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Cosmic Klangfarben The Al Neil Interview... Vancouver, December 4, 1972 By Rick McGrath Al Neil caricature by Kerry Waghorn Al Neil dropped into this world's existence in 1924 at Vancouver's General Hospital. His mother took him home to Main Street where he busied himself with the art of growing up. When Al reached nine years of age he started piano lessons under the aegis of Glenn Nelson, continuing his studies until 1940, when the fascist hordes made a break for power. Al turned to surveying and moved up to Hardy Bay, working for the Department of Transport. He helped make a runway -- and then found himself in England, plotting tangents for the Army's artillery and surviving D-Day. Johnny came marching home and Al came with him, armed with energy and itching to ascertain for himself the stories about the new jazz he had read in the war issues of Downbeat his mother had mailed to Europe. Technique had to come first, so Al renewed his piano lessons with Nelson, Jean Couthard and others. It was Wilf Wylie, however, who first introduced Al to the joys and power of jazz piano. Books and scores were impossible to pick up in those days, so Al did the next best thing: old 78's played endlessly gave up their secrets to his discerning ear. Al was soon into the structures and harmonies of the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell. "There was a point about 1947", says Al, "when some of us got tired and frustrated of not having a place to play. So we got together and formed a little society. In British Columbia you can get a charter that doesn't necessitate getting things like expensive yellow urinals and commissaries of various descriptions. You can just set up and get to work." It was a move that ultimately changed Al's life and brought into being the heaviest jazz spot on the West Coast: The Cellar Jazz Club. Al set himself up and was the leader of the house band. "First there was the Al Neil Trio and then people like Don Thompson came in, along with two of the heaviest Alto players, still the best in Canada: Dale Hillary and P.J. Perry. He's still around. "Most of us had jobs, you see. I was working in the Post Office and so we didn't need to take out too much bread. We slowly started getting into the Musician's Union and so on, but we had an arrangement with them so there was no hassle. If we had made $15 we'd take out five or ten and kick the rest back into the Club. It was several years before we paid ourselves the Union scale. So we were able to build up a kitty, and when we did well, we thought we'd start to bring in people from LA. Some of us were mildly interested in what was known as West Coast Jazz. So we started bringing in people like Barney Kessel, Conte Condali, Carl Fontana, Bill Perkins, Sonny Redd and Art Pepper as singles. And my rhythm section, or somebody else's rhythm section would play with them. One guy who was up here three times was Art Pepper. He's now doing thirty years. Bill Perkins was really impressed with us and he said there was a tenor player, a guy who blew something like Zoot Sims or Getz or one of those Lester Young derived musicians, but good, who showed up in LA from Texas. His name was Ornette Coleman and he had Don Cherry with him and Charlie Haydn on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. Perkins told us about them and just on the strength of his word we wrote and asked them to come up. "They'd been getting booted out of all the clubs they'd played at, especially Ornette. He put in his dues. So they came up and it was their first fuckin' jazz gig in Vancouver, 1958. And they played here a week or ten days and just blew our fuckin' minds. We were there, six to eight hours a night, every night, just listening to them. Up until then we just had the West Coasters and these guys were playing New York jazz. Even the West coast blacks weren't into it. Miles Davis was seduced into those early albums with Gerry Mulligan, which apparently now he considers bullshit. Lots of heavy harmony but pretty lightweight energy, and they led into the three records he made with Gil Evans and the big band. Apparently Miles has just recently put those down as being bullshit, too. "Then Harold Land came up two or three times and Ornette came back and Cherry lived here for two or three months. He lived with Dave Quarin, who is now an executive with the Musician's Union, and I don't know what he's doing for music. Cherry scared the shit out of all of us, he tried to form up a band, but we could only play the bebop stuff and he was already way past that. It took us ten years to get the bebop stuff down around here because everything was slower. And Cherry comes along and he thought he could move us up a notch. We just weren't ready for it. A bunch of us were starting to get fucked up on dope, too. I got out of that. "I copped out around 1962. I figured I had had enough and I was starting to hear stuff that couldn't be played in the harmonic structure we were using. I was going crazy because I could hear it and if I tried to play it Hillary would turn around and say "Play the fuckin' changes," because if I played what I was hearing I would fuck up the rhythm section and the horn players. "One night I took a trumpet player from LA and I heard this solo and I thought, well, I'm going to screw up the rhythm section so I just played it on the wall on my head. The wall was right behind me. Quarin, who was manager at the time was really upset. At the intermission he was getting heavy with me at the bar and the trumpet player turned around and said he thought it was a good solo. "I figured I had to get out of there anyhow, and the next year I was out delivering handbills on the street." Besides Cherry, Coleman, et al, Al and the Cellar saw the likes of Scatt Ja Faro, Elmo Hope, James Clay, Monty Waters and many more 50's greats