Starting At The Top
Ted Reichman talks about his experiences working with Anthony Braxton, curating shows at leading alternate music venues in late-90s New York, and the evils of networking
Multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser, Ted Reichman, started his musical life playing piano. He attended the New England Conservatory Preparatory School (NEC Prep) throughout high school, and used the opportunity to discover new music and to explore Boston’s vibrant music community. When he got to college, he met noted composer and improviser, Anthony Braxton, joined Braxton’s student ensemble, and it was that encounter that altered his musical universe.
“Braxton stopped what he was doing,” Reichman says in our interview below about that first meeting. He had just told Braxton he owned an accordion. “He walked up to me. He physically grabbed me. He brought me into the corner of the room, and said, ‘The future of the universe depends on you playing accordion in my ensemble.’”
Needless to say, that moment began his 30-years-and-counting relationship with the instrument, and launched his career. Reichman worked professionally with Braxton into the mid-90s, and then moved to New York City, where he started playing klezmer with renowned clarinetist, David Krakauer. He also formed a trio, Refuseniks, with drummer John Hollenbeck and bassist, Reuben Radding, which eventually morphed into Hollenbeck’s experimental world music ensemble, Claudia Quintet. He worked regularly as part John Zorn’s musical universe—including recording an album as a leader for Tzadik Records—and performed and recorded with a number of important New York-based artists, including Paul Simon, Elysian Fields, and many others.
In 1995, Reichman had a regular, weekly gig at Alt.Coffee, one of the earliest internet cafés. That led to him curating a music series there, and eventually doing the same at Tonic, which became an important Manhattan venue for experimental music. These days, he’s based in Massachusetts, scores for film, produces records, continues to record and perform, and in 2010, joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory as a member of the Contemporary Improvisation department.
Reichman is animated and great to speak with. We discussed his early history, meeting Braxton, and taking up the accordion. We also spoke about his working with world-class improvisers, becoming a part of the 90s-era New York downtown scene, the rise of Alt.Coffee and then Tonic, and his thoughts about meeting and developing deep, working relationships with other musicians, as opposed to, what he considers, insincere networking. As an aside, he recently started publishing his poetry, and, as will become clear from our conversation, that’s in spite of writer Annie Dillard’s opinion of his earlier work.
What’s your background and how did you get into music?
I was born in northern Maine. My parents had a small farm in the early ‘70s. They were what you’d call back-to-the-land hippies. The farm we lived on had an old upright piano, which I started banging on at a very young age. I just kept going forever [laughs]. I still have that piano, it’s in my house now.
Do you have to do a lot of work on it?
It is what it is. It is a borderline wreck. I have played it on one or two things, but it’s not like a super-usable piano. It has a quirky honkey-tonk sound, but I play it all the time anyway. We were in northern Maine for a while—lived in Portland ME for a while, too—and then I grew up in the Boston area. I went to NEC Prep when I was in high school. I started playing rock ’n’ roll covers in garage bands when I was in the fourth of fifth grade. I started getting really interested in blues music, too. When I was a little bit older, around 1983, I started getting really into hip hop, which was around the time that Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” came out. But because I was playing blues—I was trying to play Ray Charles, Professor Long Hair-style blues piano—the teachers in our town guided me toward the NEC Prep program to study jazz piano. As an aside to all this, I should note that all through this time I was never on the professional musician track. It sounds in retrospect that I was—because I was doing a lot of music and I was really passionate about music—but I was not a disciplined practicer. Nobody would have labeled me as a future professional musician. I was also really into literature and film. Most of the people were pressuring me to focus on writing when I was in high school. That’s why I didn’t go to music school. I went to a liberal arts college.
Although Wesleyan, where you went, happens to have an amazing music program anyway.
I was really into music, and I saw what was going on at Wesleyan. Although the reason I went there was not the music program, it was the writer, Annie Dillard. My high school English teacher was a huge Annie Dillard fan, and he was pushing me to try and study with her. I didn’t know Anthony Braxton was at Wesleyan when I applied there. The year when I applied to college was his first year at Wesleyan. At that time, to publicize the presence of a new faculty member would have meant reprinting the brochures—this was pre-internet—so they didn’t have materials with Anthony Braxton’s name on it. I didn’t know he was there until I already decided to go.
