What Does “Prolific” Mean? Part 1
Round Table is a forum where artists, writers, musicians, and listeners can engage in conversation about the issues that impact sonic art. Each month a panel of four artists discuss and respond to each other on a chosen topic.
Current topic: What Does Prolific Mean?
Some bands and labels seem to crank out albums at a pace that makes listeners either race Pokemon-like to collect ‘em all, or else wonder about how much effort could possibly be put into each one. But what does being prolific mean to an artist? Or to a critic who writes about all those albums? In this month’s Round Table, we’ll hear from Ben Hall, Brandon LaBelle, Mattin, and Dan Warburton. Ben Hall kicks off this month’s conversation…
*****
BEN HALL :
In The Wire issue 306, Lisa Blanning states of Madlib: “If you’re spending upwards of 12 hours a day in the studio, you end up with a massive amount of music.” Madlib later says, “In a week we’ll do three CD’s worth of beats.” Roughly 210 minutes, no? Given that an artist is working on material a great deal can we assume that we will likely be left with a great deal of material.
On tour with Olson (John, of Wolf Eyes and Graveyards – ed.) in ’08 I quizzed him thoroughly about production and the shit he sometimes takes for it. “Goddam, you don’t have to hear it all, that’s a waste of time. If there’re a hundred Wolf Eyes releases it should give you a similar picture no matter what you choose. There all puzzle pieces of the same set of trees and it all fits together but you don’t need to finish the puzzle to understand the whole thing. You gotta understand that this is experimental music. Also one of the things that makes it cool is there are three different visions/versions of what Wolf Eyes is.” Everything in the quote points to artistic decisions created outside commerce. Imagine if there was a Lennon version and a McCartney version of the White Album.
Phil Freeman states in a light screed about Joe Morris’s output:
“The Joe Morris Quartet album is his eighth full-length release of 2009, his sixth as a leader or co-leader. (I’ve heard four of the discs he led or co-led, and the two on which he was a sideman.) He appeared on 11 albums in 2008, and has played on approximately 45 releases (my eyes may have glazed over while counting) since the turn of the millennium. Now granted, this doesn’t come close to the audio diary-keeping of Anthony Braxton, but is Braxton really a model to be emulated in this regard?”
Whether he should be emulated or not one the listener can choose to have a clearer more insightful vision of Braxton as an artist than perhaps any composer/performer working today or ever. This can only occur through documentation though documentation does not necessitate production. Freeman later mentions Freddie Hubbard in relation to Morris: “I decided I wanted to hear all the Blue Note releases by Freddie Hubbard. There were eight of them. I found that totally manageable. Joe Morris‘s discography, by contrast, numbers in the dozens and is scattered across 26 labels. Hearing all of it is pretty clearly an unmanageable task. And even if I were able to stack all of his releases up in front of me, how would I decide which to prioritize? Sure, each one is a beautiful and unique snowflake, but taken together they are a snowdrift.”
In acknowledging jazz as a composer/performer driven music like other experimental music we have to note that Hubbard was under contract with Blue Note. Hub played perhaps 45 to 50 weeks a year 4 to 7 nights a week, lot of music, a lot of ideas. Would he have recorded only 8 LPs worth of material had he the opportunity to do more? Had the commercial interests been up to the challenge? Had technology been equipped to keep up? We’re left with eight albums to delineate that vision at that time and therefore we take those to be more solidly definitive statements though they are simply statements. They operate as islands but as we know these islands are part of a whole though the connections may be submerged.
Bill Dixon is another example operating at roughly the same time but more firmly as an experimentalist. While his first solo LP Intents and Purposes seems to be a definitive statement for Dixon, I know for a fact that the creative output during the time was huge and the pieces he chose for the RCA record were what fit with his vision of himself but also within the vision the bean counters had.
