William Parker
Interview
The first thing I ask William Parker about, as we sit down to speak, is about Universal Tonality. After all, the living titan of free jazz has been pursuing, sculpting and honing the concept for many decades. A musical and spiritual philosophy, it asserts that all people and all sounds share a common origin, something intangible and beatific, approaching the divine.
Over the years, Parker has written and spoken about it at length, explaining that, in his view, every sound, regardless of its geographical and personal origin, is something that exists as part of a colossal pre-existing whole, and as musicians press on the boundaries of music, whatever frequencies, tones and lyricisms they find aren’t inventions, but simply found aspects of that pulsing realm, which Parker has long since referred to as “The Tone World.”
This philosophy is what has driven Parker, and, aside from the poetic implications, its practical applications lend artists endless possibilities. Universal Tonality dictates that any combination of musicians can converge and play, without planning or preconception, and can create something beautiful, scraping at and tapping into the Tone World. It has become a crucial scaffold within free improvisation, and music at large, a fountain of creativity from which Parker and his peers have been drawing.
In&OutJazz Magazine: I wanted to ask about your conception of music in the aggregate. Has the definition of Universal Tonality changed for you, as you go in and out, and discover new Tone Worlds?
William Parker: In the beginning, we define music as anything that’s beautiful, that has music as it primary component. Poetry, painting, landscape, architecture – what makes it beautiful is the air vibration, that we call music. If you go down the list of everything that’s music, like mother’s apple pie, or a smile, whatever it is that vibrates that makes you feel good is music. And then sometimes, this music manifests as sound. Whereas we’re used to thinking about in the opposite way, that sound makes music.
[At this point, Parker gets up from his desk, and grabs a ruler. He taps it against a pen. Then, unsatisfied with the limitations of the two objects in the scope of what he is trying to describe, he gets up and begins retrieving small instruments and objects from around the room, inexhaustible at 74 years old. He then induces a series of vibrations and explains to me how these small, almost imperceptible progressions can plait together to make a sheet of noise, a symphony, an absolute manifestation of what we think of as music. It is intoxicating watching this William Parker, who has stood at the forefront of everything there is to love about music, explain what has been fueling him all these years.]What is sound then? If you rub your hands together – you get sound. You snap your fingers – that’s sound. You tap this ruler on the pen, that’s sound. So how do you get this ruler to produce more sound, and how to turn that sound into tone? If you hit the ruler on a bell, you get a tone. And so, every day you practice with different ways of hitting the bell, you shape the bell, you turn the bell into a horn, into a flute. Eventually, you turn the bell into an instrument, or rather, a lever. You know how at a water pump, you press the lever, and water comes out? An instrument is simply a lever that, when you press it, sound comes out.
[Crucially, for Parker, music, sound and tone carry much more than simple perceptual beauty. They can become curative and pastoral forces, something that can make humans heal.]Say, your brother is not feeling well today. You find that as you play a certain sound, they feel better. At that point, you realize that this sound can make people feel better. You investigate this, and a shaman is born. A shaman deals with vibrating sound that can heal. And a musician has a whole arsenal of sound. So you realize that you can be a musician who produces both rhythms that can make people dance, and rhythms that can heal people.
Was there a specific moment in your life when you realized that art and music weren’t just aesthetic or transactional pursuits, but something bigger, like the healing force you’re speaking of?
My father and I would watch Westerns on TV on Sundays. We’d watch this Western called High Noon, with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, where he’s the sheriff, and he’s supposed to get married, and then someone is coming into town, and they’re going to have a showdown. It has all these dramatic parts, but in between these dramatic parts, sometimes you’d see a mountain or a tree. They’re small details, but usually, you’re meant to be totally focused on the plot.
When it changed for me was when I started watching independent films, particularly Stan Brakhage. He talks about the peripheral vision. About correlations. That the part that we don’t focus is in fact the greater vision.
