Music
Wednesday, 26 August 2009 04:08
Written by Jenn Chan Lyman

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A chat with the local saxophonist, composer and all-around professor of havoc

photo by Jenn Chan Lyman

The first time I saw Alec Haavik (‘Hoe-vick’, Norwegian pronunciation) on stage at JZ was one of the moments when I really fell in love with live jazz. If you’ve seen him on stage, you’ll know what I mean. Charismatic and wacky, you can barely tell Alec apart from his saxophone when he’s whizzing around on stage, shaking his crazy shock of hair to the beat. He’s got an energy that not only infects the audience, but his fellow players as well. You can find Alec at JZ on Thursday nights with his Friction Seven, as well as on Tuesday and Saturday nights playing with J.Q. Whitcomb and the JZ Big Band, respectively. During the JZ Music Festival, he'll be performing several functions, including backing (as part of the JZ All-Star Big Band) headliner Dee Dee Bridgewater at the Yunfeng Theater, serving as the MC for the Jazz Stage at Century Park and making appearances at the festival's afterparty jam sessions at the JZ Club.

Over pita, hummus and a cooper’s teriyaki salad, Alec and I chatted at Element Fresh for a couple of hours, taking a tour of musical theory and journeying to Haavik’s sub-surface. Minds out of the gutter now, dear readers. Full of heart and spirit, Alec’s personable-ness translates offstage as he talks about his family and influences. I was also lucky to hear him sing many animated excerpts of his music. He’s a committed Shanghai-er and calls this fair city his home. He's also, as he mentioned during our interview, "made of music." After this journey into the mind of Haavik, I think it's fair to say that yes, he truly is.

Q: Having started with piano as a kid, and explored cello, trombone, and drums, what led you to decide on the saxophone when you were 19?

A: I’d always been inspired by the saxophone, especially once I got into jazz, as it’s such an important jazz instrument. I had some key experiences when I went to college - as with a lot of people, going to college is the time when the next world opens up, and they discover what they want to develop, to blossom into (makes sweeping hand gesture) in their adult lives. The director of the jazz department, Norman David, inspired me a lot and was one of the key figures in my musical development. He was a sax player but he also had a pretty developed methodology and ideology in his music and composition, which could be summed up in the phrase, “journey to the sub-surface”

Colby College is located deep in the woods of Maine, USA. Alec graduated from there with a degree in philosophy in 1992.

Q: Wow, journey to the sub-surface? Tell us more!

A: Its part of the creative process where there’s a space that you can go into in which everything is beautiful and everything is disgusting, where opposites become one. [Norman David] considered the artist as an important aspect in society, because the artist is the one that can become greater than the petty, small concerns of people, government, and religion. For him, the artist can transcend and see something bigger. He really inspired me as an artist, musician and sax player. When I listened to him, I felt a connection with what that instrument could express. He was also into avant-garde and the most extreme forms of jazz expression.

Q: What’s one track or album that really made an impact on you as a musician?

A: A late Coltrane track. In high school I’d already listened to [Coltrane] quite a bit, like on Kind of Blue, which was revolutionary but still within the realm of palatable jazz. I was a DJ for the school radio station at the time, which allowed me to listen to stacks of vinyl, and one day I heard this Coltrane track on a highlights record from Atlantic Records. It was the alternate take of ‘Mars’ that didn’t make his album Interstellar Space. It was so expressive and far out, with all kinds of extreme saxophone sounds that Coltrane helped to invent and discover, which is also called extended technique.

Late Coltrane often refers to the saxophonist John Coltrane’s work from 1964 to his death in 1967.

Kind of Blue was a revolutionary 1959 Miles Davis album featuring saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. It is one of the best selling jazz records of all time, 4 million copies in the U.S. alone, and influenced not only jazz, but rock and classical musicians as well.

The Interstellar Space album was a duet between Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali recorded months before Coltrane died.

Q: Could you explain extreme saxophone sounds and extended technique to a lay person?