who set down in Vancouver in their movement from one gig to the next. Al was, along with the Cellar regulars, a familiar musician to the radio and TV audiences of Vancouver, as well as writing scores for NFB movies. Stardom glinted momentarily with a tour Al did with American poet Kenneth Patchen that culminated in an album he and Patchen recorded for Folkways records in New York. No dice. Al jumped back to Vancouver to help the late Barry Cramer in his early stage production of Beckett, lonesco and Arrabel and then, in '62 Al did what few people would dare: he found the courage to shut out junk, his music, his friends and associates and begin his life over. Working at the most menial of jobs, Al kept to himself and immersed his being in private study, mostly metaphysical. Human relations came back, as they must, and after two years of retreat and meditation Al eventually began working with Gregg Simpson and Richard Anstey, searching out new expressions of jazz. Contact with Sam Perry, Gary Lee Nova, Dallas Selman and others resulted in the formation of Intermedia. The music had returned. Al, Gregg Simpson and Marguerite Neil began touring, giving concerts in Edmonton, Regina, Toronto, Kingston and Halifax over several seasons. This year another aspect of Al Neil has been made public. The Vancouver Art Gallery hosted its first one man show of art objects, music, slides and movie videos, as Al showed all facets of his creativity for the first time in a month-long exposition which lasted from March 14 to May 14 of 1972. Two books, West Coast Lokas, published by Vancouver Community Press, and a novel, Changes, published by Coach House Press of Toronto, have also appeared. • • • Al lives out by Cates Park in a ramshackle old houseboat-renovated barge that clutters the beach a shot away from the cabin in which Malcolm Lowery drank and agonized Under The Volcano from his typewriter. Like Lawrence's metaphorical retreat, "Las Chivas", Neil's retreat strikes the observer as being at once a junkyard of "accumulated life and things", and yet a new spark, a flame fanned by the energy force that inhabits it. Just as Al's house becomes a houseboat when the tide is high, so does the visitor undergo transformation: from the road to the beachhouse is a hundred yards of three-hundred-year-old cedar giants, branches washed in rain and roots deep in the earth. They're ike a grove of giant spines up and down whose length shiver pre-primal statements in sympathy with the watery pounding of the waves and the snare-drum pebbles of the beach below. The wind shrieks and moans, blowing like some crazy on horn and in the midst of all this is Al, stoking the fire, burning his memory of musical conventions, and trying to restate the feeling in his gut on the 56 keys of his piano that still sound to the touch of his fingers. It's as if Al has been able to cleanse his mind at the expense of his immediate spatial surroundings: the junk, the things, the objects, the crap of his mind has been lessened while, like some great metaphysical balance, the garbage index of his surroundings has increased in equal proportion. One comes close to the house and one enters a strange world of decay, of rusted bits of metal, of old pieces of this, of broken hunks of that, some of it strung together, some of it mashed into frames with broken pieces of glass intensifying the effect and mirroring the junk piled around it. And being junk, it's all smashed, useless, destroyed; it is also, one realizes, arranged... a fantastic collage of things that assault the person in their rottenness but at the same time teach, in a political sense, the corporate sense of art as object. Art objectified becomes junk in museums. Art objectified becomes trash on display. Art objectified ties up Magic and puts it into the Aristotelian linear spatial baggie of Western duality and, after securing the top with its own twistie, puts it in a can till the trashman comes and takes it away. The Dadaists tried to break the bag so they made the bag bigger and included the Dadaists. Al Neil waited at the dump. He may save them all. What Al Neil is (not does) is Art Subjectified. Al neither listens nor produces: Al is Art. So am I. So are You. Inside the house, five of us, a good number for Al, and he's alive and swinging with the tape recorder on. Towards the end of the talk a question goes out concerning Al's plans for the future. The answer comes: "No, I'm not hoping. If you hope, that means a future and it's situated right here on my two feet. What I'm doing is consolidating everything I've done in the past twenty-five years, which has always been the same thing, and if I get this grant it means I'm going to be travelling a little bit. I've a whole new life opened up to me because I feel different inside. Everybody's noticed it, all my friends. If I can go backwards a little bit, it was when my ego was having something to rub up against, namely a ying-yang system of male/female that I couldn't figure out. And when that disintegrated, I found out slowly there was no hostility, no aggressiveness, except against pigs or Nixon or somebody objectified that way around the Planet. So I began to get higher and higher, and I defined it, that it was down through the sex chackra that all the suffering and pain, just like Buddha says, started. "And that's where all my hostilities, emotional and psychic, and sometimes physical, all my violence against the woman I loved, started. When that drifted apart, and we're getting back to now, and when I start a new relationship I'm not getting back into that. And I'm lucky because I'm so fucking high l just refuse to come down into that. It's gotta be amazing, you see. So my plans are to keep my body in good shape... l have to remember to keep eating. Really, you know if you read Changes you know I've been through that drug scene and I just have to keep remembering