How did you know who he was?
Because of NEC Prep. For four years, every weekend, my weekend routine was that I would get to NEC in the morning, and have my lesson with me teacher, Barry Shapiro. Then I would go to the record stores of the Back Bay—I had a little circuit of all the record stores—I would go to the music stores on Boylston Street and futz around with the synthesizers, and then I spent the entire afternoon in the NEC record library. I spent from 12 until four, every Saturday for four years, in the library at NEC listening to records. I got to know some of the students who worked in the library, and I got exposed to tons and tons of music. At that library is where I first heard Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and I would read stuff, too. I was also a huge reader of music journalism. I would read a name in Lester Bangs’ book or whatever, and I would go to the library and look it up. If you spent a lot of time digging through used record stores in the jazz sections in the ‘80s, you were going to run across Anthony Braxton records. There were a lot of them. I can’t say that I was listening to a lot of Braxton, but I definitely knew who he was, and I did listen to some of them.
When I got into Wesleyan, I went with a friend to visit and to sit in on classes. I opened the list of classes from the admissions office that they had that day, and I saw, “African American Music Ensemble, A. Braxton.” I felt this jolt of electricity go through my body. That is not an exaggeration, I felt a physical response when I saw Anthony Braxton’s name on this list. My friend and I went to the class—and Braxton actually wasn’t there that day, he was off on the road somewhere—but Jay Hoggard was there, he was also a super-important teacher for me, and he explained what was going on. When I got back to Boston, I went to NEC the next weekend, and I gorged on Anthony Braxton records in the library. I was already into Sun Ra, and I was starting to get into Cecil Taylor, so Braxton was very much what I was into.
Did you join his ensemble when you got to Wesleyan?
There was an intense moment when I first got there. I was still really focusing on English, and I thought I was going to be an English major. I sent in my application to Annie Dillard’s workshop—you had to audition for her workshop, and I submitted a poem that I had written—then probably that same week, I went to Anthony Braxton’s ensemble. I definitely wanted to do it, even though I had no idea what was going to happen. I showed up to Anthony Braxton’s ensemble—it was an ensemble, not a class—and he’s an incredibly charismatic person, incredibly charming. I should note, Braxton at this time was not super-famous, and there were maybe seven or eight people there. He was going through the room asking us what instruments we played, and he got to me, I said piano. There were four piano players. He said, “I can’t handle four piano players. I can have three. One of you has to play another instrument.” I sheepishly raised my hand and said, “Sir, I have an accordion.” I had an accordion. I didn’t know how to play it, but I had an accordion—why I had the accordion is a story in itself—but I had an accordion that I brought to college for an unknown reason. He stopped what he was doing. He walked up to me. He physically grabbed me. He brought me into the corner of the room, and said, “The future of the universe depends on you playing accordion in my ensemble.”
And that’s how you became an accordionist.
I went back to the dorm, got the accordion, and that was it. The same week, Annie Dillard posted her list of who got into her workshop, and my name was not on it. Not only that, but she said—on her little note that accompanied the list—she said, “I was particularly disappointed in the poetry submissions this year [laughs].” I thought, “On the one hand, my poetry is considered subpar by Annie Dillard. But according to Anthony Braxton, the future of the universe depends on my accordion playing. I guess I am going to do that.” And that was the moment.
Were you able to play the accordion or did you have to figure it out?
