A Group Improvisation by the Tone Road Ramblers

This is a long-awaited opportunity for me to write about the Tone Road Ramblers when readers can experience one of their improvisations without its being through the abstraction of prose only. The video comes to us with thanks to Eric Mandat. It can also be viewed on YouTube.

Morgan Powell

As it’s currently constituted, the personnel of the Tone Road Ramblers are: Morgan Powell and James Staley, trombones, and Ray Sasaki, trumpet. These three are original members who have been playing together since founding the collective in 1981. Eric Mandat, the clarinetist and percussionist of odd hand instruments, came in 1989, and though Howie Smith, with his bouquet of saxophone voices (ranging from soprano through contra-bass) has been with the group in one way or another for years, he officially replaced flutist John

Ray Sasaki

Fonville a couple of years ago. Only recently have they been without a formal percussionist, and they find that it’s okay. By nature, the best improvisers are firmly grounded realists, requiring no magic to spin gold from straw. For them, there’s no important difference between them anyway. If you listen, you’ll understand where and how such distinctions dissolve.

I have written about this organization and its members many times before, in Starr Review, New Music Box, and in my book, Sounding OurDepths: The Music of Morgan Powell (2014). Yet, thanks to Eric Mandat’s filming, this is the first time I’ve had video footage from a concert that I could use to show what it is so difficult to tell without the experience. How does the writer translate what is literally inarticulate into words? (See the post before this, in which Ray Sasaki’s helpfully asserts that playing the trumpet is speech for him).

James Staley

The Ramblers generously answer questions during breaks during their concerts because their unique music leaves many with more questions than vocabulary. Let me share a precis of responses to their FAQs:

Everything you hear is spontaneous. It is unrehearsed; there is no initial plan or “setup.” There isn’t a plan about who will play first: Someone will, and there is no discomfort with silence until someone stirs.

TRR has no leader. Ensemble members play (or refrain from playing) in response to what they hear their colleagues playing. No one is waiting their turn. As Ray Sasaki explains it, they are having a conversation that has a life of its own. If we accept the idea that each musician has been speaking with his instrument for most of his life, we are listening in on conversation that takes the many tones conversations do: quiet, calm, argumentative, silly, reminiscent, irritable, celebratory and all the rest. In conversation, sometimes one has nothing to add, or recognizes that he would only interrupt the flow. Sometimes his contribution will deepen it, and sometimes he has  a lot to say. This model may help guide your listening.

Howie Smith

The conversational model also helps listeners organize the experience that is distinctive for having none of the traditional markers we normally depend on to direct us in music: no beat (necessarily), no measured sections, no dependence on Western scales, nothing to guide a listener’s expectations. The music is made of sound, incident, and the ever-occurring present that asks you neither to linger nor to jump ahead. Just listen with the concentration of an eavesdropper: You are all attention, never knowing what surprising gem will come your way, and your heart will race.

Many anticipate chaos at the very idea of group improvisation but listening—and watching—will quickly dispel this notion. This is not a free-for-all, but the production of highly refined musicianship as execution and listening both. Chaos would result from simultaneous exertion of ego, each performer closed to what is going on around him and determined to make his own point. 

Clearly, these musicians aren't in competition with one another but in cooperation. They respond to the sound environment rhythmically and tonally, and they participate in the creation of atmospheres and impulses that will create a whole. They trade places in the composition, moving as the music develops between foreground and background, sometimes supporting with underlying chords or rhythmic punctuations, at other times asserting themselves with outbursts or long lyric lines. All this is executed so fluently that it is often difficult to distinguish voices so protean that they are often unrecognizable from their orchestral exemplars. 

Eric Mandat (courtesy of Rex Gaskins)

The point is not the individual voices, but the experience of a developing composition. Consider the breadth of sounds lavished on the ear and their disposition vis-a-vis one another. These combinations of sound, new to listeners, are new to the performers creating them in the moment. This music occurs because the musicians have made it a practice for over thirty-five years to override deeply-rooted Western musical rules and to free instincts about how to use their instruments—their voices—and what music is in the first place. The Ramblers' conclusion that freedom disconcerts audiences trained to believe that constraints—structure, form and fixed relationships—define music.

But works of art, however they are created, must have limits and feel whole. Performances and compositions, once begun, convince listeners that they've not only stopped but concluded. Ramblers performances will never end with the resolutions of nineteenth-century symphonies, our beloved standard for The End. The frequently-asked question to the Ramblers, "How do you know when it's over?" is not only legitimate, but of great concern to audience members asked to suspend most of their musical information to listen in the first place. 

