Adam Rudolph: conjuring music’s global essence

Transcript

LP: There's a lot I wanted to try to get to with you in our time together. You've had such a rich and fascinating career, and it continues to be so. But something that stood out for me is where you're from – Chicago. I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about the role Chicago, and specifically Hyde Park, played in your development as a musician and thinker. It's such a rich cultural place.

Adam Rudolph: Yes, Hyde Park at that time was really one of those epicenters of culture and political awareness. I grew up there through the '60s and was there through the early '70s. Everything starts in your home, of course. My father, who had been at the University of Chicago, was a huge music fan. He took me to hear Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, and to the Chicago Symphony a lot. So, the home, with his recordings and then the immediate environment, was really incredible. The first big influence, in terms of my going out and experiencing music for myself, was discovering the great blues musicians who performed nearby. On Sunday afternoons, you could go to the Checkerboard and Peppers and hear the musicians, even if you were underage. So, at 13 and 14, we would take the bus and hear Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Hound Dog Taylor. And this was just the environment. I didn't think about it as special, but historically, it was special.

Looking back on it now, when you mention thinking, I think what I glean from it now, and what impacted me about experiencing those musicians live, was how it showed me how musical technique and your approach can completely serve the emotional and spiritual feeling of what you're trying to project. In other words, there was nothing extraneous; it was all about their technique. The idea of virtuosity completely served the mystical feeling that was being projected through the music, which was certainly there with those artists.

Not long after, I became exposed to the musicians in the AACM, and they were my neighbors. Henry Threadgill lived down the street, and Steve McCall lived a couple of doors down. I knew Joseph Jarman around the neighborhood before I even knew he was a musician. At the same time, one of my high school music teachers was very close with Leroy Jenkins, and she would actually have some of the AACM musicians come and do workshops and performances at our high school, the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where Ray Anderson and George Lewis also went to school. They were older than me. So, there was a series at Ida Noyes Hall at the university where I got to hear the first concerts of AIR, Trio, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Marion Brown, and Steve McCall doing duets. So, this was just the music of the environment. It was the atmosphere. It was the feeling of the time.

I loved the music, in addition to discovering records by the greats, listening to records, and things like that. The other thing that was really impactful in the neighborhood was, although I had done my classical piano studies as a kid when I was 14, I think, I used to go out to a place called The Point, the promontory, which was a grassy area sticking out into Lake Michigan. A lot of drummers would be out there, a lot of the drummers who, during that time, were playing with groups like the Pharaohs and a lot of the pre-Earth, Wind, and Fire groups: Derf Reklaw, Shango Andufunic, George Favors, Malachi's brother. I don't know, I was this kid, and eventually, they're playing, and they let you, if you wait your turn, get to play.

I can't explain it, but I was called to it, playing hand drums, and I was gifted at it. It came to me, and I can't really explain it, but it was there. Then, I was fortunate to find a teacher who had just moved from New York, who was teaching at Drums Unlimited, and who was very experienced in Afro-Cuban and Haitian drumming, so I got a good technical foundation right from the beginning.

So, all of these things were going on at the same time. Yeah, my dad's, even before I could drive, he's driving me to the Nation of Islam, had a restaurant where they would bring in groups like Max Roach. He would take me there because I couldn't hear Stan Getz or Mongo Santamaría alone. I just fell in love with it all and felt called to it.

So, yeah, that was step one, yeah.

LP: As I was preparing for our time together, putting my notes together, and thinking about some of the themes I wanted to talk about with you, I hit on something that I wanted to say out loud in advance of some of my questions. I kept arriving at lines of inquiry that were about contrasts. I'll give you some examples in a moment, so this isn't a theoretical discussion for you. But what I was realizing was my questions were very binary: compare this to that, contrast this with that. And I can't stand that.

Adam Rudolph: Yeah, I hear you. I know. Language works that way, but reality is not that, right?

