He Expects You To Read The Tea Leaves
An interview on the past & future of Wayne Shorter's orchestral work
Announcements of some Wayne Shorter symphonic tributes reminded me of an interview I’ve never shared outside the classroom. It’s time to share it with you.
First up, some dates & links for those symphonic concerts. More to come.
These concerts will include some new jazz personnel and will feature an arrangement of highlights from the opera Iphigenia, among other Wayne works.
We can assume Wayne Shorter’s galactic jazz legacy is secure. For the last few years, as Wayne focused on large-scale classical works, I’ve wondered about the future of his orchestral music. So this past October I closed out my Wayne Shorter course by interviewing conductor Clark Rundell and composer and pianist Phillip Golub.
Over the last decade or so, Clark has emerged as the primary conductor of Wayne’s large-scale works, including the opera Iphigenia. Phillip was the musical coordinator for Iphigenia and the mensch who digitized every single piece of Wayne’s music last year. As Clark and Phillip discussed in the interview, there were no copies of some scores. Only originals stacked in Wayne’s Los Angeles home, where wildfires are not uncommon. Thanks to Phillip, the music’s now safe. We can exhale.
Clark and Phillip’s work with Wayne’s music is a labor of love. They hold his artistry in the highest possible esteem. At the same time, they’re not afraid of hard questions about Wayne’s large-scale works. Why would they be afraid? They’ve lived those questions in performance.
More on those hard questions soon. In a separate essay, I’ll examine what I see as a stalled critical discourse on orchestral work by jazz-identified musicians, including and especially Wayne. We can and will bridge this critical impasse.
First, I’d like to share this discussion of how specific practices affect performances of Wayne’s orchestral music: rehearsal time, interpretation in a contemporary classical world of exact notation, etc. If we’re going to suss out music’s meaning or evaluate its aesthetics, it helps to understand the process behind its creation. Much of this discussion applies to cross-genre orchestral work in general.
In October 2022, Wayne was still among us. After his transition in March, this conversation about his orchestral legacy only feels more vital. The upcoming symphonic tributes were originally planned as 90th birthday events. Clark Rundell: “I’d say that the interest was strong when we announced the 90th birthday events and since his passing, it has only got stronger. Also amongst us who are keepers of the flame.”
Interview note: I cut some of my comments and removed or condensed my questions for brevity.
Finally, a little something extra for paid subscribers. If you prefer listening to reading, please skip to the end of the transcript for interview audio, just over the paywall. Maybe you’d even like to listen and read, you maximalist.
He Expects You To Read The Tea Leaves: An Interview with Clark Rundell and Phillip Golub
By Michelle Mercer
Recorded Halloween 2022 on Zoom for a Wayne Shorter course
Michelle: All right, so let's get going. Thank you both for being here. We really, really appreciate you taking the time to contribute to our class tonight. And yeah, I think you were you were about to tell us how you began working with Wayne, Clark.
Clark: First of all, it's wonderful that you guys are looking into Wayne's music. And it's wonderful that you're looking into him and trying to get to grips with this multifaceted, multi dimensional person. And I think, whatever is said, by us, will be with such love and such respect but still will only scratch the surface as you can only hope to do in a class of how many ever weeks you're doing. I mean, it's an unbelievable output and unbelievably varied.
So the first thing that I did with Wayne was an incredible privilege. I have a post with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and I had a bigger post with them at that time, and they were the European Capital of Culture in 2008. That’s when Britain was still in Europe. But that's a conversation that we will not go into. And one of the opening events was the Wayne Shorter Quartet with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.
So that was just, I mean, it was an extraordinary experience and life changing for me, really. Because there I was, in a room with an orchestra I knew really, really well. I wasn't particularly a young man. I was in my 40s, I think, at the time, or late 30s. So I was reasonably experienced as a professional conductor. But this was just a totally different thing, the music was totally different. And I had been the head of Jazz Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester for 17 years. So I spoke the language of jazz not badly. And I'm a professional conductor. So you can think you can conduct and you think you know something about jazz, but this was completely on another level. And the notes are hard. And there's a lot of them.