I had a vague sense of how it worked, but I hadn’t had any lessons on the instrument. I also couldn’t read Braxton's music. Braxton’s music is really hard to read, and my musicianship, by most standards, was not nearly ready to play music like that. But Braxton really encouraged me. I think what Braxton recognized in me, even though I was pretty unskilled, was that I was incredibly serious about playing his music. I really believed in his music, and I had some sense of what he wanted in his music that was beyond what was written on the page. I had some experience improvising because I played in a lot of jazz ensembles—I wasn’t a classically trained young musician who was scared to improvise—I really wanted to improvise, even though I had never really done what you would consider free improvisation at that point. I think Braxton could tell that there was something there. I was also more prepared for it than I realized, because I had done so much listening. I was so excited to be with him, and I was so ready to work with somebody who took me seriously as a musician. All through my first year playing with him, I was still intending to be an English major—it wasn’t like I immediately became a professional caliber improvising musician, it didn’t happen immediately—but I spent that whole first year working incredibly hard on getting the chops together that I needed to play Braxton’s music. I ended up doing an independent study with him in my freshman year, which was crazy. The first thing he did was loan me a huge stack of records, like Iannis Xenakis, Stockhausen—probably incredibly valuable records—John Cage. He said, “Take these records back to your dorm, tape them, and listen to them.” I think what he was really doing was starting to train me to work with him on a professional level. A year later, I was in New York recording for Black Saint with him, Don Byron, Guy Klucevsek. It was crazy. I am pretty sure I wasn’t ready for that either, but I got swept up into this world of elite improvisors very quickly.
Were those players fine with you being there?
Yeah. Amina Claudine Myers, Warren Smith—all these people. Were they fine with it? I have a few things to say about that. First of all, Braxton’s music, because of the way he composes, his music is incredibly unconventional, and very hard. It has an incredible leveling quality, where you can be an experienced, highly-skilled player of difficult new music, and you can look at a Braxton chart and be just as confused as somebody whose education is high school jazz band. It’s very destabilizing, and I think it is designed that way. It is designed to break down your patterns of how you usually play, and bring you into this Braxtonian concept. Guy Klucevsek, for example, was and is a new music virtuoso, and I think he was just as confused as I was. I was probably even less confused. I hadn’t necessarily played these pieces before, but I knew Braxton’s music really well. I was working with him two or three days a week for over a year at that point. Even though I couldn’t sit down and solo the way Guy could, I had a certain skill set for Braxton’s music that made me kind of able to hang with somebody like that. Also, this was about 1992, and I don’t think there were a ton of young people who were showing up on rehearsals and gigs. I don’t think there were that many people my age interested in music like that. To meet somebody who was playing accordion and who was really into what he was doing, in 1992, I don’t think that was a common occurrence. So I felt very welcomed.
Did you continue with Braxton after graduation?
Yeah, I worked with Braxton throughout college. I did a bunch of work with him starting my second year of college, and you could call that professional work. After college I kept working with him for a few years. I was on the board of the Tri-Centric Foundation. I helped produce his opera, Trillium M, which was a huge undertaking, and that was kind of the end. That was a huge transitional moment for Braxton. It was a moment when a lot of people exited the Braxton universe, and that is when I left the organization.
After that opera?
I made a bunch of records with him, but it was a big transitional moment for his music, because he started composing in a totally different style, called the Ghost Trance Music. I guess that was around 1995. I played on a quartet session, which was the first recording of Ghost Trance Music.
When I was finishing college, I had no idea what I was going to do, but I had one gig with Anthony Braxton in New York. He had a mini-festival at the Kitchen, which was three days of large ensemble music. That was my one thing that I had on my agenda when I graduated from college. I met so many musicians on those gigs—people I ended up working with for years and years—that’s actually how I got into klezmer music as well [laughs]. Believe it or not, Anthony Braxton led me to klezmer music. I met a guy named Kevin Norton through Braxton, and Kevin was playing with clarinetist David Krakauer. Kevin recommended me to David Krakauer. Krakauer had just made one of the first Radical Jewish Culture records for Tzadik, and he was trying to figure out how to make some kind of fusion between traditional klezmer music and what was going on at the Knitting Factory. For lack of a better term, he wanted to make like an avant-garde klezmer project. He saw me, a 21 year old accordion player who played with Anthony Braxton, and thought, “That’s they guy to help me figure out how to do this.” He trained me how to play klezmer music. I started at the top in terms of klezmer music, because Krakauer is really amazing. It took a few months. I would go to his apartment, play with him and study with him a little bit, and after a year or so of playing weddings and parties and casually getting together, I started really playing gigs with him.
By that point, you must have had it together on accordion.