A: "Extended technique" is pushing the musical instrument beyond what it was originally designed for, like creating multiphonic sounds, which means that there’s more than one pitch happening at the same time, like a scream. [Screams “baahhh!”] By making the sound of the scream, you are coming much closer to the origins of music, of human voices calling to each other. Coltrane was so effortlessly able to bring together the most elemental forms of human expression with the most sophisticated and recent developments in contemporary classical composition. That was really the most stunning achievement of his later improvised works.

Q: What other styles and instruments do you play?

A: After I graduated I wanted to play in this reggae band, and the band leader asked me what I play, and at that time I only played the soprano sax, not the other saxes, and he was like, “That’s it?” So I told him I also played trombone, and he’s like, “You’re in.” So for awhile I played both trombone and soprano sax, then flute, and alto and tenor sax. I also played in several artsy rock bands in Boston.

Q: It’s easy to see rock and jazz influences in your albums. What are some other major influences on your writing?

A: When Western music started to get away from writing in specific pitches and notes to writing how sounds should unfold instead, using a shape, or a texture, or a landscape, or a gesture. That had a big impact on me. I had a really progressive band director in high school who brought in some music written in this way, also called alternative or graphic notation, for us to rehearse. Most of the students thought it was a big waste of time and I was the only one who really got it. Then I heard another band leader when I was playing at a regional concert who had his group perform 'Apollo' by John Pennington, which is a portrait of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. It was called an aleatoric piece, or "chance music", but it was also programmatic music - music to tell a story. Listening to that group rehearse was a lightning bolt that struck me, how you can think about music performed on traditional instruments, but in a completely non-traditional way.

I was also influenced by Anthony Braxton, an avant garde composer that developed many techniques of writing music. He used big band instrumentation but all the music was written without note heads, just rhythms and contours of the lines, and the musicians were free to choose the pitch. It created an entirely different sound that was extremely dissonant. But through the dissonance, new harmonies emerged.

Graphic notation, using symbols and pictures instead of standard five line staff notation, is also used by experimental composers such as Brian Eno, Morton Feldman and John Zorn.

The Anthony Braxton album that Alec listened to over and over was called Creative Orchestra Music 1976.

Q: So in a way it’s like guided improv?

A: Right. You have contour and rhythmic information and there’s shared cultural information on how a horn is played (starts singing a riff) and each musician then imagines how to play that line not according to the strict rules of counterpoint, etc.

All [of those rules] goes back to J.S. Bach, who is a huge influence on me and all Western music. He was a supreme genius, who created conversations between two hands, with all the spiritual and logical knowledge, the feeling, and the perfection that anybody could ever achieve. So how do we contend with this, how do we go forward from that? Anthony Braxton had a lot of good ideas about that, and you can see that in my composition as well, where I use melodic contours with indefinite pitches.

Q: Melodic contours with indefinite pitches?

A: Yeah, it’s a device directly from Anthony Braxton that I use sometimes. For example, a song of mine called ‘Instant Death Part 2’ ends with that device (sings another riff). I try to create my own harmonic language, using all these different devices, such as serial composition, which is associated with Schoenberg, and an investigation to move beyond tonality and towards other paradigms of tension versus resolution. Western harmony has always depended on the relationship between the dominant and the tonic. Something called serialism or ‘twelve tone’ was trying to dismantle this sense of having a home key by giving all of the twelve tones equal air time. Also called atonal music.

‘Instant Death Part 2’ can be found on Alec’s website: www.alechaavik.com

Arnold Schoenberg led the Second Viennese School, which broke away from traditional methods of the First Viennese School masters, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. A major triskaidekaphobe (fearing the number 13), he was born on September 13 and died on the July 13.

Q: That sounds very egalitarian. (Alec is quiet. I laugh nervously.) Sorry (he nods). Is that a good nod, or a shut up kind of a nod?

A: No, no, I’ve just never thought about it that way. Yeah, I’m still thinking about that (grins). So I started to practice twelve tones as an improvisational method since I was 21, and I still practice it. Twelve tones became a very sophisticated level of composition that was eventually determined to be a dead end, because no matter what, even if you try to give each note an equal emphasis, there will still be tonal centers that emerge. Whatever notes are in the bass will feel more like a home key (sings an example) and the longer notes will feel more like the roots. But it still opened up the language of music, expanding from the rules that Bach had invented.

