Bill Laswell Interview
when Bill first met Ornette, Miles, Eno … and Gomelsky
It was a pleasure to talk with Bill Laswell about his early days in NYC. You will hear about some of the key people he would meet then — some by intention, and some by chance.
Bill Laswell Interview:
Bill was 14 when he started playing the bass in Michigan. He would eventually do some gigs in Detroit, but it was the college towns like Ann Arbor where he found more music to his liking. It was also at 14 that he saw the band Cream perform. He became very interested in how Ginger Baker traveled around Africa and played music with the locals. This early notion of discovering and playing music with locals around the world would become a goal that Laswell would achieve many times over.
Another major influence to young Bill would be the times he saw Iggy and MC5. The high energy performances of these bands were the appeal, but it was their charismatic manager John Sinclair that really left a mark in Bill’s mind. He remembers the festivals Sinclair would assemble with musicians from the jazz, funk, and rock worlds all playing on the same bill.
These concepts introduced to Bill early on would stay with him for his entire career. To this day he’s still creating music that combine different styles and cultures simultaneously.
As young Bill started playing more and more around Michigan, it wasn’t too long before he basically ran out of places to play. He’d done all he could do there. It was time to move on. He and his two band mates packed all of their gear into a van and headed to NYC where Bill had a few specific goals in mind. He wanted to meet Ornette Coleman. He wanted to meet Miles Davis. And he wanted to meet, and play with Tommy Bolin, who had just exited the disbanded Deep Purple and was performing with his own band. Bill had good reason to think he might get hired to play in The Tommy Bolin Band. He knew the current bass player in the band, Fernando Sanders, and he knew that Fernando was planning to soon leave the band. But those plans would come to a screeching halt when Bolin OD’d.
It didn’t take long for things to start happening fast for Bill in NY. Bouncing around between CBGBs and the loft scene, he was introduced to many diverse players and started expanding his own musical palette. Sometimes he would meet someone who would offer to take him straight from the gig he'd just done directly to a studio recording session. No money was mentioned, but it was a good opportunity to get your name known. At one of these sessions, Bill watched everyone going into the control room in between takes to listen to the playback. He usually wouldn’t join them, but on this occasion he noticed a guy in the control room wearing a Magma t-shirt. Hardly anybody in NY knew about the French band at that time, but Bill did. He had to meet this guy. He walked up to him and said “you know Magma?”. The response he gets was “I was their manager.” It’s Giorgio Gomelsky.
After the studio session, Gomelsky invites Bill over to his house. He meets Gomelsky’s friend Jack Bruce, the bass player from Cream, and they all go out to see a show by Captain Beefheart. Bill wasn’t sure exactly who Giorgio Gomelsky was when they first met, but it didn’t take him long to find out.
At this time in NYC people did most of their networking on the streets, and the street where Bill Laswell lived seemed like a hub of activity. It wasn’t unusual for Bill to run into Brian Eno right outside his front door. He would often hustle Brian for a gig. Sometimes they’d go to shows together. On one occasion, Bill noticed someone else hustling Eno about a project. Turns out this guy knows where Ornette Coleman lives. Bill goes to the address and rings the bell. He’s let in and finds Ornette on a couch playing guitar and watching tv. He introduces himself and their conversation becomes a weekly affair. It seems at this time almost anyone could show up at Ornette’s place and talk music. Within a couple of years, these conversations would turn into collaborations. Bill would invite his future bandmate and fellow Ornette superfan George Cartwright to do some sessions with Ornette that would never be released. Bill and George would form the band Curlew and in 1980 would record some live shows with Ornette’s son Denardo Coleman on drums.
Bill would also meet Miles Davis. It started with a phone call at 8am. When Bill answered, his friend’s voice on the other end was full of urgency, but few details. Just come to this address right away. He did.
The party Bill walked into that morning had been going on all night. The room was full of South Americans and girls and drugs, or what was left of them. He sees a guy in a flashy leather jacket on the couch. It’s Miles. He doesn’t look well. Bill manages to introduce himself and hangs around long enough to join the Mile’s entourage on their short walk home. He talked with Mile’s quite a bit, but after he left him, Bill didn’t think Miles had long to live. It would surprise him later that year when Miles Davis would make a very public comeback.
In 1978 Gomelsky moved into a 3 story industrial building. He had plans for it. He needed help. Bill was happy to oblige, along with many others in the local music community. They would create rehearsal, performance, and living spaces. Gomelsky would live on the third floor, Laswell on the second.
This is the time when Laswell begins to meet some of the people he will play with for much of his career. John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne are just a couple of the unknowns at that time who were using the rehearsal space regularly. And Gomelsky has even bigger plans. He wants to bring over some of the progressive avant-garde musicians he'd been working with in Europe. Top of the list was Daevid Allen of Gong who was eager to make the jump to NYC. The plan was to have Bill form a backing band for Allen’s compositions and build a huge day-long festival to showcase not only that band, but the cream of the progressive avant-garde that Gomelsky is able to get to join them.