LP: Yes, and that comment you just made, of course. We're continually confronted with, or if we're paying attention, we're continuously confronted with the limits of that binary thinking, right? Or, to say it in a more positive way, the opportunities around and the excitement around non-binary thinking. When you can break that mold, the world around you becomes much more interesting. That seemed like yet another path into a discussion with you because those themes seem apparent in your work and in other things I've heard you talk about. Who are some of the non-musical thinkers that have shaped the way you view not only your work and your approach to work but also if you don't mind me saying it this way, your cosmology?

Adam Rudolph: One of the things that I gleaned from my experiences with the AACM musicians and the Art Ensemble, which was my most influential group, was that anything you can imagine to do in music, you can do if you can find the way to do it. They showed that to me. Also, that music was the music of the environment. It seemed imperative to me to find my voice, not to replicate that music but to find my voice and understand and develop my process and aesthetics. That's what they showed me, those musicians. Also, the other thing about that environment is that a lot of musicians who have been very influenced by, for example, the AACM don't have a grasp of how that music was embedded in the cultural environment of that time and that place.

When I lived in Africa, one of the things I discovered was that music comes from something greater than music and is about something greater than music. African philosophy is a lived philosophy. It's not something abstract; it's lived, and to understand it, you go through the portal of understanding what we call aesthetic manifestations. Actually, in a way, I'm in the process of answering your question through the back door, which is one of the things that impacted me most powerfully in terms of my thinking or my awareness or consciousness about creativity, which were experiential. It wasn't just that I read this philosopher or that philosopher, but, for example, the experiences of living in Ghana.

When I was 20 and attending trance meetings, the Brekete trance meetings on a regular basis really shifted and expanded my thinking about what music could be and what its functionality could be, and started me thinking about the connection between that and consciousness. When you move past binary thinking, as you said, what are you dealing with at that point?

And I've been studying all along, of course, great writers like Hazrat Inayat Khan and Hua-Ching Ni, one of the great Taoist practitioners. And, of course, they try to put it into words. But again, the words are binary because that's how language works. I've been influenced by everything in terms of reading and studying; I'm always studying.

Now, I've been, just recently, reading the work of Gary Snyder, and I find him to be a fantastic artist and an interesting person. One of the most influential people for me in the last few years is the writer and scholar Robert Farris Thompson, who has written his seminal book, "African Art in Motion," and also "Flash of the Spirit." These are fantastic books. Lama Anagarika Govinda has been a big influence on my thinking. John Dewey, as well.

LP: Something that struck me about your path has been the role of formal education in your collegiate education, musical study, and art study, as well as the importance of oral tradition and practical study. The music you talk about, whether it's Ghana or some of the other, forgive me for saying, world music or non-Western music that you've immersed yourself in. And you mentioned going to Ghana when you were 20. It's hard for people sitting here in 2023 to understand what the world of travel was like back then and what information was like. And a few things you've said so far allude to this idea that you were very comfortable walking through cultures and cultural contexts. I can't ignore the fact that you were welcomed in, or if not welcomed in, you were present, you were there, you weren't kept out. And I'm curious about that aspect of your experience. What makes a 20-year-old student, seeker, curious, open-hearted person think of going to Ghana? What gets them received?

Adam Rudolph: When I arrived in Ghana, I think I was 22. I had my 22nd birthday when I was just maybe 21, yeah, but anyway, it was 1977, and I think about it now, I had a one-way ticket. I figured out how to get there, and the way communication was, it took me three weeks to make an appointment to a phone to be able to call my parents and tell them that I had arrived. It was really different then, the connections and the communication. I went, I didn't know anybody. The way I ended up in Ghana, okay, so to contextualize it, of course, I was attracted to hand drums and started learning about hand drums. At the same time, Rose's Discount Records in downtown Chicago had every record released by label and catalog number. It was pretty cool. You could go to Ocora Records or Folkways Records and flip through there and find something. And so, that's amazing, cover the music of the Senufo from Ivory Coast, and just like that.

