Photograph by Chris Woltmann
A few years ago, Brooklyn-based composer and percussionist Lukas Ligeti told the New York Times: “I’m like a griot, and the tradition of my griot clan is to do something new.”
If you think you recognize the name of that clan, you probably do: Ligeti's father is Hungarian composer György Ligeti. Even if you are not an electronic or classical music fan, you'd recognize his work from the films of Stanley Kubrick, who used it to score parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. The Times piece compared and contrasted son and father, but as Lukas Ligeti notes, he is striving to make work that is completely new, even if he bears some influences from his famous father. His evocation of the griot tradition was not frivolous and speaks of another deep influence; in 1994, the Goethe Instutute sent Ligeti to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to teach music workshops. Since then, he's traveled the continent of Africa, and it's deeply influenced his music and his life. His work is the assimilation of many other influences, too, including jazz, heavy metal, pop, electronica, and the work that's come out of New York's downtown experimentalist scene. HEARding Cats Collective brings Ligeti to St. Louis this Friday, mere days after Innova Recordings released his latest CD, Pattern Time.
St. Louis Magazine: So you’re playing something called a marimba lumina…and that’s going to be your primary instrument when you play here in St. Louis?
Lukas Ligeti: It’s going to be my only instrument. I’m doing a solo concert on this instrument. It’s a MIDI controller, so it’s an instrument that’s connected to another instrument—in my case, a laptop—and it tells the laptop what to do. But if you look at it from the top, it looks like a marimba. And it’s got malletting keys arranged on the top surface. Inside of those keys are coils, and so the whole thing works with magnetic fields; there are the coils inside the keys, and coils inside my mallets. And then there’s magnetic fields between those two coils. I actually have color-coded mallets that generate magnetic fields of different frequencies. The instrument recognizes which one of the mallets is hitting it, and I can program it independently. According to that, I can also use the mallets like sliders, like a mixing board. It’s a very, very sophisticated and versatile instrument.
SLM: And what you’ll be playing—it’ll be stuff off the new CD?
LL: I have a CD with pieces for the marimba lumina, and it’s called Afrikan Machinery. It’s out on the Tzadik label. The new CD, Pattern Time—that actually has its release day today [April 26]—is completely different music. It’s a CD of improvised music with four really great musicians coming more out of a jazz background, and in one case, Aly Keïta, from an African traditional music background, from the Ivory Coast. It’s a little confusing, because that CD is new, and the music that I’m actually playing at these concerts is from a different CD...I have some other selections, some new pieces that aren’t on the CD, but it’s that kind music, from my solo electronics album. There will be another one coming at some point, but Afrikan Machinery has marimba lumina pieces on it, and Pattern Time doesn’t. In fact, when I recorded Pattern Time—it was actually recorded 10 years ago—I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a marimba lumina. In fact, it didn’t exist at the time; it was invented right about 10 years ago.
SLM: So, speaking of Afrikan Machinery, I wanted to touch on your work in Africa, working with African musicians and traditional music.
LL: It’s something that’s informed me very much, just everything about my life, it’s become a part of me. And it’s influenced me in so many ways. Any music I make, whether it’s writing for classical or contemporary music, or working on my electronic music, or the collaborations I do with African musicians, those experiences always play a role, they’re always there. It’s influenced me in so many ways. I can explain it in musical, technical terms, or I can just say it’s the atmosphere of the African continent. It’s a very, very diverse continent, and there are so many different cultural areas, so many different languages being spoken. For example, in a country like Burkina Faso, which is the home base of my group Burkina Electric, which is again another album that came out, Paspanga, which is on Cantaloupe, that’s my electronic dance/pop band. In a country like Burkina Faso, there’s like 60 different languages. So it’s extremely culturally diverse continent. Here, from a distance, we sum it up in one word, "Africa," but that’s not really the case. I’ve learned an awful lot from the traditional musicians that I’ve been working with. And from my experiences just as a person, spending time on that continent. I hope the musicians have also gotten something also from me, and I’ve maybe been able to plant some seeds. I’ve been lucky to be able to be one of the very few experimental musicians who actually works regularly in Africa. That’s quite a rare thing.
