John Butcher: Where the Saxophone Ends

An interview with John Butcher from American magazine Signal to Noise

British saxophonist John Butcher has explored the outer limits of his instrument, the blurts, whistles, and clicks that fall outside the horn's regular vocabulary.

Bill Meyer interviews this ubiquitous free-improviser; portrait photo by Avril Levi.

Is anything in music really new? Albert Ayler stood jazz on its head by playing like a preacher from the Holiness Church; Mats Gustafsson freaked out improv fans with slap-tongue effects first introduced by long-dead vaudevillians like Rudy Wiedoeft. Scratch the young bark of innovation and you're likely to find ring upon ring of history.

John Butcher is eminently aware of the perils that beset the quest to play something new, yet he founded his career upon a determination to make genuinely new music. Butcher, who will turn fifty this October, learned how to play the soprano and tenor saxophones in jazz bands, but well before he started recording in the mid-80s, he had purged most of the sax's familiar sounds from his vocabulary. In their place he built a new lexicon out of the sounds at the edge of the instrument's reach; barely there whistles, clicking keypads, harsh barks, and liquid bubbles. Unsatisfied with merely making novel sounds, he has organized them into a rigorously developed musical syntax that synthesizes both non-idiomatic components and readily identifiable stylistic elements taken from jazz, early electronic music, 20th century New Music composition, even the blues.

Butcher played several other instruments before coming to the saxophone in his late teens. Whilst at University, where he studied Physics and eventually earned a PhD., Butcher played in jazz bands and met pianist Chris Burn, his future partner in evolving his creative persona. By the late 70s, both men gravitated towards free improvisation, a scene they joined as players in the next decade. In the mid-80s Butcher, Durrant, and guitarist John Russell formed the Acta label; Butcher has continued to operate it since their withdrawal. The saxophonist worked chiefly in Europe until the mid-90s, when he started coming to the US with increasing frequency. Around the same time he began working more and more with electronics. In the past couple years, Butcher has toured Japan, and music from a couple concerts there will comprise "Cavern and Nightlife", his first release on a new label devoted to his own work, Weight Of Wax.

The saxophonist is no orientalist, but his music fits comfortably into the notion of yin and yang; everywhere you look in it, the balance of forces in apparent opposition generates a compelling creative tension. He picked up the saxophone in part to be able to play music socially, yet he's made four solo saxophone records. He's primarily played free improvisation, yet he willingly embraces - and devises - compositional structures; check out his work with compatriot Chris Burn's Ensemble and the Austrian group Polwechsel. Butcher gravitates to unamplified acoustic settings, yet he's on some of the most compelling records of electronic improvisation yet made. His instrumental vocabulary comprises both gnarled multiphonics and tones of classical purity; boldly contoured melodies and atomized sound particles; tiny squelchy kisses, like the ones he blends with Toshimaru Nakamura's minimal hums on "Cavern with Nightlife" release, and roaring statements like the ones that leap out of Andy Moor and Thomas Lehn's electronic storms on "Thermal".

Butcher's versatile and malleable instrumental voice thrives in exchanges with players with whom he's developed a history, like Burn, violinist Phil Durrant, or percussionist Gino Robair; Robair and Butcher's latest collaboration, the duo CD "New Oakland Burr", distills their shared taste for extreme timbres and rapid-fire reaction into 16 exceptionally pithy tracks that'll put both your stereo speakers and your alertness to the test. But it also sounds remarkably right in disparate one-off encounters such as "Equation", a splendidly tactile concert recording with turntablist Mike Hansen and percussionist Tomasz Krakowiak that amounts to real-time musique concrete, or "Clearings", a stirringly poetic all-acoustic first meeting with violinist Christoph Irmer and pianist Agustí Fernández.

