Muhal Richard Abrams Interview

Interview with Muhal Richard Abrams

Interview by Brad Farberman

From his work with the AACM to his more than twenty recordings as a leader, Muhal Richard Abrams has blazed a unique and uncompromising path in music. Busy as ever at seventy-nine years old, the pioneering pianist and composer has been at the forefront of the sound scene since the 1950s.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 19, 1930, Abrams didn’t begin playing piano until he was almost seventeen years old. But he made up for lost time: by the late 1950s, Abrams was gigging with visiting performers like Max Roach and Sonny Stitt, and forming relationships with Chicago-based musicians like Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins. But by the early 1960s, Abrams’s tastes had turned from bebop to a more individual style.

“I think one has one’s own voice when they’re born,” explains Abrams. “I think developing personal approaches to a craft comes from study and research. Seeking and searching. And transferring information that you get from those practices into your own particular approach.”

In 1961, Abrams started the Experimental Band, a group that eventually blossomed into the hugely influential AACM. Founded in 1965 by Abrams, Steve McCall, Jodie Christian, and Phil Cohran, the still-extant Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is “a collective of musicians and composers dedicated to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music,” according to its website. The organization was established out of necessity.

“It’s a case that you feel that you need to have a fuller plate,” says Abrams on the founding of the AACM. “And we found that being dependent on others for a fuller plate, however well meaning they may be, just wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t enough so much because of what other people weren’t doing, it wasn’t enough because of what we weren’t doing. It had nothing to do with anybody else. We had aspirations, and goals that we wanted to reach, so we had to create a forum for building and working towards those goals and aspirations. You just go and you say, ‘Well, I’ll build my own house.’ ’Cause I want a house with 3,000 rooms in it. So I have to build one if I want a house like that.”

In 1968, Abrams released Levels and Degrees of Light, his first album as a leader. Featuring Leroy Jenkins, Thurman Barker, Anthony Braxton, and others, the recording merely hinted at what Abrams was capable of; over the next forty years, the pianist would work and record with ensembles of all shapes and sizes, and compose for symphonies, string quartets, and even solo saxophone. He finds writing for one of these groups no different than writing for any of the others.

“It’s the same musical process,” says Abrams. “You take your experience and you approach the particular structure that you want to produce for the particular project. If it’s a quartet, then you produce a musical situation that would be appropriate from your point of view at the time. There’s no formula. It’s all new. When it arrives, it’s new, so you design a scenario for that ensemble. And for me, I just design it from scratch. Because it’s a golden opportunity to try and create something that I haven’t encountered before. I may have encountered that particular size group, but each occasion has to have a different design. That’s the fun in it. The creativity in it. The infinitive in it. The improvisation, if you will.”

Above all else, the longtime New York City resident (he’s lived here since 1975) and 2010 NEA Jazz Master stresses that in order to move ahead musically, one must be always working and studying. Abrams refers to this routine as “a constant search and a constant research.”

“Everything counts,” says Abrams. “Your whole experience counts. It comes to a sum total at any point in your existence. Tomorrow, there’ll be another sum total, because the thing that happens today will be added to tomorrow. As long as you’re here in a physical existence, practicing the craft, then it’s a constantly changing proposition. You learn something new everyday. And that process has not changed as far as my procedures have been going. It’s pretty much a constant book of changes.”

Abrams will perform at the Vision Festival on June 24. He’ll play solo at 7PM, and with a trio including Harrison Bankhead and Ari Brown at 10PM.

Published in Jazz Inside Magazine / June 2010