SLM: Just looking at this list of collaborators on your website, it seems like all of your collaborations are incredibly diverse; like Eugene Chadbourne…he’s more acoustic, though I guess he goes electric sometimes. He’s got that connection back to traditional musicians, which I think of as this connection that goes back and back and back. There’s sort of this unbroken nature to what they are doing, versus something more commercial, if that makes sense?
LL: You know, I’m not sure; I think the boundaries between all these things are very flowing, and very unclear, often. In most places in Africa, for example, the music has some kind of social function, or a political function, or just to make people dance. There are so many possibilities. But it’s there to accompany people at important moments of their lives. People’s lives change through the changing times, technology, political situations and things like that. And with that, the music changes. And so I think traditional music is something that’s constantly in flux, and for many years now, griots in West Africa, and many musicians throughout Africa have been amplifying themselves, and using pickups. And now, most productions are done using sequencer programs and some computers, and hip-hop has had an incredible effect in many parts of Africa. You can have musicians who do all of the above; purism is more for the ethno-musicologists. And I think that also has its justification, it’s great to preserve things as well. But I don’t think it’s something that people locally think about very much.
SLM: Right—it’s more of an intuitive thing. While I'm thinking about it, I wanted to ask: Have you been through St. Louis before?
LL: No, actually. I’m really looking forward to coming, because I’ve never been to St. Louis, which is kind of unbelievable, because it’s right smack in the middle of the U.S. And I’ve done quite a lot of touring in the U.S., but not St. Louis… and I hope that it won’t be the last time I’m there!
SLM: So for people who are new to new music, or laptop music, or even marimbas, I wanted to give people a sense of what the experience might be like—what they’ll see and hear.
LL: I think an important difference between a lot of laptop performers and what I do, you actually see me doing something on stage. And a lot of the music I play is based very much on motion. I didn’t want to lose that feeling of moving, and of producing sound by motion, even though I’m playing electronics. So a lot of the music that I play is choreographic, and based on patterns of motions. That’s not easy to follow when you see me play, but you definitely see me playing. So it’s definitely a person playing an instrument. The music, I’m mainly playing sounds that are in my laptop, and these sounds are mainly samples. So little recorded snippets, sort of acoustic snapshots that I take, mainly during my travels. A lot of the sounds were recorded in Africa. There’s everything from found sounds, street sounds, to recordings of traditional instruments that I’ve then re-tuned and treated in some way. It’s not a sound collage; it’s not an ambient thing. It’s very much like music. It has melodies, it has rhythms. Sometimes it’s very unusual. Sometimes the pitches and the melodies and the grooves are not things you’d usually hear, but those things are there. So it’s definitely something that can be classified as music. And it’s hopefully something that sounds and hangs together in ways that are unfamiliar and still at the same time kind of understandable and listenable. That’s what I try to do, at least.
SLM: I wanted to give people and idea of what Pattern Time is like, too; you mentioned that it’s fairly different from what you’ll be playing here.
LL: It’s brand-new and ancient, because it was recorded 11 years ago. I will have both CDs with me, both Pattern Time and Afrikan Machine. So Pattern Time is a recording that was done in Austria, at the occasion of a jazz festival there. They asked me to put together a group of musicians that I really liked, a new group that was interesting. So I used this occasion to assemble this group of incredibly far-flung musicians. There’s a saxophonist from Italy, a pianist from France, a balafon player, which is a traditional West African instrument, from the Ivory Coast—in the meantime, now, he’s living in Berlin, but back at that time, he was still living in the Ivory Coast—and a bass player from the San Francisco Bay Area. So, it’s not a band that really tours, but it’s a band that has unique approaches not only to their instruments, but also playing in several grooves at the same time. Polymetrics is something I’m really interested in. And I wanted to make a record of polymetric improvisation, and try to find new ways of combining some of the ideas in African music with jazz. I gave only very conceptual ideas and small fragments to the musicians, and we worked with that. It’s not the kind of jazz approach that’s more conventional, where you have a head and then you have side improvisation and then you go back to the original theme. It doesn’t work like that at all. It’s very spontaneous, and somehow the chemistry between the band members was fantastic. I’m really proud of this recording, I think it’s one of the best improvised recordings I’ve done, and I’m really happy to finally see it released.
