All Kinds of Time: The Enduring Spirit of the Creative Music Studio

All Kinds of Time

The Enduring Spirit of the Creative Music Studio

Robert E. Sweet

Second Edition

Arborville Publishing, Inc.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Copyright 2022, Robert E. Sweet

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at [email protected].

Cover photo and design by Larry Chernicoff, Windhorse Communications Design.

ISBN 978-0-9650438-2-3

Dedicated to the loving memory of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Nana Vasconcelos, Collin Walcott, Ismet Siral, Eva Berger, and all of the Creative Music Studio family members who are no longer with us.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso

What Is the Creative Music Studio?

What Is Creative Music?

Music Mind

Taking CMS to the World

Taking CMS to the Academy

Reconnecting

Bringing CMS back to Woodstock

Sertso Studio

Partners in Preservation

In the Spirit of Don Cherry

The Turkish Connection

The Columbia Connection

CMS Day at Columbia

Karl Berger’s Improvisers Orchestra

Fortieth Anniversary

In Walked Rob

The CMS Family

In Good Hands

illy B

Moving Online and into the Future

Notes

Preface

This book is a sequel to Music Universe, Music Mind: Revisiting the Creative Music Studio, Woodstock, New York, published in 1996 as a history of the Creative Music Studio up to the point in 1984 when economic exigencies required that CMS become dormant. Before publication of the first book, I was pondering what that book's subtitle ought to be, and I had come up with Remembering the Creative Music Studio. I asked Karl Berger, CMS cofounder, what he thought of it. He said that we remember something when it's passed, when it's dead and gone. CMS had not gone away, Karl said, and so it was not at all appropriate to speak of remembering it.

I must admit, I did not have the same confidence that Karl did in CMS's staying power. It didn’t seem to that the economic climate was any more favorable to the arts in 1996 than it had been in 1984, when CMS was forced to close its doors. But I was willing to reconsider the title. Remembering became Revisiting.

So much has happened since the first edition of this book was published in 2016. Now, in 2022, I want to bring things up to date again. The sentiments expressed by Karl in the first edition’s preface, however, are just as relevant today. I stated in 2016 that three years after a fortieth anniversary year in which CMS enjoyed its greatest successes in decades—one might even say a full-blown revival—it's clear that Karl's vision of sustaining CMS had then and has now undeniable legitimacy. The year 2013 was, as Karl wrote in his year-end note to supporters, the best year in decades:

Dear Friends of Creative Music:

We are glad to report that the Creative Music Studio is back in full force making a huge difference in the lives of musicians and people who love music. In its 40th year, CMS created and produced more programming than it has in over two decades! And the feedback we continue to receive is astounding. Several workshop participants reported that it didn’t only change their music; they said, It changed my life, and many returned to attend the second workshop. Others called playing in the Improvisers Orchestra ‘the thrill of a lifetime.’ Nearly all agree that our work is indispensable in this era where great musicians are graduating universities and conservatories but need a place to develop their own unique voice in their compositions, interpretations and improvisations.

In just the past year [2013], CMS has:

•conducted two four-day intensive workshops in upstate New York

•performed 16 concerts in New York City with our Improvisers Orchestra (over 60 concerts since 2011)

•been featured in international media articles (New York Times, The Wire (UK))

•completed a dozen interviews with CMS Guiding Artists as part of our CMS Oral History Program

•digitized 250 hours of recorded concerts from the CMS Archive Project for the Columbia University Library, which is housing the CMS Archive

•launched a financially successful Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for archive recordings

•produced several videos documenting the workshops and the Improvisers Orchestra performances

•conducted numerous rhythm and voice workshops domestically and abroad

•coproduced a small ensemble music series, Sketches of Sound, in Woodstock, NY

•begun production of a series of compact disc box sets, The Creative Music Studio Archive Selections Series, that will feature highlights from the CMS Archive Project

We accomplished all this without any significant fuel in our financial tank. Luckily, we’ve been graced by a volunteer army that’s trying mightily to get everything done; webmasters, producers, sound engineers, Orchestra musicians, and video editors. Even our executive staff has generously donated thousands of hours to further the Creative Music Foundation’s mission and vision.

I was one of those who attended both of the life-changing, fortieth-anniversary workshops, the first in May and the second in October. It was for me a glorious extension of my evolution as a CMS participant, which began in 1976. I'm not sure how much of that gloriousness stemmed from Karl's heightened, or evolved, ability to convey the wisdom of Music Universe, Music Mind or from my own enhanced receptivity to the concepts that had first been introduced to me back in 1976. Regardless, it was clear to me that CMS had endured and still is providing a unique and vital excursion into a realm of understanding of what makes music music and what defines us as musicians. And it still is drawing some of the finest creative improvising musicians on the planet to the Woodstock, New York, area.

Introduction

It is now time to relate all that has occurred since the conclusion of the first CMS book, which covered the period when Karl Berger met Don Cherry and joined his band in Paris in the middle 1960s to the year 1984, when the Creative Music Studio ceased to exist as a viable facility with a home of its own. I was somewhat dismayed to realize in the midst of CMS’s fortieth-anniversary celebration that my earlier historical account of CMS covered only ten of those forty years.

I realized in 2014 after a phone interview with Ingrid Sertso, wife of Karl Berger and cofounder of CMS along with Karl and Ornette Coleman, that all of my assumptions during CMS’s dormant phase (1984 to 2013) regarding CMS’s ability to weather the storms of financial adversity and to resurrect itself in a new, twenty-first century phase were truly misguided.

I said to Ingrid, When I wrote the first book and talked about CMS closing up, I had the sense that that was it—I had written about the end of the Creative Music Studio. And before I could get the next sentence out, she interjected, It never ended.

