When I was little I had a recurring dream . It woke me up and sometimes scared me yet it was fascinating and inviting in it's scariness and abstractness . It was truly a strange and unreal scenario . The dream was of multicolored squares which were moving and colliding with circles . When the two geometric shapes would contact one another I got a sort of chill , the kind you get as fingernails scratch a blackboard and that is when I would tend to wake up and remember the absurdity of it all .
As I became more interested in music , after my father left my mother , my brother , and me , the dream included music . My father was a trumpet player in the fifties who arranged for a local hotel in Washington DC( The Shoreham ) . In those years some of the hotels supported bands and shows . When he left I was nearly eleven . I wasn't aware of the complications of adult life . I am sure there was a lot of confusion about my loyalties as well as where I was going though I was already involved with my playing . My father left some records , some seventy eight RPM as well as a few albums . Petroushka by Stravinsky and Ein Heldenlieben by Richard Strauss were two of the classical , seventy eight RPM albums .There was a "Chet Baker with Strings" side that I liked which featured the West Coast players and started me into collecting "Cool" jazz and I think that this introduction to music added to my nightmare .
The music I started imagining in my dream had a saxophone playing kind of wild yet there was also a symphony orchestra playing something else that was completely unrelated . The frantic , contrasting music became part of my dream with the squares and circles and I awoke to a world that seemed to be awaking to something similar as Ornette Coleman and "Free Jazz" came into being . In the late fifties jazz, classical , and electronic music had come together as if under the roof of modern art . The cover picture on the Ornette "Free Jazz" side was Jackson Pollock's "White Light" and it spoke to me .As years went by I was able to play a real to real tape recorder and my record player at the same time in my effort to emulate the dream . I have no idea why I wanted to duplicate the music of my nightmare nor the pictures . It became obsessive as I started painting this theme in or around 1963 . I had worked with pastels and drawing in high school but my acrylic painting had no school that would direct me to dream interpretation .
In 1964 Albert Ayler put out a record that was close to the nightmare in it's intensity . "Spiritual Unity" with the Ayler Trio really affected me and several people I met who also loved what happened there . I don't know if they had nightmares like me but I know that we played music differently because of the open , emotional content of what seemed to be Ayler's screams through his tenor saxophone . With the use of the computer , electronic music is more accessible as is the stuff of dreams and nightmares . I have truly gone into the paintings and will go further , perhaps even adding animation to the project . My dream has developed into a style and I use the photos of those acrylic paintings of the past and have gone on to produce thousands of variations on this dream scenario . Putting Albert Ayler together with Bela Bartok is simpler now than playing a couple of record players . I have been able to mix them , changing the volumes and the point of start so that this is becoming my nightmare music . I had to do a mix from the Ayler and use the "Music for Strings , Celleste, and Percussion" of Bartok at least once though I have been doing my own variations on my own themes . While I was never motivated to sell this product , I have continued to try to find the product . It could be a cathartic kind of thing , this obsession with the abstract , or it might be an actual expression of the frustration found in life . I have found that the songs I sang so often , that I began to think were my own , actually belong to everyone . All those people who I thought were my own discoveries were also discovered by other people . In cyberspace you can find the universe , the smallness of us all , and the bigness of us all . We can find the similarities and general sameness that haunts us all . All in all , I look around and don't know how people cope with all they find in life , especially those people who take the chance and live life on an edge . I used to think that was me but now I see that I haven't really had to suffer like so many others . The loss of wives, husbands , children , animals , careers, friends , neighbors , and so much more is beyond my understanding . I am still wrapped in my own nightmares , long gone , yet I am trying to re-build a nightmare that expresses , in a way , the futility of people to the changes and losses that occur over a lifetime .
Is this art? Why is there art? What is art? Is there anything more than a mirror ? I don't know . I think there is more than capitalism , that art isn't necessarily graded by a television contest or by how much it sells in it's own time . I am not sure we can see objectively what is reflected from our own time , that is if art might be a reflection of life . I am about four minutes into this piece where I like it the most ,where the music is the nightmare and it doesn't suggest it will end , the simplicity and complexity is the waking nightmare , the paradox of life . It takes a while to build the thing just to be destroyed . The music does end , the day ends , the nightmare ends , everything ends too quickly considering all the time it took to get where we are . This reminds me of the procedure informing a person on a "Bad LSD Trip" that drug induced hallucination that made the user face his subconscous while awake was temporary and would end . The thing is that schizophrenia doesn't understand "ending"anymore than it understands beginning .
Below this paragraph is an edit I made of " Dedication to Albert Ayler " with a collection of my paintings and composites. The original cut was from a live recording we did with Noah Howard at the Village Vanguard in 1972 . Below is a link to the recorded cuts from that release with a couple of unreleased tracks . It opens a new window with individual links .
"Live at the Village Vanguard 1972"
The effect of watching the paintings and the cacaphony of chance music is what I am aiming for here.