As is often the case, and this may actually be slightly more relevant than you think to the conversation or in terms of information to your colleagues, which is that, and Phillip will attest to this, and maybe you have experienced this Michelle, most big-ish professional orchestras, when they have a jazz musician visiting or a non-classical musician visiting, give not very much rehearsal time to that. So maybe the maximum is the day before; sometimes they just come together on the day of the concert. If the arrangement makes it. So everybody says you know, it's Wayne Shorter, it will be a bit like it was with Elvis Costello or with Toumani Diabaté, or whatever. You know, the arrangements are good, they're not that difficult. We'll give it the day before.
These arrangements come and they're hard as nails. And this is an extremely good orchestra that can read, like most British orchestras can read, but even they're just like, wow, there are a lot of notes in this. And so that was a steep learning curve. And also, there are wonderful little anecdotes are often quite fun. And you can shut me up when I'm rambling on too much.
Michelle: We like anecdotes. Please.
Clark: One of the first things that I learned was—and I often quote this, which is quote from your book, I think—which is what somebody said, you know, you can't ask Wayne a straightforward question, because if you asked him what time it was, you wouldn't get a straight answer. So, I was quite nervous about the tempo of one of the pieces. And I said to Wayne, you know, how do you feel about the tempo this way? Is it okay? And he just looked at me and says, ‘Well, it's a bit like, aliens are attacking from outer space. And the children, they think that's really, really cool. But the parents are really terrified.’ And that was the extent of his answer.
That was brilliant. And what's interesting is, I now use a lot of sort of Wayneisms in front of an orchestra. Instead of talking to them quite pedagogically, he would say, you know, violas play this more like a hedgehog coming out of the hedge. And you say that to a group of violas and actually, it changes the way they play. It's great. But I thought initially that the orchestra would be a bit kind of this is just weird, but they couldn't wait for me to ask questions because they couldn't wait to hear his impressions of what they were playing and and how it was working. It was remarkable.
Michelle: Clark, that's an amazing introduction. I just want to make sure that we bring Phillip into the conversation as well. So Philip, how did you begin working with Wayne?
Phillip: So I got involved on the opera Iphigenia, which is Wayne's sort of last large-scale work, about three years ago and worked closely with Clark on that. And have since been helping Wayne with his sort of archive of works over, well, over his whole life, really. But I just want to say how great it is we're talking about Wayne's recent work. Because, you know, in the way jazz is often talked about, jazz musicians are often talked about in the media, in the press, in our culture, it's as a dead thing. It's as a museum piece, it's as a thing that is not currently happening. And not only are there young jazz artists today defying that perception, but actually, some of the great legends are still out here doing it. They're current artists, they're of our time, and they're still relevant, and they're still innovating, and they're still influencing people. And it's just great that we're here to talk about his recent work, because I think that's so important.
Michelle: Let's keep speaking. I sort of interrupted you, Clark. Were you about to elaborate on what you were saying before?
Clark: The only other point I would say that kind of goes beyond what I said with that first experience in Liverpool . . . I subsequently had the chance to do a number of other concerts with Wayne. Two or three years later, there was a tour: North Sea Jazz Festival, Perugia Jazz. And there were other things before that. Some in London, I can't remember where else actually. And one thing I always did is the orchestra would always say to me, you know, Wayne and the quartet are booked for the day before the concert and that's where rehearsals start. I would say to them, it is in your interest to have an extra day of rehearsal. I'm happy to do it for nothing. Absolutely fine, I'll pay my extra hotel, we will all have a much better time if we have a full day of rehearsal before Wayne and John and Danilo and Brian [Wayne’s jazz quartet members] come. And that was a game changer.
And that was a game changer in terms of . . . the guys are saying, wow, we're hearing things in these pieces that we've never heard before. And that's because the orchestra is getting a little bit closer to it. There’s a lot of notes, it's very dense, but that means you have to rehearse, and if you don't have the time to rehearse it, it really doesn't work. But that would have been true of The Rite of Spring in 1923 wouldn't it? But it's just, the music is incredibly original. And it is a new language and ladies and gentlemen, we're learning a new language, wouldn't be nice if we have two days instead of one? And that really has helped enormously.
Michelle: Is there any way either of you could kind of broadly characterize what's distinctive about a Wayne composition? Say you're an orchestra member, you know, you're used to playing a program that's not all dated stuff, some contemporary stuff . . . but still, what distinguishes a Wayne Shorter composition?