Q: When did you start composing music?

A: In terms of finding my own compositional voice, it would be around 21. That’s when I wrote 'Instant Death Part 2.'

Q: What’s one of your favorite compositions?

A: You’re asking me to choose which one of my babies is my favorite?

Q: Um...yeah.

A: Well, I really like my song ‘Ebay’. I think it’s a masterpiece (chuckles) I really do. Every small melodic motif in it has its purpose and happens at the right time for the right reasons, and it evokes the feeling of checking on eBay all day long when you’re bidding for an item. It constantly nags at your attention no matter what you’re doing and is a peculiar human experience. People must have had this feeling before eBay, but now with the Internet and technology it’s a new kind of play room. [The song] started from this riff that I would play on the Fender Rhodes I have at home (sings the riff) and I kept playing it and it would drive my wife Trina crazy. As some sort of revenge (grins mischievously) I turned it into this full scale composition. But I also really like this tune because it combines an atonal melody with down-home Jimi Hendrix style chord changes. It also achieves one of my goals of having multiple key centers and root movements happening simultaneously (poly-tonality) as a basis for improvisation. It's very difficult to perform (like many of my tunes) and I get a real feeling of accomplishment when my bandmates and I play it well.

‘EBay’ is on Alec’s debut album, Rocks, released in 2004.

Q: What were you bidding for?

A: At the time I bought this red Yamaha keytar, and it’s become quite a sacred instrument for me, I’ve written entire albums on this little keytar. I played it last Thursday at our impromptu electro-jazz night.

A keytar is a small keyboard that is strapped on like a guitar and has a neck like a guitar, first introduced in 1980 as the Moog Liberation. Famous keytarists include: Devo, Herbie Hancock, Ben Folds, Imogen Heap, Weird Al Yankovic, Vicky-T of Cobra Starship.

Q: So you like to take your normal everyday experiences and capture them in your songs?

A: I like making music out of the most mundane as well as the most profound experiences. Like riding the bus, which is what ‘42 Bus’ is about. You think you’re about to get to your stop, but no, still not there. And anybody in Shanghai could relate as most people know the 42 Bus.

I consider myself a ‘conduit’, I ‘can-do-it!’ [laughs], because I am assimilating a lot of information about the universe about human existence which is a lot bigger than me. The most profound experience I’ve had was the birth of my son, and that story is captured in ‘Oxytocin in the Tundra’. That song happened to me, I didn’t really write it.

Q: Do your children inspire you a lot?

A: Yeah, definitely. ‘Kai’s Blues’ [on the Ye Shanghai album] was based on a line that my son Kai was singing when we were on a trip in Beijing (sings the riff). There’s another song, based on the birth of my daughter called ‘Bed Number Six’ which will be coming out soon on vinyl. Her birth was really fast and after she was born she was whisked away and they gave us a piece of paper that said ‘Bed Number Six’ on it and we could only visit her once a day, our little newborn. So that’s a sweet little song I wrote for her.

Q: What’s the major difference, playing in Shanghai versus other places?

A: I think in some ways there’s more room for experimentation here because the expectation of a Chinese audience is more open. Maybe they’re hearing jazz for the first time so there’s not preset ideas of how it should be.

You can imagine the pressure in New York City when you say, “Yeah, we’re gonna play jazz!”. I was playing in Central Park once with a bunch of guys, and they wanted to play a Sonny Rollins song named ‘Doxy’ which I didn’t really know. But we played it anyway, and I didn’t play it very well. There was a guy listening to us with a real concentrated look on his face and after we were done he walked up to me and he said (imitating a grumpy voice), “Get out your Real Book and listen to the record” and then he turned around and walked away, just like that. So that was New York. That gives you a sense of the average level of jazz appreciation there. It’s actually kind of hard to stretch boundaries of music there. I love jazz and in some ways whatever I play will always be jazz, even if it sounds nothing like jazz. What I’ve found in China is an openness to the experimentation because it’s just the reality of what we are playing right now.

