Saxophonist Paul Flaherty is a titan in the world of free and improvised music. Since 1982, he has released at least four-dozen albums of wild, blazing sound, in collaboration with some of the most recognizable names in the free jazz and rock world (Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, Wally Shoup, Randall Colbourne).
Until recently though, a little known chapter of Flaherty's career was kept very much in the dark. In 1978, as a young jazz musician in Connecticut, Flaherty began a tempestuous relationship with three other local musicians – bassist Bob Laramie, guitarist Barry Greika and drummer Glenn "Hobbit" Peterson. Using the name Orange, the four blazed their way through New England for a brief period, recording and releasing one album, the appropriately titled In The Midst of Chaos, before their dissolution. The album garnered a response as visceral as the music on it, with the few friends and listeners who were given a copy stunned by the raging noise tucked into the record's grooves.
That album will surely now be something of a Rosetta stone – a recently rediscovered piece of the past, which will affect the work of jazz and noise musicians from here on – thanks to De Stijl Records who are re-releasing it this month.
To gain some insight into this crucial piece of jazz history, Junkmedia recently spoke with Flaherty, who explained the origins of the group, their contentious history and what makes the best kind of musical collaborator.
Junkmedia: What comes to mind when you listen to the Orange album? What memories does it stir up from 30 years ago?
Paul Flaherty: Lots of different feelings from the dark and twisted past. Bob Laramie diving through the air and scraping my forehead with his bass as he flew past. Aliens landing in the backyard on a weekly basis. Questions about my own playing compared to now come up right away, but essentially I'm very happy that it's managed to re-surface and that people will get to hear what was basically a band, and a record, that got almost no exposure. We all wanted different things from the experience of playing together. So plenty of arguments, especially between me and my friend, Barry Greika, but in the end we had a lot of great and very funny and inspired moments. Personally I'm happy also that despite attempting to play tunes of some sort together for about three years, that in the end we released a freeform album, which means that it's us. Free music reveals the artist with nowhere to hide.
What can you tell me about the recording sessions for this album?
They were all bizarrely short. Each session (three in total) produced less than 40 minutes of music and this despite the fact that we'd traveled to and loaded into a studio and were capable of recording much more. But in each case the soundman, or one of us, had to leave just as we were getting going. The worst moment came when we played a 45-minute cut and the soundman announced he'd just recorded the best music he'd ever heard, but that he'd forgotten to turn on the sax and the bass. But not to worry, we could do it again. I held my head in my hands on the front porch for 30 minutes. Of course, the arguing often continued at the sessions. Hobbit didn't feel ready for one and we physically dragged him there. Barry and Bob wanted to record a Charlie Parker tune and I threatened to leave. (No offense to Charlie Parker, but I figured we had our thing.) My cousins, Dave and Dan Flaherty, showed up and sat in on one session, and it seemed the room was going to erupt into a brawl, but in the end we actually had enough improvised material to consider releasing a record. Of course we then immediately broke up the band.
The reviews that I've read about the album intimate that some people had some fairly extreme reactions to the record when they heard it the first time. Do you have any examples of that?
One piano player I knew (the late John Ciffarelli) said that he enjoyed the cut "Sadjoy," but that when he went to turn the record over he noticed the kitchen window was open and sailed it out. Another friend (Russ Heintz) saw me in a parking lot, stopped his car, left it running and walked up to me in an obvious state of insulted anger. "My wife said to get this fuckin' thing out of the house!" He almost yelled through clenched teeth as he returned the disc. I thanked him for his passionate response.
Would you be able to hazard a guess as to why they reacted so strongly to it?
Most everyone I knew liked music, but they were all into commercially accepted forms. Certainly a group of people who were aware of free music wouldn't have been shocked at all, but we lived in Connecticut in the '70s and hardcore experimental music wasn't happening in the circles I traveled in. "Where are the lyrics? What keys are you in, or don't you know? Can you even play a tune?" The usual comments I still get today from people who even now hate this kind of stuff.
What can you tell me about the other players that were a part of Orange and how the group formed?
The band formed because I met Bob Laramie in a factory we were both doing time in. He invited me to come see the band he was in which included Barry Greika. They were doing rock tunes but quickly stretching them into extreme madness that had me thinking of a deranged Hendrix. Bob, while playing, began dancing on the house piano's keyboard, as Barry straddled a booth in an almost 180-degree split while blistering about 2000 notes a minute into the smoke-filled room, which he helped create while smoking a joint on stage before starting. Those were the days. I immediately asked if we could get together and maybe discuss the possibility of free improv. Barry invited me to his practice and off we went.