I had heard of some dance and drumming groups from the Ivory Coast. At the same time, I was studying tabla and North Indian drumming. And I studied djembe with a great drummer, Alhaji Kamara, in New York in 1975. It's clear that the root is Africa. I met Juma Santos, a great conga drummer, hand drummer, who you might know as Jim Riley, playing in Bitches Brew and working with Miles. When I heard him, I played in a group that was opening for Ahmad Jamal, and we talked. he was so encouraging to me that he thought I had a gift. He was supportive of my playing, and he said, you should go and go to Ghana.

Where to go? Kwame Nkrumah started the Institute of African Studies, where he brought musicians from different parts of West Africa. The idea was a place where you could actually study both on a scholarly level and an empirical level. But to step back for a second, I just want to say I'm primarily an autodidact. I engaged in institutions at different times, but I've been finding my way and figuring out how to compose string quartets on my own. And it's much more fun and interesting that way. So I was like, okay, let me go. So, I would write these letters to Ghana. It would take weeks to get there. And then I don't think I can't remember if I heard back or not, but anyway, the Institute of African Studies is there. It's an English-speaking country. I knew there were a lot of musicians there, so it was at least some kind of structure to show up with. So that's where I went. When I got there, I landed in the middle of the night and took a cab to the campus, and the campus was closed. The school was on strike. So nobody was around. So that was the beginning of a year-long adventure. What a beautiful adventure because I lived there for a year. I never once actually had to pay to stay anywhere. People just saw hospitality as really central to the, I think, the cultural feeling there, at that time, my experience. It's just that's how it is. Still, I found housing, and I ended up studying with a great drummer who introduced me and got me involved in this Brekete religion that uses trance ceremonies.

I went and lived in the villages and so forth. I had many mind-expanding experiences. It changed me forever on many different levels. One of the things that occurred to me when I was there that really had an impact was two things. One is that, as I mentioned before, the philosophy there, I saw how it was a lived philosophy. This connection of the expression of individual and collective consciousness through what we call arts manifested, and that powerful connection for that and the context in which music, we grew up, we hear, we go to a club, we go to a concert, people clap at the end. There, I went to trance ceremonies, naming ceremonies, funerals, and all the kinds of events that encompass music. Music wasn't even thought of as a separate entity. So, it just changed my whole thinking about it in that way. That was one thing. The other thing was that I realized soon after I was there, there was, no matter how much, even today, no matter how much you listen to recordings from a place like Africa, or even just West Africa, or even just Ghana, you'll never, it's just the tip of the iceberg.

There is so much music, so diverse, so deep. I was very attracted to the Ewe, the language group that was there, and their music. So I started, I said, let me study that. But I said I'm not going to be. It's not my goal in life to be like a master Ewe drummer, especially in reference to this idea of living the philosophy and expressing your life experience through music. There's still this value of learning it, but I realized there were so many different rhythms and traditions. That was when I began to look at the underlying elements of the music. I've spoken about this before. I found a confirmation when I was reading the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku's book, where he says that as you move, they postulate there are 11 dimensions in theoretical physics, and as you move into the higher dimensions, the laws of physics become simpler and simpler.

So, what are the underlying elements that are universal here? What are the commonalities of how these things are structured? On the one hand, on a vibrational level, which is an acoustic level, and on the other, of course, on this humanistic level. And that has served me to this day because as you move into the higher elements of music, of what's called music, they become simpler and simpler. In other words, you begin with the idea of what we call style and something that attracts us. You were talking about something that really attracted you to music or me as a young person. But as an artist, you want to learn everything. I wanted to learn everything I could about every kind of music there is.

But it's not just a conglomeration of a bigger pile of things. It's like looking at these universal qualities at the same time. For example, you mentioned earlier about duality and language. So, as you move into higher dimensions, music actually manifests itself in a fundamental duality. And that duality is what I call Color and Motion. Okay, so color also implies harmony, melody, and what we call pitched material. In motion, we experience music temporally, right? That's how we are as human beings. So motion is what, in musical terms, would be called rhythm. So we're saying rhythm and color, right? Motion and color. But these two things, which I can explain or not, depending on if you want to go into it, are in unison. They're a duality; they're expressed as a duality, but the unison is vibration. That's the ultimate unison.