I wonder if you could say a bit about what originally moved you to seek out unusual sounds on the saxophone?
It's not so much to do with playing the saxophone, as the music I wanted to be involved in needed those kinds of sounds. So it didn't come so much from the point of view of OK, let's push the saxophone to some kind of limit. It was more a case of, for instance in my early days with Chris Burn, when he was working directly on the strings of the piano, this was in the early 80s, I wanted to work with a particular kind of language, and that language wasn't a natural one for the saxophone. But the challenge of trying to find a way of working, the challenge of trying to find a way to play with him on the saxophone became a stimulus in itself. Once you start doing that, you can get interested in exploring the saxophone for its own sake.
Some ideas came from the sort of music I was listening to at the time, like 50s and 60s electronic music, where you could juxtapose very different kinds of material. If you're talking about musique concrete, the actual source of the sound could change quite drastically within the course of a phrase of the music as it were, and I was quite intrigued with trying to find ways of doing that on the saxophone. And then I came to realize that trying to do it on one instrument actually gives it a sort of coherence that you won't get if you're introducing other instruments, or in particular adding electronics.
Everything I do sounds like the saxophone to me; and somehow, even if I'm using very divergent kinds of material, there is a certain satisfaction of continuity because they're derived from the saxophone. The quality of there being unusual sounds, I hardly notice that these days. To me they're all just different aspects of the saxophone, things that are related to having to physically make a piece of wood vibrate in your mouth and control it with your breath and then manipulate the air column.

So you wanted to play a certain kind of music, and that lead you to a new range of possibilities?
Negative things, and youthful arrogance, can also be a rather large stimulus. When I was 20, it seemed to me that there was very little left of interest for saxophone music. Jazz had fragmented and some of those fragments had fed into some very interesting directions, but what most people would accept as the history of the saxophone had run it's course. Certainly the saxophone as a sort of linear, semi-melodic instrument. So not wanting to work in those ways was a stimulus.

So you didn't want to just sound like another guy who listened to John Coltrane or, I'm not sure who you might have been listening to at the time, maybe Trevor Watts?
Certainly, that didn't seem to make any sense. The names you have mentioned are musicians who have been very inspiring, but part of their inspiration is how they themselves dealt with their time in music - not meaning to put Trevor in the past tense - and how they responded to circumstances when they were formulating their ways of playing. Just a generational difference of five years makes a big difference. The second half of the 70s was when I moved from a kind of student playing to the playing that was more to do with finding what I could contribute. I liked "Trout Mask Replica" as much as "Interstellar Space" as much as "Kontakte", so trying to copy a particular saxophonist's style didn't make much sense. Except in the way of digging into someone else's music, to learn about it.

What's the difference between practicing and the solo concert you just played, for example?
Actually, these days quite a lot of what I do is pretty conventional, playing the saxophone as this melodic instrument. I work at that because it keeps you very physically in touch with the instrument. Other times I've focused on the more extreme techniques that you'll hear when I play a solo concert, and I still need to practice those to some extent, because there's often a very thin dividing line between getting those sounds to speak and just some uncontrolled squeak. I still have spells of exploratory practice, but in recent years I've felt that I know those areas of the instrument well enough to be able to experiment with them in situ. If something comes along and surprises me, I can go with it and turn it into something workable.
So I like to feel two things before a concert, that I am physically prepared on the instrument, and also mentally prepared for giving the concert. And the latter might mean it's been good not to have practiced much for two days, so that practice isn't in your head but music is. When I start playing now, I try to do it with as empty a mind as possible. I have enough of an idea just to make a start, and then try to allow ideas to present themselves. There's usually no kind of predetermined structure. In the course of playing a piece I may decide that I can give it a kind of shape. I try to let that happen in the moment. That's different from when I started, and it's come through fifteen years of playing solo.

