The word ‘eclectic ‘doesn’t really capture Tom Constanten’s approach to music or the career from which his unique perspective on playing and composing has grown. He had already set in motion a progressive approach for himself by the time he met Phil Lesh and the two subsequently engaged in a mutual expansion of their musical universes, through study together and apart, the logical extension of which process was Constanten’s recording and touring with the Grateful Dead from 1968 to 1970.
Much as he does now in performing with Jefferson Starship as well as his long-term partner, Bob Bralove (the MIDI-technician who aided the Dead with the expansion of their sonic palette during the 80’s and 90’s), Constanten then continued to work solo and in collaboration, refusing to allow technology of the times to restrict his exploration of those aforementioned sonic paradigms to which he was exposed via Stockhausen, Berio and Steve Reich.
On their latest work as Dose Hermanos,Constanten and Bralove similarly transcend such practical and conceptual limitations by directly confronting them on their album Batique. Physically apart in different recording studios, but connected through the technical mechanics of recording and more importantly their psyches, the two men played together as if of one mind and four sets of hands, ultimately creating a piece of work that reflects the intricate level of detail suggested by its title. Constanten’s conversation with Doug Collette bears a similar set of tightly interwoven themes…
What a great title (Batique) for the album you did with Bob (Bralove). It’s a perfect representation of the colorful and intricate music I hear.
I must say we have a lot of fun with our titles.
Let me make sure I understand how you guys recorded this album. You sat at acoustic pianos at different studios, connected just by headphones, and played freely—is that right?
You’re a couple steps in the right direction. Punch it up Hollywood scriptwriter style: not only were we in different studios, we were in different buildings. I was used to it actually. Our modus operandi was to jump into the deep end of the melodic gene pool, no charts or anything, and see what we find. What was amazing to us when we started about 17 or 18 years ago, we were startled what we could find when we played. Music was originally made from notes then chords, now music is made out of other music, whether you’re a rap artist sampling or an electronic musician from the 1950’s. We are sampling musical styles and we are intuitively able to grasp what the other is on to, because we know each other so well by now. We are educated in a similar way, for instance, so if I know a certain piece by Stravinsky, I know he will know it and vice-verse. Or if he talks about a certain period of ska or a certain period of the big band era: we a like computer CPU processing all this information instantly.
It muss be great to have such a long biding relationship with another musician.
It does happen, but I’m not sure it happens with this particular type of talents. We are coherent, but we are not congruent. We are on eye-level on the musical plane, but our latitude and longitude is different. Bob has the advantage of working with Stevie Wonder and I have the advantage of working with Stockhausen.
That’s what makes the playing on this album so complementary. You are in the same zone and the psychic connection is such that, virtually always, the notes and the progressions fit together as if they were designed that way.
Right! I could be playing in different tempos and different keys, but there are connections there anyway.
Did you do this recording in a single session or did you do multiple sessions and then created the album in post-production?
There was a little post-producing to clean up a couple things. But it was mainly just thirteen tunes and we did two takes of each tune and picked the better one. We’ve been doing this for close to twenty years and we’ve discovered incremental connections, intuitively over the past several years, so that performances have gotten tighter and tighter and worked better and better, such that, these days, we’re confident we can just go on stage any given night and it’s be worth a cd. Whereas at first. It was the shallow end of the pool. splashing around a lot. But we need to do less and less of that post-production cleanup all the time.
How did you prepare to do this album? If I understand correctly, you two saw these studios and the grand pianos and had the epiphany to do the recording, but did you have to psych yourselves up to actually do it in anyway? Did you discuss to any great degree in advance what you wanted to accomplish? Or did you just keep your minds clear, sit down and go for it?