Around that time, I started playing with John Hollenbeck and Reuben Radding, and that made a big difference. In a way, playing with John was a thing that made me more functional on the instrument. Because unlike Braxton, John, when he would write these really difficult rhythms, he wanted to hear them played accurately. I am not saying that Braxton didn’t want them played accurately, but his feeling of time and the way time works in his music is extremely idiosyncratic. Braxton’s feeling of pulse and time is really not metronomic, and he doesn’t really want metronomic pulse, whereas somebody like John Hollenbeck does.
Where were you living?
I was in Manhattan on East 3 between A and B. I lived in a few places in Manhattan and then I moved to Brooklyn. Around that time, when I was living in the East Village, some friends of my girlfriend—John Scott and Melissa Caruso—opened an internet cafe on Avenue A called Alt.Coffee. They asked me to play there, and my trio with John Hollenbeck and Reuben Radding ended up being the regular Monday night band at Alt.Coffee.
What kind of music did you play?
We were playing a mix of stuff. We were playing a lot of covers—an assortment of jazz compositions by people like Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Charlie Haden, pieces that we had transcribed for the most part—and we would also play a lot of various kinds of folk music. We had a Turkish piece we’d play, a Bosnian piece, a couple of random African pieces. It is what you would call, eclectic. We started to compose original pieces, too, but more than that, we would improvise a lot. We ended up getting an audience, and it became an almost successful thing for a while.
Were you drawing a crowd?
It didn’t happen right away, but after a few months we started to see some of the same faces showing up, and then we got an article about us in the Voice, which was nice, and that really helped bring people down. Also, it was free. It was a pass-the-hat free gig. Krakauer came down and started to sit in with us, and that’s when it really started to explode, because David was starting to get a pretty big following at that time. We did it for about a year and a half. It would get pretty full, it was starting to feel like a thing. Then Reuben decided to move to Montana, and it kind of fell apart. Incidentally, that’s also how the Claudia Quartet started. It was me and John and he expanded that trio. And at the same time that John started to do that, I turned the concert series at Alt.Coffee into more of a curatorial thing, where I was booking different bands, and I got to book a lot of incredible people there.
Did it expand beyond Monday nights?
No, it was only on Monday nights. But the amazing thing that happened out of that was that Melissa and John, the people who owned Alt.Coffee, then opened Tonic. I became the music person at Tonic for its very first iteration. I was on tour with Krakauer on this Tzadik package tour of Europe—it was my first real tour of Europe—I was at a festival in Greece, and at this time, John Zorn had entered into a big feud with Michael Dorf at the Knitting Factory [laughs]. There was some incredible drama going down between Michael and John. I didn’t really know John, but I had met him a couple of times. I know a lot of people from his world, and somebody told John about Tonic. John decided, as sort of a “Fuck You” to the Knitting Factory, he decided to move all of his work to Tonic. We were in Greece, and he faxed to the hotel this list of all the bands he had booked to usher in Tonic into its role as the new space.
He just took over?
We had talked about it a little bit. I stepped aside and let this happen. I was not going to say no to John Zorn. I didn’t really talk to him about his motivations for this, but at that time, Tonic was not really a music venue. It was a coffee shop, it had a hair salon in the front, and they wanted to do a music one night a week like we did at Alt.Coffee. They were going to have comedy and other stuff, but Zorn took one look at it and said—he never said this to me, but I am imagining that he thought—“I am going to turn this into a music venue.” He somehow convinced them to do it, and that was all to get away from the Knitting Factory. The list of people that he booked, it was Medeski, Martin, and Wood, Arto Lindsay, Painkiller—Zorn’s band with Mick Harris and Bill Laswell—all these people who were really big names. That was the beginning of that phase of Tonic. It quickly became the new venue where all the downtown people started to work. I started booking it again after John did that initial festival/series.
Were you able to keep the audience?