So in the late 80s, you might have played a solo concert with an idea of where you wanted that concert to go?
I would probably have thought about different pieces delving into particular musical areas. But the trouble is if you do that, then you end up playing some sort of pseudo-composition. That might be interesting for one or two concerts, but for the performer the repetition gets numbing, and you feel that you're going through a certain routine. I hope that in a solo improvisation I can engage the audience in my thought processes so that a piece's development makes sense, so that they can hear that "Okay, he did that because previously he did this," and they can get the feeling of me making the decision in the moment, rather than thinking "Okay, he planned to play this material after that material." Most people who have been to this sort of thing before, I think they can detect that in a performance, It has a really different sense of organic growth if you're prepared to take the risk and not plan it out.
Something else on that - what I want to avoid is where people notice the sounds before the music. They might just notice "oh that's an unusual sound" or "how does he do that" or whatever, and it's a danger for instrumentalists where you just get a catalog of their sound effects. They might be very interesting sounds, but it's really just like the old days of somebody just playing a string of their licks. And particularly with new instrumental techniques, that's one of the most deadening kinds of music you could hear. Sometimes you might find some particularly interesting sound but you don't really want to play it, because it's too strong, so you may just suggest it or nibble away at its edges a bit. I like to find material which you can really bend and flex and transform, that isn't just there in the listener's face. For me, some of this material needs to be able to be fuzzy around the edges, so it's not clear exactly what the saxophone is doing. It's strange, because I've heard performances where the unadorned presentation of some element of new material seems to be the whole content of the music. For me, that's turning it rather too self-consciously into some kind of art statement. I'm interested in ongoing performance-related music.

I find it very hard to put my finger upon exactly what I find affecting about your music. You've got people like Albert Ayler, whose playing is understood to have a certain emotional content. Yet I can't say your music is about a particular emotion, or even what it references, but it has an affective engagement.
I don't see how you can really perform with the idea of generating a specific kind of emotion, partly because that kind of thing is very subjective. Perhaps you can do it by referring to other people's music, other kinds of music which have a particular emotional quality attached to them. If you start actually thinking about your own emotional engagement too self-consciously, then you lessen the possibility of communicating something genuine. That has to come from some level that you're not consciously working at, it has to just be there, or not. In performance you're going to go through many states of mind. Maybe sometimes you can detect things, like somewhat darker performances or lighter performances, but I find all those qualities very mixed up in the music I like to listen to and in how I hear my own music when I hear it back. You know someone like Ayler is identified with a particular kind of emotional response, but he had a lot of different qualities in his music. People sometimes focus on that bit where the tap turns and he almost loses control, but he could turn the tap back and go immediately into one of these march type things.
It's complex, because sound is intrinsically an emotional experience; neurologically it ties in with the mammalian brain of the limbic system, we're programmed to respond to certain sounds in certain ways, whether it's a cry or a loud sound, so to some extent I think you can't have a non-emotional sound. And you have learned responses to systems of sounds, cultural constructs, which seem to relate to particular emotional states. But any position on the expressive scale sounds bogus if you get self-conscious about it. The cool end often means just not creating any reasons for one sound to follow another, or working with drone material that pays little attention to what else is going on. I can be a cover for a lack of imagination. But overall, I'm sympathetic to the pared down approach, it heightens attention and the listener creates their own connections. But I'm not so keen when it gets toward Duchamp and his non-retinal art, so there's very little need to hear it once you have the idea. I like music that comes first from a love of sound.
When I started improvising I remember being criticized for being too disengaged from the process. Part of it, I think, was the gap between the image of the saxophone or it's role in a group, and what I was doing. After all these years of electronics, people seem less hung up on the expectations of a particular instrument. But compared to some current trends, I suspect I'm now put in the over-expressive camp - over-expressive to some. So you know it's very relative to circumstances. "News From The Shed", without us really us discussing it, got involved in some very reduced areas, but with a definite tension. As there wasn't a consensus on where we were going. Radu Malfatti became disinterested in improvised music and went off into composition and very minimal performance strategies. So I feel familiar with the philosophy of playing like that and the practice of playing like that, but I am wary of formalizing a performance-based music too much. You can generate some very good pieces of music by working with highly defined concepts, but interesting ideas aren't so common, and they don't have so much to do with improvisation. There's great value in playing to the strengths of improvisation, which include not just importing your musical world into every situation, but discovering your musical world through the situations. You don't take a static version of yourself to each performance; part of the self that performs each night is created by the situation.

