Terry Riley & Great Learning Orchestra
Tread On the Trail
(All photographs: Ingvar Loco Nordin)
Terry Riley & Great Learning Orchestra
Tread On the Trail at LAVA, Kulturhuset, Stockholm 25th May 2002.
Duration: 47:41
When Terry Riley appeared at LAVA, a wild and free place at Kulturhuset (the Culture House) in downtown Stockholm a warm day of May 2002, it was to be a revealing and brainstorming experience, especially for all of us who had been around for a long time on Earth, even long enough to have experienced the 1960s firsthand and head over heals, so to say, from smoky joints to daredevil political demonstrations, mind-expanding happenings, terrific poetry readings, hitchhike sojourns down Europe and so forth – but it was an important event for the young ones too, as the night spun a transparent web of benevolence and good medicine over the members of The Great Learning Orchestra, their spiritual focus of the day – Terry Riley – and the audience which gathered, occupying all the seats, the floor and the wide staircase in back of the hall. Even the passers-by outside the big windows seemed to step in time with the swinging music, and the evening’s blue turned a darker hue as night fell and the music continued in its expanding and contracting motion, Riley spreading his arms wide or bringing his hands slowly together as indications for the players.
Bebe Risenfors of The Great Learning Orchestra had managed to rig some microphones just in time for the session, and as it often is with The Great Learning Orchestra, things develop as they happen, and this time it was a complete success, sound wise; the recording I’m listening to as I write a spellbinding tour de force of musical might and ingenuity.
Bebe talked about the occasion in an interview I made a few years later:
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It was Leif who thought about it. I was originally going to play, but I had had no time to rehearse, because I had been off somewhere, and then Leif said, just a couple of hours ahead: Shouldn’t we record?
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Leif cuts in here in the interview and says that someone else was contracted to record, but that person got some acute love trouble just hours before the concert.
Bebe continues:
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I was there five of six, beginning to place the mikes etcetera, just daring it, taking chances, but it turned out really good, with two mikes also placed right in the middle of the orchestra.
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This was indeed the first time I went to a session with The Great Learning Orchestra, which since then has become one of my top priorities in life. Folke Rabe had informed me well ahead of Terry Riley’s three-day descent on Stockholm, and I had even been given a space on the floor in Rabe’s midtown studio, where I had spread my sleeping bag.
This concert at LAVA was the final touch to a truly wonderful musical three-day feast with Terry Riley and his comrade Stefano Scodanibbio [who however did not participate in this performance], and for sure Tread On the Trail topped everything off in brilliance and joy; the joy of playing, the joy of listening; the joy of living!
It was a milestone concert for many reasons. It brought the very best of the feelings of the 1960s into this night in 2002, and for this special occasion Folke Rabe joined The Great Learning Orchestra on a keyboard, placing himself inconspicuously in the back, behind – to name but a few - Leif Jordansson on electric guitar, Jonna Sandell on violin, Elisabeth Hansson with her voice, Martin Q Larsson on trumpet.
It was magic just to realize that Folke Rabe and Terry Riley were right up there on the same stage, making music. They have a history that go way back to the early 1960s. Folke traveled Europe in 1963, and in Venice, at the Biennial, he teamed up with Dancers’ Workshop. Ken Dewey worked with Dancers’ Workshop, he and Folke became good friends, and Dewey traveled to Sweden to meet Folke in the summer of 1963, and wouldn’t you know, he brought an obscure pianist called Terry Riley with him! Terry Riley and Ken Dewey stayed on for a while in Folke’s parents’ house in Hässelby Gård; a Stockholm suburb.
This was one year before Riley composed In C while riding the bus west across the United States in 1964 – and we all know what happened then!
And so here they were, Terry and Folke, with this highly vital, skilled, talented, ingenious and adventurous crew called The Great Learning Orchestra. Time and Space came together in the most pleasurable of actions at LAVA, and everybody felt the magnetism of the moment.