SLM: If you don’t mind me asking…what kept it in the can for so long?
LL: I couldn’t find anyone to release it! I think, again, even though it’s very listenable, and kind of nice-sounding music, it goes against the grain of the conventions so much, it was like too unusual for people to handle. I think that free-improvised music has become kind of constrained by certain conventions, and we just don’t follow those conventions. I always try to do music that’s as original as I can, I don’t want to replicate things that have been done by others, unless it’s just an exercise for myself to develop my chops. As far as putting out something artistically and something I’m serious about, I really want something that’s new. And I really try to be quite uncompromising in that. And that also means often going against the principles of the so-called avant-garde—because the so-called avant-garde is often very conservative, so it puts me in sort of an outsider status, in all scenes. I compose for orchestras, and I do this improvised music, and the electronic music, and things that are categorized as world music. But I’m equally categorized as an outsider everywhere, because I just do things that are not what you’re supposed to do. [Laughs.] And at the same time, but it’s not blatantly trying to get attention. It just doesn’t fit in with the program with record labels, or with the presenters. So that might be why I couldn’t get it released. I didn’t anticipate having such a hard time, because for me, the things that I do are not as weird. I mean, John Zorn, who’s released two of my CDs on Tzadik, he’s someone who’s into that kind of a thing. But he’s not releasing a lot of improvised music these days. So it’s just hard to find the right fit. Fortunately, there’s Innova Records, who are extremely open when it comes to this kind of stuff. So they’re releasing it, and I’m really happy that it’s coming out. I thought it would never see the light of day.
SLM: So this tour’s pretty ambitious—you’re jumping down from Louisville, to St. Louis, to New Orleans…you had a Midwest tour for Afrikan Machinery, so I guess this is sort of like the South-Midwest leg of that tour?
LL: That’s right, that’s somehow how it came to be. I’m playing solo marimba lumina in all of these places, and I also have just added, at the last minute, two gigs in North Carolina. The music that I'll be playing, it’s a little more composed than improvised, so it will be recognizably the same program, but I won’t play the pieces the same way for each show. It’s an interesting tour for me, because of the six cities that I’ll be playing; I have never been to three of them. So I’m very much looking forward to being in New Orleans. I’ve never been there, and then Tuscaloosa, I’ve never been to Alabama. I have been to Louisville and North Carolina, those are places I’ve played before, but I’ve never actually been to that Deep South. The driving distances are just enormous. But I have a good car, and I actually quite enjoy driving long distances, so it’s not something that I mind, especially if I can then see these new cities. One of the beautiful things about being a musician is that you get to see new places, and new people, and new things.
SLM: And then you’re going to Europe, after you do all this driving through the middle of America?
LL: I go to Europe often, but not I’m not going to Europe till the middle of July. You saw concerts of my music on my website, in Europe?
SLM: Yes, in May?
LL: Yeah, I’m not playing in those concerts, but my music is being played. I have this little asterisk in front of them to indicate that. Those are for the Bang on a Can Allstars, who are a fantastic group. I wrote a piece for them a couple of years ago, and even though their repertoire is huge, they’ve been playing this piece very often. And so they’re doing another three shows. They’ve already played it this year in Hong Kong, and I think they’re doing in London, Lisbon and Madrid. They’re playing it at Carnegie Hall in November, they’ve played it New York and Amsterdam and Vancouver, they’ve done it a lot throughout the States, including in the Midwest. It’s always very nice when you write something for musicians, and they keep playing it! It’s an extremely hard piece, and they play absolutely fantastically.
SLM: So you actually get a break after this intense tour, then.
LL: I get a two-month long travel break, which is something that doesn’t happen so often. So I stay home in New York, and then I travel again in July, to Europe. I have a concert in Venice, which I’m really excited about, because Venice is my favorite city in the world. And then I’m going back to South Africa, where I’ve been spending quite a lot of time these days. But yeah, at the moment, I’m just looking forward to coming to St. Louis!
Lukas Ligeti performs at the Mildred Bastian Theatre at St. Louis Community College-Forest Park (5600 Oakland) on Friday, Apr. 29 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $12, $7 for students and artists. For more information, go to the HEARding Cats Collective website.