You've just played several concerts with Kaffe Matthews. I don't know if she's doing this now, but when I saw her play part of her material was the actual sound of the venue that she was playing in, with microphones positions inside and outside of the venue. I wonder if you could say a bit about playing with her, or dealing with venues in general?
Because it was trio, she was focusing more on taking elements of what I or Andy Moor were doing and then manipulating them, but certainly that's only a small part of the material that she's working with. The main thing about playing with Kaffe and Andy is that it's loud, and I'm using microphones and having to rely on PAs, which is something I don't usually do. I tend to prefer acoustic situations. Usually if you play a sound in an acoustic situation, you know that the sound that you're hearing is very similar to what the audience is hearing. Here it can be completely different. So there's a kind of certain feeling of abandon, because you know that some of the subtleties that I might get involved with won't having any meaning, so you kind of chase a lot of areas you wouldn't usually chase.

What kind of risks might you be taking in that situation that you might not take in an unamplified setting?
I might exploit the way the PA squeezes the saxophone sound. Go to areas I wouldn't usually like acoustically but, combined with the roughness of the amplified sound, the volume can give it a new quality. A free-jazz squall at the top of the instrument can sound like metal plates rubbed together. And I'll use the mic a lot, in terms of distance from the bell, so I can use feedback effects.

That's one aspect of your music that really interests me. I've heard it on "Invisible Ear" and "Music on Seven Occasions". I don't know if you've done it much other than that.
There's a piece that uses it on "Fonetiks", very first LP that I put out with Chris Burn, so I was experimenting with it a bit in 1984. I explored it on a few later recordings, but have only got into it again in live concerts over the last few years. I've been working more and more with musicians who use electronics, and it's an interesting way of entering a little bit into their sound worlds.
And I enjoy the way it's different from playing the ordinary instrument, where I know where to go for specific things. When I'm using the keys to manipulate different feedback resonances, to me it's still the saxophone, just abstracted. It's different from the duo I had with Phil Durrant, with electro-manipulation where he was literally using processing effects on the instrument.

Are you and Phil Durrant still working together?
Yes. We began the electro-acoustic duo in '97, and I wanted it to be like a duo, not a processed saxophone, which is why I chose to do it with Phil, because we've had a lot of experience in playing together with him as a violinist. And also, he approaches electronics in a very fluid way. It's a system where, for instance he can have gates which cut on and off according to certain criteria. A simple one might come on if I play below middle C, and it cuts out if I play above middle C. I wouldn't necessarily know that he had it in, so I could be playing one note which is processed, move to another one expecting it to still be processed, and it cuts out. That was a simple picture of the unknown in it, and the other was he had it wired up so that the actual way his effects interacted depended on what I was playing. So if I changed what I was playing it might alter the whole tripping sequence of his effects, which he wasn't expecting. We were both doing things which the other one couldn't predict, so we had to respond through listening all the time; there was no way anybody could be in complete control of the system. It was a sort of chaotic system where a small change from one of us could actually create an unknown and large change in the overall music that was coming out.

When you were talking about working with amplification and the surrender involved, I thought about working with Phil Durrant too. the duo sounded to me like a place where you might have started working on such systems.
Yes. Another thing I found interesting was that there's certain things I do which I view as being harsh and having some emotional quality of tension, and others I might think of as being quite relaxed. But I might be playing with the intention of using one of these calm relaxed sounds and his processing actually turns it into something quite harsh and aggressive, and sometimes the opposite, so your whole subjective emotional language is distorted and not necessarily coming out the way you're intending it. We learned that sometimes simplicity was best, and if I played quite simply, we got the most interesting results. Then occasionally I'd introduce some more complex things, which already have a pseudo-electronic timbre, because it adds a much richer sound palette for the effects to work on. So I found different ways of balancing these sorts of material. After the records Phil moved from separate effects units to a computer, which seems less flexible.