Laswell sets to work assembling a band. He creates a flier to be placed around town, especially at the record stores he’s been frequenting. One store in particular, Patasia, specializes in the obscure progressive taste he has been developing. The clerk at that store, Cliff Cultreri, is extremely helpful at suggesting bands that Laswell likes. Cultreri sees the flier asking for musicians who are into bands like Magma, Henry Cow, and obscure electronic bands. He’s interested in joining Laswell’s project. Not too many other’s answer the flier, as Laswell recalls. Two that did were very young: 17 year-old synth player Michael Beinhorn, and 14 year-old drummer Fred Maher. Both had been playing for a couple of years, and Maher was in a prog band that had done maybe one gig. Their youthful energy and eclectic taste got Laswell’s attention.
The above foursome would start playing together as a unit called Zu Band and became the house band for Gomelsky’s place, now also dubbed Zu House. By the time Daevid Allen shows up, the Zu Band is being augmented with more players for Allen’s backup band, sometimes being called New York Gong. A key addition was Mark Kramer (later known simply as Kramer) on keyboards and trombone. Kramer had been attending the Creative Music Studio workshops in Woodstock where he became friends with many musicians that he would now recommend for positions in the newly forming Daevid Allen group.
When Bill first met Allen he was well aware of the music of Gong. But at this time, the Gong in France had been moving on without their founder Allen. Percussionist and member of Allen’s Gong in France, Pierre Moerlen, had taken over the band in Allen’s absence and molded their sound into jazz fusion. The Gong that Bill was now looking at in front of him in the form of Daevid Allen was a hard-core hippie. His Gong was and would continue to be completely different.
The Zu Manifestival happened on Oct 8, 1978 at a theater in the East Village. It was billed as a 12 hour long extravaganza, and it would go overtime. The huge number of performers and other people working to pull off this event meant that the chaotic day would rush by in a flash. Today, over 40 years later, the whole thing is still a blur in Bill’s mind.
The next step for Gomelsky was to take a subset of this chaos and put it on the road. A school bus was obtained and modified to add some beds. The tour would go from NY to Canada to Los Angeles and back. A key player that Laswell had chosen for this adventure was young drummer Fred Maher. Fred would have to drop out of high school for this. Laswell had turned down several more established drummers, preferring the crazy young energy that Fred brought. He would now have to persuade Fred’s father that this was not some kind of punk drug band his son was joining on this tour. He shared with him some of his jazz albums and convinced him that they were serious musicians.
The North American tour would be about 2 months long … on that school bus. They wouldn’t be home for long before Gomelsky would take them to a studio in Woodstock for their first recording session. He knew the engineer there. His name was Eddy Offord. Most of us know Offord as the guy who recorded the biggest prog-rock albums of the early 70’s. Laswell knew those albums, but it was Offord’s work on John McLaughlin’s first solo album Extrapolation that stood out in his mind. Gomelsky produced that album. He didn’t have a big budget to do it, so it was done after hours at Advision Studios in London. The regular engineer was too tired to do the session, so he gave it to the tape-op guy, Eddy Offord. Gomelsky and Offord would work on many recordings together in the mid to late 60’s. But Bill remembers best what a unique sounding recording Extrapolation was, and is.
As in past recording sessions, Bill had little interaction with the engineer this time as well. I wonder if that might have been different had Bill known that one of the last recording sessions done by Offord in London before he relocated to Woodstock was with Ginger Baker and Baker Gurvitz Army. The Zu Band would record four songs in one day at this Woodstock session. It was the last time Gomelsky would work with Offord. It was the first and last time for Laswell.
About a month after this session, the same crew that toured North America, plus or minus a few members, would jet off to France for another month long tour. George Cartwright was along this time playing sax. He and Laswell would share their love of Ornette’s music and form the band Curlew upon return. In France they were not traveling in a school bus. A couple of vans would usher them around and they would stay mostly at the house of the promoters. Some of these places were quite unique to Laswell ... weird castles with bears in the kitchen? That’s one of his memories.
When the Zu Band returned from France, the 4 songs they recorded before they left were ready to be released on Gomelsky’s label Zu Records. But in that short time span something had happened within the Zu Band. They no longer were feeling Zu. They had decided it was time to leave the progressive hippies behind and move on to new sounds. Things were moving fast for Laswell as soon as he showed up in NYC. The momentum he had built was now picking up even more steam. Zu Band became Material, with a rotating cast of guests, including Sonny Sharrock and Fred Frith, anchored by Laswell, Maher and Beinhorn. Material would morph into Massacre, the avant power improv trio of Laswell, Maher and Frith.
Gomelsky and Laswell would stay in touch a bit for awhile, but gradually drifted apart. Gomelsky’s Zu House soon turned into party central for the improv, avant-music cognoscenti of NYC. Material would become an in-demand music production team, finding early fame working with Herbie Hancock.
Although their collaboration only lasted about a year, it had a lasting impact on Laswell. He learned something from the man’s great memory and stories, going back to his days helping to shape the swinging 60’s in London working with the Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds, not to mention his time later with Soft Machine, Gong and Magma. Through Gomelsky, Laswell met some key people that he continues to work with, like Zorn and Frith. He still sees him as that old school style of producer that would bring musicians together with the right people, hype them up and help them accomplish something, which might just turn into great music.
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Special thanks to:
Merrill Aldighieri
From the HURRAH Archive, PRIVATE STREAMINGS
where you can find concert videos of Material, Massacre and many more
Great interview - you give the space for Bill to return to those days and nights and provide extraordinary anecdotes. All of which form part of a unique musical history
Great photos too ...