Clark: Phillip, I’ll start and then you could comment on the struggles and not that we had. In some ways, the language is not so unfamiliar. I mean, there's no question about the fact that Wayne is familiar with Ravel, no question that Wayne is familiar with Stravinsky. As you know, and I'm sure you've discussed with your students, he's a fanatic about science fiction films and films in general. And film, the language of film music is, I mean to say it's there or present or influential, I would say it's influential. I hope Wayne wouldn't disagree too much.
But the notes themselves are completely different. And the harmonies are completely different. What is like film music is the cinematic way in which he can go from one thing to the other. Just with such audacity and it always works. It's not that it sometimes works. It always works and you think to yourself, how did you get from that to that? And you know, you almost get the feeling that you put the score pages together in the wrong order, but it works great.
But that's hard to get used to. And, and all of these languages are unfamiliar. And like all new music, you know, it's doesn't have a lot of bowings in it and you're just learning how to understand what a staccato means in this context. A lot of the music does not have a lot of dynamics. I love that. A lot of people hate that. Because you need to work out the hierarchy through the plan of rehearsal as you would with Bach, or Purcell or Handel that also don't have dynamics. And, you know, for the orchestral musician that that wants to just say that so long as they're playing what they have on the music stand in front of them that then that's all they need to do, it's a longer process than that, as it is with Brahms and Mozart and, and all the classics. I think it is not like some music that can just be read very literal. I mean Ravel is in that case, John Adams, unbelievable comes on the part and just his craftsmanship is incredible. Janáček, for example, not. Janáček you have to really manufacture. Wayne's much more like that.
Michelle: Did you have anything to add, Phillip?
Phillip: Yeah, that last part that Clark was talking about was what I was going to mention a little bit. What's different, I think, for your average orchestral musician, looking at a piece of, at least what may feel to them as well, this is new music, this is contemporary music. They expect that if they execute exactly what the paper says, and nothing more and nothing less, they've done their job and the piece should sound well. And, like Clark is saying, you know, we don't expect that of all kinds of other music all the time.
I think Wayne's music requires people to listen a bit, how they mix with others, how they blend with others, you know, timbrelly, dynamically. And also, I think there's sort of a gestural language in Wayne's music that is not entirely like and also not entirely unlike music that they will know. So there will be times when musicians will recognize I'm playing the lead melody, or I am clearly playing a kind of contrapuntal inner voice line, people will understand these sorts of functions.
Yet, they won't be really like any other version of that, that they know. And I think that can be a little disorienting. It's kind of in that uncanny valley sometimes, when people first encounter the music. Like I know this music, but I don't know this music, like kind of how it works, how your role in it works. And I think that can take some getting used to for, for classical players and orchestras when they first encounter it.
(You can see a performance of Wayne’s piece Gaia in this video from around 8:00 to around 39:00)
Michelle: So one thing that I'd like to delve into is the creative process behind the opera Iphigenia. Can you tell us a little bit about how this all got started?
Phillip: Yeah, so I came on partway through the creative process. And my role originally was just to sort of help out, take notes, capture decisions, implement them in the score, help make edits in the score, things like that. And it quickly evolved into kind of being in the room all the time for various creative decisions. And yeah, this opera was unlike others in that, you know, what you usually have is kind of the steps are separated out: you get a librettist to write the words, a composer makes the score, sets the words, gives it to the design team, they make the piece, put it in a room, and it happens. And this piece was not so simple as that. There was a lot of music earlier on in the process.
Wayne would often intentionally, and this is something he's done, you know, in different ways throughout his life and his creative process, but intentionally give other people agency, intentionally sort of left certain types of decisions--either refuse to make them or kind of handed them off to others, almost as a gift or as an offering. He wants other people's creative minds and fingerprints to be present in his work. And I think that's always been true. He will be very, very specific in particular about some things every now and then. That's when you know, okay, that's what we're doing. Wayne said this. But that will be actually the minority of the time. Except of course, the music is written. When we ask questions, what are we going to do with this music? What will we do here? What happens after this? How should we use this? How should this be played? Often he will say, well, I need to wait and see what's going on with the scenography. I need to wait and see what's going on with the text. Before these other people make make their contributions, I don't know the answer to that yet.
I could go into more detail, but the process was very much influenced by that kind of mentality that we were often working together. And fitting one piece of the puzzle, so that we could find the other piece, so that we can find the other piece so that eventually, this sort of Frankenstein could be put put together.