What struck me about the two records the two of you did was the griminess of the sound. people try to get that with a computer, but they usually don't. And the music is affecting, affectively engaging, but not obviously emotional. Not obvious but direct.
Yeah, right. I really liked the grain to the sound, the inner life of the sound. And also the way it didn't always go into drones, which is often the direction computers lead to. The system would cut and chop and change.

I suppose that when the signal path goes from effects box to effects box instead of through the computer, which is just one box, that might complicate the sound?
Yes, and it's much more tactile the way you control the interface.

I have been playing "ensemble at musica genera 2002" a lot and have found it very exciting. Could you talk a bit about working with Chris Burn, and about the importance of working with someone over time?
There are two aspects to that. One is that I like to play, but not necessarily very often, with musicians I've known for a long time, because you've got this shared background of experience which you're bring into a new situation, but you're not working together enough to just be going through the motions of what you know does and doesn't work. You are hopefully pushing into something a little bit different when you meet up again, but with a shared history - that is vital. There's probably only half a dozen musicians I can say that about.
With Chris Burn, we left behind our more jazz-based student days and went into exploring free improvisation at the same time, and did it quite a lot through just private rehearsals around at my house for almost a year before we had a concert, where he evolved towards not using the piano keys and working directly on the strings. As an improviser, I think he's a pioneer in this. And I tried to play without relying on any conventional vocabulary that I knew on saxophone, so probably for about six months we were playing extremely radical music, which it's probably just as well that nobody ever heard. It was really just throwing everything out and trying to see, ok, what's another way? And then when you are doing that, you lose a lot of your mannerisms. Then you start bringing other things back in, and they come back in a different way. For instance, Chris might be manipulating the overtone possibilities that strings have, and I'm trying to make the saxophone copy these multiple sounds, which eventually I built into this multiphonic vocabulary.
What was really powerful for me was to do that whole experimental work with somebody with whom you weren't embarrassed to sound like a complete idiot. And it's not the kind of work you can do on your own, because you need the stimulus of another person, and you need to hear it in context. Making these discoveries whilst at the same time trying to relate to and interact with other musicians turns them into something that it's possible to create a musical language with rather than just a sequence of novel sound possibilities.

You've put out a lot of records on very small labels. What do these records mean to you? What is the function of the record, and how much is it necessary to put out these records?
When I started Acta records with Russell and Durrant we'd hardly played outside of England and that was mostly to make the music available to more people. We waited for a long time, until we thought we had some very good recordings to put out. In those days, with LPs, which are quite complex and expensive things to get together, it was a special event to put out a record. I think that attitude has stayed with me.

How does one go about making records special when you put out a half dozen of them a year?
Perhaps my criterion at this stage is ok, will this release add something to my musical output, or am I just covering ground I've already trod? Invisible Ear was a special record for me. I recorded the pieces reasonably quickly, but it was preceded by a lot of technical experimentation and was a concentration of the feedback and miking ideas that had only poked their head up here and there on other CDs.
It may be special because it's a one-off event, like the duo with Dylan van der Schyff from Canada ("Points, Snags And Windings"), I was asked to do that by Jon Morgan's Meniscus label. It was a good session, and it brought out some different things in my playing. I'd avoided the more typical sax-drum relationship for many years, but felt more relaxed about going with it, on that date. And working with Gerry Hemingway, and in trio with John Edwards and Fabrizio Spera - or the one I had with Gino Robair and Matthew Sperry - are a way back into instrumentations that carry a lot of baggage that I deliberately avoided in earlier days.

