Steve
Cohn
from CP11 pages 118-127
Pen: Steve Brydges
Lens: John R. Fowler, Jaanus Heinla,Masafumi Nakagawa
Design: Royce Deans
Click image to download PDF of the Actual layout.
This was the thought that predominantly crossed my mind during my initial listen to Steve Cohn’s latest and second recording for Leo Records, entitled The Blair Recordings. In phone conversations prior to my receiving and listening to the album, Cohn had forewarned me of how different this album was from his others, but I had no idea just how different. It wasn’t just the music that confounded me- a bizarre and disparate collection of improvised tracks involving everything from Cohn’s staple instruments, shakuhachi and piano, to electronic percussive and ambient sounds, to a guest vocalist to Cohn himself talking his way through a thirteen minute excursion on the keyboard- but that he’d choose to release this collection of tracks at this time in his life on this label, when it seemed he was just reentering the scene of contemporary free jazz. For not only are these sounds alien to the average listener, they’re foreign to those familiar with the oeuvre of its possessor.
Called “the great hidden secret of American jazz” by critic Carl Baugher, Cohn’s timing in his choice of releasing The Blair Recordings, at least initially, was somewhat baffling and mysterious. Cohn’s records, to this point, were engaging and expansive sojourns into the outer regions of improvisation, alluring yet elusive, as though from chasing the secret of the beauty of the music one could not grasp it, until letting go, because this is music of and for the soul, and how does one grasp or contain or completely define the soul? One cannot, because it is elusive, but its allure is what keeps Man searching and seeking.
The Blair Recordings, then, presents a dilemma. Its very sequencing and listenability- at times, jarring and difficult; at others, as joyous as anything Cohn has done- abuts incongruously with his previous works, they being sublime and subtle. Odd, in and of itself, The Blair Recordings is not, in an ideal situation, the proper successor to Cohn’s previous effort, the wonderful Bridge Over the X-Stream, an album for which he was lauded and one which seemed ready to re-launch him into the consciousness of jazz listeners. But the world, as we well know, is not an ideal place. Idyllic, at times, and Cohn’s music has represented that. But it is full of tumult and chaos, uncertainty and destruction, too, all represented in Cohn’s compositions. And mostly, it is full of change, something to which Cohn and his music are not foreign, which makes the release of The Blair Recordings, at this time, in this situation, all the more befitting of the life of Steve Cohn, a musical journey spanning four decades that has taken him from feverishly desiring to drink from the cup of stardom to the drowning in brink of despair in an anguished pursuit of fame by passions enflamed by conflicting and destructive desires; from being raised Jewish to a naturist, Thoreauian intellectualism to studying Zen philosophy to pure meditation to becoming spiritually involved in the Tarot; to raising a daughter, teaching music, and continually evolving and struggling and growing as a musician and human being.
With Steve Cohn, knowing where he is now and where he is going is impossible without knowing where he has been, because even as he improvises- as he spontaneously creates in uncharted territories, he is incorporating his past experiences, musical or otherwise, into his present creation. The Blair Recordings is no different.
What became The Blair Recordings actually began as a lark. A little over ten years ago, Blair Hardman invited Cohn “into his studio in California to experiment with his equipment,” wrote Cohn in the album’s liner notes. “I decided to have no agenda of my own but to collaborate with his ideas. He would feed me sounds and I would choose the ones I liked.”
“ The interesting thing is that those recordings were going on for maybe, let’s say, ten years,” Cohn said. “And in that period of time, I was doing a lot of those improvised recordings like The Beggar and The Robot in Diamonds and Ittekimasu. I (also) did a lot of other recordings, too that are not released. I was still doing those concerts all the time.”
One of the advantages to recording and releasing The Blair Recordings, ultimately, was its cost. “I was asked to experiment with technology and electronics and all this kind of stuff,” Cohn stated. “So, it wasn’t like I had to pay anything to come in there I just went in to have some fun. And came up with those kinds of things and in the end I really liked a lot of the stuff I really felt it was something worth having in the means of my work.”
Releasing a solo effort by Cohn meant not having to pay a producer or a band. Economics, especially in free jazz, always plays a leading role, though it is, artistically-speaking, that of the villain. “A lot of the stuff was about money,” Cohn admitted.
