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WILL: Although TISQ is a string quartet, you guys play jazz, classical, rock, international, Indian classical, and even funk. I was wondering who your favorite musicians in these genres are.
DAVID BALAKRISHNAN: Being 45, it’s been a long lifetime of accumulating different influences and passing through them. When I was coming up I was really interested in rock and roll: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton...
This is just me, cause there’s four of us, of course, and the interesting thing is that three of the four of us grew up in the 60s and 70s, we’re real baby boomers, and Evan Price, the newest member, is actually twenty years younger than I am. He says he was influenced by the 70s more in a pre-natal way. (Laughs) So his influences are entirely different.
But, like I said, three of the four of us came up in the 60s and 70s, and all three of us somehow hit this rock guitar stage. I think when you play violin as a kid, it’s very natural, in response to what’s happening culturally, to go [on] to the instrument that’s most dominant in the rock scene, which is the guitar. And of course the fingering feels the same and it’s an easy transition, so a lot of us that were destined to do this alternative approach to the violin and to string instruments were attracted to the idea of playing rock guitar and being rebels and all that kind of thing. So [I was into] guys like Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and I was into some gross stuff like Black Sabbath.
W: So you grew up playing violin but listening to a lot of rock?
DB: I grew up playing violin and then very early on started playing rock guitar. An important thing about classical training in the traditional sense [is that you have] very little ear training. All your focus is on playing music that’s been written out for you. There’s a very high emphasis on technique, almost to the level of gymnastics. So what happened with me is that I’m sitting there playing Mozart and the kind of music kids play on the violin, and then I started picking up the guitar and picking out solos off records. Little did I know what I was doing was “ear training.” It was just something I was doing for fun. But because I did that at that age I actually developed very early on the idea of playing by ear, so that was an important part of balancing out my training as a musician.
[Then] I made this realization that, playing a guitar, one of the big reasons is to make girls like you. So I started realizing “there’s a lot of guitar players out there, but, hey, nobody’s doing this on violin! Wow! What if I play rock violin?”
There were a couple of people out there doing it, like Papa John Creach and Sugarcane Harris. I was into this guy named Jerry Goodman. He played with the original McLaughlin Mahavishnu Orchestra way before Jean-Luc Ponty was in it, and before then he was in a group called The Flock, which was this rock and roll band. I saw a picture on the back of a record cover where he had hair down to his butt and he was waving it around as he was playing, and I said “Wow! I want to do that!”
W: Wave your hair around and play violin?
DB: Oh man, it looked so cool! Growing your hair long in those days was the biggest thing you could do to piss off your mom and everybody else. So I got into that idea and I took a big old guitar pickup and strapped it on my violin and scratched the finish. My mother was furious.
As I got older and got into college I started studying music composition and studying serious classical violin as well, but my taste in pop music started getting more sophisticated, and I became attracted to Jazz. I started realizing that traditional Jazz was even more highly sophisticated and developed than the Jazz Rock [of the Mahavishnu Orchestra et al]. So I started getting very excited and interested in studying that language, in studying John Coltrane and Charlie Parker and these kind of people.
And at the same time, luckily for me, I had this experience in 1976 of this group called the David Grisman Quintet. At that point I was really into Jazz Rock and I had an amp that was taller than I was and I had all these gimmicks and was playing really loud electric violin, and I happened to see this group, the David Grisman Quintet. They played totally acoustic, and it was kind of a mixture of Jazz and this music that I always thought was just Hee-Haw silly stiff, Bluegrass, I had no feelings about it at all. But when I felt the power that these bare acoustic instruments could generate, such incredible energy, even greater than what I was listening to in these all out Rock bands, that just completely floored me, and I got completely obsessed with that. And that was my introduction into folk music and Bluegrass.
And luckily enough for me I was able to spend the next few years hanging out with those guys – I just kind of finagled my way in there and was hanging out with Darol Anger, and David Grisman would take me over to his house and spend hours and hours giving me my Bluegrass education.
W: Good place to get your bluegrass education.
DB: He’s totally into the whole traditional style, and he taught me about groups like Jim and Jesse and Ralph Stanley, and of course Bill Monroe was the god of all that. And that was a big education for me. I was learning traditional Bluegrass and traditional Jazz at the same time.
