Home » Jazz Articles » Interview » Burton Greene: From Bomb To Balm
Burton Greene: From Bomb To Balm
Courtesy Johan Janssen
If I have tried anything in the music – it was always about trying to contribute to the universal consciousness. So that’s what I’m working on. I’m trying not to get disturbed by the so-called ups and downs. I try to bring that quality out in music wherever I can.
—Burton Greene
Alan Silva
bass, acousticb.1939
Bill Dixon
trumpet1925 - 2010
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
John Tchicai
saxophone1936 - 2012
Willem Breuker
saxophone1944 - 2010
All About Jazz: Can you describe the atmosphere you grew up in, also in terms of music?
Burton Greene: My mother was a classical music teacher. During The Great Depression she was teaching in New York, where she met my father in the late '20s. They got married just at the time of the beginning depression. She was teaching piano at that time. She had studied with Walter Damrosch, who was a famous conductor, at Columbia University. My father was selling eyeglasses from Europe and New York. They moved to Chicago in the early 1930s. My father's people were Greenbergs, not Greene. My father had shortened his name, to sell the eyeglasses to the optical trade. People loved the eyeglasses but didn't like his long nose. There was lots of antisemitism at the time, especially in small towns in the Midwest. My parents had a small attic flat without hot water and my mother was pregnant with my older brother. My father was getting desperate to sell his glasses. When he told one optometrist his name was Greene, the optometrist said: 'Oh, then you could be related to the English Greenes?' He got his first order and more to come. So, then he could afford a real apartment, and finally, in 1941, they had a small house built on Drake Avenue on the North side of Chicago, where I grew up. My mother had a small baby grand piano in the living room. At five years old, I was hearing all this great boogie-woogie—this was early '40s.
AAJ: Did you hear it on the radio?
BG: Yeah, on the radio. I was hearing wonderful stride, swing-era stuff, boogie-woogie and all that—it fascinated me. At five years old, I was trying to learn boogie-woogie lines with my left hand at the piano. So, that was my first musical fascination. My mother heard me doing that: 'Oh, he's always trying to play this jazz music, so we got to get him a classical teacher.' She brought me downtown to this Prussian guy—Isadore Buchhalter—who was great about music disciplines. He was teaching me something like the "Raindrop Prelude" of Chopin, but I wanted to improvise over this. I didn't want just to play Chopin, I wanted to see what I could do with it. I was slow to read because I wanted to try to make it personal. Most classical people can learn to read fairly fast, because they have no intention of improvising. I was a very slow reader. Isadore Buchhalter got angry, he got out a meter stick and hit me on the knuckles or the fingers. That happened to other piano players of my generation too [laughs]. We were a different breed, we wanted to make personal music. I had that instinct even at five or six years old. I studied the classics from seven to fourteen years old, sometimes under this torture. I stopped in the first year of high school. I wanted to play jazz of course.
AAJ: How do you remember the social atmosphere in Chicago, when you grew up? Was there any communication between black and white people despite the segregation?
BG: On the North Side most people were white. The first time I saw a black person I was eight or nine years old. A black kid came up on his big brother's bicycle from the South Side to the North Side of Chicago, a hip black kid who already had an earring in his ear, and already with some hip language. And he came up to Drake Avenue. We lined the street, we thought he was from Mars. When I first started identifying with jazz, I was listening to
Lee Konitz
saxophone, alto1927 - 2020
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
Bud Powell
piano1924 - 1966
AAJ: When did you decide to become a professional musician?
BG: I was always into music. And I had to do odd jobs to stay alive. After a couple of years in college I had enough. I wanted to get out and learn about music. But I had to do odd jobs. I sold insurances, stupid things. At 25 I decided, whatever happens to me, whatever stupid jobs I'm gonna have to do, I want to be a professional musician. I don't care about having not a penny, I love music. In the middle of 1960 I went to San Francisco, I was 23. After a year and a half, I went back to Chicago for some months and then I went to New York.
AAJ: In San Francisco there was nothing you found interesting in terms of music and art?
BG: San Francisco was still a total bebop scene. Chicago for me was the gigs and the jam sessions, a lot of them downtown or on the South Side. We were listening a lot to
Ira Sullivan
multi-instrumentalist1931 - 2020
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
woodwinds1935 - 1977
Horace Silver
piano1928 - 2014
Ahmad Jamal
piano1930 - 2023
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
Clifford Brown
trumpetb.1930
AAJ: How did you learn about the new, freer approaches in jazz?