“ I put (The Blair Recordings) together and I had an album, and I looked at it, and when I was negotiating my second thing with Leo (Leo Feigin, owner of Leo Records), I sent him, I think another thing with Reggie Workman [longtime bassist for John Coltrane who played bass on Bridge Over the X-Stream and has worked extensively with Cohn in the past]. Then I sent him a trio recording with William Parker and Tom Tedesco that had been produced by Tedesco. Now, he sort of wanted to put that one out, but then there was, you know, little money problems, this and that, and he liked (The Blair Recordings). He said, ‘Well, let’s go with this one.’”
Minor financial conflicts have kept wonderful recordings like, for example, the one he made with Tom Tedesco and William Parker from being issued. Also, as a leader, if Cohn took a band into the studio to record, in addition to paying the engineer, booking studio time, paying for recording materials, and ultimately, having it mastered and manufactured (or having the label handle the latter portion of the process), he would also have to pay his sidemen, whose fees vary widely, depending upon their renown. Usually, the last person to get paid- if ever, is the leader of the group. Monetary realities aside, what ultimately mattered to Cohn in issuing another record was that it was part of him and of sounds he created.
“ The thing of it is that, to me, it’s all about sound, primarily anyway. I’m not that fussy about,” Cohn said of choosing The Blair Recordings over the two different trio recordings he sent to Leo. “If I hear something that sounds good to me- there have been many times where I was playing shakuhachi or even piano or inside the piano where I was literally hearing myself mimic the electronic sounds that I heard before, so, to me, it was all about sound.”
Cohn has always been fascinated by sound- he describes himself as a “sound explorer”- and as an explorer, even from his earliest adulthood days, his journeys, musical or otherwise, have taken him to distant places, both geographically and spiritually.
“ I left high school when was seventeen,” Cohn said. “I went across the United States with a friend, and on the way back, he sort of wouldn’t come any further and he stopped in Nashville, Tennessee. I had to go all the way by myself back home. On that trip, I sort of became this person that was alone and traveling in the world.”
After his cross-country trek, he enrolled at UCLA, where studied shakuhachi in the ethnomusicology department. While at UCLA, he played blues piano, wrote songs on the guitar, and performed in the Venice Free Theater. After two-and-a-half years, he was invited by his shakuhachi teacher to travel with him to Japan.
‘ He wanted me to go over the to try to get me into this religion they had over there called the Tenrkyo. It’s kind of like one of those Jehovah Witness or one of those things where they try to get members that kind of thing. He got me over the and I didn’t care- it was so fascinating, you know, just to be in Japan. I was young. I was like twenty years old, and I started traveling all over Japan. I left him and they went back and I stayed, so I had a lot of weird stuff like that happen. It’s like if you are looking at an artist, you are looking at their whole- life all the different things that took place.”
Cohn’s teacher returned to UCLA after just a few weeks in Japan, but Cohn stayed, reading heavily from Thoreau, learning Japanese by carrying a dictionary with him to make sense of the phrases and words he heard while he walked the land, all while working and living on farms in and around the mountains. He became a “celibate monk,” either by choice of out of happenstance, and was “studying Japanese culture through the language.” To Cohn, reading from Thoreau “was appropriate, because (Japan) is a very nature orientated culture.”
He became very ill in Japan and had to return home to the US. He took a respite of sorts in his parents’ house, where he recovered from what was an illness caused by intestinal worms. For three months upon his return, he hadn’t spoken. Often, while in Japan, there would be “two weeks at a time when I never made a sound.”
Once recovered, Cohn enrolled at CSM, the College of San Mateo, where he spent a year before declaring a major in Classical Piano at San Francisco State, a university at which he would later teach. There, he studied 20th Century classical composition, the works of avant-garde composers, sight-seeing, etc.. Cohn began to grapple with the metaphysics of Zen philosophy, having been introduced to it through reading D.T. Suzuki.
“ I was interested in the Japanese culture, and I got involved in Zen and all that stuff and really did study it quite a bit,” he admitted. “I lived in Japan in ’73 and ’74, and learned Japanese. In the later ‘70s, I started to read some very heavy intellectual Zen stuff. By 1980, I was more into the meditation. By that time, I was not reading anymore, just meditating, but then I met my ex-wife and she introduced me to the tarot cards- the cult. So, once I got interested in that, I got very involved in it and I started having some self-hypnotic experiences.”
