Inneraction by Joel Futterman

Of all forms of expression, music can enter most deeply into the whole being: the emotions; memory; intellect as it connects with feeling and desire. Of course, for this to happen, the musician must be in full communication with himself. The musician must--as Joel Futterman puts it--be inneracting with himself.

Charlie Parker put it another way: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."

That’s how you tell the difference between the technicians and the musicians. The former may play a lot of notes, but they don’t have all that much to say and that reverberates in your soul. True musicians, however, have an impossible urge and a need to share their strongest, most delicate, most spontaneous feelings. And after you’ve listened to the most compelling of these players, the sounds and shapes stay in the mind for a long time after.

As is the case here, Joel Futterman, pianist-composer; alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons; bassist Richard Davis; and drummer Robert Adkins perform with tumultuous energy, explosive emotional force, and a ceaseless searching within themselves that makes for the excitement of continuous surprise.

The way to enjoy this music most fully is to open yourselves fully to it. I remember Albert Ayler, years ago, telling me that people who want to hear only what they’re used to hearing wind up missing an awful lot. “Follow the music,” Ayler said, “as it is, as it keeps on becoming. Don’t be afraid of the unexpected.”

Joel Futterman also makes the point that a lot of listeners have preconceived ideas of what the sounds and structures of a piece should be. They have what W.H. Auden called a rehearsed response. But once they let go of those preconceptions, they’ll experience new ways of listening to–and feeling–music.

Futterman, born in Chicago, has deep and varied musical experience. As he developed his own voice, Futterman was listening to Theloniuous Monk, but mainly he listened to horn players: Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Eric Dolphy. As a result, “when I sit at the piano,” Futterman notes, “I’m hearing a horn, drums, bass.” His perspective extends beyond the piano.

He played bop and straight-ahead music but for the past twenty years has been strongly involved in the new music. An important influence was trumpeter Gene Shaw, who became known during his time with Charles Mingus. I remember Shaw as an extraordinarily lyrical, thoughtful player with an unusual presence. Even in the sometimes volcanic ambience of the Charles Mingus Workshop, Gene Shaw remained watchful and tranquil.

Futterman also remembers Shaw as having “a serenity, an inner peace. He was a beautiful person and he made me aware of the importance of creating spiritual vibrations. He influenced me both musically and philosophically.”

Futterman interacted, in the early 1970’s, with members of the AACM (the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music), which has since had a pervasive effect on the new music through the many distinctive musicians who have emerged from that continuous seminar.

In recent years, Futterman has been playing his ardently original music in New York; Washington D.C.; and Norfolk, Virginia. There have been two albums–Cafeteria and The End is the Beginning–distributed by the New Music Distribution Service in New York; and now here is a third album.

Jimmy Lyons, with whom Joel and Robert Adkins have been performing concerts and doing sessions, is an astonishingly resourceful improviser. I’ve been listening to Lyons since his first association with Cecil Taylor, and I have never heard a Lyons’ performance that was in the least mechanical or predictable. Throughout Europe, as well as the United States, Lyons is justly considered one of the reigning horn players of the new music.

To play with Futterman and Lyons and Davis requires a stamina–emotional, musical, and spiritual–equal to theirs. Robert Adkins meets those criteria. He not only keeps the time very much alive innerly and polyrhythmically, making the very textures of his percussion dance; but Adkins also becomes a whirling part of everything that’s going on all the time in the quartet.

An admirer of Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes, and the music of Eric Dolphy, Robert Adkins has worked with a wide spectrum of jazz figures. It’s the new music, however, that most deeply intrigues him, and Adkins has performed his own versions of it in Japan, Hong Kong, and South America, as well as in the States.

Richard Davis is a bassist with an extraordinary list of musical credits. During the sixties, his innovative work with Eric Dolphy broke ground in the expression of new music. As evidenced on this album, he allows an intertwining, whining, wheeling of notes and rhythms to dance and enhance the whole of the piece in an astounding fashion.

The works in this set–Inneraction I and II–exemplify with often starling force the inner awakening that Futterman’s approach to music requires.

“What I write and play,” Futterman says, “basically represents the way I view life. At any given moment of living, all kinds of things are happening, all kinds of emotions are involved. What I try to do is put all this together in a musical way.”

“People don’t realize,” Futterman continues, “all the work that goes into this kind of music. They don’t realize the degree of concentration you have to have; the depth of listening you have to do. You have to really be in touch with the present because in that way, you’ll be able to hear what’s going to happen next.”

Clearly, the music is challenging to play because it has so much feeling in it. “And that,” says Futterman, “is what life is all about.”

When he sent me the tape and the information about his set, Joel Futterman wrote: “hope you hear something different each time you listen.”

Yes, indeed. And so will you.

Nat Hentoff

We publish aggressively beautiful music, connecting geographically and culturally disparate musicians.