BG: I was in San Francisco. I heard
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
Jaki Byard
piano1922 - 1999
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
AAJ: This made you want to go to New York?
BG: Yeah. I realized that San Francisco was a strong bebop scene, no experimental free stuff going on. Bop City was a prominent venue there, everybody played bebop. In spite of that, I learned so much in San Francisco—I was listening to
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
Louis Armstrong
trumpet and vocals1901 - 1971
AAJ: Did your parents support your decision to be a jazz musician?
BG: I had a fight with them. I know they meant well, but they wanted to scare me to getting a normal job, a more "secure" life. I got to make this music, you know, it's my soul, I don't care how much money I make. So, I didn't get support there. I had to do it on my own. My family did not support me with the music. My mother encouraged me; she even gave me pictures of great black artists of the day. She had a universal outlook. But she had migraine headaches all the time, she couldn't keep up her music. In my family all were following the American Dream. The American Dream will kill you. It never stops. Oh, we have two nice cars, let's have five nice cars. Three or four houses. It never stops.
AAJ: In early 1962, you moved to New York and developed The Tree System of Tonality, as you called it.
BG: Yes, exactly. I composed this piece "Tree Theme," which has the trunk and the roots in A minor, then you get into the branches, which are already bitonal. So, if you start in A minor, maybe you modulate, go to A flat and then to B flat with A flat on the bottom, and further, more freely, intuitively. So, you're getting into bitonality, of which I heard so much beautiful music like Bartók, Stravinsky, Charles Ives. I was very much influenced by that stuff.
AAJ: Going from Bartók and Stravinsky for instance, you developed your own system of tonality?
BG: Yeah. You develop that and by the time you get to the small branches and leaves, you get into so much abstraction, pantonality. Afterwards I recapitulate the theme in A minor, bring it back home.
AAJ: But you wouldn't say this is a compositional "platform" that you can use for improvisation?
BG: Actually, it is a composition, out of that I developed a theory. You can use that on any music, you can use any song like that.
AAJ: In New York, bassist Alan Silva and you founded the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble.
BG: Yeah. That was probably the first band in the world that only played totally free music. No composition. We all learned from Ornette, Cecil, and Eric Dolphy for example. But they all used composition, they improvised with and between that. Alan and I met at a church basement in Brooklyn in 1962. He advertised his art and culture perception thing that he wanted to create in his house. He was living in an almost condemned building in Brooklyn for almost no rent. I wanted to get out of Manhattan. Then Alan advertised his thing: 'If you are interested in art and culture perception and creativity, please contact Alan Silva, living in Brooklyn.' There we met in the church basement. He played free, three bass players and two drummers. I joined them, there was a grand piano in the basement. Alan and I looked at each other, we smiled and I said: 'We don't need a script, do we? We just play.' There was no preconception. We were just listening to each other and made some musical conversation. A totally intuitive experience. That's probably like all the way back to the cavemen and -women. That's how they must have made music together too. Very simple. You grow. With each comment on whatever the other person is saying, somebody comes up with a new idea. We comment on that and it often gets really complex by going our own ways but listening to each other all the time. If you don't listen, you break it! True socialism, democratic socialism.
For me, music is part of the universality. Through music I can link everything up to yoga, meditation. The whole universal thing is all connected. It's called sanity versus insanity. We need to live by basic holistic methods of living, having real food on your table, a nice place to live, that's it: one car or whatever, basic needs, taking care and making room for our brothers and sisters. Otherwise it's all a big show: ego power games, excess money, manipulations, selfishness, insanity! I have always made no more than about 20.000 [dollars] a year. So, I'm so-called "below the poverty line." But indeed, over the years I got a nice houseboat, a 25-year-old car that runs like a train, what more can I want? Now I have a recent model grand piano. It's possible living on even low money. And yet I even have to throw stuff out all the time, give it to charity, so I have room to live!
AAJ: When Alan Silva went with Cecil Taylor you founded a quartet with
Marion Brown
saxophone, alto1931 - 2010
Henry Grimes
bass, acoustic1935 - 2020
BG: The Free Form group broke up after two and a half years. It was like 12 concerts in two and a half years and never more than five or six people at a gig. But we loved what we were doing. Leighton Kerner, the Village Voice music critic, came to a concert we gave in a coffee house in Harlem. We had like five people in the audience, including Leighton Kerner. He took us seriously and did a nice almost half page review. He was the classical music critic of the Village Voice. Cecil and Bill Dixon saw that and invited us to join the Jazz Composers Guild. After two and a half years we were looking for something else to do, because we had used that formula a lot and subconsciously looked for another format. Gary Friedman, the saxophonist, brought in a simple piece of music he composed. We started working with that. Through that I guess we realized that the basic purpose of the free improvisational ensemble was over. We started to work with prepared music. We all somehow were interested in it at that point. Then I created my first Quartet, and Alan went with Cecil.
