Annette Peacock: the first jazz artist to record with a Moog
Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 6:07 pm
An interesting excerpt from an interview with composer/perfromer Annette Peacock about her early experiences with the Moog synthesizer. She and then-husband/jazz pianist Paul Bley recorded the first jazz album using a Moog back in 1969. Over the next three years the pair recorded some groundbreaking albums that sold poorly and are now rare collector's items.
We went over to a critic's house -- Don Heckman of the New York Times -- just to hang out with him and we asked him if he'd heard anything new. He said, "well, there's this one by Walter Carlos of synthesizer music," and he played it for us. I fell right in love with it; it was the first new instrument in three hundred years. I just kept asking Paul about it, but he wasn't too enthusiastic about it in the beginning...
There's quite a funny story... on the way over to see Robert Moog I psyched out exactly the take with him in terms of interesting him in giving us a synthesizer because we didn't have any money. So Paul said, "We've got to take the synthesizer away; if we don't take it away with us then was won't get it," so we went over in the station wagon we got all Paul's publicity and press and went over there. We thought that Walter Carlos was getting a lot of attention and credit and we felt that as Robert Moog had invented the instrument he might like a little bit of it himself. So we took the tack that we were going to create music with it rather than just use it as a 'jingle'-type instrument and we ere going to incorporate it into the main field of music, give it some dignity and the respect it deserves. So we went up there and Paul did the rap and I just stood around looking charming and lovely... and we drove away that night with a synthesizer.
We took it back to New York where nobody knew what a synthesizer was. Not only that, but anyone who did know what it was, or who had been working on it -- the commercial people -- wouldn't tell you anything about it, and there was no information out about it. So we had this thing that looked like an air-craft cockpit and it was just sitting in our bedroom. We just looking looked at it every morning for about six months saying "What are we going to do with it?" Then we had it in the closet in the hall, behind some curtains, and didn't tell any musicians. Finally Gary came to visit one day and I drew back the curtains and said, "Did you ever see anything like this before?" and he said "What the f**k is that?" I said "A synthesizer." He said, "A what?" Then we decided to set it up again and I started fooling around with it and patching. We had to make all these charts -- I drew the way it looked and noted the patching so we could find the sounds again. I actually invented a way to graft the voice onto it.
The First gig we did was at the Village Vanguard, and we had to make the audience wait twenty minutes between tunes while we changed the patching. It was ridiculous. Anyway, it went on from there. We toured Europe and carried the stuff around. the Europeans weren't very happy because they were used it Paul as an acoustic player. We had a lot of trouble with it and it didn't go down very well.
Then my father died and left me five thousand dollars and I produced a concert at the Philharmonic Hall. I had Leonard Bernstein's dressing room -- it was great. We did the first live concert with the synthesizer and voice. I used late night TV to promote it -- it was very cheap at the time -- and we flashed pictures of synthesizers and things on the screen. And I didn't make any money, we broke even. When I drew back the curtain on the first night there were some people out there : I was really astonished. I got some very good reviews and then we went on to do the albums and things.
But the only problem with the synthesizer is that it is such hard work. It's like making love to a very, very, large person: it's just really difficult. Every sound you get in order to change it you have to move so much. It wasn't really a live performing instrument, it was really behind the state of art. We invented a way of using pedals and things like that so that we could keep our hands free. We had a lot of problems to solve. It was very difficult.
Even when I heard Weather Report in their concert last year -- and Joe Zawinul is excellent -- there was one particular loud note that was really just painful. Did you ever hear Sun Ra live? He solves the problem. He has like twenty horn players, all acoustic, and the one synthesizer mic-ed up. And that balance works beautifully. He plays slow, he plays very long things against the very fast moving horn lines, which is really successful. If you're going to do that then you've really got to deal with the contrasts: the fast against the slow, the loud against the soft. You've got to use those dimensions. You have to create everything you do with it. It's not like a piano where you sit down and get some response. Synthesizer don't respond, they just do what you tell them to do; it's like a machine. After a while you feel like you're losing humanity, you begin losing the quality of being a human being when you are working with them. So both Paul and I felt like moving back from them.
