CAN

Some artists recoil from the idea of talking about their work and some might even consider it arrogant to have an awareness of their place in history, but Irmin Schmidt has no problem discussing his work, and his healthy sense of his own place in history somehow seems appropriate. Now in his seventies, Schmidt certainly is one of the most important figures in western music. As a member of the German group Can, Schmidt and his bandmates revolutionized rock music by thinking beyond the confines of rock music and created "new" music without being accepted as part of it.

Spending a few days with an old friend in northern California last winter, Schmidt had come to America not only to promote the latest batch of Can reissues but also to present new material at CalArts. His English is impeccable and he reveals himself as an articulate, confident man who feels that he can still push the boundaries of music. His recent adaptation of the opera Gormenghast and his work with Kuomo has demonstrated that his career was not limited to being at the forefront of Krautrock (a term he despises).

In some ways working in the opera idiom brings the composer full circle. Schmidt had studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen in his youth and planned to be a “serious” composer and conductor. He loved contemporary music and was among the first in Germany to perform the piano works of John Cage. “I played a lot of new music but I also played Chopin, Brahms, Mozart and Bach,” he says. For him, forming Can was not about expanding the consciousness of popular music or even tinkering with electronics, making art for the ears, or all the usual stuff that '60s visionaries often cite.

“I didn’t intend Can as a rock ensemble," he says. "As a composer, I was very unsatisfied with the idea that new orchestral music and the music of Cage and so forth was the only new music in the twentieth century. It claimed to be -- but new was also Coltrane, new was Pharaoh Sanders, new was the way that Hendrix played the guitar. When I started making music, I started to feel that Berlioz and Stockhausen’s claims to making the only new music weren't really true.”

An art critic and historian, Schmidt began to see that the art of the late 19th century drew from a broad palette. “It had more contradictory elements. New music intended to be a closed system, dogmatic. I thought that all this [other] new music – James Brown included – should come together with the more established to make an art form. You could have all kinds of elements in the music. But you couldn’t get it by sitting down and composing music. I wanted to bring together Jaki Leibezeit, a really fantastic free jazz drummer, and a young, extremely talented rock guitarist (Michael Karoli). To bring that together physically and not tell anyone what the music would be but rather find out spontaneously was very important. That was the idea. Of course," he says, "it is a rock group but we made a real art form.”

Although acts such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer would later borrow themes from classical works, and bands such as Gentle Giant would incorporate old forms, Can focused on making the new new.

Perhaps the only other act applying the principles of the orchestral world to a rock ensemble but not thinking of it as a rock ensemble was Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Schmidt says that he was impressed by MoI’s debut, Freak Out. “I wasn’t into rock music at the time,” he says. “But what really got me, what really flipped me was that first Mothers of Invention record and the first record by Jimi Hendrix. Those records showed me that I was on the right path. They told me that I should bring those elements into European music. But, you know,” he continues, “it was actually the American music that was important for us. James Brown was important for us. That’s something that’s never been part of European music.”

Brown’s music was repetitive, tension-mounting while English pop music was, to Schmidt’s ears, more conventional, easier to resolve and faster to collapse into expected norms. But Can's collective interest reached far beyond the standard slots of American or British pop, far beyond jazz or avant jazz, and far beyond the vague and inaccurate category of classical. There was always, Schmidt says, a deep love of ethnic music.

Leibezeit loved Arabian and North African music, even collaborating with Moroccan and Algerian musicians. Schmidt studied eastern and African music; bassist Holger Czukay held Vietnamese music in high esteem; all of them loved the music of Bali. “When Michael came to my apartment and saw that I had a collection of Bali music, he freaked out. That was another element we had in common, and that enormous diversity is what made Can.”

The group was even racially and ethnically integrated, working with a black American vocalist (Malcolm Mooney), though it is perhaps Damo Suzuki who became the group’s most recognizable and beloved vocalist. With already spontaneous-centered music at play, Suzuki added an unpredictable and unheard of element to the music that advanced Can’s timelessness. “Everything you hear on the records was invented spontaneously,” Schmidt says, “there was this incredible humor to it, a kind of dada thing. He didn’t use any real language. He’d mix up Japanese, German, English and whatever came to his mind. He’d have these nonsense lyrics that had a lot of intensity and created a big mystery. There are still people who try to figure out what he’s saying and they exchange lyrics on the web. That’s a nice thing. It creates these fantasies.”

Schmidt sees the fans and their observations about Can’s music as integral part of the group’s legacy and, he adds, Can fans have a kind of rare intelligence about them. “One of the most important sides of Can is that nearly every piece we made has a certain incompleteness, which makes people imagine things. It’s one of the major parts of modernism – on one side it’s perfect, on the other side it’s incomplete, which makes people create fantasies, use their imagination. I don’t think that these fans take it too seriously. They are very aware of the humorous side of us. If you listen to Unlimited Edition, it’s full of humor. We didn’t take it too seriously. On the other hand, it’s art. We wanted to take Stockhausen and James Brown, put them together and just let them be.”

While Can is credited as being a visionary act and certainly influenced trance, house and other genres that developed toward the end of the last century, and although his music is still considered ahead of its time, Schmidt doesn't claim to be able to predict where music is going and what it will add up to in this new century. But asked to do just that, Schmidt chokes, laughs and says, not without humor, “Well, am I prophet?” before adding, “Actually a lot of people have said that we were ahead of our time. So maybe there was some sort of prophesy in what we were doing. I think that my main occupation to this day is, as a composer, to look at our awareness of six hundred years of European art and the new things that came about in American black music and Indian and electronic music.”

As for his own role in shaping the music of the now, he's more certain. He says that he and his Canmates knew that if what they did was good it would endure. “I grew up learning to play compositions that were three hundred to four hundred years old. I think that if you do something worthwhile as a composer, it lasts. So, actually, the intention was not to make something would be forgotten in three years, but to create a music that like any other classical composer in past centuries had created. In a certain sense it’s the most natural thing that you at least try and want it to last.”