Consider these clichés: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” “Man proposes, God disposes.” And, of course, Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Each reminds us that life punishes rigidity and might be understood as advocating a stoic disengagement from worldly concerns. Instead of resigning ourselves to inaction, we would do better to glean an insight about the human condition: As finite beings confronted with a world not of our making, often we must revise our plan of action and make things up as we go along. In short, human beings are inevitably improvisers.
So says Ken Vandermark, multi-instrumentalist, composer and recipient of a 1999 MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.” As curator of the seventh annual Okka Fest, a three-day celebration of free jazz/improvised music in Bay View, Vandermark has assembled an international and intergenerational cohort of 20 acts who represent the gamut of approaches to improvised music, from conventionally melodic compositions to abstract events that use space, texture and dynamics to lend logic to the unscripted proceedings. Beginning as a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Okka Disk, a jazz record label founded by Milwaukee-transplant Bruno Johnson, Okka Fest has grown into one of the premiere improvised music festivals.
“Live music communicates differently, especially improvised music, which has a visual component,” Vandermark says about the importance of experiencing the genre in the flesh. “Physical activity explains sonic activity. You can see cause and effect in the interpersonal relationships on the stage.” This is the melodrama of improvisation. Without preordained song structures as a safety net, the relationship between the musicians is all that holds the music together. Consequently, things fall apart under the weight of swelled heads and inflated egos. The audience watches on—now in horror, now in delight—as a crumbling relationship is rescued by some ingenious coup.
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Engrossing as the music is, there exists the prejudice that free jazz is to pop music what a Jackson Pollock canvas is to a Bob Ross landscape. The analogy is faulty, but there is a comparison to be made between the visual cues of improvised music and the visual language of abstract painting. In non-representational art, meaning is constructed from the relationships between component parts, whether those components are musicians or carefully situated paint drippings. Perhaps the connection is not accidental. For Adrienne Pierluissi, co-proprietor of the Sugar Maple and Palm Tavern with Bruno Johnson and an artist in her own right, encountering the music changed her painting. “The music exploded my preconceived notions and gave me the confidence to begin painting abstractly.” Pierluissi’s canvasses hanging on the Sugar Maple’s walls add another expressive voice to the mix.
Among the improvisers performing at Okka Fest is one of the elder statesmen of free jazz. Speaking of multi-instrumentalist, composer and theoretician Joe McPhee, Vandermark says, “When I heard his 1976 record Tenor, that’s when I decided this is what I want to do with my life. His music taught me how to hear.” McPhee’s discography and influence begin earlier still. In the 1960s when the default tone of free jazz was strident and driven by testosterone, McPhee opted for a gentler approach, proving, in Pierluissi’s words, that “sensitivity is louder than any loud sound.”
If clumsy improvising is to blame for much of life’s messiness, it must also be acknowledged as a source of life’s excitement and beauty. As a celebration of improvisation Okka Fest will certainly have its messy musical moments. But equally certain is that the music’s excitement and beauty will prevail. It couldn’t be otherwise with musicians hand-picked for their patience, flexibility and cooperation. These are improvisational virtues that, musician or not, we can all learn from.
Okka Fest 7 takes place from June 5-7 at the Sugar Maple, Palm Tavern and other locations in Bay View. The full program can be found at okkadisk.com.
