An excerpt from Jazz Institute of Chicago ‘Outstanding Jazz Educator’ award recipient Mwata Bowden discussing the origins of the University X-tet, forming the X-tet Reunion Band, ‘comfort in unpredictability,’ and other life lessons learned through music.
Whatever you do, you pass it on and you hope it does some good because you do it with integrity. Now with this reunion ensemble, it’s coming back and students are talking about the wonderful experience that they had, how this exchange has had a real profound influence on the choices they’ve made in life. And they’ve been good choices. And Julia, it’s like wow, I guess you keep doing this.
Two things: they bring it back with praise, and you know, ‘Man, I thank you for all of this,’ and I’m sure somewhere on the way, Julia, I had to have messed somebody up. [laughs] So my nightmare is that some kid is gonna come back and say “Man, you messed me up! I’m mad!” It hasn’t happened yet, but on the other hand, it could. But the realization that I’ve been doing this long enough and with the idea of the exchange … it comes back. It’s really exciting because I never took an assessment of what kind of impact it would have, because I don’t need to. We’re just constantly in the grind of doing what we do. You know, we seldom take a chance to look back and retrospect.
And I don’t know if the university would say they appreciate it, but several of my students instead of going to graduate school in whatever else field decided, ‘What the heck, I’m gonna take my chances with this music.’
Which is…I mean, they know music, there’s nothing promised. I don’t care what kind. If you’re in music, if you’re in the performance element of it, I don’t care what kind of degrees you got on the wall. What happens when you sit down at your instrument is the most important thing. What happens when you put that horn in your mouth, sit down at your keyboard, that’s what people are judging you by. It doesn’t matter what’s hanging up on your wall. And I’ve had several students who have made the choice, instead of going to graduate school, to jump out here in this unpredictable jazz field. So it means that they’ve made a serious commitment to themselves and they have enough confidence in themselves that they can make it. They’ve been equipped enough to know what to do to become a part of this jazz community out here and they’re doing ok.
So this is the beginning of the Jazz X-Tet?
Yes, right, when I was interviewing, they asked me ‘Well, what kind of program would you set up?’ And I told them exactly what I wanted because I didn’t want to change gears. I said I didn’t want to teach ABC’s, so if they don’t take me I’m not gonna care. I’m gonna tell them my ideal situation. And that’s what they accepted — my ideal situation. That’s what you see when I’m conducting the Great Black Music Ensemble, the Tri-Tone Project, New Music Millennium, all those kinds of groups that I do now. It’s a parallel. Jazz X-Tet is a parallel of what I do in my professional career. I do cutting edge compositions, new music compositions, I do original compositions, original compositions by local musicians … Nicole Mitchell, Dee Alexander, you know all of these are great musicians in the city that I work with.
I’m not teaching undergrad-kind of band charts, you know, all the traditional swing charts. It’s geared toward students being freer with traditional charts and understanding where music evolves. … It’s a way of thinking, it’s a way of freeing yourself up, to think about what it is that you really want. So being around people that help free up your thinking makes all these things now really possible.
The [X-tet Reunion Band program] title “Beyond 5 lines and 4 spaces” … Well, the reason I’m doing that title for the reunion ensemble is because they’ve been through the storm with me. We’ve done the traditional, we’ve done the modern stuff, and then we’ve done the more conceptual kind of improvisation and writing and composing that we have in jazz.
So they’ve been through it, and where we are now, the development of jazz, it has evolved “beyond 5 lines and 4 spaces.” The new vocabulary … has really extended beyond just 5 lines and 4 spaces.
So right away a student starts to think “what the hell’s beyond 5 lines and 4 spaces?” because conceptually we can write ledger lines, one hundred ledger lines. But the language has developed beyond just the simple 5 lines and 4 spaces. What that does for you as an artist is it makes you really sincere about learning everything you can about the past so you can understand how to think about the future. It allows you to think differently about everything … encompasses a lot … opens you up for something that is to come so you’re not afraid to take chances.
I talked to [the Reunion members] about how we have to develop a comfort zone in very unpredictable areas. There is a comfort zone in challenging areas or grey areas, and as an improviser and experimentalist you look for that. Unpredictability has some comfort zone in it. You’re still OK in being and maneuvering in uncharted areas — uncharted because you know it’s part of a continuum and you trust yourself and your imagination. Students have asked me if we’re conducting, ‘Uh oh… Mwata, Mwata, where are we?’ And I’m like ‘I don’t know!’[laughs] You know, ‘We’re in the middle of the creative process, that’s all I can tell you. We’re off the page.’
