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Lola's interview on WGBH Boston's 89.7, "Eric in the Evening" Jazz show, February 25th 2009:
All About Jazz Interview:
Lola Danza: Free To Sing Free
Lola Danza - Published: February 25, 2009
By Simon Jay Harper Discuss
Free jazz has wound its way through many permutations since arriving in the
early '60s. An important custodian of its new directions is vocalist and composer
Lola Danza, of Brooklyn.
Danza is a graduate of Berklee College of Music, Boston, and stayed in Boston
for a few years after graduating, developing her approach to music before
becoming completely "free" over the last three years.
Her latest album, Live Free (Evolver, 2009), is a live recording from a gig
at Boston's Ryles Jazz club in 2008.
The instrumentation for the recording is voice (Danza, of course), tenor sax,
bass and drums. The effect is inspiring, and the journey the listener is taken
on in each of the three tracks is a true adventure.
Danza's voice has a range of four octaves, which she fully uses in each performance.
Notes turn into low moans or emotional cries. On the album's first track,
the music builds to Danza providing urgent high notes, followed by similarly
frantic-sounding drums from drummer Bob Moses. The effect can appear ceremonial,
or exploring.
"RaKaLam Bob Moses, he's legendary," notes Danza. "I'm very
fortunate that we've played together so much."
The second track sees Danza "playing" (she sees the voice as an
instrument, whether soloing or accompanying) a striking, climbing chromatic
passage, followed by Moses playing an almost rock-like backbeat pattern.
Dynamic shifts are a strong feature of the music over the entire album, periods
of quiet succeeding dramatic action. The sax player, Matt Langley, is brilliant
on the record, at times recalling the sound of great swing and bebop sax players
and at other times evoking modern free players like Ornette Coleman. Every
note feels authentic. Langley's interplay with Danza is exciting to listen
to. For example, in the third piece where the sax inverts the usual position
of a voice (above the horn) by playing a very high note against Danza's low
note. Near the end of the piece, their positions are reversed, with Danza
high above Langley in a dramatic dissonance; shades of the ending of Charles
Ives' second symphony.
The bassist is Wes Brown, and he too has interesting moments of interplay
with Langley.
And it is all improvised, free, from start to finish. There is at times a
journey-like drama: the mid-point of track three, for example, sees the musicians
falling quiet briefly, before the adventure continues. Yet the structure was
unplanned.
"That was totally improvised," she says. "There was no structural
idea whatsoever. I don't really think in terms of preplanning a composition
or form because I think that it can inhibit the player, so for me, I want
to allow the players to be completely free to be themselves.
"So the important formula for what I do is choosing the right player.
Choosing the players is essential. So I go around, I listen to players, I
hear what they're doing and if I like what a player is doing and I feel he
would work well with me—usually it's an intuitive thing. I look at them,
I hear them and I say, 'That's the guy. I have to play with that particular
player.' ... and [then] I put these guys together. I start hearing different
guys and I say, 'You know what? This guy is going to work great with that
guy, and with me.' I can hear what they're doing, and usually these players
have really, really, really strong personalities. They really know who they
are musically."
How did Danza find the musicians for the recording? The process, as she describes
it, shows that the effective composition of the music begins before the actual
gig. It begins with the choice of musicians who will be playing with her.
"This is going to really sound funny, but this particular recording,
I played with these guys for the very first time. In fact, we had never played
with each other except for Bob Moses and me. That night, originally I was
supposed to have my bassist that I've worked with the most, John Lockwood,
who is the bassist of The Fringe (Lockwood with George Garzone and Bob Gullotti).
John played with Freddie Hubbard in his band and with Joe Henderson as well.
I've had the pleasure of working with John for six years now.
"So that night was very interesting because John Lockwood couldn't make
the gig and I had Moses on the gig, and I was supposed to have Jeff Galindo,
this really great trombone player up in Boston that I've played with for the
past four years. But he couldn't make the gig, so Jeff recommended Matt ...