to keep eating. I just can't believe it. I'm shooting the energy right where I need it, and where I want it. "So I got my body connected up ok. I got my new spectacles here and it gives me 20-20 vision and I'm just about to become a welfare bum. Permanently. A guy came down here from the rehabilitation centre and he saw me making one of my head things and he said: "l don't want to embarrass you, Al, but I just recommended you be listed unemployable." (laughs) So I got a pension, brother. I'm going to get new teeth out of it. "Then next year I'm going to travel around and get out what I've got up to this date and show Ornette and those guys that might've remembered me and, you know, no ego trips, just to show them that there's high energy out here in the Rain Forest and somebody got something together, you know. "And the next step for the rest of my life is to form up these Mandalas. In whatever system, because that's what I'm doing and they're infinite. It would be with visual, aural and whatever other, chanting, you know, it's infinite. Jack Wise knows that. I tried to find him yesterday but he's peddling his mandalas for $1200 apiece and when I went over there to find him yesterday the lady in the gallery (laughs) said he's gone to get some visual aids. And I said fuck, he doesn't need any visual aids. It turned out he needed them to drive his car whenever he goes to town. "He (Wise) knows what he's doing. He's just tightening up his form. • • • "I happened to stumble into a system of kundalini by some rare conjunction of events, which are too dangerous for me to reveal. And this is true and this is not hype. I'll see how many tips I can give. One, is that I set out myself to give, or find, like I thought any man should, thanks to my mother, who's 90 years old right now and she's completely stoned and high on God, and a mystic. She's an opera singer from Massey Hall in Toronto from the turn of the century, and she's so fuckin' high she has to wear dark glasses to avoid the White Light. But there's a conjunction of that setting out as your destiny before you, which I did twenty years ago in a magazine in this City called P.M., in two articles. One was called "Art and Mysticism" and the other was "The State of Consciousness In Jazz". And so it was the conjunction of my mother's influence and having that destiny already spelled out for me, which I could do nothing about. The second thing was this: I chose to study two forms of spirituality, and there are hundreds, thousands, to get into the unity and the integration. Astrology, or whatever way you're going to do it. The two I chose were Zen, for its humour, and Tibetan, for its kundalini. The third element is too dangerous for me to reveal, but it happened to be my accident. Somebody performed something on my body by accident. And because of studying Tibetan Buddhism, I knew I was into it. I couldn't have gotten into it just by reading a book on Buddhism, but I knew I was into it. The fourth thing was drugs. But the third thing, the one l'm hesitating to reveal, it concerns the seed. And so I was lucky enough to conjunct all this together and realize what the Tibetans were talking about. And I can't reveal this to anybody and there's no need to, because everybody's got to find their own way up into the triangles of reintegration, the return to God. And that's why you're feeling what have to say to you and -- that's what I have t give. It's not me that's giving it, it's someone else. "And that's no fuckin hype. "It's there, it's there, and I can't deny it. And I'm scared. I'm fuckin awestruck, man. I'm awestruck. "The fifth thing, I just thought of. Since New Year's day of last year when my wife left, and the three months of the duality pain was over, I noticed I was going up. And I reasoned this way: the pain that I had been suffering through three eight year marriages was in the duality and the sex chackra and I felt myself getting higher and higher and higher. And when I had a brief romantic fling, and we mutually declared ourselves Platonic after the fourth bout in my bed, (laughs) because she fell out of it. (Al's bed is four feet above floor level) Anyway, and this is the clue, and we get to the secret number, five: celibacy. If you know what you're doing with it, you can get the triangles upward. Celibacy. And this is still duality, it's between the sensuality and the aestheticism. And if you're working with extremes, it's still Duality, but it's better to get it up into the heart and the head and the possibility of opening up the suture on the top of your head than it is to go downward into the darkness of duality. Into everything that fucks up man and woman. Yin Yang is a sex chackra. Down is duality, disintegration, up is the apex thru the axis maundi of the spine to the axis of the earth pole star and on out." A pause from this subject and soon we're off on another line: Al's new album, which is soon to be released. Al puts down electricity as using up energy, and is asked how he feels this will affect his own album, going, as it must, through several degrees of electric entropy. "Then we have to get into the media of feeding it through electricity and what we're talking about is spirituality. It comes down from the Creator through: the Solar System down in through you and if it goes in electricity then the electricity cancels out a lot of the energy. The media, from VTR to tape recorders and everything else, I'm giving it all up. And when I get some bread next year I'm going to get short wave radio, I'm not going to reveal… yeah... Stockhausen has given me the first energy that anybody has for ten years. I'm going to get one sound source, the best possible short wave radio l can get. A Halicrafter. Because it's picking up all the sounds in every language that are going around the globe. And maybe some coming in from outside, eh? And maybe I'll get