Pianist and composer Burton Greene gained a measure of fame when he recorded free jazz for avant-garde music label ESP-Disk in the ’60s, but his pioneering work has influenced pop music in circumspect fashion. Like the equally celebrated improvising pianist Cecil Taylor, whose balletic style referred to jazz while incorporating the approaches of various American and European composers, Greene attempted to burn off the accumulated flab of bebop — a style of jazz that was by then 25 years old — in an era that was notable for the emergence of such demotic pop musicians as The Beatles. Working with bassist Henry Grimes and a band that included saxophonists Frank Smith and Marion Brown, Greene cut the 1965 full-length Burton Greene Quartet, a milestone in improvised music. He may be best known for his ESP work, but Greene has experimented with synthesizers, recorded klezmer music and essayed straight-ahead hard bop during his 50-plus-year career. As he makes clear below, he applies his smarts and his robust pianistic technique to any music he deems worthy.
I caught up with Greene, who is 80 and lives in Amsterdam, during a break in his current North American tour. The Chicago native makes his first Nashville appearance Saturday at Fond Object, and his solo performance will afford listeners an opportunity to hear a world-class jazz pianist who is also one of the world’s finest improvising musicians. Although his free work retains its savor — check out his eldritch accompaniment of vocalist Patty Waters on her 13-minute reading of a folk tune, “Black Is the Color (Of My True Love’s Hair),” recorded for ESP in late 1965 — he digs into tunes by pianists Jaki Byard, Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk on his new full-length Compendium, released in May on the Improvising Beings label. You may hear traces of the influence of Monk, Silver, Herbie Nichols and Randy Weston in Greene’s playing, but he remains a free man working in a circumscribed cultural moment.
Burton, you’re known for your ESP-Disk recordings in the mid-’60s, but your discography is extensive. Tell us what you’ve been doing recently.
I’ve done about 80 records and CDs since then, but a lot of people still just know me from the early stuff. That’s 50 years ago, you know. Do you know about my latest record, Compendium? It’s recorded in Amsterdam with the guys I’ve been working with for years, like Roberto Haliffi, a great drummer. I’m also working with [German composer and vocalist] Silke Röllig, who I’ve worked with for many years. She’s kind of my spiritual partner — she’s in Germany, in Cologne, and we have a duo record [2015‘s Space Is Still the Place] out on Improvising Beings.
What influenced you in your early years in Chicago? I know you studied classical music and jazz, and you went to see jazz performances on Chicago’s South Side in the late ’50s.
Unfortunately, people have been brainwashed forever by Broadway, Madison Avenue and Hollywood. I grew up in Chicago, so I really got it: I got Hollywood in one ear and Madison Avenue in the other until I eschewed the whole thing. It took a stint in the army to make me wake up to the fact that I was like a Pavlov’s dog and I better get out of the whole scene. After I got out of the army, I wanted to get out of Chicago, and I went out to California in ‘60, ‘61. I heard all this great stuff that [jazz critic] Martin Williams was sending from New York. [Williams hosted a radio program, The Art of Jazz, which was broadcast in the early ‘60s.] I heard Eric Dolphy and Cecil [Taylor], Jaki Byard, the great [Charles] Mingus stuff, Ornette [Coleman]. I heard all this stuff, and San Francisco was still ensconced in the bebop scene, and I said, “Let me out of here.” I already knew when I was 19 or 20 that the bebop scene had been cleaned out. All I was when I was 19 was a Bud Powell clone, so I had to go past that.
What was it like playing with Chicago jazz musicians?
The lesson, especially from black musicians in Chicago, was “Be yourself — don’t copy nobody.” They were really irate. They didn’t care how many notes you played or how correct you were in the form or whatever. They really wanted you to be personal. I knew they had cleaned it out, and I heard this great open music coming from New York, and I made a beeline. I met [bassist] Alan Silva within six months of being in New York, and I moved in his place on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Alan and I, without realizing it, had formed the first band in the world to play total open-communications music without a chart, for two and a half years. That was the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble. There’s only one record extant of those recordings, and there’s a bunch of stuff buried somewhere — tied up in escrow somewhere — in Queens.
The ’60s was an incredibly fertile decade for innovative music, from your work to the music pop and rock artists like The Beatles and James Brown were doing. Were you listening to rock and pop back then?
What I liked about the ’60s is that we all hung out together. I hung out with [Frank] Zappa, and I stayed with his pianist, Don Preston, when I was in Woodstock [N.Y.] sometimes. I was listening to The Jefferson Airplane and The Who and the Stones and everybody. The only thing we were against was the establishment BS in Vietnam and all the crap that went on. We were against the political establishment and we still are.
I take it you’re a student of Thelonious Monk’s music, Burton.
I consider him the father of free jazz, actually. Without Monk, there would have been no Cecil Taylor or the rest of us. Just a simple thing that I love to play is this tune that hardly anyone else plays, but I love it: “Shuffle Boil.” The bass line he wrote for Wilbur Ware, I guess, is in E-flat,but the tune is in F. So he’s already heard the bitonal shit from Stravinsky or Bartok or whoever he listened to. I thought he was weird even when I was playing free jazz. I didn’t get him until the late ’70s. He was so basic and so innocent — he never showed off.
You’ve played electronic instruments during your career, I believe.
I did the first jazz synthesizer recording for Columbia in ’68, when I overdubbed the Moog synthesizer. The album is Presenting Burton Greene, and [Columbia executive and producer] John Hammond [Sr.] produced it. Hammond always wanted to be contemporary, and he thought free jazz was taking over New York, if not the world. We did a very nice record, man, and Columbia buried it within four months.
What are your solo sets like these days?
I’ll do some free stuff, and also some tunes. Playing just totally free is one modus operandi. It’s only one way to play. Deliberately bringing controlled form or something, there’s a whole other way to approach it, so it gives the ear a rest. There’s no mountain without a valley. I like contrast. I might do something totally out and then something totally in. “In” and “out” is just bourgeois. Music is either magic and timeless or it’s nothing.