His first hypnotic experiences brought about by the tarot shook Cohn. Through the cards on the tarot deck, Cohn was shown visions he believed to be symbols of his past lives. A lot of this hypnosis was “about searching for past life stuff. In hypnosis, you make suggestions and you know what you are looking to know or find out, and that is what they ask you or you ask yourself,” he explained. This “experimenting,” as Cohn called it, led to self-hypnosis, and the visions he conjured formed a theory for Cohn of seven life stages- a very involved and convoluted theory Cohn has detailed in extensive writings he has done on the subject. One tangible thing that came of it was that the vision of his first stage, that of a “bizarre white cow,” became the name of his record label, White Cow, on which he released the LPs, Sufi Dancers, Arts & Crafts, and Ittekimasu.
“ In the tarot cards,” Cohn said, in attempting to explain it, “basically it is a bunch of cards with symbols on them, and it is essentially fifty-two cards of a regular deck, and added are these twenty-two trump cards, and each card has a symbol on it or a picture that represents a certain aspect of the human experience. It’s almost like when you read the bible, you are basically reading words and they conjure images and you have thoughts and philosophy and spirituality and all that kind of stuff. Well, the tarot- it does it more so through images. The images affect your psyche and the way you feel, and the visions that you see within yourself, so it’s still a book of truth. Essentially, nothing less than like a Bible. It’s definitely what they call The Occult and not everybody believes in it, and there is a tremendous amount of questions about it, just as there is about Christianity, Judaism and a lot of other things.
“ I don’t have a specific religion. For me, I think a lot of what helps me get through life is being creative, and to whatever means and whatever way I can I do things like get involved in sounds around me or anything where I am finding new forms of creativity. Because to me, I am not stuck on being involved in the tarot or the Zen or being involved in anything.
“ I think Zen still plays a very important part in my life, I think, more so than most things, because I do like to be very organic about things. I like nature. I am kind of like a transcendentalist. In that sense, I really like the organic evolving of things how things grow and go through their natural growth process.”
During his time at San Francisco State, Cohn was having little breakdowns caused, in large part, by his relationship with his father. His parents escape Nazi Germany to the United States, and the experiences his father had shaped not only his dad’s work ethic and outlook on life, but also forged a polarity between father and son. Steve Cohn struggled with the lack of acceptance he received from his father, a businessman, who couldn’t come to terms with his son’s devotion to music. Cohn “was living in a very secure environment where he had no needs,” which was the complete opposite experience his parents suffered before they fled, and his sense of security made him “want to dig deeper into the world,” to taste danger and to feel the insecurity and poverty and the like. “Whereas my father, who went through all that shit, said, ‘All I want is a roof over my head and some money.’”
After a several years of living abroad, discovering music and seeking spiritual enlightenment, Cohn, a very ambitious man with dreams of success, couldn’t reconcile his anger, saying it was a “culmination of being very sensitive.”
“ I think I was realizing I was extremely unique. I remember sitting on a street corner- I had just come from living on pig farms, learning Japanese, and here I was back in San Mateo,” he recalled, adding, “I remember feeling extremely insecure from the relationship with my dad.
“ My whole thing was I had a competition goin’ with my father, probably always have. I wanted to one-up him, in a way. He did really well in terms of making lots of money, in terms of his success. I wanted develop a kind of immortality- I was looking for fame and immortality; being a historical figure.”
He didn’t get along with other musicians, was fired from bands, and had become very “embittered” by his lack of success. Cohn couldn’t accept himself as a musician, couldn’t make manifest his talents, and struggled mightily with his playing.
“ Earlier in my career, before I actually became ready to make records, I went through Hell,” he said. “There were times where I would sit there and try to play a solo and I’d get so scared of the power of the solo, I would freak out and I would just kind of stop. Now you know I am not going to record a record, because I am not ready. Emotionally or technically, I am just not ready.”
As a result of all of these internalized pressures, in the late-1970s, Cohn imploded, suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized.