The other guy (on the gig) was Wes Brown, on bass. And Wes was recommended
to me by RaKaLam Bob Moses. Wes played in Leo Smith's band, so it was really
a treat to play with him. Such fabulous guys. I left Matt a message and I
told him 'Hey, don't be afraid to blow. 'Cause the last thing I want is for
a sax player or a horn player to be afraid to come in while I'm playing because
I'm a singer, because I'm doing something and they don't want to step on my
toes.
"So I told him, 'Don't be afraid to blow.' And then I left him this message
saying 'You don't need to call me back. We don't need to discuss it. We don't
need to talk about it. But know that my voice could be coming at you from
underneath, above, sideways, inside of what you're playing. Just play.' So
I left that message for him and I talked about the same sort of thing with
Wes. ... He has this really awesome Bose equipment, a PA system, and he brought
the Bose to the gig for me and I got to sing through that.
"I don't think in terms of 'Well this might sound good here. Let me try
this there,'" says Danza about her music. "I don't think in those
terms. Basically, I think what's happened is over the years of really practicing,
... my main thing, what I like to do at home is I practice a lot. You know,
I've studied with so many people over the years, especially instrumentalists,
which have been so important, as well as some really great vocal teachers.
And through that process, that journey of really practicing and learning music,
learning how to play the piano and really digging it, these things just sort
of by osmosis, just sort of automatically come out in the music. Because you
are practicing so many other things.
"And from practicing all those things, when you get musicians that are
at this caliber, at such a high caliber, like RaKaLam and Matt Langley and
Wes Brown, it's so easy. They put something out there and you respond off
of what they're doing ... For me, when I'm listening to these players and
being inside of the music, there are four individual and equal voices and
I'm just speaking to these other players and they're speaking to me and we're
responding and not responding off of each other."
She says she doesn't think in terms of changing keys.
"This music, it transcends paper. It's not about that. I just like the
different transitions. We're creating together. We're composing together in
the moment. No one is thinking about what key to play in. It's another type
of playing. It's another type of hearing."
And she doesn't give signals to her band mates.
"The signals that I give are with my voice, because they know how to
hear ... There is a very important element of hearing in this type of music.
Because I don't deal with pre-planned forms or compositions, it's all about
hearing, so it's about hearing and accepting the player as they are. With
these guys, I am not trying to tell them, 'Hey, play this for me so that I
can hear this and do that.' I don't do that and I don't like that. They come
in, they know that I'm hearing. I'm accepting their playing as it is. I'm
not trying to hear something or make it into something else. I just allow
those guys to play what they love to play and I'm hearing ... I choose these
players because they're brilliant and sensitive and they understand music.
"It's about another way of hearing music. It's a different way of listening,
so when I'm hearing this music, I just hear the notes, the sounds, and I accept
the sounds as they are. Then when you can do that, then you start to hear
in a whole different way and it opens up your hearing and you hear behind
the note. Because there is a whole concept. Just like when you're speaking
to someone, the way you speak to a person, you can hear. You don't even have
to know the words they're saying. You can hear from the nuances within their
voice. The sudden changes in pitch when they speak. You can hear certain sounds
that go beyond verbalization. So you don't have to actually say it. It just
comes out. So that's the same thing with this type of playing."
"It's intention or spirit. It's almost like a Zen Buddhism, a Taoist
thing," she adds.
Influences
Danza gets inspiration from philosophy or other such writings.
"I like to read Krishnamurti," she says. "He's a favorite of
mine. [And] people's biographies. I am in the middle of reading Albert Einstein's
biography. Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet' is my bible. I love Rainer
Maria Rilke. I love 'Letters to a Young Poet.' It's about what it means to
be an artist. For me, living that life daily, I think, makes this music. It
brings out all those things. I also practice Chinese yoga with my bassist
and yoga teacher John Voigt."
In terms of listening to avant-garde jazz, Danza likes Albert Ayler and Charles
Gayle. Of Ayler, she says "I like a lot of his beliefs, his philosophy.
I really love and admire him and the freedom in his music. There's something
there. It's spiritual. Just like John Coltrane. For me, Crescent (Impulse!,
1964), Sun Ship (Impulse!, 1965) and Ascension (Impulse!, 1965), those are
my favorite Trane albums. There's this complete beauty in them and spirituality
that goes beyond words.
