Andy Biskin's Interview on
NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross"

November 21, 2000

TERRY GROSS: A few weeks ago, our jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviewed the debut CD of clarinetist and composer Andy Biskin. We liked the music so much, we started playing it on the show. Then we decided to invite Biskin to talk with us about it. As Kevin said, Biskin's compositions recall early jazz and old social music, short solos alternate with tightly arranged passages. The rhythm section sometimes plays two-beat oompah rhythms and his quintet has a trumpet, clarinet and trombone front line like an old New Orleans jazz band. Even so, the sound he gets from those old ingredients is quite fresh.

Biskin's new CD, "Dogmental," is on GM Records, the label founded by composer and conductor Gunther Schuller, who praises Biskin's originality and sophisticated humor. Here's Biskin's composition, "Sad Commentary."

GROSS: One of the things you do as an arranger and composer that I like is that, you know, you take the tune that you wrote and you very quickly put it through different distortions and permutations. In fact I was listening to your record while watching the timer, just to see--like, 'cause I sometimes do that for the show. We might play a minute or a minute and a half or something. And by the time you're, like, 40 seconds into one of your tracks, it's often gone through, like, two or three different permutations.

ANDY BISKIN: I think I'm approaching composition as an improviser because I spent a lot of time improvising before I ever attempted to write music. And when I'm writing music I try to be in that sort of mind-set where you just write down the first thing that comes into your head. If I'm looking for the next thing to do, I just start playing the song and say, `Well, if I was playing a solo on this song, what would I do next?' And so I try to capture that spontaneity and then fix it on paper.

GROSS: I'm interested, too, in the speed in which the changes happen. I mean, it's--What ca n I say?--short attention span music in the best sense of the word?

BISKIN: Yeah, I agree, maybe because I have a short attention span and I go hear a lot of music and I get bored. You know, I'm really happy at the beginning of the tune when you're hearing the stuff that was written out and then there's all these long solos and I'm kind of wishing that more stuff was written out. So I guess I'm catering to someone like me that's sitting in the audience that wants things to keep changing

GROSS: In the liner notes for your new CD, you talk about when you were young and you had a band and you bought a sheet music book featuring the music of Harry L. Alford's "Hungry Five." This sounds like a really odd little book of sheet music and 22 sets of wisecracks plus additional patter. What was this about?

BISKIN: Well, this was music that Mr. Alford put out, I guess, in the ‘30s. And I stumbled upon it by accident. I was rummaging through a local music store. And I was in my high school band and I was looking for some other kind of band that I could start on my own. And they're funny little arrangements. A lot of it is oompah-pah music like waltzes, polkas and things. And there are also arrangements of classical tunes, overtures and waltzes, like "Poet and Peasant Overture," "Merry Wives of Windsor," "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies."

And there's something kind of nice about this combination of two clarinets, trumpet, trombone and tuba. It's sort of like taking a concert band and shrinking it to the very smallest essence that you could have. There's something kind of naive and charming thinking about this little miniature band trying to play Tchaikovsky or Von Suppe. And I liked that. So I got some like-minded souls from the high school band and we just started to have rehearsals in the living room and eventually we had a band. And when I was writing the liner notes for the album, I was thinking about where this combination of trumpet, trombone, clarinet came from, and it is the fr ont line of a Dixieland band. But I realized that the way I had gotten the sound into my head was from the old "Hungry Five."

GROSS: Who were you performing for then? I mean, this is the era where people had garage bands, not...

BISKIN: Yeah. Well, we played at some, like, PTA meetings. We played at parties that our parents were giving.

GROSS: Are you suggesting no one your age wanted to hear the music?

BISKIN: Well, there was one funny thing that happened. You know, I grew up in San Antonio, and there's a big Latino population. And somehow we ended up playing on the talent show for Lanier High School which was a Mexican-American high school. And we got out there in our lederhosen and we started playing this polka, and everybody in the audience went wild. I mean, it turns out that polka is a big part of conjunto music and they related to it in a way that we didn't. We thought that we were going to be throwing tomatoes at us and they loved it.

GROSS: Let's hear another track from this CD, and this is called "Flim Flam." And I like it a lot. It's kind of circusy and marching bandish. Let's give it a listen.

(Soundbite of "Flim Flam")

GROSS: Anything in particular inspire that composition?

