Following The Muse
Henry Kaiser talks about his hundreds of collaborations, his adventures with new tech, changes in distribution and how composers are paid, and his efforts on behalf of musicians from Madagascar
Experimental guitarist, composer, and new technology pioneer, Henry Kaiser, believes that sometimes the music takes on a life of its own. “The piece has a spirit that drags the players to different places every time, if you let it do that,” he says about his experiences playing compositions like John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star.” “You’re not just trying to make something that sounds like the results of the original framework for improvisation, rather, you see what it wants to do every time. It’s like a Ouija board. Everyone has their hands on it, and it spells out the different things. But one person is probably not guiding that, and you don’t know what it’s going to spell out.”
That openness defines Kaiser’s career. Call it serendipity. Call it karma. But he seems willing to try whatever comes his way. His collaborations number in the hundreds, and include projects with everyone from trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith; to guitarists Nels Cline, Elliott Sharp, and Fred Frith; English folk artist Richard Thompson; ethnomusicologist Kiku Day; master percussionist, Zakir Hussain; and many others. He is an early adopter of new music technologies, and was one of the first people to experiment with long delays and loops, incorporate rack-mounted studio gear into his live rig, and master the then-state-of-the-art Synclavier. He has extensive credits scoring for film and television, and his efforts include nominations for an Oscar and Grammy. He’s traveled the world and recorded albums with artists from places as disparate as Norway and Madagascar—and he’s even recorded in Antartica while doing research as a scientific diver. He also appears on about 350 albums as a collaborator, leader, or sideman, and that list is growing.
“I don’t worry about it, and I don’t keep track,” Kaiser says about his massive discography. “I just try to put out more stuff to serve the audience that’s out there, before you can’t reach them or won’t be able to serve them any more.”
Needless to say, Kaiser has been around. I spoke with him from his home in California, and we talked about Metalanguage Records, the cooperative label he founded with Larry Ochs and Greg Goodman, the dearth of live music and what that portends for the future of experimental music, the reasons he stopped scoring for documentaries and television, his secret to initiating collaborations with his musical heroes, and the story behind A World Out Of Time, his project with David Lindley and musicians from Madagascar.
Before we get started, how did you meet composer Conlon Nancarrow [pictured above]?
I met him when he first started coming back into the U.S. from Mexico. I had friends who knew him. I always loved his music, and I got the first record he did for Columbia [Studies for Player Piano] when I was in college. I met him and we got along really well. He gave me 12 rolls of his studies that will play on regular player pianos. Every once in a while, I take them to a piano store and play one or two.
Your connection with him is interesting, because you’re both early adopters of new technologies.
Yes. We could communicate very well. I visited him at his house in Mexico City. I played all his rolls on the pianos there, and I heard everything on his own pianos, which was amazing. At that time Charles Amirkhanian, Bob Shumaker, and I were making new recordings of all of Conlon’s studies for a new series released on the German WERGO label. He had a library about the size of an average elementary school library that contained only books about time. He was fascinated by time. It was a giant library, with stacks down the middle. It was crazy.
What’s your background and when did you start playing guitar?
I started playing when I was 20. I had been an emancipated minor since I was 14. I had no guardians and I was legally on my own since I was 14. I went to college when I was 16. When I was in college, I’d go to school every other year. I worked in film and television production, so when I started to play music, I was already working in professional production work. I was able to apply things I learned there, or the ways I did things, to music. To this day, I edit music in the studio much more like a film editor does, as opposed to how music editors work.
What’s the story behind the Metalanguage label you started with Larry Ochs in 1977?
That was a cooperative label with sax player Larry Ochs and pianist Greg Goodman. The Metalanguage records that were Greg’s would say Beak Doctor on them. We’d sell mainly through a distributor at the time, New Music Distribution Service in New York. We sold a lot of records and made surprisingly good money. Back then, you could probably sell ten times what you can sell now of an independent American experimental release.
How were you marketing your releases?
It would go through that distributor in New York, and it would go to record stores. We’d also send promos to radio stations.
Would you tour as well?
We’d tour, and play big festivals in Europe. We were really busy back then. I was working in film production at the same time. Half time was film production and half time was music.
Was that your first experience recording?
Eugene Chadbourne asked me to be on a record of his, Guitar Trios, which was the first album I was on. That was just before the end of college, in 1976. He heard a recording that my friend Owen Maercks and I had done for a radio show, and he asked if we would play on his next record with him. At that time, he was a draft dodger, and he was living in Canada. He came to visit us and we made that recording.