As Cohn recalled, “I was on the drugs- they had me all drugged up on this mental-like Haldol. I was completely catatonic. I couldn’t even move my body. I was pissing in my pants and I couldn’t brush my teeth; I couldn’t unbutton my fly. I was hospitalized for like five months and then I was in boarding care houses- halfway houses and all that stuff. It wasn’t until I got off of the drugs that I actually started to come alive again. It was the drugs that was keeping me- the breakdown was like a month or two- it was the drugs that screwed me. So, I did not think I was going to play anymore. I thought I was finished.”
But he was far from finished. In fact, he was just coming back into himself.
“ I was always touching pianos, even if I could not move, I would lean over and try to shape a chord and hit it on the piano. Once I stopped the drugs, my body started to move again- my body started to move again and I started playing basketball, and I finally got this urge to go to this jam session [music, not hoops], and I walked in there and I think Sonny Simmons was there. I walked in and they were playing the blues and my body just took off. It was phenomenal. The way that I felt, I just went right through the ceiling on that piano, and so I was like physically mentally and emotionally ready to kick ass. And that’s what I did, I kicked ass until about ‘84, ’85, when Shapes, Sounds, Theories came out. And I fulfilled my little dream thing and then I changed again, so the breakdown was actually sort of like, to me, a Rite of Passage into manhood- my Rite of Passage was that breakdown. When I came out on the other side of that I was fearless. I was ready to play.”
By then, “it became not about competing with my dad but more about, ‘Who am I, What am I trying to prove?’ Things changed. I became much deeper in terms of my involvement.”
He plunged into the nebulous chasm of recorded music in 1982 with the album Sufi Dancers, the first of three albums he released on his White Cow label (the other two being Arts & Crafts, released in 1983, and Ittekimasu, 1989, which was later reissued on CD in ’91 by a Japanese label, ITM Pacific). Committed to tape in January and April of 1982, Sufi Dancers saw its release later in the year on White Cow, which was now based in his new home of Englewood, New Jersey. The album was representative of the more structured music Cohn was playing at the time, but within those composed pieces of complex chord structures and relatively standard arrangements were signs of the Cohn’s improvisational nature. Cohn’s move to the greater-NYC area signaled a change in his musical approach that resulted in a such a steadfast pursuit of his vision that it free jazz became like a vice, a prison, on Cohn’s creativity.
He struggled with finding a distinct voice he could call his amongst the influences that informed his music throughout his first thirty years of life, influences that quite naturally seeped into his playing. Cohn consciously fought these influences, sometimes stopping or changing things in the middle of a piece to destroy the path of influence he thought he was channeling. He found reconciliation for his power of destructive desires during the sessions that produced the piece, The Robot in Diamonds.
“ In ’86, when I did The Robot in Diamonds, the sextet piece on that album- I had six people in a room and I had no control of the band,” Cohn said, recounting his frustration. “I couldn’t tell them to swing or not to swing. I couldn’t direct, I couldn’t control anything.
“ The thing of it was, the band swung like hell. It just kicked in certain sections and there was nothing I could do about it but be in it, be a part of it,” he said, later adding, “I had six people and they were kicking ass and all I could do was add myself to the music.”
“ And I think one thing that happened after that,” he continued, “was I started to stop trying to control what was coming out of me, to stop saying, ‘Ooh, OK, I better destroy this or I better do this or I better do that.’ I started to let whatever influences were in me just be me. But I was playing them more through myself. I wasn’t always worried about them.”
After he broke through his mental barrier, he “could now play without worrying about sounding like someone else. I had found a voice and I was able to incorporate any kind of influence that came through me without worrying.”
He said, “I was more comfortable with just going in and letting things come out the way they came out, and you know, because in that period around Shapes, Sounds, Theories [Cadence Jazz Records, 1984. LP. CJR1020], I was driving my musicians crazy, because I wouldn’t write any tunes. I wouldn’t put any heads or anything, and of course, I never did after that. And a lot of times, if the music got too swinging or got too into anything too familiar, I would change up, and to me, the music really worked and for everybody else it really worked, but that was part of the process. I was really trying to do something different and that was the only way I new how to do it. Later, like by the time I did that sextet, then I was able to let go of that and say, ‘OK. Let them all come on let all those things go through me and let me just play, ‘cause I am ready now.’”
