After thirty minutes on the phone with Bobby Previte, it’s not hard to understand how his musical and human personalities fit together – they’re one and the same. A railroad map of his trains of thought would look a lot like a map of his musical career: a maze of backtracking, forked roads, shortcuts, impossible leaps through walls and over bridges with no final destination in sight and a seemingly bottomless tank of spiritual fuel. It’s convenient that Previte’s engine runs on the same thing it produces. He’s a perpetual music machine.
He’s gorged himself on jazz and classical compositions, but more recently, the less refined bubbling ooze of rock, metal, funk, and jazz of his Coalition of the Willing has kept his engine stoked – that, and at least two other projects he gushes over – but despite the variety of paths his wandering eye has led him on, he’d prefer to be thought of as an engine of boundless creativity and interest rather than some musical vagrant. It is not some musical attention deficit, or God forbid eclecticism, that bends Previte’s straight path. He is merely following the proverbial carrot, searching for “it.”
He finds a mystery around every musical corner, but his highway soul hasn’t scared away his peers. As the percussionist directs me around the turns of his career, he spouts off strange names too quickly for me to ask directions, but despite being lost on the map of his mind, I get the distinct sense I should know every street by name. Instead, I only recognize landmarks, most of which make up his newest project.
On the self-titled Coalition of the Willing, Previte is joined by Ropeadope coalition members Marco Benevento, who makes up half of the white hot Duo, Charlie Hunter, whom Previte managed to talk into picking up a six-string for the first time in recent memory, and comic Claypool cohort and saxophonist, Skerik. He even lured fellow kitmeister Stanton Moore onto a few tracks. The Coalition of the Willing is a mighty, yellow, red, white and blue beast with a hundred arms, but Previte is the head, and though his newest track leads him away from his classical and jazz past, he leads this monster with the same precision of his earlier work, and more importantly, the same infinite energy.
You’re a busy man, involved in so many things. How do you keep it all straight? Or do you even try?
You know, a lot of people ask me that question. I get it more often than not. I’ve come to figure out that I must have a lot of energy, because I’m curious and I like doing a lot of things, and I don’t know. Me and my trio, we keep it straight somehow, but it’s not easy. I’m just used to multi-tasking by now. It’s not always great, but I think I’ve somehow been able to figure out how to do it, and I want to keep doing it, because I am interested in a lot of different things.
Which of your current projects are you most excited about?
Well, two: The Coalition, which I think you know all about. It’s my new band and something that I’ve really been getting into in the last year. Personnel you know: Charlie [Hunter]’s playing six-string guitar, which is really odd for him. And he sounds great. And Marco Benevento, who’s killing it. We just got back from Europe with Steve Bernstein, but now on this west coast tour, we’re going to have Skerik. So this band is great, because it’s a power band. I like that about it. But yet, it’s still got all my things in it that I like to put in things that you might not hear the first time around, but that might keep you listening. I really like music that you don’t get immediately, that doesn’t slam you over the head. You might get part of it, but there’s always something there for you to hear in the future. So there’s that.
There’s actually three things. The second thing that I’m really interested in is the solo electronic record that has now turned into a solo electronic DVD. I recorded a solo electronic drums record called Dialed In, and I just back from a tour where I was a supporting act for Charlie and Christian McBride, playing solo electronics. This is something I’ve been getting into more and more. It’s basically – it’s not really electonic drums. I only say it [is] because it’s in the form of drums. I have to hit them. I set up these electronic pads, and they sort of look like drums. But the sounds are all – it’s as informed as much by Varese’s Poeme Electronique as it is by any kind of drum technique. It’s as if someone was making electronic music, but as a drummer. In other words, you don’t sit and loop something and you don’t have multiple pads and you don’t have overdubs and you don’t sit at your computer and press play. You have to actually strike everything, every sound that’s generated, so this makes for a different vibe, because it is played. It’s electronic music that is performed. Now, Benton Bainbridge, who’s like video-genius-dude-man, has done a lot of video improvisation. He’s now creating fourteen short films for each of the fourteen tunes, and that’s really exciting, because I really truly think this is going to be the first DVD of its type. I want this to be the DVD that hasn’t been made yet, the electronic music and video DVD that you can actually look at and listen to more than once. And actually, there’s eight videos for the Coalition tunes – eight different videos from eight different video artists, some of my favorite video artists. They’re really great. I don’t think they’ll be released as a DVD, though you never know. I think they’ll be downloads on iTunes, but you’re gonna start to see them on the Ropeadope site. As a matter of fact, I just got back from mailing them to Ropeadope.
And the last -it’s not the last project I’m doing, but one of the ones I’m most excited about -the writer Andrea Kleine and I are collaborating on a piece about religion called “The Separation.” What I’ve done is taken a fifteenth century masque by a Flemish composer and rearranged it. I’m writing concurrent music for an almost metal, black, wild, modern ensemble, and this is going to open, I hope, at the Walker Arts in 2007. It’s going to travel to Buffalo and to the ICA in Boston. This is a big project. I’ve got a medieval choir, the Rose Ensemble. They’ll be singing the piece, and Marco’s gonna be playing with me, and Reid Mathis from Jacob Fred [Jazz Odyssey], so that’s a whole other thing. I haven’t written that yet [laughs], so I can’t get too excited about it, but it’s in the works.
