Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}
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© 1988-93, 2005 New World Records | New World 80478-2
Jazz / Structured Improvisation / Avant-Garde / Experimental Ensemble

The ceaselessly innovative and searching composer and Butch Morris died yesterday in New York. He had been under treatment of cancer for several years. Morris was 65. He developed an approach to big band music that he called conduction. It made demands on musicians by insisting on intensive, intuitive listening, reaction and interaction. The effort involved adjustment to Morris’s highly personalized methods of conducting while simultaneously composing and arranging through a system of cues and hand motions. Sometimes combined with written scores, the technique required rigor and concentration that not all players and audiences were willing to bring to his efforts. Many who found the results rewarding considered him a genius. Ben Ratliff’s obituary in The New York Times traces Morris’s career. Morris was not merely a composer, arranger, bandleader or conductor. Or he was all of those things and more. In a film about Morris, our colleague Howard Mandel, a specialist on the avant garde, says Morris’s music “is not jazz.” Or it is.

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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The jazz musician Butch Morris was beloved by his fellow musicians and acclaimed by critics and fans for his ability to conduct improvisation. While that may sound like a contradiction, Morris pulled it off — with jazz musicians and symphony orchestras around the world. Lawrence Douglas "Butch" Morris was a Vietnam War veteran and an experimental cornet player when he arrived in New York City from California in the late 1970s. With his friend, saxophonist David Murray, he developed a style which was dubbed "avant-gutbucket." But in 1985 Morris introduced a new approach to music, with far-reaching implications. Conduction, he called it, a method of composing by conducting. He used well-defined hand gestures to summon sounds from musicians, singers and sometimes poets, too, as he told NPR's News and Notes in 2008.

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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"I teach a vocabulary to an ensemble, but we don't rehearse the music we're going to perform," he said. "The performance is really an instant of composition, in many ways … I realized there is a great divide between what is notated and what is improvised and I wanted to discover, to understand what that divide was." Seldom using scores or pre-conceived motifs, Morris constructed spontaneous compositions from what his ensembles came up with in response to his cues. Here's Morris in a rehearsal, captured in the documentary about him, Black February: Music Is An Open Door.

"I need your creative ability and some fantasy," Morris said. "The music needs some fantasy. I don't want this to be in any way random, I'll give you some info, and you'll have to put your horns to your lips or your strings to the bow, because the next thing is going to be the downbeat, and that's when everything happens."

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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Morris made music happen with ensembles of every type, all over the world. He worked with classical musicians for whom any sort of improvisation was a foreign language. He worked with free jazz musicians who balk at following any rules. He worked with groups that used instruments of their native lands. He didn't care about boundaries or labels. "I'm a jazz musician — I know what I am," he said. "Whether the music you think I'm playing or professing is jazz or not is not my problem, you know what I mean? I do conduction. And it doesn't matter whether I do it with classical musicians or jazz musicians or traditional Japanese instruments, Korean instruments, Turkish instruments, it doesn't matter, this is what I do."

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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When he conducted, musicians poured forth their personal sounds, became expansive upon command, provided counterpoint, recapitulated. The results were works that were always fresh, new and unrepeatable. Even when he wrote beautiful melodies, he treated them as raw materials, useful for orchestration in the moment. His influence has spread widely. Today, many musicians try to do what Butch Morris started, though seldom with equal results.

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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This is a superlative collection of Morris' conducted improvisations. The general methods of conducting become a framework within which to create and direct by gesture. Meter and form, melody and harmony are all up for transformation in this setting. These pieces bring to mind the humorous and expected turns in pieces composed as cartoon soundtracks. Voices (that can add an Oriental flair) and odd instruments that contribute to the exaggerated and comedic side juxtapose in these pieces. Included are many East Asian instruments (nokan, ohtsuzumi, tugaru, etc.) in the three pieces recorded in Japan. A final, fourth piece is a European recording and includes both classical instruments (cello, piano, etc.) and several horns with drum and guitar.

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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Testament challenges not only conductors’ orthodoxy but the very vitals of music and music-making-no tradition is left untouched…. When the musical history of the 20th-century comes to be written, Testament will provide one of its most essential chapters.

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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Recorded in nine countries, the music is surprisingly coherent. In Turkey, using a band of mostly local musicians, the music takes on a stunning, solemn quality.In Tokyo, with a group of musicians using traditional Japanese instruments, along with turntables and electric basses, it takes on different colors. Noise and music mix; at times it’s wild, at others, meditative.

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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Conducting is no longer a mere method for an interpretation, but an actual part of the process of composition. Conduction is a means by which a conductor may compose, (re)orchestrate, (re)arrange and sculpt both notated and non-notated music. Using a vocabulary of signs and gestures, many within the general glossary of traditional conducting, the conductor may alter or initiate rhythm, melody, and harmony; develop form and structure; and instantaneously change articulation, phrasing, and meter. Conduction is a viable musical tool for the improvising ensemble.” Butch Morris

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Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris - Testament: A Conduction Collection (1995) {10CD Set, New World Records 80478-2 rec 1988-1993}

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