As with making the music, the decision to conclude a piece is a group decision. Like all their decisions at every point, it could go any number of ways and it depends on what they are collectively and individually hearing. When they hear the possibility of completion, there is no necessity of doing so. If some one or two have more to say, the music will continue, refreshed. But when it ends, it ends with a conclusion—but it's one of countless possibilities in the continuum of sound and silence from which improvised music is made.

The Tone Road Ramblers: "Always Some Surprises"

Thirty-two is a good age: At thirty-two, we are smart, energetic and ready to take on the world. 

The power of a musical ensemble at thirty-two? It's off the charts. For a group to reach thirty-two with original members is remarkable in the first place. Rarely do six musicians have a history of cooperative musical and personal relationships deep enough to withstand the many challenges to solidarity posed by the sawing edges of personality, taste, and ambition. 

Tone Road Ramblers on the stage at Roulette, March 1, 2013. Photo by Doron Sadja for Roulette.

The Tone Road Ramblers have such strength, flexibility, and love. They formed as a leaderless ensemble to play experimental concert music, and their music continues to be renewed by the life experience and musical passions of its members. Personal openness and second-nature sensitivities to the world of sound have led them to create a nonpareil, protean, yet timeless music. 

Jim Staley. Photo by Doron Sadja.

The Ramblers arose out of relationships established at the University of Illinois School of Music. Now far flung as virtuosos with eminent careers, four founding members knew each other and played together in Champaign-Urbana during the late 1970s. They are composer and trombonist Morgan Powell; Jim Staley, trombonist and founder-director of Roulette, the New York venue for new music and performance; composer John Fonville, maestro of the flute in all its forms, and professor at the University of San Diego; and Ray Sasaki, virtuoso of jazz and classical trumpet both, and professor at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin. (Powell and Sasaki have appeared before in this blog in the September, 2012 article about Jazz Sextet: The Champaign Connection.)

I have written before about clarinetist and new music specialist, Eric Mandat, professor at Southern Illinois University, who joined the ensemble during the mid '80s, replacing the original clarinetist. Ron Coulter, a senior lecturer in percussion, also at Southern Illinois, in 2012 became the third percussionist with the ensemble. 

John Fonville and Morgan Powell. Photo by Doron Sadja.

With its core of enduring relationships, the ensemble's members are cooperative and patient; it's no wonder that their performances seem to come as the result of instinct. 

The Ramblers' primary mode is group improvisation. They appear on stage as a new music ensemble in the traditions of classical music: They arrange themselves formally in a "U" and remain seated; they read music from stands some of the time, thus disguising from the audience the long passages they improvise within scored work. Their core interest in improvisation is, in fact, usually associated with jazz. 

Powell, Sasaki, and Staley are all jazz musicians. Sasaki splits his time between jazz and classical trumpet, teaching a large studio from which his students go into both types of professional work. Powell plays jazz day-to-day. Having been brought up with the big band music, his heart is now deeply devoted to traditional jazz. From his Illinois days, Staley moved from traditional and mid-century jazz into free jazz and the avant-garde. 

Fonville and Mandat weren't raised with early training in jazz or improvisation. They each have played a variety of classical, world, new, and electronic musics, though Mandat's love of klezmer has taken him into that spontaneous, ornamental tradition.  

Eric Mandat. Photo by Doron Sadja.

In traditional jazz, musicians improvise as soloists, one at a time, within a formal structure that dictates when and for how many measures each will take a solo. They know the key, they know the tune, and, if they've played it often enough, some of their improvisation may even have become a matter of "licks," or  habitual patterns they've developed to fill the solo-improvisation spaces; spontaneous creation has taken the back seat.

Sasaki likens group improvisation to conversation in the sense that everyone has something to say and through listening to the others finds the best way to say it. The conversation will be as rich, intelligent, and interesting as the participants are attentive to their interlocutors. If no one is listening, nothing will come of the intercourse; no one will have an appropriate response or gambit; there will be no definition or sense to the flow of words.

The Ramblers do play some scored music written by its members. These works often include sections of unspecified duration open for group improvisation. Such writing is characteristic of Powell and Mandat. In Powell's daFunkaMonkus, played at their March performance at the University of Texas, there is a staged, pugnacious verbal discussion among the ensemble members about committing to their musical ideas—"playing their own way"—despite audience objections. The rough dialogue leads into an exciting extended quotation about jazz from W. C. Handy, which points the listener to a big connection between Rambler music and its roots in the impulses of jazz—to the freedom and the drive toward change and surprise. This passage is sampled here from TRR's University of Texas dress rehearsal of Morgan Powell's DaFunkusMonkus on March 27, 2013.