"I love free jazz, avant-garde. But then, also, I like straight-ahead
jazz too. I'll sing standards and solo over changes. I love listening to Sarah
Vaughan and Anita O'Day ... I listen to so many different types of music I
don't really like to say 'this is good music and that is bad. If it's good
music, it's good music. Doesn't matter what genre. I love world music as well.
And I have written some compositions where I get into flamenco and Asian influences."
Through drummer Moses and also her time at Berklee, there is inspiration from
vocalist and scat-meister Sheila Jordan.
"I never studied with Sheila. She did a clinic at Berklee when I was
there and I got to sit in and she was just amazing. I called her a couple
of times for advice. She's just a wonderful, wonderful human being and brilliant
musician."
Danza says Jordan's classic album Portrait Of Sheila (Blue Note, 1963) is
a special favorite of hers. "Then there's this really amazing album,
I think its Steve Swallow's record, and it's called Home (ECM, 1980). Bob
Moses is on it and Sheila's singing these poems by a friend of theirs and
that's an amazing record."
On broader avant-garde music in general, says Danza, "I love John Cage
and his philosophy on sound. He's such a beautiful man, always so happy and
full of laughter. I love Stockhausen and the way he talks about sounds. He
says, 'If sounds can heal, it can evolve humanity.'" For older classical
music, "I love Stravinsky, Shostakovich ... I love Rachmaninoff ... I
got to see an amazing Russian concert pianist here in New York at the Met
Museum. When I was living in Boston, I saw the Boston Symphony as much as
I could."
Her favorite opera singer is Maria Callas. "I like to go to the opera
at the Met a lot too." But for Danza, less predictable sources of music
are also always at hand.
"One thing that I really like is this CD box set of music called The
World Museum and it's these guys who go around all over the world collecting
samples of tribes and different exotic sounds. Even some guy who's selling
newspapers in the street, but singing it. In a different language, it sounds
like a symphony. It sounds gorgeous. So yeah, I love that kind of stuff. It's
inspiring."
Danza also lists "post-modern pop" as an influence. "I think
of Beck and Björk. Björk is definitely an influence of mine. I love
Björk ... The two albums I have are Debut (Elektra, 1993) and Medulla
(Atlantic, 1994). Medulla I really, really respect because it's all voice.
I love the harmonies she's using with the choir. I like the sounds that she
makes. And I think she has a really great vision. I also have the making of
Medulla DVD. I used to watch that a lot to get ideas.
“There's not a lot that has been explored as far as the palate of different
sounds go, because there is such a vast range of sounds that you can make
with the voice.”
"And Debut [Björk's first solo album], I really like. She takes
a standard, "Like Someone in Love," and sings it over a harp with
some sound sampling. The sound samples actually tell a story underneath the
harp accompaniment—a sort of sound sampling accompaniment to the music
and herself—and that's brilliant. I mean that is gorgeous. I'm into
harp and I'm into sound samples."
Background
Danza came from Boston to New York in 2007 to become more involved in free
jazz. Guitarist Ben Monder, not a "free jazz" musician, was one
of the musicians she sought out. "I did move here because of him and
I had to play with him," she says. "And I've played with him a few
times. I heard him and Theo Bleckmann [the expansive German singer and composer],
and through Theo, I learned about (vocal innovator and composer) Meredith
Monk. My godmother, opera singer Angie Perez, worked with Meredith in the
'80s in Berlin. But I moved here for [Monder's] playing and the idea of a
different kind of music existing for the voice in a whole new way. These guys
like Ben, Theo, and Meredith are performing and writing revolutionary music
for the voice, so I knew I had to be here in Mecca, New York City."
She has played with Monder at the Cornelia Street Café in New York.
"Monder's played on my compositions. We did a little free thing and we
did some standards, and he was incredible on my compositions. He's amazing,
really amazing."
