Jazz pianist Bill Carrothers turns his fascination with American history into challenging music, writes Ray Comiskey
It's safe to say that there are not many jazz musicians who have read Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet. Brad Mehldau, perhaps; he has set some of Rilke's work to music. And Marc Copland, who is deeply into poetry, is possibly another. But for Bill Carrothers, who will partner Copland in a series of piano duets at the National Concert Hall next week, these letters are as valid a statement of the artist's condition, its demands, dangers, responsibilities, pains and pleasures now, as they were when they were written, a century ago.
To him, to be an artist is a vocation; if you haven't got it, go sell life insurance or vacuum cleaners. Not that he lives like a monk or spends 40 days and nights atop a pole in the desert resisting the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. Home is an expansive house, full of kids' toys, on three acres on the shores of Lake Superior, which he and his wife, the singer Peg Carrothers, have transformed over the last few years. The nearest big city is Chicago, over 500 miles away.
That's how he prefers it. "I don't like big cities," he says, "all the smells, the constant noise. I grew up in the country, in Excelsior, Minnesota, a little town on the western edge of a small lake, and we had horses when I was a kid, so moving to New York [ he spent five years there in the late 1980s and early 1990s] was an incredible culture shock to me.
"My bubble, growing up on a farm, was very large, and so my personal space was kinda big. And in New York there just isn't any. Everybody's in your space all the time, so it made me kind of manic and suicidal. I just had to leave."
How does he manage to sustain a career as a jazz musician, then? "I play 10 dates a year in the US, at the most; the rest is all in Europe. In a good year I probably tour 10 or 12 weeks. In a bad year, like after 9/11, it was three. But, you know, part of the reason I live up here with my family is because it's incredibly reasonable to live. I mean, if I told you what I paid for my house - I'm not gonna, but what I paid for my house it's like buying a car."
Living up on one of the Great Lakes and the paucity of engagements in America haven't stopped him gaining the respect of his peers. Maria Schneider, for instance, one of the greatest living composers and orchestrators in jazz, is an admirer. Mention his name to any other knowledgeable jazz musician and the response is the same.
Over the past few years critics in Europe, and even in America, are catching on to a singular talent. His growing discography encompasses albums devoted to the music of the first World War, the American Civil War - he's a military historian - solos, duets, trios, quartets such as his The Electric Bill, several CDs with singers. And his influences on piano are similarly diverse.
"You can't be a jazz pianist nowadays and not be somewhat influenced by Keith Jarrett," he says. "And Lennie Tristano, I love his time. The way he pulls his lines one way or another is really nice and that's what I got from him. The harmony thing I got from other people, but the whole kind of swingy thing would be more like Lennie, Oscar Peterson, [ altoist] Cannonball Adderley.
"Herbie Hancock, that's an obvious influence. He has a nice balance of everything. He can go a lot of different ways and that's why a lot of people copy him because he's interesting harmonically, he's got a great swing feel. He's also somewhat virtuosic; not so much as some other people, but he's pretty great at it.
"But you don't get everything from every person," he continues. "You get it from different people. Keith Jarrett plays a whole lot of things that nobody else can play, but, you know, he can't play like Monk. Monk has a tenth of his technique. Which is better? Monk or Keith? They're both great. They're just different. Thankfully, no great master god has come along to play everything, because what a bore. Who wants to hear that? Nothing spoils a party faster than a genius."
IT'S PROBABLY FAIR to say that Carrothers began to make the wider jazz world sit up and take notice with Armistice 1918, his double album on the first World War, which was voted one of the top 10 albums in eight magazines in Europe and North America in 2004. What is it that fascinates him about war?
"On a personal level," he answers slowly, "and I've never been in or near one, so I wouldn't really know what the hell I'm talking about, I've studied a lot of war and talked with a lot of veterans and - how do I put this? - there is no experience in life that matches this. And I don't mean good and bad. I mean there's nothing where the spectrum, emotional, physical and intellectual, is any wider than war.
