Fred Frith is a giant of the avant-garde. Among experimental guitarists, perhaps only Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser, and Sonny Sharrock can be considered his peers. He has an impeccable resumé in progressive rock, having started Henry Cow while still a teenager in 1968 and cofounded spin-off band Art Bears in ’78—both also featured drummer Chris Cutler, godfather of the late-70s Rock in Opposition movement. Other groups in which he’s played include Massacre (alongside bassist Bill Laswell), Skeleton Crew (with cellist Tom Cora and harpist Zeena Parkins), Naked City (led by saxophonist John Zorn), and the relatively new Cosa Brava (with Parkins, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, percussionist Matthias Bossi, and sound artist the Norman Conquest). His vast discography includes complex compositions, simple songs, pure free improvisations, and lots of music for dance, film, and theater; among his myriad collaborators are fellow iconoclasts as diverse as Brian Eno, the ROVA saxophone quartet, Eugene Chadbourne, and Christian Marclay.
Fred Frith: I’m interested that you use the word “mistake,” because of course that’s a very charged word, and it’s only a mistake if you decide that it is. And so as a performer, especially—I mean, it’s a little different if you’re making something on your own time behind the scenes—when something happens that you don’t expect or that you didn’t intend, the way that you frame that in the moment it happens is critical also to the way that the listener is perceiving it. So if you decide that it’s a mistake, the audience will hear it as a mistake, which will interrupt the flow of their concentration. If you treat it as an interesting, unexpected opportunity, then the listener will experience it that way too.
Well, she’s a singer, so she uses text, and she also is kind of panstylistic—she’s so sensitive to the nuances of what I’m doing that if I even suggest something that sounds like something she already knows, she will immediately go there. So we might be improvising, and she’s suddenly singing a 1950s pop song or sounding like a train or I don’t know what. So it always makes me laugh, just the speed with which she can figure out things.
I think the thing I was hearing, in what you were saying about your own work, has also to do with the business of finishing things. And I think I resist very much the idea of a finished work, even as a composer. I don’t like things that sound like they’ve been completely shaped. Because I think that takes away from the intimacy of the performing or listening or perceiving moments. So I like things that allow something to happen in the moment of realization, not just in the moment of putting it together. Even in film.
We’ve been doing it a couple times a year for the last few years, and we actually spent time in an artists’ residency in Switzerland, spending several days just practicing things. I feel like we’re developing a pretty interesting language at this point.
I can probably talk about soundtracks forever, but I skipped over a question also related to improv. I have a lot of friends who do improv comedy, and frequently—especially in the group form, the Harold form—the audience will shout out a word in the beginning of the performance, like “milk shake,” and then they perform about milk shakes for 45 minutes. I’ve never heard a musician say that they do this, but I’m curious if that’s ever relevant to the way that you improvise. If you ever think, “I’m gonna meditate on baby pigs while I’m improvising,” or meditate on—
Mon 3/3, 9:30 PMConstellation$1521+