From the purely free-jazz aspect, Danza says she moved to New York because
of Ornette Coleman. "He was the main guy." She also cites Anthony
Braxton, John Zorn and her teacher, Jeanie Lovetri, as big draws to New York
for her.
Before she lived in Boston, Danza's father was in the military band and the
family moved around a lot, "So I don't really have any place where I'm
from." She went to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music and
stayed. Currently, she attends the Aaron Copland School of Music at the City
University of New York in CUNY Queens.
She's working on a master's degree in jazz performance and says the school's
jazz department "has changed my life. The program is outstanding and
the teachers are dedicated ... they love jazz and they love young musicians.
They support the jazz scene. I believe it is by far one of the best programs
in the country."
Danza's father is a jazz guitarist and her grandfather played jazz piano,
but she didn't listen much to jazz music growing up. "I listened to classical
music ... When I was 11, I had an LP of Beethoven sonatas and I listened to
that record on repeat for years. I also remember, as a little girl, going
to the record store to get an LP of Cindy Lauper, She's So Unusual (Portrait,
1983). "Time After Time" is a great tune on that album. Not to mention,
Cindy Lauper looked really cool and pretty in her tutu on the cover. Then,
after that, I started taking classical voice lessons and listened to Beverly
Sills, Joan Sutherland, Frederica Von Stade, Kathleen Battle, Angie Perez,
Maria Callas. I wanted to be an opera singer and sing Mozart's 'Magic Flute'—you
know, be the Queen of the Night."
The Voice as an Instrument
Other influences on Danza include Sarah Vaughan, Anita O'Day, Aretha Franklin,
Jeanne Lee, and Nina Simone.
"Jeanne Lee is an avant garde jazz singer, really incredible. And she's
one of my favorites. She has a great album called Conspiracy (Earthforms,
1974) and there's another one with her and Ran Blake, a pianist. Really great."
She also acknowledged that at times on the new album she "does get into
some tribal influence. I feel like the voice is a very flexible instrument.
It's mind boggling. There's not a lot that has been explored as far as the
palate of different sounds go, because there is such a vast palate of sounds
that you can make with the voice. And if you look back through history, talking
about tribal things around the world, with the voice 55 muscles are involved
in making vocal sound. If you talk to any linguistic specialist, they'll tell
you that when you are young you get used to using certain muscle positions
that then affect the voice. And that creates an accent so you have a certain
style of talking, because you are around certain areas or groups or whatever.
So a French person sounds very different from an Asian person or an African
person or an American person. Because we're using different muscle patterns
and have different sized vocal mechanisms to create these sounds.
"What I think can happen through this type of music is the exploration
of using different sounds with the voice to create. Because if you think about
it, if you listen to a piano it has a certain type of sound. A saxophone has
a certain type of sound. For instance, at a recent benefit concert that featured
John Zorn, there was a pianist in his trio, Sylvie Courvoisier, who used mallets
and duct tape on the strings of the piano to transcend the instrument. Hal
Crook does it with his Harmonizer on the trombone. As an artist you try to
transcend your instrument.
"Piano is a hard instrument to get different types of sounds out of it.
If you look at someone like Lowell Davison or even someone like Cecil Taylor,
they have been able to transcend the piano sound by having so much technique,
so many different imaginative ideas, and the ability to create so much within
the moment. At home, I'm practicing how to make these different types of sounds
with the voice and put them into a musical context and just explore the flexibility.
The possibility of using the voice within music is limitless."
She says the voice "can be written into a symphony. For example, Berlioz:
I love his 'Requiem.' He is actually having the choir comp for the (orchestra)
in Latin. And it's a trip to listen to 'cause he's using the instrumentation
in a totally different way. So when I heard that, I thought. 'That's another
possibility.' So what I'm looking for are the possibilities and the impossibilities
of what the voice can do.
"The human voice is limitless and has not been fully explored, not by
any means. The human voice is capable of so many different things. And also
for me, the human voice is really the connection, the essence of our being,
of who we are, so in this music, that's what I'm doing. I am allowing that
connection to be seen no matter how personal. It's who I am, and I am just
allowing that to come out in this music."
