Interviews
Dwyer interviews Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustaffson
Benjamin Dwyer: We're going to start with a quote of yours that I came across. It says “For me the definite starting point of making music is really the punk rock scene in Umeå, my home town, on the border of Lapland,” would you like to expand on this?
Mats Gustafsson: It is simply a question of the connection between music and ideology or politics, and the energy of music and what music actually can do or awake within. When I started playing in punk rock groups it was the same time I started playing tenor sax, it was the same time I heard Peter Brötzmann on record, it was the same time I heard all the initial free improvised music. It all happened during one year. And for some reason I thought I could see some connection between the energy in the punk rock music and the energy in the improvised free jazz, and also the political and ideological connections.
BD: What age were you at this time?
MG: Fifteen or so.
BD: So the punk rock scene, the Brötzmann influence, did all that come across like an anti-society movement?
MG: Yea, there was some kind of protest thing there, not trying to adapt to what you were expected to think or believe in. I was trying to make up my own life. You know I was fifteen, sixteen, and it was the beginning of the punk rock scene, we're talking about the end of the 70's, 1980, so in England and in America, and then a couple of years later in Sweden, it happened and I was just in the middle of it. You don't analyse this when it happens – some years later you look back at it and you say 'Ahhh that's how it happened'. Because I didn't think it would be strange to connect Brötzmann or Evan Parker or Barry Guy to the punk rock thing. For me it was always there and the funny thing now is that playing with 'The Thing' which is my main group – we do a lot of old Garage Rock covers like old Stuges pieces, the Crams and it's all really simple – simple structures, simple, harmonies, simple melodies, it's really basic. That's the same with the early free jazz both in Europe and in America with Ayler and also with Archie Shepp it's really all simple, one or two chords, really basic shit, it's all about energy and direction.
BD: A jazz journalist once suggested to me that Coltrane imploded music whereas Hendrix exploded music. Did Brötzmann represent that explosion for you on a personal level?
MG: He represented both on a personal level, absolutely. But in the beginning it was more of the expressive thing, of course, the 'out' thing, if you just listen to the music. But then when you start to work with him and start to know him as a person, as an artist, it's a much more complex, much richer palette
BD: So it's very easy to misinterpret Machine Gun?
MG: Oh man, Machine Gun? Yes, because of the title people thought it was a very political statement – anti-Vietnam kind of thing. It wasn't. Machine Gun was the knick-name of Don Cherry. The Piece was a dedication to Don Cherry. So it has nothing to do with politics. You can interpret it the way you want, of course.
BD: In the late 80's you really were part of the emergence of free improvisation in Sweden, maybe not at the very beginning, but certainly with the first burgeoning of very strong developments there with two groups – Gush (with Raymond Strid who played with Mostly Modern here some years back), and with Christian Munthe and duo you had together Two Slices of Acoustic Car, so do you feel part of the history?
MG: Yea. I mean, it was a really interesting time when I moved on from Lapland to Stockholm in the mid-80's after this punk thing and exploring the experimental music the way I could. In Lapland there were not so many people to collaborate with. I was pretty alone. So I had to move to Stockholm and from there I thought Stockholm was the scene, that's where everything is happening, but when I got there nothing was happening. The scene there was about to die. There were some initial groups – there was a group called Iskra and Lokomotiv Konkret and some other individuals, great musicians. But it was about to die. There was no exchange with any musicians or groups internationally, it was only inside Sweden. When that happens, the scene slowly just dies. Then there was me and Christian Munthe and Strid and some other people, and we started from scratch. We started a concert series, we started some small festivals, building up really slowly, inviting people from around Europe. Barry Guy was one of the first to be invited to Sweden.
BD: But I imagine it was years and years of slogging.
MG: It was not so slow, in a way when I think about it, maybe five years or something. Yea, in five years we really built up the scene and then, suddenly, a lot of us were touring internationally and then festivals happened and the scene was really alive. And then just five or six years ago the same thing happened in Norway. I mean Norway was completely fucking dead. Except for the pure jazz scene - the ECM stuff, and the contemporary music scene, but there was really not much experimental activity around.
BD: Now that you mention the whole ECM thing, how did you feel about Jan Garbarek and that scene? Obviously it didn't really interest you. In terms of mere energy levels it seems to be on the complete opposite side of the world to your music.
MG: It's difficult for me because it's part of the history, and history is important and you have to deal with history, but as you say, it started off as a very creative way of making music – using elements of folk music and maybe even elements of the Scandinavian...how shall I say, slowness of the mind, but it has really turned into some kind of wall paper. It's really just Muzak for me.
BD: Has it become a caricature of itself?
MG: Yea. It was so great in the late 60's early 70's with Terje Rypdal and others, fantastic music. But I don't know what happened. It happens everywhere. It happened in the States with its jazz tradition, a lot of really young, hungry, ambitious musicians doing creative and personal stuff, and then suddenly, sometimes because of commercial interests and labels and shit, they go safe.
BD: They become victims of their own success.
MG: Yes, and they're trying to play safe. They try to repeat what they've been doing and that's a really big mistake if you want to develop your music and develop your person also, with others or through others. So I feel really distant from the Scandinavian so called ECM or pure jazz scene. I really have problems with it. There are a couple of individual musicians who are still doing personal enough music, but most of it is shit.
