By Gene Santoro
[photos by Jonnie Miles in original article]
He looks more like an imp with a gleam of mischief in his eyes than a driven ax maniac. Any conversation with him almost immediately bubbles over into a breathless cascade of swapped enthusiasms, punctuated by a ready and infectious wit, as he chronicles his route toward realizing the unique and improbable sounds in his head. Onstage, he lets loose with the kind of abandon any out-and-out rockerwould envy. He's David Torn, one of the up-and-coming generarion of neo-psychedelic players - among them Eugene Chadbourne, Ronnie Drayton, Henry Kaiser, Robert Quine and Vernon Reid. - who, simply by the way they play, are demolishing all the labels set up by those shrewd marketers at the record companies.
For some time now, this new guitaristic development has been afoot, an offshoot of the electronic diddling and extended space jamming pioneered by Hendrix, beck, Page, the San Francisco hippie bands and their numerous progeny. Add-on sonic gadgets - fuzztones, wah-wahs, compressors, tape loops and delays - made their first significant commercial appearance during that period, and allowed guitarists to dabble in a suddenly expanded tonal spectrum. The results ranged from massive sustain to feedback firestorms, inspiring explorations into making the sound a seperate entity from just the notes played.
Jagged edged scrapes, startling pitch swoops, spiky tonal lurches, haloed sonic washes, billowing feedback, dramatic volume swells, smeary whammy-bar pyrotechnics, raw jews-harp harmonics - mix 'em with a rocker's kick-out-the-jams instincts and a jazzer's relentless lay-it-on-the-line improvisations, and you've got some idea of the lengths to which Torn's outrageous, provocative and far-reaching music goes to reshape crumbling traditional notions like jazz, rock, blues and whatever.
"When you're the kind of player I am," Torn shrugs, "some of your playing is hard for you to like, because it's a lot like exorcism. So I don't necessarily like to listen to my records; they're just things that I do. But Cloud About Mercury (ECM 831-108) sounds to me like I'll be able to listen to it for some time."
You could say that. With the connivance of Bill Bruford, Tony Levin and Mark Isham, Torn has put together a record wher ethnic rhythms jostl overdriven blues guitar, where pan-pipe programs fade into Miles-ish flugelhorn, where logdrums rumble between feedback and Stax-style riffs.
It's not an approach that sprang up overnight. After starting classical piano lessons at the age of eight, Torn played drums in the school band and got his first guitar at age 12. "My mother collected S&H Green Stamps," he grins, "so for my birthday she presented me with a Kay acoustic guitar." Both the mid-sixties British invasion and Motown filled his young head full of musical ideas, which he picked up off the radio while studying flamenco and jazz. Though underage, he began club-gigging, playing Hendrix, Cream and Zeppelin until he split home at 16 to globetrot for two years. When he returned home, he enrolled at Berklee for a semester. "Then I heard the Mahavishnu Orchestra," he recalls, "which relally juiced me to get playing again."
Just when the academic methods at Berklee were pushing him out the door, the phone rang: a drummer pal on Long Island asked Torn to join the arty Zobo Fun Band. After a successful seven-year run in Ithaca, NY and environs - during which time Torn studied bop with Pat Martino - the fun went out of the band, and several near-misses on label deals, so Torn started a free-improvisational ensemble called Wheel.
It hadn't rolled too far before Torn bumped into bassist Bruce Yaw in a music store in 1979. Yaw played in the Everyman Band, which backed Lou Reed in the seventies. When free-jazz trumpeter Don Cherry tapped the band for a European tour, Yaw called Torn to fill in for the first two weeks; he wound up doing all 10 weeks and recording two discs, one with Cherry and the other with the band. The gig taught Torn several lessons: "It seems to me that Don was one of the first proponents of a world of music that doesn't lose its teeth so it's disrespectful, but uses lots of elements from all over. And while he was very much the leader, it was definitely a cooperative effort. I leearned that you could be assertive and just hold your line and set up musical contrasts within that framework."
That framework remains the Everyman Band's to this day. "It's the kind of band," Torn asserts, "where you don't need to be virtuosic in any way to get the point across." Not that what they do could be described as amaturish, as Without Warning (ECM 1290) amply demonstrates. Catch "Talking With Himself", for instance, where arcing alopes of whammy sorceery view with Hendrix-like feedback for explosive power. Or take a ride on "Multibluetonic Blues" to the far outside and over the edge.
His edge is something Torn retains even within the softer focus of the Jab Garbarek Group, where he took over ax wizard Bill Frisell's slot a couple of years back. "I'm more agressive than somebody you would normally see associated with Jan," he concedes. "Even Bill Connors did a very sweet thing with Jan, and Bill Frisell did a very orchestrated, beautiful thing. So when Jan called me I was real nervous about it - I didn't want to not make some rude sounds, throw some spikes in there. But his directions are very broad. He might say, 'Can you do something like fingerpicking behind the melody here?' Well, I might do fongerpicking or I might pingerpick something incredibly fast into a [delay] loop and then play the loop back at double the speed so that its' an octave higher." You can sample the unpredictable results on It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice (ECM 25033-1).
Torn's interest in percussive tonal sounds is what led him to approach the eminent Mr. Bruford about the project that became Cloud About Mercury. "It was because of what I saw him doing with the electronics and the potential I saw for improvised music using tonality generated from drums," he explains.