They wanna know then, ‘Well how do we know when to go on?’ [I’ll respond] ‘I don’t know. But when it comes time we’ll all know when it’s time to move, when it’s time to make some differences, or cool it. We’re in this unpredictability, but we’re comfortable, laid back. Enjoy it and when it comes time together, collectively, we’ll know it’s time to go on, to get back on the page. G is truly G this time. Don’t be giving me nothing else. We’re back on the page.’
So it’s that kind of thinking and being able to experiment and explore in these new areas that I enjoy in my own professional career and I can readily share with students here. Now that they know me, they come looking for that. You know, students they have choices, and they try something and they can come back, or they won’t, because that’s not their cup of tea. But that’s OK. It’s not for everybody. But I am seeing that those who do … it’s amazing to me that these students, they’re so well developed, right brain left brain. Their critical thinking skills are so well developed. They take what they learn here, Julia, it applies across the board.
My greatest composer is coming back [for the X-tet Reunion Band]. Rowan Bell, the mathematician, he wrote a high school math book with one of his professors here. Numbers, numbers! He came out and started working actuarial tables for an insurance company or something. But numbers, he was the greatest organized composer I have had come through here. And you could tell that numbers were his thing.
But all of that, all that he learned from one area transfers over to the others. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s not isolated cubicles of learning, everything is across the board, one relates to the other. So it’s not isolated. Music is not an isolated thing that we do at Goodspeed and we leave it there. It’s an intricate part of their every day.
It sounds like your teaching students not just music lessons, but everything they learn here and with you and in the Jazz X-Tet they’re able to take that and apply it to the rest of their lives.
Right, it’s just how I approach music. And it’s totally encompassing. I’m saying, it’s still music, but it does encompass all these other things that we’re still talking about and allows them to realize that it’s not an isolated subject. What I’m talking about now is conceptual approaches to music. Comfort zone in an uncomfortable area or an unpredictable area. That’s for any researcher. That’s for any experimentalist. You’ve gotta have something else when nothing else works or is going for you. It’s important. So these things when kids see it, it travels across the board. And they’re able to see and understand that. It’s because that’s the way I see and approach music. It is an open-ended subject for me. It is my subject, but I also see everything else tied into it.
Like one of the compositions I’m going to do [on ‘Beyond 5 Lines and 4 Spaces’] is called the Maze Factor. This composition came out of years of traveling around Europe and Vancouver, and looking at the sculpture gardens. I’ve been to the Louvre in Paris several times and again upstairs in the Louvre, I’m looking down on some of these great sculpture gardens. In Vancouver, it was like a maze. There were these corridors and everything. I’ve been in several of them, in Japan in Kyoto, and Osaka. I’ve been in those gardens, and Julia, you’re in this garden and everything affects you in this particular section. I mean the aroma, the texture of the leaves, just everything, everything there. How the light plays in it or around it as you travel through there, then you go and make a curve and go around somewhere else and then a new set of aromas because of the flowers, you know certain kinds of plants, you’re in a new place. The light plays differently, the leaves, the textures, all of those things change, and every time you go into a new section you have a different experience, in other words. After several years of that, I started seeing that as music, as a musical form. A maze as a musical form. Music has forms and each part of the form is something different. So for me, going to different parts of this maze was part of a whole, was part of a form and each one was different: aromas, textures, light, all those kinds of things that we talk about in music.
Music doesn’t have aromas, but it has texture; is light or heavy, has density hard or soft, thick. But those are my experiences in the maze. It first sparked an idea of form, that I can manipulate form, this not AABA but ABAB. This is going to be something else. Differences in a maze and a labyrinth; I think a maze has one entrance in and one exit out. I think a labyrinth (you can have several entrances and things) is the difference in the two. I wanted to work with that, normal forms AB in out, that way. But I want to make a form that could be several entrances in and out of each one of these forms.
So I started working with different kinds of musical forms, actually grids. I first started working with grids. That was years ago; that’s traditional. But this new one led me to this new kind of form that I’ve been working with. It’s part of my whole Maze Factor series of compositions; it’s a new way of approaching form now that I’m working with. So these kinds of things in life spark energy and ideas for me in terms of the music.
Again, exploring and experimenting with different kinds of things is what I’m about and that’s gonna be part of this ‘Beyond 5 lines and 4 spaces’.
It’s everyday life and music and it’s all one. If we start to think of it that way and have a conference somewhere … I think it helps us all just get through our every day in a better way, in an enjoyable way, one that’s not so mundane, full of excitement and risk-taking. It’s OK to take risks! You never learn anything new or discover anything new if you never take risks, if you’re afraid to take risks and experiment with certain kinds of things and ideas. And it’s OK. I don’t know what to say about failure. Is there failure or things just don’t work? I don’t know what I can suggest about that, but I’m not afraid to take chances. I let failure take care of itself.
Interview by Julia Tobiska, Performance Program Assistant. Transcript by Polly Faust.