The last thing I want to talk about is the Indian music part. My father was born in South India and he came over in 1948 and then married an American woman, my mother. I grew up in L.A., and in those days it was very unpopular to be foreign, and so they really made a conscious choice not to expose us childen to anything that would make us seem foreign. So I basically grew up in the L.A. suburbs a pretty American guy, but my father would play this music – he had records of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan – and my mom would make him close the door because she said it sounded like cats being killed. Really, she thought it was the most horrible sound. I didn’t think much about it, but later on the Beatles came out and all my friends were saying “Wow! You’ve got a Ravi Shankar record?” It was, all of a sudden, really cool. Of course, I’d heard it all my life, I just didn’t know anything about it. So I started listening to that, and then it slowly developed, in a very natural way... When you know something’s in your blood, even if you don’t have training in it, somehow you have a tendency to lean towards that. I’m not really highly trained in that but I’m highly influenced by it in terms of musicians like Ravi Shankar and also the violinists L. Subramanian and L. Shankar. And Shakti, oh that was just incredible. It was a realization to hear that group. Those guys play like nobody else. They’re some of the finest string musicians in the world. You listen to L. Subramanian – there’s nobody that can cut that guy. He’s great.
W: One of the things people remark about when it comes to your group is the fact that you guys improvise, which is rare in a string quartet. I’ve personally met many classical players who can’t improvise or are scared to improvise. It occurs to me that perhaps some classical players may be intimidated by improvisation because they spend so much time playing beautifully polished and thought out music that has “stood the test of time,” so to speak, whereas improvisation involves playing your own music instead of Mozart’s, relying on energy and invention rather than full realization and perfection. Do you think that playing well-wrought music by “the masters” scares players away from the prospect of spontaneous creation of their own music?
DB: I think you’re really close to being on it... It’s not so much of a value judgement, especially nowadays. Nowadays Jazz is just as ignored as Classical music. Jazz has become really accepted as an art style so therefore the radio stations aren’t playing it.
But [the reason Classical players are scared of improvisation] is more because they lack training. It’s like a muscle you’ve never exercised. Classical music has a sense of refinement, and improvising takes that away from you a little bit. You have to search, and there’s an ugliness you go through, an awkwardness. And it’s just no fun; you have to start all over. And Classical music tends to put such a strong emphasis on control of elements, so the worst thing you can do is be in an orchestra and play one note slightly out of tune or slightly off the beat. You're indoctrinated with this very strict idea that everybody’s very intense about: don’t make mistakes. Well, anybody who improvises knows that you can’t even think about improvising without [making mistakes]. Making mistakes is part of the whole process of it. Look at Miles Davis, he has some of the most great recordings – he plays a wrong note and he plays it again: ‘See! I meant that!’
It’s very hard to overcome the years of the voice in your head saying ‘Don’t make ugly sounds! Don’t play a wrong note!’ It’s very hard to break through that. That would be that way for anybody, but it’s especially a problem for classically trained musicians because the style’s been around for awhile. For string players, there’s such a strong tradition of there being a right way and a wrong way. And it inhibits people from taking the chances you have to take.
It’s less about feeling that the music of the masters is better. It’s more related to the fear of sounding bad.
W: I was really interested in your point that Jazz is now respected, so it’s ignored. Do you think that gaining respect made Jazz seem less vital?
Well, those are dangerous words, “vital,” “less vital.” I wouldn’t go so far.
W: I guess I’m referring to people’s conceptions, not objective assessment.
DB: I know what you mean. It’s a very good question, and it’s one that’s bandied about by greater minds than mine. There are people that obsess about this. I go to the IAJE conference, the Internation Association of Jazz Educators, and this is a big, huge subject in the Jazz world. My limited understanding of what happens in these kind of situations is that when you have a musical style develop organically, like Jazz did, it starts off as being music of simple people, of folk people. So if you look at the roots of Jazz, it came from Blues and then it went through the Ragtime thing. It was a folk style and then gradually became a pop style, just like listening to Rap music is today. If you read books written in the 20s they say “Jazz is the music of the Devil.” It was thought of as being lowbrow, and that perception was very strong. And then of course you get into the Big Band era and everybody’s dancing to it and it’s starting to make it’s way out of the black culture and into the white culture. And then you get Be-Bop, and you get Charlie Parker and that single move that took it from being a pop/folk style to an art music style. And it became more difficult to listen to. And once again, the critics were saying “this is like Chinese music.” Charlie Parker was vilified for ruining Jazz by some of the critics, but a lot of them could recognize that something very special was happening. And the music became much more complicated; the chord changes became more complicated, the rhythmic patterns became more complicated, you had to know a lot more. My teacher in college was in the Tommy Dorsey band, and he got drafted, went to World War II, fought in the war, came back and he said the standards of playing from the Be-Bop era had risen the bar so high he had to just go crazy and practice really hard just to keep working. It changed the consciousness of players. From that point on, you started seeing this development of the music to where it looks and feels more like great Classical music, which is challenging, subtle, all this stuff.