Clark: I think it's great to acknowledge that that's incredibly common. Nobody plays the entirety of The Marriage of Figaro. Nobody plays the entirety of Carmen. Most of the Handel operas, you'll probably only ever hear about two thirds of it.
I just want to echo how I felt so privileged to be given, as Phillip said, the trust and the agency from Wayne. Right, he loves Frankenstein, and we really called it that a lot of the time because we were piecing these things together. And there were times when he would he would deliver, as is often true of orchestral scores, as I talked about earlier, these multilayered things that need to be rehearsed on a lot. And I said to him, you know, Wayne, we said many times, you know, it's okay if we just take some of these layers out. There are some moments in Act Two where we have nothing but the bass line, you know, nothing but the bass line and someone's speaking at the top of it. There are other points where we would just decide that this battle scene maybe went on a bit long, so we would alter layers, bring in layers, take out layers.
And Wayne, he expected that of us because he's used to dealing with people who make decisions. Danilo, John, Brian, you know, in the most recent iterations of that, to which he trusts totally to--I mean, a description my partner Tansy Davies, a great composer, says he sort of expects you to read the tea leaves.
Michelle: Clark, something with these orchestral works began coming together in a way it hadn't before when you began conducting in particular. Can you talk a little bit more about your approach to conducting Wayne’s orchestral work?
Clark: I can probably do it by giving it a very simple example that didn't involve Wayne's music. I have worked quite a bit with the great tango player Pablo Ziegler, who is the pianist in Astor Piazzolla's band for the last 20 years of his life. So you're playing music that orchestras—you do that with an orchestra, and they absolutely think they know how that goes. Everybody's heard Piazzolla, and then you're sitting next to those guys [tango musicians]. And then you say to them [the orchestra], listen, gentlemen, we're playing absolutely all the right rhythms. But it doesn't sound anything like they do. How can we solve that?
And this then comes back to a point maybe I made a little bit earlier. It has to become more like chamber music and more like Handel and Purcell. So ladies and gentlemen, just listen to the way that Brian or Danilo or John are playing this. Just play that once for us guys, and listen to how they're phrasing that. And the fact that we're engaging, that I would engage constantly in those discussions doesn't mean that the piece is inaccurately notated. You couldn't notate that inflection. You can also blind your musicians with so much information that they can't actually put, you know, a bow to a string.
My philosophy has always been to treat it like any normal piece of music where we just need to listen. We're not reading. Just listen to the way they play this. But you can only do that if you have enough time. If you have enough time so that the musicians are not simply saying, look, I can't listen, 75% of my brain is just trying to play these notes, because they're hard. And the pieces are long, they're not short. Iphigenia is like, how many pages is the first violin part? Phillip, you probably know. I mean, it's long, it's, you know, it's like that [stretches out his arms]
And even pieces like Gaia, you know, which is truly one of the great works of the last 50 years for orchestra--I really think it's incredible. It's tough, it's 35 minutes; it's not 15 minutes of orchestra and 20 minutes of improvisation by the guys. It is 30 minutes of written out stuff and maybe three, four or five minutes that might be a little bit open or might not. But the structure and the narrative and the vision is vast. A new 35 minute piece by Augusta Read Thomas or Chaya Czernowin or something, I mean, holy smokes, you'd expect to rehearse that a lot, you know. So it's challenging. And you need to get to a certain point in the notes, to be able to then listen and say, you know, I don't really believe the inflection. Let's play this a bit more like them.
Phillip: I just want to jump in with something that I want to make sure I say during this class. You just reminded me of it, Clark. It's the simplest thing. But it's one of those things that's so simple, it's sometimes easy to overlook. About Wayne's approach to putting, you know, folks like, like John, Brian, Danilo, and himself in the context of an orchestra, which numerous people have done over the years.
But the biggest difference I see is that Wayne doesn't write a part for the band. He writes an orchestra piece, a full orchestra piece that, frankly, could stand alone without the band. Completely, as a great piece, as Clark is saying. And he merely puts the band in there. And he gives them a reduction, he gives them a bass part. That's all they need, and they do their thing.
So you're not in this sort of unhappy marriage between two ways of making music, two sounds, one amplified, one not, with a section of written out stuff, a section of improvised stuff that you often find in these attempts. You're in this kind of completely new synthesis that is no longer an orchestra piece or a quartet improvising. It's both the entire time and it becomes vastly greater than the sum of its parts. And that simple decision not to make a part for the band, not to have a Danilo part and a John part and a Brian part is hugely important to that. I think we could all we could all learn from that.