Once Bruford was hooked, he pulled Chapman stickster (and fellow Crimsonite) Tony Levin abroad. "I love those super-low notes at the end of the Stick," enthuses Torn, "and Tony is an unbelieveably supportive player who's also inventive. So the three of us for together and it worked, but somehow it felt too intense for me to be the central voice without a soloist to bounce up against."
Enter trumpeter and flugelhorn master Mark Isham: "He was perfect because he's also a very good composer, and he had a handle on things like tape loops and effects processing and production techniques. And, of course, he plays great jazz trumpet, so we had this chemistry."
Which Cloud About Mercury translates to disc. Torn describes the process: "Most of the stuff was pretty wide open; there were places with certain melodies or particular grooves, but these guys, being who they are, they always put into it something I didn't.
"I used a lot of ambient sounds on this album," he continues. "I've got this Lexicon PCM-70, which has a program called 'resonant chords' that I used extensively. Here's the way it works: when you input a sound that has a lot of transient attack, it outputs at the specified delay times six different notes. But the sounds that don't have a lot of transient attack give you the same note but in a very ghostly, reverbish way. A lot of the solo guitar stuff has that kind of ambient around it. Take the opening piece, 'suyafhu Skin,' which opens with a sound like Incan panpipes. That's very much like the things I'll start up in my living room. Basically, it's a loop with a harmonizer on an octave above that was delayed and wasn't in the original signal at all, but did go into the loop - in fact it went in louder than the dry signal did. The notes are centered around a differen key from the one I'm playing actually in: it's like tonal ambience, like you're playing in a room that emits its own notes."
While he didn't overdub much, something he did do a lot on this record was play several parts live by means of delay loops. Take, for instance, the album's longest piece, "Network of Sparks": "That's almost all solo guitar and a lot of crossfading. The opening is live tapping with harmonizer and a bunch of time delays using that resonant chord program; I was tapping with my right hand and playing bass parts with my left. Then it fades into a bagpipey thing, which is another loop; then this drum sound comes in, which is a loop of me making noises on the guitar and then changing the speed and pitch. Then I played over that to get all those weird little high harmonized things, and added another loop into it while I was playing over it. There's a break and then it comes into funky drums with a blues-rock solo, kinda Hendrixy; there's are clouds behind that, which is another loop I had on a volume pedal so I could bring it in and out while I soloed. Mark was playing picolo trumpet through a harmonizer and doing twisted Stax horn section parts behind that solo as well."
By now it should be clear that Torn is nothing if not an eclectic explorer. "There's always some element of bizareness in everything I do, in the psychedelic period or after it," he says, "and it remains that way." Which is why he's one of the musical scouts mapping the instrument's future.
A Torn Axology
As you'd expect, Torn rig is not exactly simplicity itself. "Steinberger guitar with transposing tremolo - I won't use any other guitar until somebody does something nearly as revolutionary. My amp is by Dan Pearce of Buffalo, New York: it's a transistor amp with incredibly flexible inputs and outputs. Essentially, the way I use it is with one channel very clean and bright and another very dirty and distorted and kinda nasal, that buzzsaw sound.
"The rest of the set-up is pretty complicated. From the Pearce amp I split the signal. The dry signal goes to channel one of this little Rane SM-26 mixer; the other signal goes into an Ibanez HD-1500 harmonizer, which I'm going to replace with ADA Pitchtraqs. The wet signal from the harmonizer goes into channel two of the mixer, and then the mixed signal from the Ibanez gets sent to a Lexicon PCM-42, which is essentially a digital delay line modified for me by Gary Hall of Martin Audio to have a 19.5 second delay time - that's what I use for my loops. The wet signal from the 42 goes up to the third channel of the mixer, and the audible clock from the 42 goes to channel six for the timed stuff that I do. Then the mixed signal from the 42, using its dry-to-mix controller to control how much, goes into a PCM-70; another controller on the 42 that I use is loop feedback or whatever echo is there, while a third controller dictates the actual speed of the loop in a ratio of 3:1 when I use the pedal.
"Now, the PCM-70 is MIDI-controlled, but since I don't have a MIDI guitar, I got this little Yamaha MCS-2 which generates MIDI controls; that goes from MIDI-out of the MCS-2 to MIDI-in of the PCM-70. Then there are program-change switches, pitch wheel, modulation wheel and two controllers on the MCS-2, and three pedals that I have hooked up to it, which are essentially to let me control a different parameter for each program in the PCM-70, whether it's reverb time, delay time, wet/dry mix or pitch of the resonant chord programs.
"That's the whole wad, except for my pick, which I've had since 1979. It's made out of stone with these little nicks in the side that I use to get those high harmonics and whistling things. If you do that using the bridge pickup you get the whistling, but if you use the bass pickup, if you just rub the pick in one spot in particular places while you're fretting notes on the high unwound strings, you're actually making a new bridge for the string. In effect, that shortens the scale of the guitar, which changes the relationship of fret to fret interval. So a half-step fretting difference is not necessarily going to be a chromatic step. I've found certain pentatonic scales in certain portions of the neck that way - it's pretty out there.
"Oh, yeah, the strings are .010, .012, .016, .026, .036, .046."
- G.S.
Printed in Guitar World, July 1987.
Sourced and supplied by Scott Hansen, May 2003.
Transcribed by John McCullagh, May 2003.
