Preface

In January of 1976, I was playing drums in a bar band in Traverse City, Michigan. We were a quartet of musicians, all in our early twenties, who had had some instruction on our instruments, some experience in school bands, but were, for the most part, learning on the job, driven by our love of the music. Our repertoire was a standard sort of pop/rock/soul amalgam: Motown, Meters, Beatles, Tower of Power, Stevie Wonder. We even did Eddie Harris and Les McCann's "Compared to What" to let the people know that we were hip. But when I wasn't on the gig, I was drawn to, motivated by, and sustained by "the art of the improvisers."

The Detroit radio stations that had turned me on to Jimi Hendrix in the late sixties had also thrown a little Miles Davis and John Coltrane into the mix and set me on my way to discover jazz and the whole universe of improvised music. My musical guides became Miles, Coltrane, Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Olatunji, Charles Mingus, Albert Ayler, Ravi Shankar, Max Roach, and on and on. I had no loyalties to bebop, postbop, avant garde, fusion, cool, swing, Latin, or whatever. I soaked it all up. Communication technologies had brought the whole world of improvised music to my living room.

What happened next, for me, was the first of a number of episodes of near perfect timing-coincidences, if you will-that directed my life toward Woodstock, New York, and the Creative Music Studio Our quartet was breaking up, and I was ready for the next phase of my life, but without a clue of how it would unfold. I came upon a little ad in Down Beat magazine, which was the first that I had heard of the Creative Music Studio (CMS). It was offering a chance to study music with some of the finest improvising musicians in the world: Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Anthony Braxton, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, and a host of others whom I was at that time unfamiliar with, including Karl Berger. It seemed too good to be true. I had a car, a little bit of money, no commitments, and was faced with an opportunity of a lifetime. By March, I found myself transported from my humble rock-and-roll beginnings to a community of improvisers of the highest caliber.

I relate this episode because it is so similar to that of hundreds of other musicians from all over the world, who, by seeking a higher level (or is it a deeper level?) of musical expression, found themselves at the Creative Music Studio. Many were following commercial music careers; some were just discovering music; some already had university degrees in classical music studies; and some came with fully developed experimental concepts. They came from all levels of musical proficiency and from all backgrounds. All were welcomed with open arms. What we found at the Creative Music Studio was unique and it was amazing. There has never been anything in music education that could compare with the experience of CMS.

CMS was an environment in which personal expression was paramount. For some, there was too much freedom in that environment. For those of us who were open to the experience, our lives were changed forever. It was the type of experience that can make the rest of your life seem mundane.

The last CMS session that I attended was in the spring of 1979. Since that time, my life has taken many turns that have made Woodstock seem as if it were light years away. That heady, elevated feeling that comes from doing something truly extraordinary had become too much of a distant memory. Being at the Creative Music Studio had started to seem like a dream that I once had. That is why I decided to write this book.

I called Karl Berger, the director of the Creative Music Studio and the Creative Music Foundation, in the summer of 1994 and proposed to him the idea of a history of CMS. He was enthusiastically in favor of it. My wife and I then drove to Woodstock from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I began a process of reconnection. By interviewing Karl and whatever remaining CMS people I could contact during our short visit, I began to reconstruct the rise and fall of this unique study center. Each person I spoke to was able to provide me with names and phone numbers of others who were involved. Over the course of a year and some months, I interviewed, by phone, as many people as I could reasonably contact. Musicians across the United States, in Canada, and Europe were eager to reminisce and relate their CMS stories. Their enthusiasm made my job much easier-a true labor of love.

Throughout the course of these interviews I became increasingly aware of a pattern of connectedness. It was often eerie, running into so many coincidences of time, people, and places. This emerging realization of my connectedness to a cultural phenomenon and the people who made it-a phenomenon much larger than I could measure by my own experience-convinced me of the necessity and the timeliness of recording what happened at CMS and attempting to place those events in the larger context of our arts, our society, and our times.