It might seem at first blush that group improvisation would create a chaos: sounds from six performers who "do their own things" simultaneously—the ultimate clash of self-involved cross-purposes. In fact, it is the result of exquisitely attuned listening, focused on knowing where the individual can be make the clearest, most relevant, useful, and distinctive contribution. 

Roulette, on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Photo by
Angela Gaspar.

The Ramblers' brief tour during March took them to the University of Texas at Austin and to Roulette in New York City. Their concert at the University of Texas contained scored works by Powell, Mandat, and Sal Martirano, as well as improvisations. The New York concert, at Roulette in Brooklyn, was improvisations exclusively.

John Fonville. Photo by
Doron Sadja

Roulette has graciously provided rough cuts of recordings from the Ramblers' April 1 New York concert that I've sampled here to give my readers some idea of the range of sounds and the level of mutuality both of mind and virtuosity that this music demands. In SAMPLE no. 1 we hear flutist John Fonville open a piece supported by percussionist Colson. One Fonville creates the sound of at least two flutes through his mastery of overtones produced fluently, in flight, in an atmosphere shaded by the use of a subtle palette of microtones. These tones between the scale tones we are attuned to place his sound in neither minor nor major key, but in a zone of his own devising. So delicately, so vividly, so dramatically, Fonville initiates this group improvisation. It's not hard at all to understand how the rest of the ensemble will become charged with ideas and energy from the get-go. 

Ray Sasaki's lyrical trumpet leads to the close of another improvisation in SAMPLE #2. The beauty of his playing can only be experienced: his level of control over dynamics and seemingly endless phrases uninterrupted by perceptible breathing; the molten quality of his sound into which he injects brief passages of tonguing as quick and light as attacks of hummingbirds. Here, he plays blues in a way that proves the evolution that Handy spoke of. This is not blues as structure: there are no measures to count off, but a languorous, sensuous, mournful beauty; a necklace to which the ensemble attaches charms and pendants of differing weights and colors. His line is ornamented by the sounds that accrue to it. And still Sasaki delivers a seductively personal, conversational tone. It's not the tone of a man talking to himself; I think he's talking above the crowd, to us.

Ron Coulter. Photo by Doron Sadja.

I chose this THIRD SAMPLE to
show how adroitly the Ramblers propel themselves through a spontaneous composition—for it's important to understand that they are not merely making sounds together until they lose steam, but that they are executing a spontaneously created composition. Their improvisations have beginnings, middles, and ends, with evident transitions along the way. On one of their CDs on the Einstein label, Tone Road Ramblers: The Ragdale Years , all of the tracks are improvised. Lacking awareness of this fact, there is nothing to suggest that they are not playing from scored parts. 

In this sample, the ensemble is moved from the massed urgency of low, dense voices by the entrance of the piccolo, which cuts through the rumbling just as a fife is meant to do. The new voice redirects the trombones and calls forth sounds similar to its own. Lilting bird songs respond to the dance of the piccolo. The bird songs are generated by: bird calls. Coulter manages the Ramblers' serious arsenal of noise-making toys that are used throughout, as inspiration guides them.

The Roulette Store is the best source for Tone Road Rambler CDs and for CDs by Staley, Fonville, and Powell issued on the Einstein label. The iTunes Store also carries three albums and the individual tracks (including The Ragdale Years and their most recent, Dancing with the Ramblers, with music by Fonville, Mandat, and Powell.)

For a more in-depth profile of the Ramblers, the reader can access an article by this author posted on Powell's website: Off the Charts. 

DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott: This is Improvisation

Derek DiCenzo, Dave DeWitt, Aaron Scott

Dave DeWitt, piano. Derek DiCenzo, bass. Aaron Scott, drums. This jazz trio has been improvising around Columbus since the late '80s. Jazz; improvisation. Inseparable, right?

Yes and no. There's improvisation...and then there's improvisation.When a jazz ensemble begins a tune, they establish the melody first. Usually it's a widely recognized standard song from a great composer of the early-to-mid twentieth century, like George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, or Jule Styne; songs you know, like "There Will Never Be Another You," "[Take the] A-Train," or "Skylark." Or, it may be a jazz tune derived directly from one of those great, standard songs. 