It was the same when I first began to listen to music. At first, it was pretty clear, there’s the main progression, then the solo, then something else, then something else. Those are the dramatic parts of it. But then I began to realize that it really isn’t. That there are other reasons for how we see and hear.
Then, I began to listen to music that wasn’t dramatic, but that was poetic. It may not necessarily have to have a plot running through it. It was poetic. And it was in the poetics that the beauty was found. And it was the beauty where the tone was, and it was the tone that was going to heal us. Now, that doesn’t mean that when you hear Johnny Hodges play that beautiful melody, it’s not healing you. It just means that there are many different ways to go somewhere. There’s something else in what Johnny Hodges was doing in between the sound that we all can relate to.
So you can have have that moment in music that is more traditionally arranged as well?
You know, I was playing with Cecil Taylor, and he was talking about Marvin Gaye. He loved Marvin Gaye. And so we grew up listening to Marvin Gaye and James Brown. But in all that music, there was something that was not immediately obvious that was maybe more beautiful. While still being connected to the roots of the music, to Africa, to Asia, to the blues,
And because it is hard for black musicians to let go of the blues. Even when you talk to musicians who do play with chords and numbers and systems and improvisations and lines with squiggles, the blues are there. You can’t run away from it.
This is also academic musicians versus street musicians. But street music is just another form of academia. Just a differently wired system of how we learn. The academic will always acknowledge John Cage. But I hope that John Cage acknowledges Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor. It’s all valid because we are all human beings. So whatever system we use, it becomes the keys to that great doorway to poetry that we’re trying to open up.
Music is a great force. And we have to get it out there. We have to. It’s not just about making money. We will continue to exist without the praise and the talk and the pay.
Do you think that in the age of computer-generated music, improvised notes become a safe haven? Because a computer can never replicate them with any degree of soul?
Yeah, I mean, so far it can’t replicate it. When someone plays music, it becomes their life force. They have to play for it to come alive. It’s not alive on paper, not until it’s played. So it is the life force of the musician that makes it come to life. No matter how skillful the machine is, it is never going to come up to the way musicians can play. Musicians can improvise, they can make mistakes. These variations are just another road to beauty. That’s why mistakes exist.
And it comes from truly loving something. In America, we play baseball. So a kid, when they get into baseball, they sleep with their baseball mitt right next to them. And they’re so happy. Everything is baseball. Everything is baseball. And that’s the way it is with music. Once I got into music, I could never get enough of it. I can’t stop talking about it. I can’t stop listening to it. I can’t because I really love it.
And there are people like you out there, who are interested in this, interested in music, in its poetry. That makes me so happy to find people who really love music, and are into it, and try to do anything to help the music get along. Once once it grabs you by the heart, you can never let go.
That’s what it is about. It is never about money. I mean, the only reason I think about money is how to help people and get rid of it. How much it is to have an apartment here in New York? It’s $3,000 a month for the lowest apartment. If I had money, I would just be buying up buildings and putting up low-income housing. That would help people.
You are right, William. Art was always the be-all and end-all. It’s the first and the last thing to push against tyranny.
Yeah! It’s quite amazing. But you are right, the frequency of the world has changed. I feel like there’s less people now who find that frequency and that tone early in their lives. They get written into this kind of circle of like, have to work, have to make rent, you know, have to watch something on TV and then have to go to bed. And it doesn’t leave a lot of room for beautiful things and healing things.
And even when you watch TV, you watch Netflix, there are new movies every week. But they use it all to control what is beautiful. They control what is important in life. They put out there in these movies. They control the tonalities that we hear.
But then, hopefully, you hear something like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and BAM! It changes your life. All of this other stuff is still going on around you, but you hear Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane. And you follow that path to A Love Supreme. You find your tone.
Tone is the answer. Tone leads you to the Tone World. There’s no rent in the Tone World. There’s no global warming, no war. It’s beautiful there. That’s why once you stop playing, you want to play again as soon as possible.