some twelve year old genius to figure out some dimensions on fucking with it. But I can't deal with synthesizers or moogs or any of those because they're such low energy sound. And by low energy, I mean if you have a note, a pitch, aaaaaaaaaah (sings) that's the pitch of the Moog. But if you have it coming from the creator into the Axis Mundi (and returning) it's aaAhhaaaHHHAHAHaaa and that energy is the particles or klangfarben around the note and it includes the room and the ambiance of the room and the people in the room. And when that's fed through the electricity it comes out as a metallic aaaaaah right back where you started from. So the best possible thing you can do, like if I get this record out, is get a good grand piano. That's why the electronics just kills everything. "And I'm going to do it to the VTR boys. Haven't you ever seen yourself on TV? Just this deathly grey dot plane. And you're always brought down. I was playing all through the 50's on CBC television. Art Pepper and everything. I kept it to myself because it was an intuition then, but I always thought we did really great, and then there's a whole room full of people. Some negative and some positive. Some people don't like you, the electricians or whatever, and you're trying to get this great fucking thing on and Art Pepper comes in and he's stoned on junk and we've already planned our program and it's ten minutes before the TV show goes on and he throws down something new he thought up on his junk dream and l had to try and figure out how to read it in ten minutes and the producer's getting nervous and it turned out really high energy and it's beautiful. And then you watch it played back and there's this little twenty inch square of grey dots and all you can see is nothing. "That's why I'm going to use the Halicrafter. Because I can't get enough out of the $10,000 Steinways to please me. In the next year or two l'm going around on my own. I've been working on my own. On the 88. I'm going to use the Halicrafter for other collage systems. I m going to be looking for people who are situated in music like I am. Stockhausen's found five. He's got his group together. They're tuning into the short wave and that's why I say he's given me the energy. I'm going to be writing to him because I know what I'll do with it is completely different from him and his Russian-Germanic polyglot system that he's arrived into. "lt's a sound system. Instead of having the moog synthesizer you have a Halicrafter radio. So instead of hearing beep beep beep, which is manufactured by the system, the same system we're trying to defeat, and not only because it's got no energy because they're pure sounds, they're sine tones. Sine means they've got no energy because it's pure. I can't do it with my voice. The most obvious example of their corruption is the sounds they make for that guy who made the Bach out of it. That's the most vulgar, stupid thing that anybody ever did. "With the Halicrafter, what you hear when you tune it in is a foreign language, (or other sound) so you'll be able to chant to it because it's just coming in as a sound, and those people might be saying "Look out, there's a fucking bomb coming down" and it's a sound source. Stockhausen, he's worked with synthesizers and with short wave radio. The only thing is that I'll do it completely different. He sits away out and he feeds it through a bunch of echoes and stuff while the musicians sit down there. He's still chairman (fascist.) I'm going to be sitting in the centre, not because of the ego, but because I'm a medium and I'll let it flow through with five musicians sitting around me, and I know how to write for them now, and I'll tie it all together. But it won't be "I" tying it. Stockhausen still thinks he's tying it together, because he still sits away back and his five musicians sit down there and each one has a short wave radio and he's told sound comes up he's told them ten or fifteen ways to relate to that sound. But he sits back, and takes what they've done and then he feeds it through so he can distort it. That's not what I'm going to do. When I'm using musicians there's not going to be any radios. I'm just using the radio when I'm on my own. "When I use the musicians I would be in the centre of the mandala with the grand piano as a receptor. The five musicians would have gestures and movements to do and so on. It's a subtle difference between Stockhausen and myself, but we are one Stalag different. "There's only one place I can think of in Canada and that's looking down onto the mezzanine floor of the National Gallery (Al shows a picture of the floor's mandala). With the piano in the centre, and as I repeat, a medium. The spectacle would be for various mandalas, there would be costumes or gestures or things. Wouldn't it be great? It's awful pretty in my head. Be BopARoonie! I've got to play some music that's too much for words. • • • Al Neil moves to his piano, such as it is… as a child advances upon a favorite, well-worn toy. They both play with the same kind of immersion, the same loss of self in the greater energy of the imagination that makes one reconsider the old notion of the artist as magician. For if it is magical for us to sit there and watch an aging pianist suddenly become ageless, like some rain forest leprechaun, whose language is musical, non-referential but purely emotive, then pause momentarily in your straight life and try to conceptualize what changes are happening to Neil. If he says he's plugging in to the Creator, who's to argue? This interview was found in the vaults by Harold Colson, an ace Librarian at the University of California at San Diego. Harold is researching the Stones 1972 North American tour, and he's found a bunch of my lost stuff in some special collections of underground newspapers. Thank you, Harold!
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