Cohn was indeed ready to play, as evidenced by the release of Sufi Dancers and Arts & Crafts and Sounds, Shapes, Theories, which was issued by Cadence- no small feat, that- in a relatively short period of time. He was working fervently, poised for his big break and the financial rewards and fame that would inevitably come his way. But they didn’t. His last major hurdle to clear was in coming to grips with the impact that had on his life and his devotion.
“ (Shapes, Sounds, Theories) was sort of the end of a point in my life where I had a dream about becoming a star and making records and all this stuff, and after that phase was over, and those three records came out, and I was working with Reggie Workman, and I was playing at The Great American Music Hall- all that kind of stuff- and developing some kind of a style, something happened to me. I said, ‘You know what I did? All this shit, and nobody really cares. And so what am I doing this for? Why am I doing this? Am I trying to prove something to daddy? What’s the point of this?’ And then I went into this thing (state of mind) and I realized that I went back into the arts (for a reason), and later, as time went on, I realized that I had to do it, because I couldn’t do anything else.
“’ This is me and I need to do this,’” he told himself at the time. “’I have to do this,’ so it became eventually something that was not just like this dream to love and be recognized, it became this need to do something that you had to do that was in you to do, and then it became more ingrained as part of my life, and I think that it’s a healthier way of approaching it. I think, to be honest with you, that is one of the reasons my career has moved kind of slowly- those first three records, I was like a maniac for fame, and when I saw what it was about, I lost interest with the whole thing.”
He later added, “It started to come clear over the years that it’s the life of and death of the artist. You’re surviving to be an artist- that is what you are there for. It will either come or it won’t.”
Refreshed, Cohn played and recorded extensively, including the session that would become The Robot in Diamonds. The The Robot in Diamonds, however, though recorded in 1986, wasn’t issued until ten years later, when it was released on CD by ITM Pacific with another suite Cohn recorded called The Beggar, this time as part of a quartet he led with the late Fred Hopkins, violinist Jason Hwang, and French horn player Tom Varner. Cohn’s only albums, besides The Beggar and The Robot in Diamonds, was 1989’s Ittekimasu, which was recorded in 1987 and featured Hopkins on bass and Thurman Barker on drums. Despite the abundance of material he had amassed during these years, astonishingly, Cohn had amassed more albums- three- in his first three years after fully recovering from his breakdown, than he did in his next fifteen.
It wasn’t until 2000 that Cohn had another album released, a 1999 recording featuring Workman, Varner, and Hwang that became Bridge Over the X-Stream [Leo Records 288. 2000].
In addition to experimenting on his primary instrument, the piano, on Bridge Over the X-Stream, an album made from a terrific live recording done at the Knitting Factory in NYC, Cohn explored sound with various non-Western wind instruments beyond just the shakuhachi. The shofar, a ram's horn of various limited range first used by the ancient Hebrew in ritualistic and religious ceremonies, as well as in battle; and a hichiriki, another Japanese instrument, but one similar two an oboe in that it has a double reed, both are introduced into this setting. The players explored in close proximity to each other to create a beauteous, subdued record. Working from pure improvisation, with a clean slate, so to speak, themes emerged in an elastic, meditative setting as the players explored their individual pathways, often coming together briefly- an astounding thing, considering the music is completely improvised. Such is the nature and the wonder of improvisation performed by master musicians. While subdued sonically, expressiveness and intensity are revealed in the manner in which the players performed, especially the way they worked off of one another. As an example, Varner would be thumping an abstract, muted melody on his French horn that inspired Cohn to launch into an extended extrapolation of it on his piano- sometimes inside his piano, as he can often be heard manipulating its strings by hand or by device. Cohn's remarkable excursion would send Hwang into a gorgeous fit, with Workman hovering beneath them all.
A mélange of overlapping sound-origin possibilities arise from this foursome. A rubbing sound is heard. Could it be Cohn scratching on his piano strings or Hwang rubbing the threads of his violin, or even Workman on his bass? Arco lines drawn across the sputtering, puffing and melodies of Cohn and Varner could be emanating from Workman, Hwang, or both. Is Cohn using the hichiriki or the shofar? These questions, taken in stride, deepen the experience of listening repeatedly to Bridge Over the X-Stream. Its loose yet lucid, sprawling nature may confuse some looking for a roadmap, a discernible pattern to follow, but with the proper frame of mind, this album is an absolutely joyous journey into the sadly undercharted territory of the music of Steve Cohn.
