№ 5
Gary Peacock
The Cadence Interview
—Cadence
This interview ran in two parts, nearly filling the September and October 2001 issues of the magazine. Gary Peacock and I met in Toronto, the night before his performance with the Keith Jarrett Trio. We spoke in a small bar, just east of the elegant King Edward Hotel, among the city’s finest, the trio’s lodgings for their two nights in town. Peacock remembered the last time he was here. It was the early 1980s, the Standards Trio’s first days. They’d come north to see if their approach would work in a large concert hall.
GARY PEACOCK: It [the Standards Trio] could have been jeopardized by a really large hall. How do you create an intimacy at the level that we wanted to do it at, or experience it at? In general, in a smaller club (200–300 people) that’s not a problem because it’s built into the whole system. You don’t have to rely so much on amplification or speakers or anything like that. But when you’re in a big hall, is it possible? We came to Toronto and we said, “Well, it looks like it’s possible. But we’ll have to do some work with it.”
CADENCE: You’re talking about right after those Village Vanguard gigs in the early ‘80s [the first Standards Trio performances in September 1983].
G.P.: Not right after. It was sometime after that. We did the Vanguard, and then there was a lot of interest in the group. Offers coming in from Europe and Japan. So Keith said, “Is this gonna work? We have to see if it’ll go, if it will really work.” But it is different, very very different, when you work in a large hall.
CAD: Do you miss the clubs?
G.P.: Yeah, because all of our early history was basically club work. The music that we’re playing is part and parcel of that context. The music wasn’t originally designed in a way for an audience of 2,000, 3,000, or 10,000 people. But we’ve found ways to make it work. And we’ve done some halls that were just so loud. An Opera House in Vienna, they’d never had jazz before. We had to play almost triple pianissimo. And it worked. But everybody had to be attentive. So this is actually the first time I’ve been back in Toronto, I think, since the ’80s.
CAD: You were just in Europe with Marilyn Crispell. Now these two Standards Trio performances [over the same November weekend in Toronto and Chicago]. In the New Year you’re touring with Ralph Towner. Then in the spring you’re back playing with Marilyn Crispell and Paul Motian. This seems so typical of the kinds of things you do: spreading your net so wide. A lot of people couldn’t do it.
G.P.: That question’s been asked before. I was talking to Steve Cloud, my manager and Keith’s manager, and I realized that it’s not something new for me. I started doing this stuff thirty-five or forty years ago, and what I discovered was that it isn’t so much the form of the music or the style of the music that makes it different. That isn’t what makes it different.
So in one sense, where I am musically — with Marilyn, or at least before with Albert Ayler or with Jimmy Giuffre or with Paul Bley, or if I’m with Bill Evans or Miles Davis or Keith Jarrett — doesn’t make any difference at all, because the space, the internal space that this music comes out of, is no different. The form that emanates from that is different, but the musical space that comes out of it — that it comes from — it’s the same kind of space. And for me to say, “What is it? Can you put that into words?” That’s a bit more problematic.
There are some key features. One is the intent of listening. If you are working and playing with whoever it is, and they’re listening — listening, listening, listening — they’re not just there to play their thing. They’re really listening. And that means listening to themselves and listening to everything around them at the same time.
CAD: Everything you’ve done has been like that.
G.P.: Right. Exactly. That’s a necessary ingredient. Another ingredient is that there has to be an element of lack of seriousness and a very high intent of sincerity. Seriousness is usually when someone has developed a particular skill, a particular understanding, a particular orientation to music. And this is all-important. So whenever they play this is the thing that they have to do. That’s seriousness. Sincerity includes all that but at the same time it’s like open for something that you don’t know what’s going to happen, so you can give it all away, you don’t even need to play anything you’ve ever developed, ever, you just let it go. You don’t have to make a statement.
So those, for me, are two crucial ingredients. And sometimes it looks like — People say, “What’s so great about Paul Motian, for example. [Takes on a funny voice.] He doesn’t have any technique. He’s not really a skilled drummer.” Like you’ve missed the whole thing, you know. [Laughs.]
CAD: What he’s doing on the Crispell record [Nothing Ever Was, Anyway (ECM, 1997)] is —
G.P.: It’s unbelievable. Yeah, but see, and I don’t mean this derogatorily, it’s because he doesn’t care.
CAD: What people think, you mean?
G.P.: He doesn’t care, period. [Laughs.] He says, “This music? OK, let’s play.” He’s not carrying all this baggage. He doesn’t have any baggage on his shoulders. He’s not carrying a lug of Paul Motian around with him. He isn’t carrying anything. And Paul Bley — same kind of thing. He’d be playing something and then make a right turn. It’s like, “What?”