Clark and I are both in different areas working on this, this being the future of Wayne's music, with some other people, of course. But this music needs performances, and it needs real performances with real rehearsals, like Clark is saying. It needs to not sort of be in the gutter, excuse my language. But you know, it needs to be properly played the way a new piece of Thomas Ades or whoever would be, given that sort of attention.
And it needs to be recorded, this music needs to be recorded. My role in that is trying to get the scores and the actual materials in a state so that they can be easily published and distributed to orchestras so that they can they can actually be played. Because the way it works is basically orchestras are generally going to choose the path of least resistance. If it's complex to actually acquire these materials, they're gonna say, well, we have we have a big library right here. We'll just play something else. So that's, that's kind of my role. Clark, I'm sure, can talk about, the kinds of things that we're trying to make happen.
I think part of what's missing with Wayne's music is a performance practice around it. The way we have with various other . . . we know how to play Messiaen now. We know how to play Bartok. We know how to play these composers. And Clark is, if there's anyone on this planet, the one who's contributing to that the most. And so, you know, we need Clark to be given more opportunities in front of orchestras to develop this performance practice. And also, we need new conductors also to start to take it on.
And of course, there's nothing like having John, Brian, and Danilo play this music. But I think it's worth saying, someday, maybe sooner not later, other people are going to play this music too. And in fact, it's not someday, it's already happened. There's been a performance of Gaia with with a different quartet. So maybe you want to talk about that too, Clark. But we need to expand this music so that it can fully be realized, because it's really only once an understanding in the musical community of how this music should be played and can work—until that happens that it really is born and has a life and blossoms.
Clark: Again, in terms of things that can't be understated. Phillip's digitizing of this . . . I probably thought that I had a reasonable handle on how much music for orchestra Wayne had actually written. Because I've probably done at least as many concerts with him as anybody else. And, you know, there's Lotus and Prometheus and Pegasus and Three Marias and Aurora, and Gaia, of course, and I could probably name about six or seven titles. And maybe I thought there would have been couple more. And then it became clear--because you've visited his house and I'd not yet been there--that there was a lot more than that. And so we just got into a Houston, there's a problem scenario. Because, you know, he lives in California, they have fires. Walking into his house is like walking into a house in the south of France that nobody knew Picasso used to live in and there's just Picassos all over the wall, and you're thinking there's a fire just around the corner. Can somebody sort this out?
Yes, it needs to be published. One thing that will make sure that it stays alive is there's a lot more of it than any of us had imagined. If there were only two or three pieces . . . one of the problems with Ellington, for example, they're not that many Ellington orchestral scores. It's unfortunate that Milhaud only wrote La Creation du Monde and not so much else in a jazzy idiom. Isn't it such a bummer that Gershwin died in his 30s? You know, we could do with a lot more pieces like that. And so really, really successful pieces by jazz musicians, as you talk about learning language and performance practice, there just aren't that many of them that are really easily accessible.
His status, and the sheer quality of the music when it becomes accessible, meaning as in the way that Philip talks about it . . . It's not easy to play. But it's certainly absolutely cast iron possible to play the thing incredibly well if you work at it. And generally speaking, we're not afraid of work. We just need enough time to do the work, orchestral musicians. Then they think to themselves, wow, how much more is there? God, there's loads more? And it's brilliant, and it's through composed. And yes, there are moments where, as Phillip rightly says, different jazz musicians will bring different things. And I mean, Wayne would love that. They never played the same . . . I mean, all the gigs I did with them, they were so wildly different in what they did and that's why they're so great. That's why you can't not go to Wayne Shorter gig, you never know what's gonna happen.
Thanks again to Clark and Phillip for this October 2022 interview, and for all their valuable ongoing work. Special thanks to Esperanza Spalding, another keeper of the flame.
For you paid subscribers, audio of this interview is below, just over the paywall. You may notice a few rough cuts where I’ve removed my questions and comments.
Maybe I’ll see you at one of the symphonic tributes . . .
This is absolutely tremendous. Gonna share it widely.
Thanks so much for this beautiful and insightful article Michelle! I can't wait for next week to explore Wayne's work in Poland. A real dream coming true.