BISKIN: Well, I think there's some Nino Rota there. I mean, it's sort of like a--I think of it as a little miniature film score or something. I'm not sure where it came from. It was one of these tunes that just came to me very quickly. And I started writing it, I wasn't even sure what key it was in. You know, I said, `Now I've got to write a bass line to it,' and I'm still not really sure what key it's in. But I liked the idea of going to this waltz in the middle of it. I had this waltz that I was trying to figure out something to do with, and I thought, `Well, let's let the song just kind of fall apart and get quiet and suddenly we'll be in the waltz and then we'll go back to the march.'

GROSS: How did clar inet become your instrument? Where you assigned it in school?

BISKIN: Well, it was chosen for me by my parents and I'm not sure--I didn't have much to do with that decision, but I came home from school one day and there was a clarinet sitting on my bed. And my father announced that this was going to be my instrument and I said, `Well, what is it?' And he said, `This is a clarinet.' So I accepted that. I was nine years old. I liked the way it looked. I liked the way it sounded. And soon I was taking lessons from one of the clarinetists in the orchestra and working my way through the method books and scales and arpeggios and etudes. But I don't really remember not playing the clarinet. It's something that's always been there.

GROSS: Now you have a forthcoming CD that features mostly songs by Stephen Foster. And I'm wondering what it's been like for you to go back to songs from the early days of American popular song and play them and rearrange them.

BISKIN: It's been a really incredible experience. I've been writing my own music for a long time, and I never really have attempted to arrange anybody else's music. I was doing a gig once with a piano player and we were just leafing through a songbook and we came upon "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair." And we played it and I said, `Well this is a beautiful song.' And there's something about these tunes. They're like folk songs except they all happen to be written by the same person. They were all written in the 1860s, and they're so ingrained in our unconscious that you can do so much with them and they still maintain their identity. I do this version of "Old Folks At Home" that's a little bit out there but somehow the song still comes through.

GROSS: Did you like Stephen Foster songs as a kid or did you just consider them to be cliches or old-fashioned?

BISKIN: I did consider them to be cliches and it was something that I think I really didn't appreciate until I was an adult, but I'm interested in the idea of a musical cli che. That's something that really fascinates me. I have this book called "The Book of World-Famous Music" by James J. Fuld. And it's an incredible book. It's just a--it's like the canon of every familiar melody that we have in our heads here in Western civilization. It has everything from "Three Blind Mice," "What Do You Say To A Drunken Sailor," plus a lot of classical stuff "Fur Elise," "Santa Lucia," "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow," "Shave And A Haircut, Two Bits." And you think about these things and they're these melodies that have somehow survived through natural selection or something that they're just part of our vocabulary, that are just in the air that everyone knows and we don't even know why they're there. But if you go bump, ba-dah, bump, bump; bump, bump, everyone knows that you're referring to "Shave And A Haircut, Two Bits."

GROSS: Yeah, well the interesting thing, too, about those old songs that are just kind of in the air, is that whether you like a song or not, there's something that a familiar line of music does to your brain that's just unique. And there's a certain pleasure in familiar music, even familiar music you don't like. So I think even if you, as a composer or arranger, take a piece of familiar music and you rework it in an unusual way, there's the pleasure of a listener has of taking this familiar thing and making it different, but that familiar thing just gives you this common language to work with.

BISKIN: I think that's true, and I think a lot of what makes a composition interesting is this whole interplay between the familiar and the new. And it works in improvisation, it works in composition. But when you're playing, you're playing with people's expectations, you're giving them things that they know and understand and find comfort in, but you have to keep them stimulated, and there has to be a certain amount of novelty, and I think these tunes are great for that. Because everyone knows--you know, they know what's going to happen, but they really don't know how you're going to get there.

GROSS: Your Stephen Foster CD is recorded, but it's not nearly ready to be released. You're actually still looking for a label to release it on. But maybe we could just play a preview of it. Do you want to choose a song?

BISKIN: Yeah, let's listen to "Camptown Races."

GROSS: Oh, great. Let's hear it, and I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

BISKIN: Thank you, Terry. It's been great.

(Soundbite of "Camptown Races")

GROSS: Andy Biskin's interpretation of the Stephen Foster song "Camp Town Races" from an unreleased CD. His new CD is called "Dogmental."