Did you ever have the feeling during the eighties and nineties that maybe CMS was history? I asked.

No, never. She was emphatic.

You always felt like it was continuing.

Yes, Ingrid said, because the philosophy is too powerful. It’s universal. We got so many letters from different people that wanted to know, do you still have a location, can we come up, can we be involved? It went on and on. It was the end of [only] the location.

The idea, the spirit, of CMS lives on. This will become clear as we look at what transpired between the closing of Oehler’s Mountain Lodge—the last physical home of the Creative Music Studio—in 1984 and the events of the current day, events that are defining the Creative Music Studio in the twenty-first century and setting the course for whatever’s next.

I have used a format that is similar to the first book, Music Universe, Music Mind. That is, to a large degree, I have chosen to let others tell the tale through their own words, gleaned from telephone interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. The section that follows (Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso), however, contains extensive quotes taken from an oral history conducted in 2012 as part of the Columbia University Columbia Center for Oral History. All of this material is used with permission.

Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso

In 2012, Brent Edwards, a professor in Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, and Ben Young, jazz researcher and director of WKCR, Columbia’s radio station, conducted an interview with Karl and Ingrid as part of the Columbia Center for Jazz Studies Oral History Project. Many people who are familiar with Karl and Ingrid know them through the work they have done since coming to New York in 1966. I knew a little of their background from before that time, their work in Germany and Paris, their early years. But Edwards and Young’s interview skillfully elicits a fascinating, deeper, and broader portrayal of these two artists, which I think will help people to understand much better who they are and why their artistry has taken the course that it has. Most of what follows is in Karl and Ingrid’s own words, and is presented with the permission of Brent Edwards under the auspices of Columbia University.

Karl Hans Berger was born in Heidelberg, Germany. His father was a gymnasium professor, a teacher of languages. Although his father was not a musician, his grandfather was a choir director and his mother a pianist. Her side of the family was fairly musical. He has an older brother who is an engineer and a sister who is a linguist, who, like their father, teaches languages.

Karl’s mother pushed him to play the piano, although he would have preferred to play soccer. By the time he was fourteen, Karl was studying in the music conservatory. By the age of nineteen, he was approached by a professor who told him that it was finally time to decide whether he would undertake a career as a classical pianist and totally commit himself eight hours a day to the study of classical piano performance. At that time, however, Karl had begun playing in a jazz club called Cave 54 in Heidelberg, which was one of the first jazz clubs in Europe. The American armed forces had established a stronghold in Germany, and within 100 miles of Heidelberg, there were five or six army or air force bands. Many of the musicians in the bands would congregate at Cave 54. Karl expounds:

These bands had a lot of players who later on became famous, like Lex Humphries, Don Ellis—I met Carlos Ward there, whom I played with until recently. I met him at age twenty, at the Cave. The Cave was like a session place for American players, literally. They would come—one of the guys was an MP [Military Police]. He would give everybody passes so they could stay out, and some would even stay overnight at the place. It was sort of like growing up in New York, playing sessions every night, five, six hours. That was my schooling so to speak. It was all bebop. A total bebop scene. I was trying to imitate Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk and all the things we listened to all the time.

One of Karl’s teachers at the conservatory had an interest in jazz and asked Karl about what went on at the Cave, and so Karl encouraged him to come out and see for himself.

He [Karl’s conservatory teacher] said, Well, I can't really afford to do that as a professor from the conservatory. I was a little more revolutionary, let's say, at the time and I just told him, In that case, I can't come to this place anymore. He showed up, but he showed up in a big hat and sunglasses and a coat so nobody would recognize him.

Although Karl was building his foundation as a jazz pianist, he readily gave up the piano chair when Cedar Walton came into the house. There happened to be a vibraphone in the club, so with Cedar on the piano, Karl began to teach himself to play vibes. His expansion to vibes was helped, too, by the fact that Cave 54 had a pretty lousy piano. Karl recalls:

Just a couple of years ago I talked to Cedar, yes. He remembers very vividly that time. They were like eighteen, nineteen and twenty, just starting out. They just happened to be in the army. Don Ellis, for example, he wouldn't bring in any charts or anything. This was all sessions. It was an amazing education because we . . . had to sort of play on the level of these players after a while. Otherwise, they wouldn't play with you. It was a fast education, and it was all oral. I've tried to explain to the kids today—there were no Real Books or anything like that. We learned a couple hundred tunes in a couple years, just by listening and playing, not by reading anything. There was no written music on stage.

The level was quite high. The music level was great. I had to sort of struggle in. I was a classical-trained guy so I had to learn to work this out. There were a bunch of piano players coming in all the time, too but no one else played vibes so I always had a chance to play because I would play the vibes.

The following passage, in which Karl speaks about his relationship to the vibraphone, reveals a good deal of how Karl relates to sound and overtones and how he approaches music, even now, nearly sixty years later.

In 1961, I got a call from a saxophone player, Hans Koller. Hans Koller was, at the time, the top European tenor player. He asked me to join his quartet, which was a great honor. To be in Hans Koller's band was sort of the top position for a piano player. I got there in 1961, I think it is and Hans traveled Europe-wide. We played in Antibes, we would open for Miles Davis, and we would open for Mingus at the Antibes Festival. We were getting onto the big stages. One of the gigs we did was with Michel Hausser, this vibes player. Koller joined Michel Hausser in Paris and we played a concert there. Michel had a custom-built vibraphone from a maker by the name of [Albert] Bergerault. Bergerault was kind of a genius type. He lived in the middle of France and built the off-instruments. He also built marimbas and he started to build vibraphones. He had a unique concept about it—he didn't tell anybody what it was. The metal was so overtone rich, like no other vibraphone. I still play that instrument now. Michel was just getting a