The Road To Avant Garde
Before Danza's 2007 move to New York, she had not yet fully embraced free
jazz: she says her compositions were world music with jazz. "It had form,
but it was moving into the free thing. There would be free sections, and I
was exploring and trying to go in another direction. So I wrote for a string
quartet, and I use guitar, bass, and drums a lot and I have some albums that
I released with that: Rebirth (Evolver Records, 2002) and Vision Quest (Evolver
Records, 2005). In the last album, you can really see that there's a bridge
between what just happened on this newest album and the singer-songwriter,
jazz sort of thing.
Evolver is her own label.
Visionquest has a mix of free pieces as well as compositions. It's sort of
chamber music-ish sounding, because I don't really use the drums very much
and it (has) strings—it's two basses actually."
So what in particular led Danza to avant-garde?
"I think it's listening to instrumental music," she says, "and
I wanted to be inside of the music and I think that free jazz allowed me to
explore that without putting any limits on it, psychologically speaking. I
started hanging out with these free jazz guys in Boston , Nat Mugavero [drummer]
and John Lockwood. The three of us sort of just having these experiments around
Boston, and I just started playing with stuff, sitting in sessions, talking
to people ... I had been searching. Looking back on this, I had been looking
for this for a very long time, but did not know how to say what it was or
what to call it. And somehow it found me.
"These last three years I've been working on what came out on that album.
I'd been writing [and] singing compositions that I wrote, and I felt they
were good but they weren't exactly what I was looking for, and I put strings
on it to shake it up a bit ... But then me and some friends were listening
to John Scofield, Steve Swallow and Bill Stewart in my apartment back in Boston
years ago, and, as instrumentalists, they're able to experience music this
way [by] being inside of the music. Instrumentalists can experience music
in the way that a voice has not been able to experience in group playing.
Usually the voice is on top.
"So this time I wanted to be inside of the music, just like a guitar
player or a drummer, even more so than a horn because a horn stays on top
a lot of times. I wanted to be inside, so that's the development of this process
of learning how to be inside of the music. I wanted to actually have the voice
comp for the band, have the voice give tones to support the band, rather than
only singing on top of it. So that's what this project was about, and over
the past three years that's what I've been investigating. It's been three
years of working on this process of 'How can the voice do this?'"
She notes, "There is so much more territory that has yet to be explored.
And right now, this recording, it's a year old and already I'm somewhere else,
musically speaking. There's new territory. This music, it's changing. It grows
so rapidly. You know, people are like, 'Are you going to do a CD release party
and are you going to have the same band?' Well, you can't really have the
same band because this recording, it's done. It's over. Now I am searching
for more, the search for something else. This new album can never be captured
again. That night doesn't exist anymore. It's in the past. I wouldn't want
to relive it again. Not at all, because I'm thinking about something else
now. I have so many ideas and I want to develop and explore them all."
"I have just discovered the music of Bill Laswell," says Danza.
"Cause and Effect (Innerhythmic, 2007) and Imaginary Cuba (Wicklow/RCA,
1999) are extremely powerful, as they have a strong political message. Points
of Order (Innerhythmic, 2001) is hip. Buckethead and Karl Berger are on it.
Bill Laswell is masterful. He's brilliant."
Guitarist Marc Ribot is also on her
radar. "Saints (Atlantic/WEA, 2001) is a solo guitar record and he plays
"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" from (The Beatles') White Album (Apple,
1968) and it's incredible. Ribot's interpretation of that tune is the sexiest
thing I've heard in a long time. He's so amazing. He can totally manipulate
the sound on his guitar. It's insane. He has many different personalities
when he plays. It's as if each note takes on a life of its own. When he plays
"Happiness Is a Warm Gun," he sounds like a cowboy. I mean it gets
really dirty and it's groovin.' You feel it."
She adds, "I have a few guitar players I work with. I love guitar. I
don't usually work with piano, just because I feel like guitar has so much
more possibility because you can bend the note. A guitar can do anything.