AAJ: And this Quartet used compositional elements?
BG: Yeah, compositions with free improvisations on the themes. My first recording for ESP had compositions; I worked with Marion Brown, Henry Grimes, [drummer] Dave Grant and [percussionist] Tom Price,
Frank Smith
saxophoneb.1927
Rashied Ali
drums1935 - 2009
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
AAJ: Can you share some thoughts about the Jazz Composers Guild?
BG: The Jazz Composers Guild is basically the reason why I got some serious recognition at that point. It was also one of the reasons why I had to leave America. This is symbolic. America was not ready for community. And I was raised with community. My grandparents were fighting against the bosses in the garment district in Manhattan, NYC, for 50 years, to get Jewish workers from 12, 14, 16 hours a day down to 8 or 10 hours a day. My grandparents were socialists from Russia—my father's people. They were strong social democrats, not communist; they were fighting the bosses. Well, back to the Jazz Composers Guild. I was happy to find a community in America.
AAJ: Is there any connection of the Guild to the socio-economical concept of the guilds in medieval European towns?
BG: Yeah. That would be the idea that Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor tried to create. They wanted a social organization, one with our own buildings, our own recordings, our own gigs and places to practice. And the Guild would decide what music would be played, not the promoters and the businesspeople. All in our own hands. That was their idea.
AAJ: And solidarity between the musicians.
BG: Yeah, exactly. And I was all for that: 'That's it, I'm happy to be here.' Guess what, it lasted six months. It was disbanded because Bill and Cecil felt that some of us kept too much in their own individual paths, contrary to Guild ideas. In America it's all about "I get mine, you get yours." No community. So, it broke up. At the meetings there was talk about all kind of nonsense, what the meaning of jazz was, or who took $25 out of the treasury, this kind of stuff, instead of focusing on the real thing. Meanwhile I talked to Ornette, I saw him on the street: 'What are you guys doing in those Guild meetings?' And I told him what was going on. Ornette: 'If you stop screwing around, I talked to John Coltrane, he said, that he and Trane would also come in; we could take all the important music off the market and really make a community. You guys have to stop screwing around.' At the Guild, we were having a phalanx—for example against the Village Vanguard which would only give a few Guild members a Monday night with low bread, or the record companies.
Archie Shepp
saxophone, tenorb.1937
AAJ: Your consequence was leaving the scene.
BG: Yeah. But first of all, I did that record for Columbia [Presenting Burton Greene, Columbia, 1968] with
Byard Lancaster
saxophone1942 - 2012
Steve Tintweiss
bassb.1946
Count Basie
piano1904 - 1984
Benny Goodman
clarinet1909 - 1986
AAJ: What do you think about categories such as "free jazz," "avant-garde," "free music," etc. today?
BG: I am an instrument, a creator of music, I don't care about all these names and whether it's "old" or "new." Because music that is real, is timeless. So, if anybody tells me that Bach is old fashioned, I say: 'You don't know the first thing about music, do you?' Great Bach is great Bach, and always will be. Great Van Gogh is great Van Gogh, and always will be. I don't care about what label you give it. I played two-thousand years old ragas with sitarist Jamaluddin Bhartiya in our group East West Trio, they were fantastic, they are timeless. I've heard fifth century Syrian music played, it knocked me out. It's either, yes, this is real music from the soul of real musicians, or else it's producer muzak, commercial bullshit. Anybody who is just into labels, into profiling, is in a box and it becomes fascistic because it doesn't let in anything or anybody else. Link these things to personal life. I think they are important to be linked together. When I'm talking about one item, I'm talking about one item as part of a universal whole and only this holistic thing really exists. It's diversity within the deeper level and awareness of oneness. Anything that is contra to that, is destroying it, killing the fabric. In the music, it's these boxes—the free jazz box, bebop box, the swing era box, the New Orleans box, the pop and rock boxes, etc. People who are just into these boxes are missing a lot. I know if I go to a jam session, for example a free music jam session in a few places that are a bastion for free music, if I go there and play something really tonal and pretty, they will probably never hire me again. When I go there and just play the weirdest shit, put newspapers in the piano, or beat the piano with thousands of notes, then they say, he's cool. It's not cool, it's a joke.