I feel there may have been a little period of roughness, but the answer is, yes, it kept going pretty well after that. They switched to a new curatorial concept not long after that. I continued for a little while, and then we switched to a thing where every month there would be a different curator. Similar to how the Stone was for a while. So that was the end of my concert curation phase. But at that time, I was working a lot. I was a working musician at that point. I wasn’t really that into being a concert promoter, especially for what was now the happening venue that everybody wanted to play at. My answering machine was blowing up. It was crazy—this is all pre-internet—and somehow my phone number got out to every free jazz musician in New York. I’d come home at the end of the day and there’d be 15 messages on my answering machine from legends of free jazz. I thought, “I don’t want to call these people back. I don’t have gigs for them.” It got a little weird.
What gigs were you doing at that point?
I was playing a lot with Krakauer. I was playing with Hollenbeck. I was also starting to play in the rock ’n’ roll, singer-songwriter world a little bit as a multi-instrumentalist side person. I was working with a singer-songwriter named Eszter Balint, who most people know as the young relative from Hungary in Stranger Than Paradise [laughs]. That turned into a thing of working in the pop world, and I was working with a bunch of really great New York singer-songwriters at that time as well.
What was your involvement with Tzadik Records?
I made a record for Tzadik. I was working with David Krakauer, who made a record for Tzadik. I was working with Anthony Coleman quite a bit—now he’s my colleague at NEC—and I have been working with him since the month I arrived in New York. I was very involved in that world of people. I played on a lot of those Radical Jewish Culture records. I was working with different bands all the time that were on Zorn’s radar screen. I wasn’t a composer, but I think Zorn felt, because of my position in the community, that I should make a record. It seemed obvious. I know Zorn was hearing my playing on a lot of these records.
Alt.Coffee was at the beginning of the internet, and your career spans the rise of the internet. This is a huge question, but what are some of the changes you’ve seen, and how has that impacted you over the years?
It is a huge question. I am one of the first generation of people who grew up with the internet in a way, because I started using the internet my freshman year in college, which would have been 1991 or 1992.
That was very early.
The internet was crucial to my early career. This is incredibly strange to me, but there were Usenet groups, where you would talk about jazz, or Zorn’s music, or whatever—and I was involved in those on and off—and there are people who I encounter now who were on those Usenet groups. We remember each other from those early internet days. That’s pretty weird to me, but it is kind of beautiful at the same time. The early years, where a certain community of people who were on the internet, and who were interested in this music started to meet—that was more important than we realized. Also, early on, I was involved in early internet email groups around music that really helped me learn about stuff, and helped me connect to people. People I met in that period who I still consider friends in actual life. I think it was important for me as an educational, social, networking thing. Although I hate the idea of networking—I talk about this with my students all the time—I despise the idea of networking.
Why is that?
When it comes to creative work—this relates to what I was saying earlier about meeting Guy Klucevsek and people like that—you meet people you admire, know their work, and maybe even have something to offer them that will help move their work forward. Connecting with people on that level, where it is a constructive mutual thing, is very different from what I see a lot in the music world where people just want to meet people because they are famous, or they want to meet people because they think that is somehow going to move their career forward. And that is kind of gross. It is different when you share things. You have shared interests. You have shared goals. You can work together in a constructive way. I don’t think that’s networking. That’s just how creative connections are made. But I think there are some people in the music business who indiscriminately go out there and try to connect with people, and that’s not constructive.
It’s like you’ve been saying, you have relationships with some people that go back 20 or 30 years.
Yeah, in some of these cases, especially someone like Guy, or Anthony Coleman, or even Braxton. People from the older generation who I worked with, I was very knowledgable about their music before I met them. I knew their music, I knew a little bit about them as people. I didn’t just show up and say, “Oh hey you’re friends with John Zorn. I want to be friends with you because you’re friends with him.” It’s different when you are sincerely a fan. I should also say, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about is pretty far in the past at this point. In terms of that phase of my work, a lot of that happened because I was a fan. My affinity for Braxton’s music had a lot to do with being a fan of his work, and somewhat related artists. Artists like Braxton, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor were like gods to me.
And some of that has come full circle.
I just produced this record by a band called Tropos. They just put out a record on Biophilia Records. It is mix of original compositions and Braxton covers. I produced and mixed this record of my students playing music by my teacher, which was an incredible experience for me. It completely transformed my feeling of what it feels like to exist in a musical continuum, to feel like a conduit between Braxton and these 20-year-olds. And it is a really good record.