How were you funding your projects on Metalanguage?
Funding was coming from sales and sales were good, because distribution was good. There were record stores, they’d order it, and the records would sell. Clerks in stores would recommend our products to buyers. We went to a truly first-rate pressing plant. We did what you’d call audiophile pressings now, and we had reasonably good artwork. If you put that stuff in a record store, people will buy it out of curiosity.
How long did that label last?
That lasted into the ‘80s. Now and then Larry Ochs and I will self-release a CD and put it on the Metalanguage Label just as a joke. It’s funny, because old people who care about that stuff get excited.
How did your experiences back then compare to streaming and how people consume music today?
The type of music I do is complex in timbre and sound quality. It’s the kind of music that you can only enjoy in high fidelity. Streaming is lo fi, and the music is just dead there. It is not going to recruit new fans and it’s not going to satisfy people. It’s the kind of music that can’t survive in streaming.
Is your audience sensitive to that?
Yes, and you can’t recruit new audiences for this type of music with streaming-quality audio. On Bandcamp you can have downloads that are CD quality, but as far as streaming goes, it sounds terrible everywhere, all the time.
How are you drumming up new business?
It seems like there are dying channels of distribution. It is hard for experimental music to reach the kind of audience sizes or the younger audiences it used to reach in the last century. But I’ll point out, on the momentary-positive side, that during the quarantine now, Steve Feigenbaum [Cuneiform Records] has told me that his sales of physical product are the best they’ve been in 20 years.
I’ve heard that streaming is down, which is interesting.
I don’t pay attention to streaming because the music that I love doesn’t survive in streaming. But in the old days, if you wanted to learn about new music, you’d go to a record store and someone would say, for example, “If you like Conlon Nancarrow, you might like Stockhausen, too.” But that doesn’t happen now. Now, the streaming service will say, “If you like Conlon Nancarrow, you might like Lizzo.” It is going to direct you to the most promoted thing irrespective of taste. That’s the way it works, everything is promoted. In the old days—of course there was promotion—but in record stores there were fans of music who worked there. They would see a kid buying a Johnny Winter record, and they might say, “Hey, do you know who BB King is?” It wasn’t an algorithm for profit, it was fans caring about musical expression and art. I think that’s a huge difference. I see what is promoted next to my own YouTube videos—I see what comes up in the column on the side—and most of it is not what I would recommend, rather, it is what I might suggest is a true waste of my listeners’ time. So the market place for people choosing to buy what they like isn’t really working, because they are not getting the information to direct them to what they really like. The amount of information, while it seems way bigger, is actually more restrictive and limited in some ways. Last century, an average record store clerk could—and would—provide much better suggestions based on a buyers’ expressed tastes, even without the buyer asking for it. It was a passion for clerks to match buyers up with music that they would enjoy, rather than with what would profit the store as the single priority. The clerks sought to expand the buyers’ musical worlds, while modern promotion seeks to contract it to the least common denominator.
Joe Steinhardt from Don Giovanni Records told me that the streaming services promised a great celestial jukebox, but the reality is still the same gatekeepers driving you to the same Top 40-type music.
Exactly, and that effects what live performances people go to, and everything on down the line, including who becomes musicians and what they choose to play and create. It used to be that young people were the big audience for the more experimental and weirder music, but that’s largely because they came up through seeing live music in high school. It was important to have live music as part of their experience. They’d find what they liked and gravitated towards that. Nowadays, kids can go through high school and never see a live band once. Everything is DJs. When I was a kid, for instance, I remember the Young Bloods played a high school dance once. Bands you were buying records by would show up and play high school dances. And then kids from the school would have their own groups doing their own thing at high school dances, too, and that’s gone.
Exploring new tech is a hallmark of your career, how did you get your hands on the new gadgets as they were coming out?
I came from a film production background and we were mixing and doing things in the studio. I had some studio skills already and I was ready to learn. When I started making my first records, I noticed they used these rack effects in the studio and I thought, “Why can’t we use those live, too?” And I gradually bought little bits of studio gear.
Was it insanely expensive back then?
