing.

SUN: Right. Like, and Archie Shepp did the same thing with "Girl from Ipanema." And Albert Ayler with "Bells."

STEVE: Ayler's thing is just total schizophrenia. He'll play this little march thing and then, bam, right off into the zone.

SUN: The total space energy music. How can you even begin to explain it?

STEVE: I don't know, you listen to all that energy going down, it's just like a scream. And that's something people can relate to too. It's just like you get it all out of your system. You just like thrash, and punch and kick and you get as violent as you want to; you get as obscene as you want to; you can do whatever you want. You're not hurting anybody, you're just running it through your mind and pushing it out of you, you're just playing it-- and you're gonna activate channels in somebody else's mind which is gonna put them through some changes. Which is far out.

Like, people can dance when they hear this music. They don't have to stomp -- they can like wander and float and bump into people and it's really hip. When we see people dancing when we play, you know, we get real turned on. It's really a physical thing.

PHOTOS BY LENI SINCLAIR

ARCHIE SHEPP   JOHN COLTRANE