After the tune's first chorus is set down, the musicians trade improvised solos based on the progression of chords used in the melody. By "improvised," we mean, generally, that they wing it. Their muscle memory and their ear knowledge allow them spontaneously to invent variations on the tune while adhering to the structures that tie those variations, however bold or soaring, to the melody.

The ideas of improvisation, spontaneity, and uniqueness in jazz intertwine. But if a group has two or three gigs a week, how can those improvised solos continue to be genuinely spontaneous night after night? Isn't it inevitable that the musicians will develop "licks" or patterns they like, feel comfortable with, or wish to continue exploring? Does spontaneity have to imply uniqueness, the result of continual reinvention? Is non-repetition even a possibility for musical creativity? Wouldn't that be to invoke a god-like standard of conceptual fertility?

We who follow DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott—variously appearing as the ADD Trio, TRio, Aaron Scott Trio, Derek DiCenzo, or Dave DeWitt Trio—can make it our week's work to attend the two or three gigs that hard-working Scott books for them. We can hear them play "Moon River" many times over. So one might assume that sooner or later, we'd start to pay more attention to our drinks than to repertory we'd presumably heard before.

Dave DeWitt. Author photo.

This emphatically doesn't happen. Every performance by this trio starts in a galaxy far, far away, from which we witness the emergence of a new star. We in the audience arrive as musical newborns. We struggle even to grasp the tune, for even the musicians aren't sure, as they set out, where they are headed, let alone in what key. These are jazz improvisers in the radical sense. 

The trio is the house band for Becky Ogden's Jazz Bungalow. On November 4th they opened the first set for a Jazz Brunch with the following set up by Dave DeWitt on the piano. Put yourself in the shoes of the bassist and drummer, preparing yourself for the tune emerging HERE. What is it? I still don't know. Clearly, the first premises of the music are trust and anticipation.

Making music that coalesces into standard tunes, the trio depends on pianist DeWitt to let his hands and imagination wend their ways through rhythmic thickets and chordal tides for as long as it takes DiCenzo and Scott—and DeWitt himself—to figure out what they are playing. When everything falls together (it can take the audience even longer to figure out what the tune is), the band surges, often beyond the information of the moment. The ambiguous, novel puzzle of DeWitt's question—the antithesis of the normal "statement"—makes each performance of the same tune a unique event for musicians and listeners alike. Given this device the trio has chosen for setting up each tune, there simply is no possibility of repetition. As you watch as well as listen, you can see these guys literally sweating to pull it off; you can see and hear the hits and misses, the facial telegraphing of the hits and misses, the pleasure, panic, and pains of improvisation. And it is good.

I love this antic, all-out, seven-and-a-half-minute performance of a tune I didn't identify until several minutes along, the name of which you'll find with the following YouTube of its simple version. This tune gives ADD at its best: The statement-as-question, the headlong playing, the unity on-the-fly. I've decided not to excerpt this or the following tunes. I simply don't know how to interrupt such driving music, and my will to try is weak. So HERE it is. You can compare it to a simple rendition, the perfect material for a "tune with variations," copied from YouTube HERE.

Derek DiCenzo. Author photo.

The music this ensemble makes is molten, always hot and taking shape, but never solidified into a state of rest, even up to the last second. Only in retrospect can the listener, like the musicians, begin to analyze what happened; only when there's time to exhale and laugh off the tension can anyone begin sorting through all the musical quotations, key changes, and collective exhibition of forms, styles, and rhythms of Western music.

The gigs that this trio play are divided into sets. Unlike others', though, the sets are not exactly divided into tunes separated by time during which the crowd applauds and the musicians reset. Usually, there is barely a break between one number and the next. DeWitt is loath to let the energy lapse and keeps his hands on the keyboard, roiling the notes until the next tune unravels itself. In some groups, this would be the means of making a medley of tunes, but that's never what DeWitt is setting up. For these guys, the performance unit is the set, not the tune, so their energy is wave-like, increasing in pressure throughout the hour. The lack of space between the tunes gives the listener the heady sense of riding a wave that is gaining height and force until it exhausts itself in a crash—as these musicians literally come close  to doing by set's end.

To illustrate the persistence and push of a performance, on this 8-1/2 minute sample is the closing of "On Green Dolphin Street" and the full performance of the Latin classic, "Fungi Mama." Listen HERE.

How do DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott generate music of such size, energy, and originality? For one thing, by being nonpareil musicians. For another, by being playmates. One has a sense of them as being in an eternal clubhouse: At one minute they're the chess nerds, and the next they are covered in grease, taking apart car engines.

Aaron Scott. Author photo.

