Paul Motian: Method Of A Master (Part 1)

©1996 by Chuck Braman

I have a vivid memory of the first time I heard Paul Motian. I was a sixteen year old record store employee, and playing in the store was Keith Jarrett's 1966 recording, "Life Between The Exit Signs." As the music began I stopped in my tracks, struck by a conception of drumming more adventurous, more complex, and more musical than anything I had ever heard before. In place of traditional timekeeping patterns were extraordinarily detailed rhythmic phrases alternating with carefully sustained brush strokes and deliberate silences, each phrase simultaneously a response to the phrase preceding it and to Jarrett's piano improvisation, with Motian's performance slowly rising and falling in complexity from the beginning of the piece to it's end. As I listened, I thought, "this is exactly how the drums always should have been played."

Of course, before Paul Motian, drums were never played this way. Even today when musicians first hear Motian, they marvel over the uniqueness of his conception. His music is a fusion of opposites: gentle and violent, acoustic and electric, structured and free, complex and primitive. The primitivism is, of course, deceptive; the complexity, subtle. To hear Paul Motian play is to enter a highly personal world, a world as demanding of the listener as it is rewarding.

Perhaps as a result of his uniqueness, Motian himself is impossible to pigeonhole. I've heard him referred to as a legend by an audience member at one of his performances. Journalists often lump him together with many of the avant-garde drummers of the sixties. Yet how many avant-gardists have been hired to play with swing era giants such as Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge? How many jazz drummers Motian's age can execute rock rhythms with an appropriate feel, and without altering their musical identity? How many drummer-bandleaders can claim to have composed several albums worth of strikingly original compositions? More importantly, what other modern jazz drummer, with the exception of Roy Haynes, can claim to have been a stylist and an innovator during several stages of jazz's evolution?

Most artists reach their prime in their youth and stagnate thereafter. Motian became a prominent hard-bop stylist in the fifties, and yet has continued growing ever since, becoming a major innovator who helped to create several of the drumming styles of the sixties, and a brilliant bandleader and composer in the seventies and eighties. Now in the nineties he is more prominent than ever. He simultaneously leads an all-star trio with saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell and his new six piece "Electric Bebop Band." His recorded output during the last five years includes 11 albums as a leader or co-leader, with many more as a sideman. And three years ago, after countless appearances as a sideman over the past four decades, he debuted as a bandleader at New York's most prestigious jazz club, The Village Vanguard.

I recently had the pleasure to question Motian about his ideas on himself, jazz and drumming. His unpretentious comments reveal how his development evolved as a matter of course, given his approach to making music on the drums.

I ran across Gil Evans in Central Park one day, and the conversation got into this thing about studying and learning, and he said that if you hear something that interests you, you'll try to figure it out. In other words he was saying, like, let's say I heard a Duke Ellington tune, and it was arranged or had a certain sound that intrigued me enough that I wanted to find out what it was, so then I would learn how to do it myself.

Also now there's a lot of other kinds of music around that wasn't around then. You know? Like, there was no fusion at that time. There was no rap. There was no rock and roll. Maybe you had rhythm and blues…

In 1940, jazz was the popular music of the day. When I was in high school and I went out to hear music, most of the stuff I heard was big band stuff. I was in high school between 1946, '47, '48. I went to ballrooms, not nightclubs. Bands were playing for dancing but I was in the front row there listening to the music with a bunch of other people who were into the music. That was the popular music of the day, man. It's not today! So I think that has a lot to do with what's going down.

You might get an argument with that. Other people may say, "Well, I started it," or someone else did. But for me, that's when my playing started to change.

Then all of a sudden I got turned on to Paul Bley, and in the '60s shit started changing and started becoming a lot more free kind of playing, and I got involved in that, and that also started changing me more and more until, you know, it just kept growing in that direction.

I know myself, man, I know that I'm not goin' to sit still for nothin', even today, I'm going to look for a creative way of playing, man, something that I'm going to feel is musical, so even if that hadn't happened, I'm sure that I would have done something else. I wouldn't have stayed in one place.

I remember a conversation I had with Red Garland, the piano player who played with Miles. He said if you hear the idea in your head, somehow you'll get it out on your instrument, whether you have the technique for it or not. And I always believed that, man. Maybe it will be a little sloppy at times. (laughs) But if you hear that shit, it will come out. And, as recently as this record date I just did last week, we were playing some fours and eights, and I played some stuff that I never heard before. There are certain patterns and certain ideas that I've been playing over the years that I may fall back on…

Look at Art Blakey, sometimes he's playing along, and all of a sudden, maybe at the bridge or in the top of the tune he hits a cymbal WHAM!, really hard, and then he chokes it. That's beautiful, man. Art Blakey was a motherfucker, man, I appreciate him more now than I did back then. I heard him at Birdland when he had his first band with Horace Silver, and Lou Donaldson, Hark Mobley, Clifford Brown, and Kenny Dorham, man, that shit, he was smokin' boy! How old was Art Blakey then, thirty maybe. He plays so fuckin' great. That's some great music. I ain't heard no drummers today like that. Well, I can't say that, I'm not out there, I don't hear the cats, maybe there's some people out there.

But I could tell you a story. I was on the bus one time, and on the bus was a piano player, John Bunch, who I played with with Zoot Sims. And he said, "You know Paul, I'll never forget the time when you were playing with Zoot and just before the set started Zoot came up to you and said, 'Hey Paul now, I want you to play 4/4, man, I don't want you to play that fucked-up shit you play!'" Right? So, in instances like that I'll be thinking, "Well, could be some truth to this thing about me." Maybe I'm not being supportive of, in that case, Zoot. He didn't want to hear me breaking up the time and stuff like that. He wanted to hear straight-ahead time, right? Same thing with Lennie Tristano too. Lennie liked to have bass and drums play that 4/4 time and then he would play around it, and play over the bar lines. So in some instances I had to tie my hands down a little bit, you know what I mean?

But it's also difficult for me to play more myself under those conditions because of the music that they were playing, and what it required of myself and the rhythm section, you know? So there were some kind of rules in those days that I had to abide by.