No, it was not insane, and you could get used stuff easy back then. At that time, the LA studio guys wanted to have those same effects at whatever studios they worked at, so they started to travel around with racks. Those LA-based musicians also started to tour with that gear. Frank Zappa was somebody who pushed on-stage technology about the same time that I was. He used rack gear and kept experimenting with getting a better sound. It wasn’t just about getting a great sound with the guitar and the amp, but it was about having the real refrigerator-sized rack there on the side of the stage. There were other people who did that early on, and I would say Zappa was one of the prime examples. Another prime example was the Grateful Dead, who changed the gear at a near-weekly, and sometimes daily, rate.
Didn’t Zappa even take a Synclavier on tour with him?
He took the Synclavier on tour. We both had Synclaviers at the same time. Back then, in the ‘80s, I primarily made money doing soundtracks for grade B science documentary TV shows. I had the Synclavier for that. Zappa would give me samples that he made, and share a lot of information. He was very kind.
What would be the equivalent of the Synclavier today?
The equivalent today would be Logic Pro X on a Mac. You can pretty much do all that same stuff. The software for Logic Pro X is $200. You would have needed a $150,000 Synclavier to do that in the old days. You can buy a used Mac for $400 or $500, so for $700 you can do now what would have cost $150,000 or $200,000 back then. That’s the difference, but nowadays you typically get paid nothing—or nearly nothing—for doing TV scoring. Back in those days, you could have made several hundred thousand dollars a year doing TV scoring. Now you can probably only make $10,000 or $15,000, unless you are on an A-List dramatic show. The middlemen at the studios and in publishing have things sewed up so the composer and musicians don’t get much money anymore.
What’s changed?
Legal stuff, where the production companies make sure they get 90 percent of the royalties. Plus, a lot of TV scoring is mostly done with library music now. They buy a library from somebody and slap different stuff on. The music wasn’t made for that particular show. The pleasure of doing TV and film scoring for me was creating the music. It’s about the process, creating the music for that specific show, and trying to do something that worked for that show. You can’t really do that anymore. I know people who concentrate on producing libraries that they sell to shows. But that doesn’t satisfy me. I remember when I scored a show called Secrets and Mysteries, which was about Big Foot, ghosts, Hitler’s ghost, and stuff like that—a pseudo-science show—and the agent I had at the time told me, “I made a deal and I got us all the publishing.” Normally they only gave us a quarter of the publishing at best, because the production company would take half, and the distribution company would take half of the other half, meaning that I would get a quarter. But here they mistakenly signed the contract and gave us 100 percent. I said to my agent, “You never make money through publishing.” He said, “No, you’re going to make money.” I was shocked, the first quarter check would have paid for the Synclavier, and that was for a syndicated bad science show, which then stayed on cable TV for about five or seven years. That paid for my house, tons of gear, and a lot of stuff, just by luck, because they happened to sign the wrong thing. You can’t get anything like that deal now.
Were you involved in designing or developing new gear?
I’d give feedback to Eventide to test things and they’d pay attention. Gary Hall at Lexicon, too, those were the main ones. Nowadays, there are a few pedal companies who pay attention. The Red Panda Tensor pedal is where someone actually did exactly what I asked for. Curt Malouin at Red Panda basically made the perfect pedal for me. I am surprised by how many people have found so many new sounds with it—and come up with so many different ideas—that I would have never thought of. Red Panda even put together a great compilation album that aptly demonstrates how many different things people have discovered using that pedal.
The Red Panda Tensor emulates a lot of those things you would do with long delays, but in a pedal.
Exactly. It makes it very easy for me to do things l like to do, and I found a lot of new surprising things in there as well.
How have you managed to do so many collaborations with other artists?
That’s one of my favorite things, to play with people I haven’t played with before. I’ve been fortunate to play with so many people who were heroes of mine, and I think that grows out of two main qualities of the type of music—improvised and experimental musics—that I’ve always engaged in. Improvising musicians like to play with different people all the time, and that’s led me to a lot of people.
How do you initiate those collaborations?
You just walk up to them at a gig and say, “Hey, do you want to do something together sometime?”
It’s that easy, even if they’ve never heard of you?