"Anyone who's been through that crucible and come out the other side and is a reasonable human being, deserves respect. Veterans get an automatic pass in my book, at least to start with, unless they prove themselves to be total dicks. On another level, sometimes wars are very necessary and justified, sometimes not. I read the most amazing quote. Have you got a second? I'll get this quote from John Stuart Mill." He gets the book and reads: "'War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. A decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important to him than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.' That's how I feel about that subject."
There were enough contemporary resonances there, in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East, not to mention George W Bush's less-than-glorious military "service" and Donald Rumsfeld's strutting appropriation of military expressions like "not on my watch", to fuel hours of discussion. But Carrothers is first and foremost an artist, so we had other concerns - though not before he had one more thing to say about war and how it can destroy even the survivors.
"They come back and they can't adjust," he adds. "If you read a lot of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and his great book, Goodbye To All That, they tell you exactly what it's like - either for the living, later on, like Sassoon, who wrote a whole lot of stuff about how he feels after the war, or Owen, who kinda projected how he would feel after the war, even though he didn't survive the war. I think the whole subject is really undervalued."
WHERE DOES ART - in his case, music - figure in all this? "Music takes all those ugly things, all that swirling pot of thoughts and emotions, and all that shit that goes on in your head, and then you pour them into music. And you can make it into something that other people can stand to listen to. Only art can do this.
"That's what's beautiful about somebody like Billie Holiday. She lived such a miserable life on many levels, and she was able to channel it all in a way that takes all that pain and distils it into like something you can drink. There's a couple of people, like Billie Holiday, or Frank Sinatra, or Miles Davis, that if you don't like them, well, we're not gonna be able to do a whole lot of business together," he laughs.
He has no time, however, for re-creating the past. "One of the things that makes jazz so beautiful, and even painful," he has written, "is that it relies on spontaneity and relentless searching from the artist as its sole means of growth. Of course, no one has the ability to be spontaneous and original all the time, but many of those players don't even make the attempt."
Partly, he says, it's their own fault, and partly it's the bottom-line mentality of the shakers and movers in the music industry who decide what kind of music we get to hear. "Money, and the pursuit of it, is slowly strangling the music we all profess to love." Many of these sentiments are echoed in Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet, which he calls "an owner's manual on how to be an artist".
And though he's not against music education helping people with their craft - being a craftsman won't stop you being original and creative - he doesn't like the way it can turn out craftsmen who seem to be content to remain so, no matter how great their instrumental skills. Creativity and originality are the goals. But he agrees there is a tension, not always complementary, between savouring the emotional impact of music and analysing what makes it tick.
"That's a Pandora's Box," he acknowledges. "EB White said that 'analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.' I've had a real mysterious drawing to certain pieces of music and then I've gone and figured them out. And I know I won't listen to them again for five years, until the mystery regrows."
HE APPROACHES HIS recording sessions in much the same spirit. "I make records about stories," he explains, "and a certain thing I want to get from each record. Sometimes it becomes something totally different. Ghost Ships [ a very moving album he made in 2002 with saxophonist Anton Denner and drummer Bill Stewart] is a perfect example of that." Originally it was to be much more swinging and outgoing. "We made it on the first anniversary of 9/11 and that affected us. Anton and I went and walked all the way round Ground Zero before we recorded. It was a ghost town that day. No one in the streets. I've never heard it that quiet. Then we went and recorded. And, of course, we started playing God Bless America instead of playing all this stuff that we were going to play. So it became a totally different record than the one I set out to make."
His interest in American history has been a thread, sometimes explicit, at other times implicit, running through several of his recording projects. "Ghost Ships was somewhat that way, both the Civil War CDs were that way. A lot of the old music I've found is kind of another offshoot of that - the duet with Bill Stewart has a couple of old tunes, The Whiffenpoof Song, Tenting on the Old Campground. Ghost Ships has the sign-off theme from Radio Free Europe during the war. I like old things: old houses, old cars, old people." And old music. But it's not the stories it has to tell. It's the way that he tells them.
Bill Carrothers duets with Marc Copland at the National Concert Hall on Tuesday at 8pm