Scott is unstoppable both as drummer and impresario: He will get work for his phenomenal group, and he does, even in  tight times. He's been booking since his twenties, when he returned to town from North Texas State where he went on scholarship. Even then he began booking for himself and for the city's top jazz musicians with whom he was playing, including his father, pianist Bob Allen. Booking, and playing, Scott was also teaching at Columbus Percussion Center and enrolled at Capital University to complete his degree. He's a man whose excellence on his instrument is paralleled by his knowledge of talent and determination that it will not go empty-handed. He will also not let talent go without attracting it to his own.

DeWitt and DiCenzo are madmen; naturals, whose music wells up from inner springs. Both are self-taught musical polymaths. 

I first knew the mercurial DeWitt as a premier bassist when I came to Columbus ten years ago, and was surprised when I first heard him on the keyboards, making astonishing music. Yet, as it seems, many know him primarily as a drummer. DeWitt explains that he began playing piano at age 3, even before his musician father knew that he could; his parents thought he had been simply pecking at the instrument in the garage. He confesses to a lifelong "love/hate relationship" with piano, the hate side of which led him to give it up in his teens and to take up drums, again on his own.

DeWitt returned to piano for a decade but in his mid-thirties (during the '80s), he turned to the string bass. "I was seldom happy with the bassists I played with, so I decided I'd do it myself," he grins. "I really liked it. I like being in the middle of the rhythm section."

Dave DeWitt. Author photo.

Indeed, the relationship between piano and bass in this trio is arresting, for the two instruments occupy virtually equal positions—DeWitt cites the relationship between pianist Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro as an admirable example. Although the piano "leads" in the sense of insuring that each tune becomes the strand picked from the knot, this is not at all a "piano trio." Actually, it's not a trio led by any voice: It's a three-part conversation. Even the pianist plays all three instruments.

As does the bassist. Derek DiCenzo, too, like his colleagues, has supported himself by his music in Columbus since the '80s. He, too, is largely self-taught. He reads music, as DeWitt does not, but he makes it clear that he is in another world from the great "technicians" of conservatory and college with whom he often plays in the Columbus Jazz Orchestra and on tours. 

I originally identified DiCenzo with guitar and electric bass. Then I heard him on upright bass, as in this group. But these are just the start: He also gigs on piano, Hammond B3 organ, drums, steel drums, and accordion. On special occasions, he can be convinced to bring and play his theremin.

Derek DiCenzo. Author photo.

On the occasion of this recording, the second of two sets ended with the musicians literally close to physical collapse, yet in a nervous state of exhausted euphoria. Scott threw down his sticks, laughing to DiCenzo, of the last tune, "All the Things You Are," "Man! We were swinging by the seat of our pants!" DiCenzo responded incredulously, "Where are the beats? What am I doing up here? This is crazy stuff!" Laughing, "You'd think we'd rehearse or something!"

Yet when I talked with DiCenzo a few minutes later, he assured me that of all the work he does, playing almost daily, this is "what makes me feel like a great musician." As he explains this, I know exactly what he means, because I've heard everything. He says that, "It's not just filling up the space with notes. It's crazily fresh," because the three of them have "a perfect hook-up" that allows "great accidents to happen." And, best of all, it is the most basic form of improvisation, the complete opposite of playing from scored music. "You don't practice at home to go play the same notes that you practiced. The music happens. I love it. It's unlike anything else." He nails his words with the hammer of his voice.

DiCenzo, Scott, and DeWitt play with love and abandon. They joke about calling themselves the ADD Trio (for Aaron, Derek and Dave) with the implications ("attention deficit disorder") of frantic, turn-on-a-dime energy. Maybe, given that each member is absolutely crucial to the existence of the music they make, they should try something like The Codependents, or Dave DeWitt and the Enablers. 

The intensity of their abandoned playing—the all out, sweaty, no-breaks and no-brakes leap—does indeed make me marvel at the energy they generate for work that leaves them at the end both exhausted and possessed. Coming down from a session like this would seem to be as difficult as playing it; the consequences of returning to earth after such a euphoria of ideas, adrenaline, and fiery creativity could require as much attention, balance, and management as making the music itself.

Those of us on the audience side of jazz enjoy the privilege of sitting at the table, knowing how richly we enjoy the feast. But we are as gourmets to cooks, savoring the dishes without having had to slit any throats. It seems so little to applaud musicians like these, who can take us to heights of joy as we simply listen, while they get there by sweating blood.

Listen HERE to DeWitt, DiCenzo and Scott play "My Funny Valentine."