LP: As you were saying that, something that landed for me, and I'm going to give you my sort of, my freshman year dorm room understanding of this, but, again, from physics, it sounds like you're describing the way, say, a particle and a wave move. So you have the color and the rhythm. At a lower level, we perceive them as different things. As the dimensions simplify, they're different manifestations of the same thing.

Adam Rudolph: They are, and it has to do with the mathematics of it because I can explain this. Again, this duality has to do with what's called yin and yang, okay? Yin is a female energy that is even; it has the numbers two and four associated with it. Yang is the male energy, which is odd, number three. What was fascinating to me was when I traveled in Ghana on the same trip in 1977, I went up into Burkina Faso, which was called Upper Volta at that time, and then went all the way up into Mali and traveled as far as up to Mopti, and then from there, I went out to visit the Dogon people. These cliff dwellers have a very deep, interesting cosmology.

One of the things they say is that they call the male energy Nya, which is the same as yang energy. It's three. It's odd. And the female energy is called Tolo, which is even. So yin energy or Shakti energy, if you're thinking from a Hindu perspective, and the yang energy, the male energy, odd. They call, again, Nya, or we could call it Yang energy in Taoist philosophy or Shiva energy in Hindu. It's male energy. And they have a proverb, and the translation of the proverb is, "Every rhythm is a marriage and an interplay between the male and female energy." This is odd and even. So three and two, looking at it from a mathematical perspective, I found that this is universally true in many different kinds of ways that I've explored, and by the way, I just published this book last year called "Sonic Elements," where I go pretty deeply into this.

So, how do they connect? Okay, so three against two, three, and two happening in the same period is the fundamental polyrhythm from which all rhythms are derived. So, three against two, if I even do it now. (plays a percussive rhythm on his lap) If my hands were doing that fast enough, you would begin to hear the vibration of the interval of a fifth. And the fifth is the dimensionality that moves into the multi-dimensionality of all harmonic material. In Taoism, they say, "From one comes two, and from two comes three, and from three comes all the numbers, or all the ten thousand things," right?

When you have a pitch, a pure tone, the first overtone is the octave. But you're still in a linear reality. But the second overtone is the fifth, and the fifth is what opens you up. That's that three against two vibrating, something three against two, opens you up to the fifth of the fifth, and all the harmonic materials moving all the way into sound, mass, and everything. So, that opens up the door to all of that. That's where this connection is of this sound and motion, or color and motion.

LP: When you're approaching a new project, we'll use "Timeless" as an example since that was the impetus for us to get together. You're creating some of the initial concept work if you will. I don't want to get too bogged down in your process, though I am interested in it. But when you're doing the initial work to start your project, and you start to think about the collaborators you would like to have come in and contribute to one of your projects, are these concepts overtly discussed? Do you find that the community of musicians that you are drawn to is conscious of these concepts?

Adam Rudolph: Some musicians like metaphor and philosophical, energetic conversations more than others. Yusef Lateef, who was a long-time associate and great mentor, was like that for sure. Don Cherry was another great mentor, but it was more experiential with him in some ways. Everybody's different. But you mentioned process, and without getting into the specifics of process, I would like to touch on the fact that process is extremely important. I read an interview once with Richard Serra, the sculptor, and he said that when you can generate new processes, creative processes, your art becomes prototypical. With every record I make or concert, I want to do something I've never done before. That's what keeps me interested, alive, and inspired. So, that means always thinking about the process and experimenting with the process. Of course, we're building on what we know all the time. The musicians I've been attracted to, elders and now younger musicians, have been evolutionists, studious, and great philosophical thinkers. Yusef and I spoke a couple of times a week for decades about all kinds of things. I've also had incredible conversations with Muhal Richard Abrams, and anybody who worked with him or knows him knows that he's also a great thinker. Don Cherry. One of my first mentors was Charles Moore from Detroit.

Chicago, the south side of Chicago, was one school for me. School in the sense of an environment. And the other was Detroit. I started performing and working with musicians from Detroit when I was 17. And Charles was also a great thinker and philosopher. But, in terms of the musicians, everybody's different. Some musicians are just more interested in those things than others; what can I say? The idea of Miles Davis as a great prototype because he understood so much about chemistry in terms of working with musicians to get the right musicians, combine them, and then create an environment for them to be as free and inspired as possible. That's the goal for that, right?