Barry was certainly at the center. We usually played at his place - an old barn in Stafford Springs, Connecticut - during the warm months. We found other places to meet in the cold weather. Barry is quite capable of playing almost any type of music or instrument. I was totally impressed with his ability despite the fact that I considered him crazy most of the time. Not in a bad way, but he does know how to push my buttons, usually without realizing it or understanding my own madness. I often wondered if we had any chance at all of breaking out of that barn, but now and then he'd find us a gig. Never the same place twice since he'd demand a huge raise after the first time we played anywhere. Or he'd line up an unexpected recording session, which always kept me coming back for the possibilities. He plays and teaches in Stafford Springs even today. Only occasionally does he do a concert and continues to threaten to release more records.
Bob was and remains one of the really fantastic electric bass players I've ever known or heard. He's played about 5000 gigs since this record was made, but his released recorded material is almost non-existent. I'm sure he's gotten on a few commercial records here and there, but the real Bob Laramie, who makes a room stop and listen whenever he solos, is severely under-recorded. He's still living in Connecticut and leads certain blues and jazz jams in bars around the Hartford area.
Hobbit has just been found. He wasn't really lost but I didn't know where to look. He's also living in Connecticut again but has been traveling the far corners world for the past 20 years, playing gigs here and there in bands that usually have no connection with free improv. Hobbit was truly the glue that made this group work at all. With all the arguments we sailed into, Glenn was always the guy who got us to laugh it off. Who insisted that the jams continue even if he had to drive way out of his way to pick up Barry and drive him to the jam spot of the week. Plus he played in such a loose style that three different players, who all wanted the music to go to divergent places, could each find a place for themselves in his rhythms. The free form looseness of Hobbit made this band work. I don't think he realized at the time how important he was. That's why we dragged him to the final recording session. Without him we would have just started throwing punches.
I'm always curious to know what attracts people to start playing jazz music instead of picking up other genres or styles. What is your story about becoming a jazz saxophonist?
I started playing the sax at age 10 because I passed a test to get in the school band. If I'd realized at the time what was happening, I would have failed it intentionally. My mother liked the sax so she rented me one. I was pissed off about it because it was heavy and now I had to carry it around along with my books. But, I was coming along pretty well, learning classical music and marching songs so we could parade around the cemeteries on holidays. Around the age of 12 or 13, I heard modern jazz on the radio. I don't know who it was that I heard but my life was ruined from that point on. I gradually became worse in the school band because I could no longer relate to the music, but by the age of 16 I'd started improvising with jazz records to try and learn how to play by ear. I continued that for seven years. Some of the players on record who helped me learn were Eddie Harris, Gene Ammons, Bobby Timmons, Johnnie Griffin, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and a host of others. I always loved jazz with a passion from the first moment I heard it. Of course not all of it, and I'm a product of the movement that respects the past, but is much more connected with the jazz that came into the world after 1955 rather than before it. It's all a connection, but two camps split around then with the arrival of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman and the riff continues. Eventually in my twenties, my passion for jazz became a passion for totally improvised music of any genre. And that seems to be where I got stuck or found some sort of direction.
You have worked with a lot of different musicians over the years, coming from all different styles and musical languages. How do you choose who to play with or do they choose you?
It's both of course. It takes two to tango. I look for someone who is literally bursting with energy and who wants to improvise pieces from beginning to end. It helps if they've been playing for a while and have developed their style to a place where it seems to make sense in a weird way. You never know where these type of players might be since the world has probably beaten them down many times for having such an uncontrolled spirit. I've found them in commercial bands, marching bands, working in a factory, wedding bands, rock bands, insurance companies, washing dishes, wherever. It's usually the guy who feels like an artistic outcast and lives knowing that he's sitting on a musical time bomb. That's all it takes. Of course now and then someone will just call and offer me a gig. That's always nice.
What makes for the best kind of musical relationship/partnership? Why, for example, do you find working with Chris Corsano to be such a fruitful partnership?
There have been two drummers over the past twenty years that I've worked with somewhat equally - Chris Corsano and Randy Colbourne. It's a case where we all enjoy the concept of high energy improvised music, and we all enjoy working to release recordings. So, I've released about 15 albums with each of them. In working with Chris, I found I was with someone who wanted to travel around and tour as much as possible. This is something I'd never done, and so for the first time (in my 50s) off we went from town to town, including Canada and Europe a bunch of times. This process has really allowed both of us to meet a lot of people and spread the music around, something I never really thought I'd ever do.
--Photo by Croki.
Robert Ham
July 11, 2008