Dixon contended the opportunity to make recordings simply wasn’t available although he had already worked as a producer for Savoy and had been involved with the business end of the recording industry and therefore one would assume had a more implicit knowledge of navigating those channels. For his trouble, Dixon is almost always referred to as under recorded and we have little recorded evidence of his vision spanning 50 years.
The scant recorded output of Bill Dixon during this time does not leave us to question the validity of the statement, but leaves the listener wondering if that was the definitive statement and if perhaps it wouldn’t have been more eloquent in another setting? Perhaps another more important island in the archipelago exists but our awareness lacks due to a scarcity of documentation?
Olson’s prodigious output makes the case for the shift from a definitive statement based art controlled by capital to a process based art controlled by the artists. If you are Madlib or Olson and you produce 210 minutes of music a week, let’s say 175 hrs a year roughly, then how does one not put out 30 to 80 records a year? Furthermore, why wouldn’t you want to be in control of that output at the commercial level?
In a process based art, we are to behold the body of work as the statement, the whole, with an individual release operating as a part of the whole. That a composer/performer can readily shift to the role of composer/performer/producer/publisher is a political action. Whether that means that it’s a political action to have a 100 Wolf Eyes CD-Rs come out every year is a different question.
*****
Ben Hall is an improvising percussionist and world class shit talker from Detroit. He also directs brokenresearch, a label dedicated to New American Improvisation with forthcoming LPs by Memorize the Sky and Anthony Levin-Decanini.
Tags: Anthony Levin-Decanini, Ben Hall, Bill Dixon, Brandon LaBelle, Dan Warburton, Freddie Hubbard, John Olson, Mattin, Memorize the Sky, Phil Freeman, Pokemon, Prolific, Round Table, Wolf Eyes
nice piece, ben. of course, “In a process based art we are to behold the body of work as the statement, the whole, with an individual release operating as a part of the whole” could also imply releasing very little, no? not that these are mutually exclusive, but i’ve always, as both a listener and maker, preferred a deeper/denser statement i can listen to over and over rather than a big stream of less-edited work. also, wolf eyes (aside from their collabs) and joe morris work a bit differently, in that morris frequently works in collaborative settings, where a consumer could easily figure, “well, i want to hear him with nate wooley, but i don’t need to hear another disc of his regular trio.” there’s a sort of built-in layer of extra info and context.
also, i know we are supposed to pretend that the marketplace doesn’t really exist, but a high-profile group like wolf eyes does actually have greater demand for product than even a joe morris, plus lots of tours on which to sell things, aside from the pretty well-established american/hanson distros. that said, they’ve probably been keeping up this pace since before anyone cared about them.
For my part, I gauge this quandry by one thing: how much listeners can meaningfully take in. Because it doesn’t matter how many records you do or don’t put out if nobody’s listening. Far as I can tell, it takes people (even fans) months (& sometimes years) to ingest a single recording to the point that they feel like they *know* it well. If you want to issue a lot of stuff, leave a scattered trail of breadcrumbs & let ‘em figure it all out after you’re dead. Fine. Olson, for example, might put out lots of stuff, but it’s in tiny, tiny editions. Nobody’s getting it all because you basically can’t. But if you put too much stuff in front of the same people too many times, they’ll stop caring. Some artists (Merzbow in the 90s anybody?) start going so fast you can watch the economic value of their releases plummet like the stock market. Yes. It’s a difficult thing to control, as stuff often gets released long after it was made. But you wouldn’t forget to keep an eye on your tour van’s gas gage, wouldja?
The stock market analogy is precise. If each release is not an individual artistic statement then it is economic. Someone thought it was worth selling it whether limited edition or not. There are those who treat recordings like baseball cards, but even they shy away from over-saturation. Artists limit their audiences by saying too much, so I’ll shut up.
Another solution to the Wolf Eyes deluge: hear none of it. Works for me. If you can’t self-edit, I can’t be bothered to listen. It’s like the jackass at the party who won’t shut up and has a “story” for everything. I don’t hang out with that person.
(Same goes for Joe Morris and Madlib)