Afterwards a few Great Learners, myself and Folke joined Terry Riley and Stefano Scodanibbio for some beer and some after concert recuperation at a nearby bar. Riley asked me along to his hotel room to get a copy of his new very own production Atlantis Nath. We walked through Stockholm together with Stefano, reaching the hotel in about ten minutes. The elevator was the tightest one I’d ever seen. I could never have imagined that anyone would construct a contraption like that. I’m generally a bit claustrophobic, and I would not have gotten into a lift that looked like a standing coffin, but I was a bit drunk and Terry shoved me in there and got in himself too, while Scodanibbio climbed the stairs. I took a deep breath as Riley and I started the ascent like sardines in a can… It was at that instant that Terry realized he didn’t have the bag with his camera with him. It would have been tough to get the bag in there with us, which is why he suddenly missed it, exclaiming a spontaneous “Shit!”
We got into his hotel room, picked up Atlantis Nath and headed down the stairs, the three of us, grabbing a cab back to LAVA, where the janitors were setting things in order – but the camera bag wasn’t there. I suggested we’d look in the bar that we’d visited too, and as we scrambled in there the core crew of The Great Learning Orchestra was still there, and under the table we’re we’d been sitting I found Riley’s bag. He was so happy about it that he pulled out his camera and shot a few quick pictures of us all right then and there. A nice, relaxed stroll through downtown Stockholm in the cooling air of night took Riley, Scodanibbio and me past the train station, where I left the guys to take a night train back to my habitat in Shitville (Skitköping). I saw Terry & Stefano disappear into the shadows towards Rosenbad (the government quarters) as I entered the grand lit up space of the railway station, transiting between worlds...
Leif Jordansson up front
Folke Rabe made a radio interview with Terry Riley prior to the LAVA concert. Here is a transcript:
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Folke:
Tread On the Trail was composed in 1965, one year after your famous work In C. There are similarities between the pieces, I think, but also big differences.
Terry:
Yeah. It was the next thing I composed after In C, for ensemble. I’d done some solo keyboard things, but it was the first [ensemble] piece, and that along with Olson III comprised my total written output for the late Sixties…
Folke:
Tread On the Trail is dedicated to the famous jazzman Sonny Rollins. How come?
Terry:
Well, I went to see Sonny play in 1965, just shortly before I wrote this piece, and he came out from New York with four or five musicians, but didn’t give them any music. It was an interesting night, because he just sat up on the stage, and he would start improvising something with his horn, and he would kind of glance at the musicians and expect them to interact with the music he was playing. It resulted in a really – I thought – very interesting night of music, because you could sense the anticipation and the kind of bewilderment, even, on some of the musicians’ part, about how they were supposed to interact, but it result ed in some really interesting music. At that time I was playing with a big band rehearsal band in San Francisco, all made up of young students from San Francisco State, and we were going to do a big concert at the Tape Music Center, and decided that everybody should write a piece for it, so this was the piece I wrote for that concert at the Tape Music Center.
Folke:
It’s still repetitious music like In C, but in a fairly definite jazz idiom.
Terry:
Yeah, it was really meant to have a jazz feeling, or funk jazz feeling. In C doesn’t have this quality at all.
Folke:
No, it’s more clean.
Terry:
Yeah, it’s more like Sibelius or something.
Folke:
Hehe! It’s not one of your frequently performed pieces.
Terry:
Well, you know, I’d sort of forgotten about it after the first performance. The first performance of it was a very, very crazy performance, and one of the reasons I put it away was that I wasn’t particularly happy with the way we played it the first time, so…
Folke:
I was there; I heard it!
Terry:
Yeah, you were there, right! So, you know, it sat around, but then I dug it out a couple of years ago, [to bring it] to Moscow [in 2000], because they wanted me to play with some musicians in Moscow; something we could play together, and not have to have to rehearse a lot, so I took it there with me. That was the second performance of it.
Folke:
Is this performance here in Stockholm the third?
Terry:
It’s the fourth. It was performed at the Bowling Green University in between, so this is the Far North premier!
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I also have my own makeshift recording from the event, enabling me to also hear the tuning of the orchestra and the sounds of the players and the crowd pre-concert, revealing a vibrancy and anticipation out of the ordinary. I hear Leif Jordansson trying out the tuning of his electric guitar and I hear Jonna Sandell fine-tuning her violin. I’m sure all the members of The Great Learning Orchestra were quite edgy at that moment, full of nervous life and joy, because they were just about to play with Terry Riley and his career-long friend Folke Rabe.
The audience. Staffan Olzon on the floor.
LAVA is a very special place right in the middle of downtown Stockholm. It’s a combination of concert stage, library, coffee shop, youth center and much more; a real live culture center and retreat, placed at street level with big, high windows facing the center och central Stockholm, at Sergels Torg.