AAJ: What do you remember about the early times of the free music, the late '50s and the '60s?
BG: Explosion. Explosion of consciousness. It came through the music also. So, of course we all know the original channels—Ornette, Cecil, Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard. Those guys were the pioneers. Everyone did it in their own way. And then there was
Albert Ayler
saxophone, tenor1936 - 1970
AAJ: You decided to move to Europe.
BG: I was in Paris first of all. That was great. A whole lot of musicians came over and we met each other. I didn't know some of them until I was in Paris—like the AACM who were also from Chicago. A lot of gigs, a lot of stuff happening, it was wonderful. I came to Europe with forty dollars. I was able to hitchhike to Paris, went to an Arab bar on the right bank of Paris, where you get the cheapest coffee. Then I ran out of money after two days, I had my last café crème and I passed out on the floor at the bar. Algerian workers felt sorry for me, they saw that there was somebody on the floor, they took me into their flat. I woke up two days later, they gave me tagine and couscous and I felt really good. When I hear about the problems between Arabs and Jews I say, don't tell me about this, the Arabs and the Jews have been together for five thousand years. It's the politicians, they are making this shit enmity.
AAJ: You must have been exhausted.
BG: I had no money. I had my last 20-centime piece for a cup of coffee. I had not connected yet with the musicians, who were arranging things: Dieter Gewissler and drummer Claude Delcloo. Dieter, a German bassist, had promised me maybe ten gigs or something. In the end there was one gig. Only one gig down in Heidelberg. I wrote to him saying: 'You're promising me money for the airplane and everything and in the end there's just this 25-dollar job in Heidelberg?!' I knew I just had to come over to Europe anyway. I hadn't found them yet. After I woke up in the Arab flat near Bastille, the word got around through the grapevine that there was this crazy jazz musician, a guy with a big beard, a pianist in an Arab flat. Dieter said: 'Oh, it must be Burton.' He came to the apartment and took me to Heidelberg.
AAJ: How long did you live in France?
BG: For six months. After that, I first was in Denmark to play with John Tchicai. I loved Denmark, I loved Copenhagen. So, I had to choose. I said, I'll not go back to Paris, it's too nervous and too expensive. But I enjoyed the contact with all the great musicians in Paris. So, after that I wrote a couple of pieces for the radio orchestra in Denmark. That was great. J.C. Moses was on the gig, John Tchicai, Niels-Henning ?rsted Pederson, a lot of great musicians. Then I came to Amsterdam. Willem Breuker became really my patron at that time, he supported me, a beautiful guy. That gig for the radio was with him and
Han Bennink
drumsb.1942
Arjen Gorter
bass, acousticBut all the crazy stuff that had happened came on me and I had a nervous breakdown, there in the garden house. It took me two or three months to get myself back together slowly. I couldn't walk for about 3 weeks. My lower back was frozen, the nerve ends. I gradually came back and then things started to happen. The '70s were great in Amsterdam—socialism. The Jazz Composers Guild only lasted for six months, whereas the guilds here in Europe lasted for centuries. European Renaissance has a guild history—they were communal. I was so happy to be in a place, where community lasted. Today, it's not there much anymore, it's gone. Today, the problem is that when you are 50 years old or more you are already suspect: 'oude rot in het vak.' In one way, people appreciate that you are old, but when you are old and still professional—they put you down: You are old, let's get some young people in here. Willem Breuker, who almost single-handed started the whole scene of free music and contemporary music in Holland, together with
Misha Mengelberg
piano1935 - 2017
AAJ: Around that time, you went to India.
BG: Yeah. Obviously, this was part of my healing process. I took a 4-month trip as part of the yoga group traveling with our teacher Swami Satchidananda, a deep meditative yoga experience in India and Sri Lanka (1970-1971). The yoga was slowly beginning to get me more together. I had met my teacher in 1967 and started doing hatha yoga for some months before getting my meditation mantra initiation from him at the end of that year. Thanks to yoga over the years it helped me put back all the pieces into a more peaceful existence. We all exploded with such a dynamic music in the '60s, but unfortunately most of my contemporaries are gone, because they never found a way to put back the pieces. I gradually went from an atomic bomb to an atomic balm!
AAJ: Can you share some details about your musical connection to the Indian ragas?