Wow.
Already right there, it’s too much, right?
Sounds like it. Tell me about how the Coalition came together. I know all of you have crossbred and worked together at different points.
Well, Skerik and I worked together in Ponga. I was going to Seattle to play with my friend Wayne Horowitz, just going to play with some Seattle musicians. I had met Skerik through Wayne, we started to play together, and some other group coalesced around me and Wayne and Skerik, and we added Dave Palmer, and that become Ponga. So I started playing with Skerik quite a bit in that context.
Then, about four years ago, somebody, I think Skerik, told me, “You should call up Charlie Hunter, because you two might get along.” So I just called him and said, “You wanna play together?” We jammed a little bit and decided to do a duo, and I’d play electronics and drums. It’s kinda great, because we got the bass player, we got the guitar player, we got the drummer, and we got the electronics guy, so we were already sort of a quartet with two people. And we did one record on Ropeadope as a duo and then we got this three record deal with Thirsty Ear, for which later this year, we’re recording the third record of that series. So, we called the project Groundtruther, and I started playing a lot with Charlie in that context.
So then I met Marco through doing the Ropeadope seminar tour. I think it was last year in the fall. He was playing with the Duo, and we hit it off. I really loved his playing and I wanted to play with him more, so I called him up. First I made the record. It’s very much a studio record. Jaime Saft produced it. He played a lot of the guitars, too, and the organ. He’s my bro dude man. He’s great. And I brought in a lot of people to play on the tracks. Charlie of course played on a lot of tracks -he’s all over it – and Steve Bernstein and Skerik, and I actually even had Stanton Moore play a couple tracks. We really approached it like a studio rock record, but tried to keep the spontaneity in there, which I’m fairly confident we succeeded in doing, because we had enough time to make sure the spontaneity was there. Sometimes if you have only four or five days and you try to make a record like that, it doesn’t work, you know? You either have to do the record in one or two days, or you have to do it in a couple months. So we had the luxury of having enough time to really undo any carefulness we could possibly have put in there. And I think we did. I really am happy with the record. I think that except for this record I made a few years back called The Twenty-Three Constellations of Jean Miro, which is a totally different chamber record, it’s the closest I’ve come yet. I’ll just say that. I won’t say to what.
bWhat was the impetus for getting The Coalition together? Was it your idea? Was it everyone just kicking around and saying, “Hey, what about this person, what about this person?”
No, it was my idea. It’s my band, which all these musicians graciously agreed to play in. But it’s my band and my vision as far as that goes, with the added vision of all these genius musicians. I believe in bands that have leaders. It’s tough for bands that are totally democratic. A lot of times you don’t get one strong vision, for better or for worse. I mean, you might hate what the vision is, but it is a vision. That’s what I think is important. To have one. To have a point of view. I might hate your point of view, but I’d much rather listen to a conversation with someone who has a point of view, even if I despise it, than to someone who doesn’t or whose point of view is derivative and hence boring.
If The Coalition is your vision, what is your vision? What were you trying to accomplish with the record?
Now’s the time when I should walk over to my bookcase [he is obviously walking over to his book case] where is it? Yes, walk over to my bookcase and try to find, let’s see a particular book. And I won’t tell you what until I find it!
Because you don’t know the title.
I do know the title! It’s A Picture of Dorian Gray. I believe it’s in [there]. Aha! And [shuffling through pages] you’re not gonna print this, but I’m gonna read you this, just for fun.
This is the answer to that question: “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is the art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest and the lowest form of criticism is the mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these, there is hope.” Blah blah blah blablablah. “They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly-written. That is all.” And at the end, he says, “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely, and all art is quite useless.”
That’s great. It’s funny that you say that, because I often find that when I reread my reviews, I realize how much I read into the records. I read the symbols, and I take them for more than their surface value. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I often look at it and say, “Eh, that didn’t really work.”
It’s very personal, you know, and that’s what makes it so powerful. It’s mystery that makes it so powerful. And the fact that you cannot answer that question is the great thing about art and about music. And that’s the thing that we want. That’s the thing we all want from music and art.
Just the beauty?
It’s the feeling, the uselessness of it. As soon as it becomes functional, it’s over. It’s boring. As soon as you put up a painting because it looks good next to your couch, that’s the end of it. You’ve just narrowed it to a point where you really can’t get the “it” factor from it anymore, the X factor. That’s the mysterious thing. Who knows what that is? I don’t want to know what that is. I don’t really want to know why or what I’m putting in the music. I really don’t. Because I want to be seduced by it. I still want to be seduced, even by my own music, you know?
So you want to feel it, but you don’t necessarily want to understand it?