BD: And quite repetitive. I can't help personally feeling that Garbarek, and I've been a great fan for years, is indulging in his sound which has become a kind of label for him and he hasn't done anything really new in the last fifteen years.
MG: Yea. If he would try at least to do something new, he would have all my respect. I mean, he has my respect, but there is so much potential and he is not using it. It's his choice.
BD: In reference to the way you interact with other performers on stage you once referred to the process as 'dressing the skeleton'. It seems like a very interesting way to describe what you do. Though I don't really feel this when I hear you play, it implies that you are a responsorial player, that you are responding to people. But you obviously don't negate your compositional input either?
MG: Yea.....it's always about breaking the conventions. Using the conventions, but breaking them. Maybe you negate the whole skeleton sometimes, but it's always about form. Improvised music is always about form and structure. And that is what pisses me off with this new scene of, whatever they call it, Minimalist, Redundant improv that is pretty popular these days because there's a lack of form, there's a lack of structure and direction in that music. Improvised music is about improvisation but we are using a language that comes back every night, it's not like we are re-inventing the language every night, we are using who we are.
BD: Speaking as someone who has written a lot for the saxophone, you have really brought to your palette an extraordinary breath of sounds, rhythms, timbres. These are all within your compositional reach, your improvisational reach. I say both because they are the same for you.
MG: Yea. For me, you have your language, that's number one. If you want to start doing improvised music you have to build up your own language. I don't want to sound like someone else, that's stupid. Someone else is someone else, I'm me. I sound like me and people should be able to recognise me, or recognise Barry. But you can't just relax that and say 'I'm done'. You're never done. You have to continue to develop and you have to broaden your palette. The more you work, the more techniques and sounds you can add to the music. You have to add more and more and more all the time, otherwise you are going to get trapped, and then there is no more inspiration and then there is no more communication. It's a life-long process. Through my teachers and sources of inspiration I understood this really early, but I will never be finished. It can take some time, it doesn't have to happen over night. Then suddenly, when you start to relax about this, great shit really starts to come to you, when you don't stress it. Stress is really anti-creativity. The music we do (me and Barry) can sound pretty stressful maybe for some people! It is not for us though, it's more like a state of mind.
BD: It very much is like a state of mind. It's a music that is incredibly aware, an entity in itself, as if there were invisible tentacles between the musicians. Can you give me an idea of what it's like to play it?
MG: When I do this kind of music with Barry at this level of technique, you are not really aware of it while you're playing. You are aware of what happened just after it happened. If you start to plan the next move then you loose the energy, you loose the moment. You really have to be extremely focussed but also really relaxed, and yet don't think. It is not an intellectual music. That's why people who are not musicians, not used to this music, when they hear it live they can really get it. That's the kind of experience I have when I play in non-specialist venues. People are really getting the communication level of it.
BD: You formed a new group called The Thing with Norwegian musicians Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass and Paul Nilssen-Love on drums. Why is this the group, as you say, you've been waiting for all your life?
MG: To go back to what I said before, it's like suddenly I have this group where I can produce my roots, the initial kicks I had with the Punk Rock and the Garage Rock scene that really interested me when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. It's also the way we work together. We never decide what pieces to use, we never make a set list. We have sixty, seventy pieces we can use if we like, or, we can play a full concert of free improvised music. It doesn't matter as long as we feel good about it. It's a chemistry thing. For me it's really interesting to try with these two Norwegians to work with material which is so simple and so groovy, metrical and directed like some of the pieces we do and then having the complete abstract free improvised stuff as well, within the same context, and see if it's possible to combine those, and all the bridges in between. We improvise all the sets, how we move from point A to point B to point C is always improvised. That's really interesting to me. It's the group I've been really waiting for because it connects all the music I really, really love and get inspired by.
BD: Is the jazz world too overtly exposed to the market?
Well the jazz magazines and radio stations are always talking about profiles, that the traditional jazz scene is powerful and that today's icons are always selling X amount of records, like American musicians on Blue Note or on bigger labels. But if you look at the figures Peter Brötzmann is selling the same amount. But the hype is completely different and you have this so hip jazz costume guys like Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, all these people travelling around Europe all the time, and the thing is that they are not selling. It's just hype, and the jazz media, the jazz community, the jazz society are creating this. It's a complete illusion.
BD: The hype factor is interesting now in terms of globalisation. How do you feel about music as a political tool?
MG: If I didn't see the connection I wouldn't do it. Absolutely. Because that's what woke me up. Especially now how Europe looks like. We have to do stuff that is not commercial. We have to do stuff that helps people think that there is an alternative, that there might be something else around the corner. We have to look around the corner.
BD: For you it's like keeping the candle lit?MG: Yes. I don't believe in saying 'fuck Bush' or 'fuck the war' from stage. I believe people need to start thinking by themselves, and the music that we do can be a spark, it can be an ignition to start to think on your own – why is it like this? What can I do? What is alternative music? What is alternative politics? True knowledge can only come through yourself, when you realise you are yourself. But you can't tell anyone what to think, what to believe in music or life or anything. That's a really strong belief that I have, and that's why I do this music.