LP: To take a quick side detour, you mentioned Detroit. When did you first cross paths with Laswell? Does the relationship go back decades?

Adam Rudolph: It goes back to when I lived in Ghana in the compound I was living in, based out of a kora player from Gambia. Nketia had brought him to Ghana to teach at the institute named by Foday Musa Suso. And Foday Musa Suso and I became friends. We came back to the United States. I think he and I together started the first band or among the first bands to really combine, especially this traditional African music of Mandingo, Kora music with rhythm and blues and so-called jazz, right? We started the Mandingo Griot Society. And we invited Don Cherry, which is how I met Don, to play on the first record. I invited Don, I found him. Foday Musa is the one who met Bill, and Bill produced our third record of the Mandingo Griot Society. So I knew Bill, but I only really connected with him in a more significant way once I moved back to the East Coast after living in California for years. And his studio is like 10 minutes from my house. And I started working with his engineer, James Dellatacoma, who now we've, James and I have worked on at least, I don't know, 30 records together. So I help Bill, I go, and I play on his, whatever he needs me, I go, and I play on his records, and I get used to the studio, and we've become closer in the last ten years, I would say since I moved here.

LP: He's such an interesting figure, obviously, in the world of all these kinds of music that we're talking about. And it's just because of the nature of, just the prolific nature of his work. He's often the entry point for so many people into all this music, into all these themes. So that's the nature of my curiosity there.

As it relates to the new record, what does it mean for you that you use the term Boonghee?

Adam Rudolph: So the first Hu Vibrational record we made was a duet of Hamid Drake and I. The first two were actually duet records. I call it organic groove music. So, Boonghee is—I want to say this in a politically correct contemporary term—but it's like, what is the quote that George Clinton had, "Free your ass and your mind will follow"?

LP: Or is it "Free your mind, and your ass will follow"?

Adam Rudolph: So, Boonghee is music that's hopefully going to make you shake your Boonghee, your butt, man or woman. Anybody, whatever now, you know, but that's it. So, Boonghee music. I make a lot of music that's also more abstract through composed string quartets and my Go: Organic Orchestra, and rhythm is in everything, as is inherent in everything, just as the form is inherent in everything. Boonghee music was to have an arena where I was going to do music that was more what people call groove music, that you could shake your Boonghee to.

LP: As you're talking about it, I see you sheepishly smile as you're describing it. I'll tell our listeners that, but is it essentially a framing device for you? In the absence of genre limitations, it's a way to frame how you're approaching a project.

Adam Rudolph: That's actually a good way to think about it. Hu Vibrational, that project, it's exactly, that's the way you put it. It's framing it as if this music is going to be grooving, which is ostinatos. When I'm thinking about grooving, it doesn't have anything to do with style, whereas now I'm going to try and make a pop record or have a backbeat. Still, it references more actually the original Boonghee music creators, who would be what I call the Aka, Baka, Babanzeli, the so-called Pygmies, the people in the Ituri Forest, music that cycles around and around with a very particular kind of combination of motion and color and this collective lifting of the moment to move into a place of ecstasy. That's what we talk about when we're talking about groove. That's the idea. So yeah, Hu Vibrational Boonghee music is a framing of really, I'm going to focus on that now. And not about solos or about theme and development. It's not about that. It's not even about storytelling. It's about creating this environment that orbits around, orbits inside of orbits, and that lifts and really tries to make it where this feeling of lift goes on.

LP: It's a really fun record in that it's full of little sonic rewards, and because it is Boonghee music, you can put it on with a certain volume and enjoy it, and move around and do that thing to it. But it also rewards careful listening. These are some of my initial feelings after spending several days with it in that, again, some of the collaborators you've brought in or some of the percussion accents rear their heads for a few moments and then go back into the mix.

Is this a studio work? Are you taking all of these elements and spending a lot of time on the assemblage and mixing, and is it a production project, or is this happening in real-time?