Many of the people interviewed I had never met. Others I hadn't spoken to in over fifteen years. Larry Chernicoff was one of those. I called Larry out of the blue one Sunday afternoon and he related the following incident. He and his daughter had been driving near his home in Massachusetts when they passed a sign advertising Pete Sweet's Tree Farm. They both found it amusing, and Larry told his little girl that he had known a guy named Bob Sweet at the Creative Music Studio. Not only hadn't he spoken to Bob Sweet since 1979, he probably hadn't thought about him either. Three hours later I called. A minor coincidence, perhaps, but typical of countless other personal connections that seemed downright uncanny.

Another series of connections, however, opened my eyes to the place that CMS holds in a larger, historical context of arts and education in the United States. While talking with Richard Teitelbaum, composer, educator, and electronic music innovator, he drew a parallel between CMS and Black Mountain College. His point was that if not for books like Martin Duberman's history of Black Mountain, the school probably would have fallen into complete obscurity.

He laughed when I told him that I had never heard of Black Mountain. "You see!" We agreed that it would be tragic if the Creative Music Studio were to be forgotten.

I didn't pick up Duberman's Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community until several months later. It was during a conversation with Doug Hesseltine, the designer of this book's cover, that a flash of coincidence struck me again, illuminating even more brightly this connection between Black Mountain and CMS. After I gave Doug some background on CMS, he told me how much it reminded him of Black Mountain College (BMC) in North Carolina. I knew, then, that it was time to look into Black Mountain.

When I began to read of the similarities and actual links between CMS and BMC, I was astonished. Karl Berger had told me that initial planning talks for CMS had included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, and John Cage (whose CMS involvement I was vaguely familiar with), along with Ornette Coleman and others, and I was surprised at this range of notables from various artistic and philosophic disciplines. But here, in reading Duberman, I discovered that Fuller, de Kooning, and Cage were prominent figures at Black Mountain, teaching and developing some of their most important works there. The composer Christian Wolff also had taught and presented works at CMS and BMC. The similarities between the two schools (I hesitate to call CMS a school, but the term is useful for the sake of comparison) are undeniable. Both CMS and BMC were located in settings of natural scenic beauty, an aspect that lent much to their character; neither would have been what it was if located in a city. Both were controversial, inspiring acclaim and derision in students, locals, and observers of the arts. And both were established by German emigrants, followers of a school of artistic thought that would relentlessly draw its proponents to an environment of freedom so that it may be given expression.

Like Duberman, I found myself being affected by the place (he, BMC, and I, CMS) through the process of writing about it. He impressed me with his view that history is not actually served by separating the historian from the retelling; his willingness to insert himself into BMC's portrait gives his book a vitality and a warmth that might not otherwise be there. I am not a historian as is Duberman. On the other hand I was there. My frame of reference had already been laid; the interviews and the reacquaintance with CMS merely fleshed out a body of experience that had begun its evolution in 1976. My having been there and having been strongly and positively affected by the experience will no doubt lessen my objectivity. That's fine. It is not my aim to give an objective account. I wish only to give my own view, with the confidence that its corroboration by so many others who were there will give it legitimacy.

In an interview with the trombonist George Lewis, we touched on the difficulties of going about the process of defining improvisation-no easy task. It would require, George felt, an ongoing dialogue over a period of time among masters of the craft, in which various seemingly contradictory aspects could be examined and all individual interpretations could be given voice. We reached the conclusion that defining the importance of the Creative Music Studio or attempting to characterize what it meant to be there (the experience was so different for so many people), was equally daunting. George states that "at a certain point you say, well, here's my definition of improvisation right at the front. Well, maybe it's already a mistake. Maybe at this point, instead of defining, you just have cases, and then the cases add up to something. That's what I find about CMS. It's not like, aha, here's the epiphany which occurred while I was at CMS. It's more like, here are all these cases of encounters I've had with different people and what I learned from each one."

It is my hope that the encounters in this book, with the nearly one hundred musicians, writers, and administrators who participated in CMS on some level and who consented to interviews, will bring CMS into a clear enough focus that its contribution will be recognized and that its memory will endure.

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