His dearth of albums “goes back to maybe me not really dealing with it the way I should have, or sticking too much to the way I wanted to play and not worrying about the business,” Cohn said of his ardent stance concerning the recording industry, a position which contravened his desire for fame and success. In free jazz, it is mainly the industrious who survive, if not thrive, as the mainstream jazz machine has long since turned a cold shoulder to its avant-garde brethren. But that’s old news, and players like bassist William Parker, who, according to Cohn, “is an example of someone who works really hard,” pianist Matthew Shipp, saxophonists Evan Parker and David S. Ware, Ken Vandermark, and others, have become successful and have achieved a certain measure of fame, if not fortune, in their time. Certainly, they will be remembered, and will be held in the same lofty regard as people today revere Coltrane, Davis, Mingus, Coleman, et al. Cohn’s place in all of this is uncertain; it’s too early to tell. His work is strong and beauteous, and very distinctive. The question remains as to whether it will be released and heard.
“ If there is not money to be made, you have to have people come to you out of love or deep respect,” Cohn said. “I just have to believe what I am doing is good and eventually, it will get more and more recognized. My goal is to keep on recording interesting projects and get them published, and also do the other aspects of my art life, which is my writing and my painting, and going out and living in the world and trying to be creative in this world and learn things and have a good time doing it. I am at a point now where I have been around long enough where I would like to be playing more. It irritates me, and believe me, I am pondering the ways to do it, from borrowing money to, whatever, hiring someone, getting on the phone myself- however I am going to do it. I don’t give up, I keep going. I just take it at my own pace and that way, it doesn’t kill me and I can keep being creative.
“ And that’s where I think the Zen thing is kind of large for me. For me, (the body) is and empty space that is a vessel where the great chaos and creative force of life can pour through, and as it’s pouring through you, you can kind of make some decisions and create little sculptures and things along the way, and then when it’s done, it’s done. You just have fate coming through you like a tree or something growing from the beginning to the end- you will be a story or you will be this tree that lived and died.
“ Because, you know, we are creative people,” Cohn said of humanity before tailoring it to musicians. “We feel an urgency to say something, to be really good human beings. We want to communicate something and give something back to our audience. We want to teach them or tell them something that will help them, whether it makes them think; whether it gives them entertainment; whether it gives them relaxation; whether it makes them stop and wonder, or whether it makes them change their whole point of view.
“ I like playing with people,” Cohn beamed. “I was playing in the street in New York and everywhere; I play on the street all the time. But just shakuhachi. I don’t play for money, I just play. I like the audiences. You got a group of people walking by you that are not there to hear shakuhachi music; they are just human beings. You can play off of them and see how they respond and watch their body movements and play off of that- you’ve got a natural audience right there and you don’t have to book the gig. With a lot of these gigs in New York, you don’t make a lot of money, anyway. Why should I go to the trouble when I can stand out there and play for the people? That’s what I am here to do is to make music.”
Reaching people is paramount in Cohn’s work, for he believes that with the right mindset, one’s life can be altered by music. To him, being open and approachable to new and different forms of music is akin to being open and approachable to new and different kinds of people and experiences. When we close ourselves off is when we cease growing and intellectually and spiritually.
“ I think that the main problem that people have after they basically reach three years old or haven’t reached ninety-five is that they developed some sense of what they think is right or wrong, so their mind is what’s listening, not their bodies and not the spirit of the child. Not the spirit. They’re thinking. Their thoughts are saying, ‘That’s different. That’s not what it’s supposed to be. I heard it this way before…’ You see? And if you take a child, a child may say, ‘I don’t like this,’ and he may run out of the room or start screaming, but he is not going to analyze it. He is either going to like it or not. He either is going to have some fun with it or not. So a lot of the problem in listening to anything different or new, the first aggravation of pain that we feel is change from what we think it is supposed to be. That gets in the way, and for a lot of people, that gets in the way just enough to make them not want to listen. They don’t want to change or let go of their thinking process.”
He suggests letting new music- music that is challenging your perception of what is right or wrong euphonically- “pervade in the environment. Do your work. Walk around. Let it be in the environment and not be something on which you have to concentrate, because a lot of times, people will get tired. They are thinking so hard, they are getting exhausted.