Because of its many combined functions, there was no special arrangements to keep the concert separate from all these other aspects of the place, so through-out, people kept coming and going, stopping for a while in their steps to check out the orchestra and Terry Riley - who of course dominated the area - but some just bought a cup of coffee, and you can hear the clattering of porcelain and some fragments of extraneous conversation here and there in this recording.
This makes the whole situation even more reminiscent of the cultural climate of the 1960s, and it truly fitted the atmosphere of The Great Learning Orchestra, who sometimes plays in uncontrolled areas like parks etcetera, and who, by virtue of the philosophical and creative make-up of the orchestra, has retained and developed the best characteristics of the golden age of the Sixties, furthering them and giving them a natural and very viable place in contemporary music and art.
Right before Terry went on stage he turned to Sung Hae Park, who was in charge of all the arrangements during Terry Riley’s three-day visit, handing her his white cap, asking if she’d wear it during the performance, which she did.
The commotion slowly died down as things were getting in order on stage, but some babies – what a wonderful sound! – still prattled inwardly.
Folke Rabe was in charge of the formal introduction, so he left his keyboard way in the back and stepped up front, talking into a microphone:
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Welcome! My name is Folke Rabe. I participate in the orchestra here, and I’ve known Terry for almost 40 years by now. I’d like to say something about this piece and its place in the chronology, so to say.
In the Sixties Terry Riley composed a piece called In C, which has to be considered his most famous work. It’s a piece which very much is based on repetition of a chain of motifs, which the musicians play through. However, Terry wrote two other pieces in the Sixties, which also are ensemble piece, but much lesser known. The second one, which came the year after, in the spring of 1965, is the one we’re going to play tonight; Tread On the Trail. Terry wrote this after he’d heard a concert with the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins in San Francisco. The piece is dedicated to Sonny Rollins, but he’s not aware of that! Terry was a little too modest to send him the score, but I have encouraged him to do it now, because I think Sonny Rollins would enjoy seeing that score.
It’s a piece with quite a bit of jazz influence. It works differently than In C, but it still contains a lot of repetition, in agreement with his methods of the Sixties.
The third ensemble piece that he did then was Olson III, from 1967. It’s called Olson III [a Swedish sounding name] because it was written for a Swedish situation, for The Music School of Nacka, which together with The Royal College of Music in Stockholm and The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation invited Terry for a residency. He was here for a month, gave lectures and rehearsed this piece with the pupils in Nacka; choir and orchestra. That concert from April 1967 can now be found on a CD from Cortical Foundation.
Tread On the Trail was premiered in San Francisco in 1965. I happened to be present at the occasion, when it was performed by a rather small group of eight or ten musicians. After that it lay dormant. Terry was a bit put off by that premier, so he stashed the score away, but then in 2000 he was to do a concert in Moscow, with music students, which is when Terry pulled the score out, revised it some and played it there. That was the second performance. After that a small group at a university in the U.S.A. [Bowling Green University] has played it too, and tonight this excellent musicians’ collective, Great Learning Orchestra, delivers the fourth performance. I recall that it was played twice at the premier in San Francisco, which would make this the fifth performance, but it’s the fourth study anyway.
Since we’re relatively many in this group, Terry has offered to guide us some – not exactly direct us, but bring us through the gross form, which can be done in different ways.
We’re ready to begin!
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Right after the performance we all remained at LAVA for half an hour or so, and on the recording I hear myself telling Sung Hae Park that my eyes were almost filling up with tears. That shows the impact of the occasion and of the music, and all its implications.
I talked briefly with Terry right in the post-concert commotion out on the floor, and he said, among other things:
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This is a great group to play this kind of music. This kind of thing is rare to find these days, these kinds of musicians that can really see this through.
This reminded me of things we used to do in San Francisco in the Sixties, you know.
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Terry Riley with one enthusiastic listener
right after the concert
The event has grown since then, and now appears to me as one of my major musical/cultural experiences. It has to do with many other things than the downright music too, as this text has amply suggested already. It’s a whole cultural climate, a truly spiritual atmosphere of benevolence and hopeful creativity, so characteristic of Terry Riley, and so characteristic of The Great Learning Orchestra. Like The Incredible String Band once had it: “Be Glad, For This Song Has No Ending!”
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