It has so much flexibility with pedals and all kinds of stuff. I love Bern
Nix, Marc Ribot, Ben Monder, Bill Frisell, John Scofield, Egberto Gismonti
and Dave Tronzo ... I just started playing with Bern Nix and he's legendary.
He's got a solo album out called Low Barometer (Thompkinson Square, 2007).
Bern is such a humble guy and a genius.
Dave Tronzo's a Boston guy now. He used to be in New York. Incredible, incredible.
He plays slide guitar. There's a great recording of him live at the Knitting
Factory playing "Monk's Dream" and it's amazing, beautiful, incredible.
That, to me, is how Monk would have wanted it."
Of the trend of jazz artists making cover versions of rock tunes, Danza says,
"It's great. I actually did that on my album Vision Quest. I used a Radiohead
tune, "Motion Picture Soundtrack," and I also used Beck's tune."
It's interesting to note how she says "used." Jazz is all about
improvising. She isn't saying she simply covered the tune. She took it as
a start, and built on it. It brings to mind Bryan Ferry's talking of other
people's tunes as "ready-mades." Even he, as a more traditional
(though faintly avant-garde) rock singer, took songs written by other people
and added his spin to them. Pre-written songs can be seen as "ready-made"
to make a new start on—that is, beyond making a simple jazz band or
group cover. And it is interesting that jazz artists such as Danza, Monder,
Ribot, Herbie Hancock and the like are performing and recording their versions
of some rock tunes.
It is perhaps not surprising that Danza was attracted to the music of Cindy
Lauper when she was a child. Lauper's album contained, of course, "Time
After Time," a hypnotic tune rapidly and successfully covered by Miles
Davis.
Nadu
But Danza doesn't stop at pure music. She has also been performing with an
audio and visual concept group named "Nadu," which blends music
with visual art—live music teaming up with live film, dancers and painters.
"Nadu's a different thing," says Danza. "It's
my project that brings audio and visuals together. Nadu in Korean means 'me
also.' That's exactly what I wanted to accomplish with this project—to
bring a bunch of different 'me's,' different personalities, together to create
an alter reality. I've been lucky enough to play at these spaces in New York
that have allowed me to take Plexiglas and cover the stage with it, and then
I have the painter come in and throw paint and paint to the music. I work
with a lot of video artists to transform time and space, to go somewhere else.
Where? I dunno. It's a work in progress."
She says the last project she did was at a gallery where "we covered
all four walls with video and had the audience sit in the middle of the space
and then the musicians were part of the video as well, while they were playing.
There was a live-stream of video, and the artist triggered it with the sound.
So he was creating the video as we were playing the music. He had patches
of video and could trigger them while the sound was going. So if we started
doing something crazy, he would trigger a certain type of footage to match
or not."
In the true spirit of a free musician, Danza says she'll be "going where
the music takes me, always changing, always going in different directions."
Selected Discography
Lola Danza, Live Free (Evolver Records, 2009)
Lola Danza, Vision Quest (Evolver Records, 2005)
Lola Danza, Rebirth (Evolver Records, 2002)
Lola Danza, Within The Past (Evolver Records, 2001)
Photo Credits
Top Photo: Duane Huang
Bottom Photo: Courtesy of Lola Danza and MGG Design
Lola Danza at All About Jazz.
Lola's interview on WGBH Boston's 89.7, "Eric in the Evening" Jazz show, February 27th 2008:
Boston Herald, December 13, 2002
Bob Young
Young Hub-based vocalist and composer Lola Danza is the kind of bright up-and-comer who makes Brackeen feel there’s hope for the future of jazz.
Danza graduated from Berklee in 2001, has already worked with Steve Kuhn, Luciana Souza and Sheila Jordan, AND runs her own music school. She marks the release of a new CD at Ryles on Tuesday night.
The disc, “Rebirth”, is unlike anything you’ll find in the jazz bins these days, and in fact could be easily suited to a number of other categories, including world. With a stunning voice that elongates words ad phrases with almost ethereal clarity; Danza follows her own muse stylistically, preferring the spare and airy to the busy and hot.
At Ryles, she and her quartet will be joined by guitarist Leni Stern.