I guess, yeah. If your definition of understanding is that kind of understanding. I think that in a way, this could be a greater understanding of it. This could be a great understanding to not understand it in the sense that I think that you mean it is actually a greater understanding of it. Because that’s all there is to understand. There’s no secret, there’s no code. It hits you. It doesn’t hit you. It makes you feel something. It doesn’t make you feel something. That’s really all there is.
Speaking of understanding, the title of the album and some of the album titles have some pretty strong political undertones. Was that intended?
Yeah, they’re all from 1984, except for “Anthem for Andrea.” It’s a great book that people might want to reread. And of course, the Coalition of the Willing, which has its own other meaning. So there is kind of a political element to it, but what is the political element? It might not be exactly all I’ll say is you have to read the quote on the record. Sometimes things are not what they seem right on the surface. Let me say this: I like to put things together and see what third thing happens. And I don’t have a political agenda. Although I do, because everyone does. I try to minimize that in my art, though, because I don’t like political art. I don’t like art that’s trying to be political just like I don’t like art that’s trying to be beautiful. I don’t like art that’s trying to be anything. Because I don’t think you can try to be anything. Art is just like what we talked about before. I like to put these things in there, and then I think the quote sort of brings it to another place that’s almost in confrontation with the album art if you really read the quote carefully. These are things that I really like to do because that’s what I like to do in the music. It’s not perhaps as obvious as it might seem.
Having named the album Coalition of the Willing and having thrown in these song titles from 1984, which is particularly relevant right now, obviously that was on your mind. Did that in any way shape your approach to the music that you were writing?
I would say no, but only maybe in the largest sense that I wanted it to really be powerful. And so there’s quite a contradiction there. We’re the Coalition of the Willing. That’s very sort of military. You know, the cover can be seen as almost anti-military, almost socialist, yet military in the sense that it’s kind of a mob psychology. And then there’s the quote, which kind of disavows all of it in a way [laughs maniacally]. It’s just that I like to subvert things and I like to subvert my own music and I like to subvert myself. That’s how I choose my musicians. I like to hire and have with me on stage subverters. I don’t like people who go along, even with me. Because I don’t like going along, even with myself. I feel it’s very important to subvert yourself constantly. So this is one way I do it.
The album has a lot of different sounds. There’s rock and blues and jazz and metal and all kinds of other stuff. How did all the songs come together? I’m assuming that you did all of the composition, but for example, “Ministry of Love” really has a prog/metal feel to it. Were you trying to write a prog/metal song? How do you write your songs?
All the songs are mine, yes. But how do I write them? All different ways. They come to me in my half-dream state. I’m playing guitar and they’ll come to me or I hear the song as I’m playing the drums or I hear just a direction and I try to hammer it out. It really comes from all different ways. You know, it’s funny that you say the album’s all over the place. I really hope that it’s not all over the place.
Well, not in a bad way. It’s still very cohesive.
Yeah, that’s good. You know, one of the things people always like to say about me is that I’m eclectic. And I_
That’s sort of a backhanded compliment
Yeah, I don’t like eclecticism. Because it’s too close to dilettantism in my mind. Eclecticism especially for eclecticism’s sake, I just detest, so I feel like all the things that I write are so -in fact, if I could make them more different I would, but they’re so Bobby Previte. I can’t get away from Bobby Previte.
Well, and that’s what makes the album coherent and unified. It all sounds like you. But the “eclecticism” (or however you want to phrase it) of the album got me wondering what you might have been listening to. Is there anything that you think had a really big influence on the record?
Well, I have been listening a lot more to metal through Jamie Saft. He’s really gotten me into that. So I’ve been listening to a lot more metal than I ever listened to before. So I was listening to that a lot and before that, I was listening to a lot of hip hop and Messan, particularly to his organ pieces. So that kind of all crashed together, I suppose, with this record. And a lot of guitar music. I love the electric guitar.
You’ve had a long and “eclectic” career.
You could have said “distinguished!”
Well, I had to throw that in. What have been some of the really shining moments that will stay with you?
Bribing my way out of Moscow during the coup of Gorbachev when I was there writing music for the Moscow Circus. That stuck with me. You know, that whole project, I was kind of at the height of my powers at that time. Really finally getting my band together years ago and doing my first tour of Europe, that was thrilling. Writing “The 23 Constellations” and hearing them go down in the studio was one of the highlights for sure. Making the record Claude’s Late Morning in 1988 for Gramavision was a breakthrough for me. I felt like that was a real different record finally. It was something I’d never heard, orchestration I’d never heard anybody do, and that was really important for me, for my development. And now, I feel really, within the last four years or so, I’m re-energized. I’m hearing music in a way I never have. I feel better about music than I have in a long time. I feel better about where I’m going. And about this band, The Coalition, and just the whole direction that I’ve been in and all the new people that I’ve met. That is really the most exciting of course, because it’s right here, right now. I’m in a really good spot. I’m really lucky. I’m surrounded by talented people who really wanna play music, and I just feel really, really good. I feel like The Coalition’s really going to be something that people really are gonna go for.
Photos courtesy of Ziga Koritnick, Cees van de Ven and Michael DiDonna.