BG: I met sitarist Jamaluddin Bhartiya from Jaipur, India in 1973. I knew his student here, sitarist Darshan Kumari. She organized a lot of Indian music concerts here in Holland. She brought Bhartiya here and I became his student. We were the East West Trio. I realized that the Indian tradition—great music that always existed and always continues to exist—has to be done with original flair and not by copying or imitating it. The idea of the East West Trio was to bring the jazz idea into the raga. And also, we had this great bongo player during that time, Daoud Amin. He is a Puerto Rican from New York and he brought his Latin rhythms into it. So, it's a fresh world music the way we did it. Daoud is not on the records we made, he already left town. Instead we got Glenn Hahn from Suriname. He brought that same idea with bongos and congas and other percussion things. He's gone unfortunately, died quite young.
AAJ: When did you start playing klezmer music?
BG: At the end of the Eighties. When I was about 52, I met this young Jewish kid named Yiftach Bar, a musician who came by and said: 'We heard about you and your music.' He brought along a friend, who was interested in what I was doing too, and they said, can you play us some of your music? I was already on my houseboat. I played them some of my music on records. And then Yiftach said: 'That's nice, jazzy, but what's your music?' He was a nineteen-year old kid. I got a bit peeved and said: 'Listen man, that's my music, what are you talking about?!' 'No, this is your music.' He played some beautiful stuff from clarinetist Giora Feidman. Giora is the guy who played so beautifully on the score of the movie Schindler's List, so poignant. John Williams, the guy who wrote it, worked with Steven Spielberg and the big Hollywood guys. He wasn't Jewish, but he really got it, the feel of that music. So, these cross references of different cultures are very interesting. People transcend their own cultures and get into other cultures. They really live it, you know.
AAJ: Do you have the feeling that you are closer now to yourself with the music you are playing today?
BG: Yeah, otherwise I wouldn't do it. It transcends descriptions, it has traditional blues and bebop elements, it has Indian elements, it has Jewish elements, it has Arab elements, all kind of stuff.
AAJ: Can one say that your Jewish background is just a part of your universal musical language.
BG: Again, going back to the Tree Theme. The roots might be anywhere but it grows and spreads out to everywhere, so we are all connected. You cannot diss anybody. If you do that you diss yourself.
AAJ: But it was and is important for you to go back to your family roots.
BG: You should know where you come from, know your ancestry, know your history. Without that you don't know where you are going. You have to be rooted somewhere before you can have branches and leaves. Trees live thousands of years because they have these wonderful roots and expansion. This is the way we come to universality too.
AAJ: Can we talk about your klezmer bands?
BG: This kid Yiftach, he came and played me the Giora Feidman music. And I thought: 'Wow, this is beautiful stuff.' Okay, I didn't agree with him when he told me the other stuff wasn't my music. It is my music too, but he taught me something new about Jewish music. Up until that point the old Jewish music, I'd really only heard the bands playing the old-fashioned way at Jewish weddings or Bar Mitzvahs. When I was a kid, I got bored with it: 'This is something from Russia in the nineteenth century, what does it have to do with me now?' But when I heard the more modern interpretation of this music—hearing Frank London's Klezmatics, the Klezmorim, and a couple of other original bands like that, I thought: 'Okay, these guys are folky, but Frank has also got a jazz background, that I can hear. So that's a way to go with this, finally. Then I started realizing that the Black and Jewish experience goes way back. At the time when Nubians and other Blacks became—for whatever reason—converted into Judaism, long before Islam. 1500-2000 years before Islam they were already into Judaism. And lately I found out about the Igbo people in Nigeria: 25 million people were Jewish 1500-2000 years before Islam. If it ever came out, that would be almost a triple of the Jewish population on this planet. I talked with a cultural attaché, a guy from the Igbo people. He was my neighbor when I was on vacation in Portugal. We started talking and he said he knew this history and was considering his roots in Judaism. So, what's the difference between Ibrahim and Abraham, Salaam Alaikum and Shalom Aleichem? It's ridiculous making such a big deal out of the difference. In music, the Arab maqams are exactly the same like the Jewish modes. The most popular Jewish mode Ahava Raba, is exactly the same like the Arab Hijaz.
Tags
Interview
Narada Burton Greene
Barbara Ina Frenz
Jazz Composers Guild
John Tchicai
William Breuker
Han Bennink
Alan Silva
Bill Dixon
Marion Brown
Henry Grimes
Rashied Ali
AACM
Niels-Henning rsted Pedersen
Arjen Gorter
Misha Mengelberg
Jamaluddin Bhartiya
East West Trio
Tilo Baumheier
Renato Ferreira
Salvoandrea Lucifora
Itai Waismane
Adam Lane
Patty Waters
Tim du Roche
Alex Coke
Comments
PREVIOUS / NEXT
Support All About Jazz
All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.
Buy Now