“ So, if they don’t have to think, that is perfect. You don’t want them to think, you want them to just let it affect them. That’s what it is getting back to- some idea of vibration; they are just vibrations.”
Cohn believes these vibrations can go a lot further into the human psyche than just making one feel good, good, good. “I feel the music, the artwork or the communicating is a very powerful political opportunity. What you are doing is you’re helping people think in a freer way, and in a way where their senses are more volatile and open. They’re feeling their lives, instead of just being numb. I think that’s really the one thing I want to put across, is feel the emotion, see those wild psychedelic images that are inside of your psyche when you sit and meditate, those visions that are there. The final thing that I think- talking about the political power that artists have to change the way that people feel, I think the other thing, too, in my work is that I hope I allow people to feel a little bit freer to feel more free to express themselves and not to be so inhibited.”
Cohn is less and less inhibited as he grows older. As he stated, “Let go of yourself and let yourself go forward- it’s the cleanest way to live.” He may be moving more fluidly through this abrasive world, but he hasn’t completely let go of his desire for fame or success, nor should he. In many ways, healthy ways, it’s what drives and stimulates the mind and soul.
“ It’ll never leave,” Cohn matter-of-factly stated. “That hasn’t changed, believe it or not. That whole thing of wanting to have it documented. I don’t think it’ll ever leave me. I think the Ego is there for a reason, because I feel like I’m contributing something important to the world that I think needs to be known about. That’s why it’s there, to push us to do what we have to do.”
For Cohn, that means recording music, it means teaching music (as he does quite often to students), but it also means having to “live ready to die. If you do that, you will move, the energy- the chi- will be released. The life force. Most of the problem that humanity- that people have is that with all the fears they have, they block the chi. Life’s gonna go on, anyway. The more you get on that wave, the farther you’ll go.
“ The more danger, the better. I love danger.”
There is a theory about which Cohn has written concerning time as it pertains to its definition and usage in improvised music. He’s not the first nor will he be the last to articulate his personal thoughts on this elusive yet constant known as time, but his ruminations are particularly visual and as a result, quite instructive.
There is a little ditty in there,” Cohn began, referring to one of the many unpublished theoretical and philosophical papers he has written over the years, “where I talk about the butterfly theory, which I use sometimes. The main thing about time is- most musicians understand this, musicians that understand music- is that time is not really something that you hear. (You) think (you) can hear the time but you don’t- you’re playing the time. But if you didn’t play it, it would still be there. What I was saying about the concept of the butterfly (theory), is it is kind of like the butterfly goes from one flower to the next and each flower is an equal system apart, so the flowers represent the pulse. So, let’s say that the butterfly decides to pass over one of the flowers, maybe even two of the flowers, and let’s imagine the wings represent the rhythm. Now the wings are going to start- based on the wind, they will go fast, they will go slow, and they are not going to be consistent with any kind of pulse. And when that butterfly ends up landing on a flower, the rhythm that it played over those other flowers- which are the pulse along the way- are the polyrhythms that we fit over the beats. The way the wings flap as an image- that would be your rhythm that’s going to stop and start and it may even glide for a while. It’s not going to come right down on the beat.
“ It’s really interesting when you are playing with great musicians and you yourself are feeling the music so well, the pulse is almost something that you don’t have to think about. It’s so a part of your body that it’s like you can float freely, like a butterfly, and your going to land right on that flower, right at the right time. That’s like the ultimate nice feeling, and when that’s happening in an ensemble where everybody is feeling that so naturally like that, interesting things happen.”
There was a time when Cohn wasn’t feeling that pulse, he was concentrating on it so hard that he couldn’t spread his wings to fly. The chi that was flowing through him freely while he was in Japan, was blocked as Cohn devoted his energies to subconsciously battling his father and engaging in an idolatrous pursuit of fame. But one of the nice things about life is that, for most, it’s long, and one may learn from it if they open themselves to the process. Steve Cohn has, and he has traveled farther as a man and as a musician for it. “What was he thinking?” Maybe he wasn’t thinking about it at all, at least not in those terms. Maybe it’s this confounded listener who needs to stop being so fussy, and to let go of what he thinks is right and wrong and what should be heard coming from the music Steve Cohn makes. After all, he did.