What you just said is pretty much what we did. It was not at all like a football coach preparing for next Sunday’s game! (laughs). We’ve played together so long, we’re confident whatever we play, wherever we find ourselves we’ll find something fun to do. We’ve played in New York, Chicago, Tokyo many different circumstances and locales and situations and the fact we had two grand pianos, Yamaha and Baldwin, even in two different studios—it’s very rare to find matching piano like this—we figured this is about as good as we’re going to find, at least in the near future. So we figured we could go for it: I knew but Bob says he was worried for a moment… but I was never worried about him.
I saw the previous albums you’ve done, some live and some studio, but you’ve never done anything with just pianos before, am I right?
That’s correct, but let me qualify that statement. Before any of the cd’s, we put out a limited edition cassette and that was two Midi-piano’s. It was a piano sound, but they were not acoustic grand pianos.
What was the sensation like as you got into the sessions and began doing the playing? Did you get lost in the music after a short time? Did you set a certain interval of time to play, then hear a playback to review what you did or did you just play…. and then stop?
More of the first description. We’d play a couple numbers, then play it back. There was never a time when we’d do a track then review then do the track again. You can keep up your stamina better that way then recording for four hours and listening for the next two.
That makes perfect sense. I have some material here that references different influences on different tracks on Batique: when you’re playing, in this context or any other, do you hear these influences as you’re playing flashing through your head?
Let me try to explain this properly. It’s not like billboards in front of me. Instead they’re subtle images that I’m aware of, very deeply, that are behind me. I can sense them as they occur and there are also things that come up during playback that I realize I was not thinking of at the time, but are so obvious hearing them after the fact, so to speak. It’s only natural on both fronts because of all the stuff I’ve been exposed to.
I suppose it would be something akin to an out of body experience if you hear yourself play, in the moment or after, and say “Oh, I see how I put this together!”
Yes and it’s mostly ex post facto and it’s a collection of influences of people I’ve know directly and indirectly. Jerome Garcia, for instance, or film score composer Maurice Jarre, who was kind enough to allow me an hour to pick his brain, so all this stuff is in there and it’s all emulsified together. I can’t un-know the ragtime I’ve picked up over the years, for instance
And why would you want to really? As you were listening back to these takes of free playing for an interval, rather than “Here’s a song we’re going to do!” how did you come up with the titles?
Usually they would suggest themselves. There were several little methods we would use and one that’s mad-lib style: in concert, we’ll work with the audience to come up with a title, then play that. I use a method called the Terry Riley Formula borrowed from my friend of over fifty years: he would use something generic something exotic and something ideal, such as “Sunrise in the Interplanetary Dream collector” or “A Rainbow in Curved Air.” One way or the other the title will fit that formula. One time at a festival in Toronto, Bob and I did “Canadian Hippopotamus Polka”—that stopped the show!
(Laughs) I bet it did. Do you have plans to do any live shows based on this recording? I would think it would be fascinating to be in the room with you guys.
We have a cluster of them booked in early August. I’m horny to play (laughs).
You must then be very satisfied with what you came up with, but did it come out like you expected? Or was there surprise somewhere in it or permeating the whole thing that, when you got it all together, you went “We didn’t plan it that way but, boy I love serendipity?”
My attitude is expectations are non-existent. We figure it’d be pretty good some way or another. To get back to the ‘Batique’ theme, we’re knitting a movie we haven’t seen yet. Is that metaphor mixed enough?
Sure, but it makes a lot of sense. As you talked about the billboard concept, it’s all about pulling out the scenes in your head and placing them in a certain sequence.
There’ll be there anyway subconsciously. You can’t be anyone except yourself based on what you’ve absorbed during the course of your life
How did you decide on the sequence of tracks? Does the cd bear any resemblance to the order in which they were recorded?
It doesn’t. We went over it painstakingly over several conversations, but let me oversimplify it for a moment to give you an idea: we asked questions like “Which one do you want to begin with” and “Which one do you want to end with?” “Are there any (tracks) that have to precede another one?” It’s like a brainteaser puzzle in which you need to figure things out from the missing information.