I read in an interview where you said that after you finished your physics degree you did some kind of teaching, and at a certain point you stopped doing that and went to music full time. you said something about being a better person for that. Can you elaborate?
Probably what that was connected with was when I did my PhD., which was in theoretical physics and involved a lot of solitary sitting at a table with a piece of paper and a sharpened pencil, doing mathematics and reading technical papers in physics journals, which is really quite a solitary activity. It doesn't encourage sociability, and improvised music making is almost the only art form where it's a genuinely collaborative, creative process. Of course, you can have collaborations between all kinds of disciplines in the arts, but not in that kind of vulnerable, mutually dependent way that occurs in group improvising. You have to make decisions moment by moment in the music according to the other players' input, which may well upset and distort what your own intentions were. You have to find a way of modifying your intentions to have some meaningful correlation with what other people are doing. People with very strong musical opinions somehow have to coexist and find a way of playing that sounds like more than the sum of the parts. If it's working, it's got to come up with ideas that couldn't have been imagined by any of the individual members on their own. Getting to those parts that could only have been reached by going through what came before, that you couldn't have just started with. At the core, that's the motivation; those surprises you get, and not the same thing every night.

I think that the different people you play with probably help to make sure you don't do the same thing every night. Jon Abbey told me that you were in Japan recently, and that you played with Taku Sugimoto. I imagine that the difference between playing with Taku Sugimoto and playing with Andy Moor, who you were with last night, must be vast.
They're from different planets, really.

I wonder what it's like for you to play for Andy's audience. someone who goes to an EX concert would most likely be more open to improvised music than someone going to a Dead Kennedys concert, but you're still facing a really different audience, playing in really different venues and circumstances.
Sure. It's possible now to play your music in front of an extremely specialized, highly informed audience who follow improvised music. That has its values in that you're working in a very astute critical framework. That can spur you on to further developments in your own playing, and, if you pass the test, you get the support of these kinds of audiences. But there is a danger of the whole process becoming far too refined, in the sense that everybody's too concerned with the next smallest step on somewhere, and you get this kind of fevered critical attention from the small number of people who are interested in a particular little subgenre of a subgenre of a subgenre. I'm inclined to think that if this music has any value, it must be from qualities more intrinsic than something only noticed by hard-core followers.
I went on this tour opening solo for the EX in Italy. You know that you're going to have 150 or 200 people there, three of whom might know me, most of them are waiting for the EX to come on, talking, drinking, feeling excited about the EX show, and then some bloke comes out and plays solo saxophone. It's a refreshing perspective change to one's normal performance context. Most of the time I was very encouraged by the response. And it was an indication of how much things have changed, certainly in terms of the sorts of sounds that people will now happily accept as musical. I used to get people saying "Oh, that's not music," based on the kinds of sounds I was using. Nobody pays much attention to that anymore. People will still get a bit twitchy if you're not working with repeated rhythms, but the whole nature of what sounds can be harnessed is almost not an issue anymore, certainly since the rise in sampling and electronics.
But you can also convince people who never hear these kind of things, like recently with harpist Rhodri Davies, we played a lunch time classical music subscription series in Newcastle. Quite a few elderly ladies with blue rinsed hair, sitting there at the University, and it's usually Brahms and Mozart, and out of an audience of 50, maybe 6 or 7 walked out. There was a little old lady who came up afterwards and said "Ah, that was rather interesting." She's got no idea what context we're coming from, no idea that there is such a thing as improvised music, but she recognized that we were making music with these strange sounds, and I think the visual side creates extra ways in, gives clues to how to read it, like Rhodri bowing strings and me circular breathing.

I think that actually being there to experience it allows people who could never deal with the records to become engaged. the same thing that you described happens here is the Chicago Cultural Center, which is at the old chicago public library. They put on all sorts of stuff, including improvised music, and because it's free you've got this huge crowd of people who show up simply because it's a free concert, and they have no idea what it is, they just sit down. Sometimes there's a mass exodus after the first piece, but a lot of people who you would never see at the bottle or the velvet lounge are there and they stay the whole time.
It demonstrates the intrinsic value of this approach to music making, I think. It's not just this esoteric, specialized thing for a few enthusiasts. But I wouldn't want it to get too comfortable. I hope it still remains an irritant in many places.

Reprinted from the Fall 2004 issue of Signal to Noise

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