We went over to a critic's house -- Don Heckman of the New York Times -- just to hang out with him and we asked him if he'd heard anything new. He said, "well, there's this one by Walter Carlos of synthesizer music," and he played it for us. I fell right in love with it; it was the first new instrument in three hundred years. I just kept asking Paul about it, but he wasn't too enthusiastic about it in the beginning...
There's quite a funny story... on the way over to see Robert Moog I psyched out exactly the take with him in terms of interesting him in giving us a synthesizer because we didn't have any money. So Paul said, "We've got to take the synthesizer away; if we don't take it away with us then was won't get it," so we went over in the station wagon we got all Paul's publicity and press and went over there. We thought that Walter Carlos was getting a lot of attention and credit and we felt that as Robert Moog had invented the instrument he might like a little bit of it himself. So we took the tack that we were going to create music with it rather than just use it as a 'jingle'-type instrument and we ere going to incorporate it into the main field of music, give it some dignity and the respect it deserves. So we went up there and Paul did the rap and I just stood around looking charming and lovely... and we drove away that night with a synthesizer.
We took it back to New York where nobody knew what a synthesizer was. Not only that, but anyone who did know what it was, or who had been working on it -- the commercial people -- wouldn't tell you anything about it, and there was no information out about it. So we had this thing that looked like an air-craft cockpit and it was just sitting in our bedroom. We just looking looked at it every morning for about six months saying "What are we going to do with it?" Then we had it in the closet in the hall, behind some curtains, and didn't tell any musicians. Finally Gary came to visit one day and I drew back the curtains and said, "Did you ever see anything like this before?" and he said "What the f**k is that?" I said "A synthesizer." He said, "A what?" Then we decided to set it up again and I started fooling around with it and patching. We had to make all these charts -- I drew the way it looked and noted the patching so we could find the sounds again. I actually invented a way to graft the voice onto it.
The First gig we did was at the Village Vanguard, and we had to make the audience wait twenty minutes between tunes while we changed the patching. It was ridiculous. Anyway, it went on from there. We toured Europe and carried the stuff around. the Europeans weren't very happy because they were used it Paul as an acoustic player. We had a lot of trouble with it and it didn't go down very well.
Then my father died and left me five thousand dollars and I produced a concert at the Philharmonic Hall. I had Leonard Bernstein's dressing room -- it was great. We did the first live concert with the synthesizer and voice. I used late night TV to promote it -- it was very cheap at the time -- and we flashed pictures of synthesizers and things on the screen. And I didn't make any money, we broke even. When I drew back the curtain on the first night there were some people out there : I was really astonished. I got some very good reviews and then we went on to do the albums and things.
But the only problem with the synthesizer is that it is such hard work. It's like making love to a very, very, large person: it's just really difficult. Every sound you get in order to change it you have to move so much. It wasn't really a live performing instrument, it was really behind the state of art. We invented a way of using pedals and things like that so that we could keep our hands free. We had a lot of problems to solve. It was very difficult.
Even when I heard Weather Report in their concert last year -- and Joe Zawinul is excellent -- there was one particular loud note that was really just painful. Did you ever hear Sun Ra live? He solves the problem. He has like twenty horn players, all acoustic, and the one synthesizer mic-ed up. And that balance works beautifully. He plays slow, he plays very long things against the very fast moving horn lines, which is really successful. If you're going to do that then you've really got to deal with the contrasts: the fast against the slow, the loud against the soft. You've got to use those dimensions. You have to create everything you do with it. It's not like a piano where you sit down and get some response. Synthesizer don't respond, they just do what you tell them to do; it's like a machine. After a while you feel like you're losing humanity, you begin losing the quality of being a human being when you are working with them. So both Paul and I felt like moving back from them.
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