Yes. I did that to Richard Thompson. I walked up to him at a solo gig in the early ‘80s and asked if he wanted to do something—he said, “Sure”—and we did it. Plus, people who are part of the same community, like Fred Frith, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Frisell, or Derek Bailey, it was natural for us to run into each other and to play together. Those were the social rules of what you did. But David Lindley, I just called him upon the phone and said that we should do a track for this Neil Young tribute album, and he said, “Sure.” Ray Russell, a great British experimental and studio guitarist—he’s known for being the guitarist on all the old James Bond John Barry soundtracks. A few years ago, I asked him if he wanted to record something. He said, “Ok, I’ll be in the U.S, can I come over and we’ll do something?” And we did. We just made a new record in London, last March, and we both were really amazed because it’s as if we’ve been playing together for years, with a deep understanding of each other’s musicality, even though we’ve spent very little time together. We happen to fit together really well, and since he was a hero of mine from the late-‘60s, I feel especially grateful and honored that that’s the case with Ray.
What’s the story behind the album you did with David Lindley in Madagascar?
I love music from Madagascar. The first day I bought my first guitar, I tried to play along with a 1964 record called, Valiha Madagascar, on the French Ocora label. I always loved that music, but there wasn’t much because the country was closed to the west, aligned with Russia, and nothing much came out. In the late ‘80s, there were suddenly some CDs. A German engineer and producer had gone to Madagascar and recorded a few people. I then read an article in National Geographic about a photographer, Frans Lanting. He went there and took photos. It looked like there was tourism and that Westerners could go there. The country was suddenly open to us. I decided to go and take a DAT machine, record something with somebody there, and see what happens. I mentioned it to Howard Dumble—he made the amplifiers that both David Lindley and I had at the time—and he mentioned it to Lindley. Lindley called me up and said he wanted to go with me. I said, “If you’re going, too, let me get a record label and see if they’ll pay for it.” Long story short, I did get a record label to pay for it, and at the time, we were looking at what people like Paul Simon and David Byrne and Peter Gabriel had done, ripping off third world musicians for their publishing money, and getting them to sign things where they got all the money for songs that those guys wrote. Lindley and I were both pissed about that. Lindley talked to his publishing company—a publishing company would normally take half of any publishing money—but he said, “I got them to give a special deal. The publisher will only take 10 percent for administration and the Malagasy musicians will get 90 percent of the publishing money.” We decided not to pay ourselves or make any money, either. We just paid ourselves a per diem for hotel and food out of the production budget. We also paid the Malagasy musicians good fees—$200 a day or more—at the time of recording, which was out of the production budget. All profits and 90 percent of the publishing money went to the Madagascar musicians. These guys who were normally making $400 a year, some of them were suddenly getting $10,000.
That must have been a huge boon for them.
It was great for those musicians. About half of them are dead now, but we were able to have a lot of money sent to them. I know that one of them—his name is Sammy—and he’s been through horrible cancer stuff recently. His life was saved because they still get publishing money from it. A couple of years ago, he had another good payment come in, and he was able to get the expensive fancy treatment he needed to stay alive. Sammy is currently performing and healthy, and he would have been dead otherwise, without the World Out Of Time project. That did a lot of good. The musicians who have died, there is no way to sort out if they had families or whatever, or how to get money to them, so that money is going to a charity called Seed Madagascar, which helps provide water and health care for people in poor areas of Madagascar. We try to take care of them and make sure the money still goes to them there. Isn’t that crazy? That’s a 1991 release. That’s almost 30 years ago and they’re still making money. You show me if one South African musician on Graceland, who actually wrote most of the songs, ever got a publishing penny from Paul Simon. [According to this, and similar articles discussing the various controversies surrounding the album, Simon did pay the studio musicians well for the sessions—$200 an hour when the going rate in South Africa was $15 a day—but they don’t mention publishing, which, considering how well the album sold, could be in the millions.]
Did you bring them to the U.S. to tour?
We did a few gigs on the west coast and east coast, which was a promo tour when it was released. Rossy and Rakotofrah came over from Madagascar. We played those gigs—a couple were with Lindley—it was about eight shows. Later, at a festival in Louisiana, we brought over Dama Mahaleo, D’Gary, and Rossy’s band, and made another record in Louisiana and that same time. Some of them, like D’Gary, were able to keep coming to the States until it became impossible for a Madagascar musician to afford a visa to the U.S. anymore. I think it turned out to be an entirely good thing, I feel very proud of that and so does Lindley.
Have you tried that with other communities in the third world?
No. Lindley and I made a record like that in Norway, where the musicians make more money than Lindley and I ever do in a normal world. We made two nice albums there, but there’s no way a record company can pay for that kind of thing nowadays. It’s not going to happen any more.