PAUL BLEY:   Thoughts on electronic music and synthesizers

When improvisers left their previously acoustic domain and took up electricity,  the intention in many cases was to make a literal translation of the acoustic music to electric.  The inclusion of this new wealth of timbres produced an unexpected richness.    In my case, the change from piano to electric keyboards, including the first primitive synths was to lead to results that I could not have fully predicted.  One has only to examine the evolution of the sound of the electric guitar to realize that the sound an instrument makes may forever change the future direction of the music to be made on that instrument.   In ensemble playing the thrill of loosing oneself in an electric universe where the players may not be able to tell who is doing what presented opportunities for real group integration.

 In 1969, I did an interview for Downbeat Magazine. At the end of the interview, the writer casually asked what I thought about the new keyboard synthesizers. At this time, the keyboard had just been added to the synthesizer, so it was now perceived as being in my domain.
I said, "What's a keyboard synthesizer?"
He told me. Now I was interviewing him.
My next question was, “How do I get my hands on one?”
Bob Moog had just opened a factory in Trumansburg, New York, in the Finger Lakes district. I found out that there were only a few production models of the Moog synthesizer in existence, and that to get into that game you needed about twelve grand. But I decided I had to get this instrument.
When I phoned Trumansburg it sounded even more difficult. In fact, there was only one production model in the factory, and several pianists and their wives and children had emigrated to Trumansburg, just because Bob would let them play it at three o'clock on Thursdays.
I sat down and wrote a script about a luncheon date between Paul Bley and Robert Moog. Although I'd never met the man, at the beginning of this one-act play I said "Hello Bob" and he said "Hello Paul", and at the end I drove off with a Moog synthesizer.
I called him up and told him I would like to come to Trumansburg to see him. He'd heard of me, at least enough to say come on up.
I understood that the synthesizer was a miniaturization of an electronic music studio, where composers laboriously spliced together hundreds of pieces of recording tape to create an electronically conceived musical composition. I pointed out to Bob that in reducing this roomful of equipment down to the size of a coffee table and adding a keyboard, he had not made any allowances for real-time performance. And I put it to Bob that his company was doomed to failure unless he had the input of a performing musician.
Bob went for it, but said that since there was only one production model in existence, he would have to ship it to me later.
I said, “That’s not necessary, Bob.  I have my rented station wagon just outside the door and if you grab a corner of the synthesizer we can carry it outside right now.”

When we got back to New York there were certain problems to be solved, since there was no manual.  Problem number one: how do you turn it on?  Number two: How do you get it to make a sound?  Number three: How do you get an attack and decay?  Number four: How do you filter the sound?
This instrument required patching phono plugs between  two places to make a connection.  There were a million choices.  For example, I learned that there were three kinds of vibrato: pitch vibrato as in a violin tremolo; volume vibrato, as if turning the volume knob up and down quickly; and timbre vibrato, as in turning the filtering knob up and down quickly.  Since my hands were fully occupied with the keyboard and the patching, I had the luxury of designing twelve foot pedals for controlling these parameters.

In fact, only the instrument knew what it could do. It just sat there, pregnant with information. It took me two years to get to the point where we could give a performance on it.  Finally I found sound one. That was a nightmare, because once I'd found sound one, I had to go back and start again to find sound two. I literally spent two years or so drawing charts of the face of the instrument and the patch cording that was required for each desired sound and treatment. I had pretty much decided early on that I wanted the keyboard synthesizer to do things that the piano couldn't do.

With the synthesizer band I made some records.  Between April 1969 and October 1971 I made ten synthesizer records, of which Annette Peacock did voice synthesis on eight, one of which she is the leader on.

We played at the Jazz Workshop in Boston for a week, Barry Altschul and myself and a bassist, with this monophonic instrument with no memory. For a week! It was very hot stuff. I made tapes of it, but there was some very raw synthesizer playing which we decided was too far out to be issued. As our technology grew I found myself with several keyboards at my disposal. Photographs from that period show me stacking them. At that time there was no precedent for putting one keyboard on top of another--what we now call the keyboard sandwich. I had to think of that by myself.

There was no difference between the electric music and any of the free jazz we played acoustically. We didn't bother using the instrument to change the music, we were just hoping to be able to do some things that you couldn't do on acoustic instruments.
Annette assembled an instrument from additional Moog synthesizer modules that she could trigger using her voice, choosing the sounds she liked. She was plugging voice microphones into jacks that were looking for oscillator signals. That took even more work and the whole system became even less stable, because the instrument had zero memory. But she got some wonderful things.

I remember fondly a concert at the Village Vanguard. I had the synthesizer on the stage, a trio waiting to perform, an audience waiting for us to begin, and I was on the floor looking up under the synthesizer with a pocket flashlight and a screwdriver and the house mike, asking the audience to please bear with us. Max Gordon told me three things: get out, stay out and don’t come back.  I haven't played the Vanguard since.

After doing the first live performance ever done with audio synthesizer and voice treatment at Philharmonic Hall in Friday on December 26th.1969 at 8:30PM,  Annette and I received an offer to take the show to Europe. I should have learned my lesson while I was lying on the stage of the Vanguard, but I was so excited about this instrument, that I accepted the offer and went on the road.

The tour was with a quartet. I decided to buy a Volkswagen bus to get to the airport, because if we left it at the airport, we'd have a way to get back. So I bought a Volkswagen bus. It broke down, so we abandoned it on the Long Island Thruway and somehow made our way to the airport. We caught a plane to Luxembourg where we bought <MI>another<D> Volkswagen bus which also broke down, so we abandoned it on the German autobahn. We finally caught a plane to Milan, but when we'd filled out the insurance form in New York we'd declared the true value of the equipment, so the customs inspector wanted the equivalent of about fifty thousand dollars cash as a deposit. However--and this could only happen in Italy--after I autographed one of my LPs for him, he waved us through.
We arrived in Milan, exhausted and half-crazed for the first date, and explained all our trials to the promoter. He looked at us and said, "You know, as far as I'm concerned, you could have just come and played the piano."

Once I finished that tour, including a performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, that was it for electric instruments.  For awhile.

Electricity showed that one could play a lot slower than had been previously played, and with sequencers and sample-and-hold modules,  one could play a lot faster than anyone had ever played on the piano.  So electric threw the gauntlet down.  Can you play as fast as a synthesizer? Can you play as slow as the electric instruments?  And for the next two decades, I spent time playing very slow and very fast.

Copyright Paul Bley 1999