The Real Book is a book of jazz standards compiled in the 1970’s that serves as a sort of ‘Bible’ for jazz musicians.

Q: Would you rather your audience have more or less knowledge of what you are playing?

A: My ideal audience would span the entire range. I think my dream, my goal, is to make music that somebody who doesn’t know a thing about music would enjoy. Like if I tell him it’s about Bus number 42 in Shanghai and he can say “Okay, I get it, I understand it.” And if there’s a guy who knows a lot about music, and I tell him, yeah, this is a funk song which goes through one bar of four, then one bar of five eight, then one bar of four, then one bar of three, and uses a twelve tone row, my song ‘Beta Tester’, and if he says, “Wow, that’s cool, it sounds good”, that’s also great.

Q: Are there any changes you make to your gig when performing in Shanghai, to connect to your audience?

A: Speak Chinese! [laughs] As soon as I open my mouth and say three words in Chinese, there’s a connection. And that’s not a show, I’ve spent a lot of time studying Chinese. I don’t speak, comprehend, or read nearly as much as I should given how much time I’ve put into it, but the important thing is that I actually really love the language. I love speaking it, I love thinking about it, I love looking at it.

Last night I attempted stand up humor in Chinese, but no one thought it was funny. Humor is for sure the most obscure aspect of culture. I’ve always tried to translate my favorite jokes into Chinese, jokes without specific cultural references, and what I’ve found is that it’s not funny to a Chinese person unless they’ve spent time in the West and can understand it in a Western framework. Then they’ll laugh.

Q: From watching you play, it seems there’s a lot of humor in your music.

A: Oh yeah, definitely. Humor is a really important part of my music. Yeah, that’s where I seriously diverge from Coltrane [chuckles]. Coltrane was dead serious all the time. Never joked. Sonny Rollins, though, always joking.

Q: If you were to give one track to someone who’s never heard your music before to represent you in all your Haavik-ness, which would it be?

A: I’m really proud of my track ‘Cruise Control’ on the album Ye Shanghai, which is available [mocks a commercial voiceover] for a limited time only as a free download on my website. It’s a good example of seventies funk music and classic rock with groovy jazz playing. It’s a pretty ‘shufu ganjue’ (comfortable feeling).

Q: So Shanghai is your home now?

A: Yeah, we’re here to stay. It’s got everything for artistic development and the level of musicianship here continues to rise. I’m getting new inspiration here all the time.

Q: What’s the future of live music here?

A: The musicians playing in Shanghai are developing a language and a new style of expression. We can’t say what the future is, other than to say that (dramatically) the future is now. More musicians from around the world are coming here and it’s a delicate ecosystem here for the amount of work opportunities and the number of musicians that can come play and stay. But we are seeing more places to play and of those places, we are seeing an evolution of artistic value and interests and the standards and quality of the music [they are looking for]. It will definitely continue to grow.

Q: What part do you want to play in the scene’s growth?

A: It’s very important to me to continue to write music that brings all of us together. The role that I’ve found already and will continue to play is as a conduit for a lot of the musical influences that are coming, because they’re bigger than me, but I can write music that has a place for all these ideas. I want to continue to expand that and make my saxophone playing the most profound integration of every spiritual, rational and irrational experience that I have. I want my music to be an avenue for information and messages that come from outside of the human world that can inform us. A sort of shamanic connection with the sub-surface, the spiritual dimension, the universe that holds this universe within it.

Q: If you could go back into any era and play with any artist, who would it be?

A: First instinct would be New York City in the early seventies and check out the fabled “loft” scene. I’d also love to go back and hear Bach improvise as well. He’d improvise entire church sessions but there’s no way for us to hear it as he only jotted down a few lines afterwards. Can you imagine? It’d be like going to church and hearing God speak to you (grins).

’Sax Machine’ was the name of a track on Sax Maniac, a 1982 album by New York jazz-punk band 'James White and The Blacks'.

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