Interview with Ken Vandermark

Two days ago I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Ken Vandermark - a truly great, open, friendly, avant-garde jazz saxophonist and composer. Mr. Vandermark is in Montreal for 2 shows with the Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, the second of which is tonight, June 27, 2008, with Powerhouse Sound.

(Powerhouse Sound:

“Ken Vandermark wrote the compositions with the idea of building the music from the perspective of the bass instead of the more conventional approach of composition construction, “from the top down”, as he puts it. “The three major influences I considered when putting the music together were the rhythmic ideas of James Brown, the dub ideas of Lee Perry and the collage ideas of Public Enemy.”)

Mr. Vandermark started being interesting pretty much as soon as he walked in, so Tessa hit record and I skidded past the radio-style intro in favor of prolonged casual conversation about improvisation, the internet, favorite performance experiences, making a living, making art, building a scene, North American gentrification, and how to survive the incredible and unexpected honour of being the youngest person to ever win the MacArthur Fellowship.

Note on the audio quality: Despite a clean test the recording gave us some inexplicable fuzz, maybe the mics got nervous with a humble, friendly, frank and fully certified genius in the room. We’ve cleaned it up to the best of our abilities in limited time (we wanted to get this up before his show,) still you may find it a bit quiet and mechano-echoey, for which we apologize. If you are interested in helping us share this incredible hour and a half of insights and stories by cleaning, transcribing or translating it, please use the comments below to let us know. Thanks and we hope you enjoy!

 

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