Of course, this is a slow process, and the great musicians that instigated it have passed away. So now people are left with a choice of “do we keep re-creating what John Coltrane and Charlie Parker did?” A lot of people are doing just that, and they’re saying that’s what Jazz is, to play Jazz means I play like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and John Coltrane. But then there’s the other side, people saying “No, Jazz is a constantly evolving, changing organism that shouldn’t be captured by such boundaries.”
This is the problem: when you put something in an academic framework, and Jazz started making it’s way into the colleges because it was becoming more accepted as an art style, the rules become more codified; What is Jazz? What do you have to do to play Jazz? And so you go to a Jazz workshop and you see this 13 year old white kid from the suburbs playing Charlie Parker licks. Charlie Parker was a heroin addict living in New York! It’s just the weirdest thing to think that [Jazz] made its way all the way into basic middle-class America. And in so doing, it started losing a certain amount of freedom to evolve. And if you look at Classical music, that’s a great example: it got so fossilized that they even eliminated improvising from it! See what I’m saying? You could take Jazz that far, so that it became: “No, you can’t improvise. You have to play just like this.” Or “your improvisation has to be kept in a small box. It has to fit over these chord changes and use these licks or it’s not Jazz. People are wrestling with this, in terms of keeping an identity for what the style is versus killing it and making it so rigid that there’s no life to it and no chance for it to evolve.
You do see, from my standpoint as a professional, the difficulties involved in trying to make a living and getting this music out; somehow, when something’s an art style, it gets harder to convince stations to play it. This is something that everybody’s struggling with; keeping the quality of the music high and still reaching people.
W: I was unaware that improvisation had even been a part of Classical music, which, I guess, is a measure of how buried that is.
DB: But so was I. There’s musicologists that know a whole lot more about that than I do, but I have a general idea that I can tell you.
When I was learning Classical music it was completely unheard of to improvise, but, you know, you play these things called cadenzas. Now it’s obvious, especially when you read, that the cadenza often wasn’t written by the composer, so you play a Beethoven concerto and the cadenza’s written by Leopold Auer, or somebody else. So you get the idea that this must have been something that was left to the performer at some point.
In the 18th and turn of the 19th century, with Mozart and Beethoven, they were already starting to write out stuff, [but] if you look at the Baroque music in the century before that, you see that the music was very sketchy and it left a lot of room for the performers to embellish the melody, and composers who wrote more were unpopular. For instance, one of the reasons that J.S. Bach was unpopular was that he wouldn’t leave a lot of room for the performers to improvise in his music. He would write a lot of it out.
The way you improvised was a little different, I think. My understanding of Baroque-style improvisation is that it was more ornamental: you’d take a simple melody and embellish it in different ways. Whereas in Jazz you just have the melodies and the chord progression you play off of, you take the song form and you blow over that.
As the style progressed, the composers became more and more controlling over what they wanted to hear, and the performers were given less and less room to take part in the composition…[The composers] didn’t want to give up control, so they started writing out more and more, and the performers didn’t want to chance failure – they didn’t want to go out and play a cadenza that didn’t mesh with Leopold Auer’s cadenza, or Paganini’s cadenza.
W: It seems like writing enabled that, too. With something like Jazz or Bluegrass, you learn the songs from a record or from somebody else and then you make them your own, whereas with a lot of these classical pieces every little thing can be written into it.
DB: That’s a very good point. Notation becomes a big part of the process of the piece; the composer writes everything on paper, and then presents it to the group fully realized: ‘Here is my masterpiece.’ As opposed to ‘Hey man, check out this tune I wrote. Here’s the chords…’
And that really affects how you react to the music. I think that one of the problems with Classical music is that it’s hard to feel like it’s alive. The composition is so codified and there are such clear ideas about what it should be, and of course it’s beautiful music distilled through time, but the performers themselves – who are they? How are their personalities being represented in that music? I think that’s what Jazz does a good job of, giving you a feel of the individual who’s playing, at the time he’s playing. That’s what makes music live.
Listen to an mp3 by the Turtle Island String Quartet (from Audiogalaxy.com):
Steel City Strut
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interview used by permission of Audiogalaxy.com
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