Adam Rudolph: The simple answer is yes—completely a production project. I have my parameters of how I do it. I look at every record, every piece of music, as having its own process. Yeah, I released records like the last records of my trio with Tyshawn Sorey and Dave Liebman. Actually, now there's a new record that just came out of a duet with Tyshawn Sorey. It's, this is what we played that day, being documented. Or there's, let's go in the studio and we play, and this is what we did. One of the great things about someone like Bill Laswell or going to all these great producers is that it's completely valid to me and fascinating to go in and spend hours and days and weeks and months or whatever going into that process.

I work in Pro Tools here in my studio, so I did all the assemblage here from organic materials that were performed in different kinds of contexts. I really appreciate what you said about that. Yeah, you can listen to it in a background way, but it does reward the listener who decides to do whatever, put on some headphones, or listen carefully. There is every little detail. There's nothing left to chance in this record. Every little detail, everything is placed down to the most minute thing, and the color, the processing, the electronic processing, the panning, everything is done in super duper detail. And, of course, when we were confined, that was a great way to keep my hands on the creative process. I enjoy it. It's a competent, it's a valid compositional process.

LP: The studio is an instrument and a tool, and it's incredible how, in the modern age, although I guess not, we could talk about Phil Spector even. The studio's always been there; there's always been an awareness among certain creatives that the studio is not just a box that you walk into to play in.

Adam Rudolph: I'm all for that; I'm interested in it. Some musicians aren't. If Bach were alive today, composers like Stockhausen and Xenakis would certainly be interested in it. Of course, why wouldn't you use the tools and technologies that are available to you? Now, in making a record. So there's the idea of a record being a document of something that happened. But then, yeah, as you mentioned, Phil Spector and Jimi Hendrix with records like "Electric Ladyland," "Sgt. Pepper," or even before that, what George Martin was doing with Paul McCartney and all of them. Why not? Why not make a record be the record? And, of course, now we have some concerts coming up with Hu Vibrational in the next months. I'm not at all interested in trying to reproduce anything that happened on the record. The record is its own thing, and the concerts are going to be their own thing.

LP: What is the live presentation? Will you have any of the themes from the record? Will any of these songs be performed? Will you use them as springboards, or is it just you showing up and tapping out a polyrhythm, and all of a sudden, you're off to the races? What can one expect when they go to one of these shows?

Adam Rudolph: The lag time between making a record and when it comes out, you're on to something else. So I'm thinking about other things now. There's a great story about when Coltrane put out "A Love Supreme," and it won all these awards. It was beloved. By the time he was invited to play at the DownBeat Jazz Festival in Chicago at Soldier Field, everybody was there, all excited, waiting to hear "A Love Supreme." He showed up with, I think it might have been two drummers, and I think Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, and they were doing more like "Ascension," and he was on to something else. It was a year later, and some people will hang with you, and others won't.

For me, what I'm interested in with Hu Vibrational is working on this concept. I call it Sonic Mandala, Rhythm Mandala. I use musicians who are playing now in the live concert; some of them are the same as the record, but some of them are different, so we're using materials that I've developed with them in my Go: Organic Orchestra and in Hu Vibrational that are what I call signal rhythms and ostinatos of circularity, which are these orbiting patterns that move inside of each other. So what I'm interested in is another kind of virtuosity, what we're going to be doing in these concerts. So virtuosity depends upon what it is you're trying to do. As I said earlier, the way Muddy Waters plays guitar, that virtuosity might be different than, say, John McLaughlin, right? It depends. We're developing a virtuosity that is based upon the idea of a mandala, where rather than adding, it's not about solos, and rather than adding ideas in, it's about how you can maintain the aesthetic. And the structural aspect of these sonic mandalas that are going around and around by playing less and leaving more space. And what happens is, we've done some concerts like this, it's pretty amazing as you leave more space and focus on the essentials, like a mandala, the idea of it is to go to the center of it. You go into the center of it, you move into the center of this, you discover all kinds of things.

And again, it's not unprecedented, although we're doing it in a very contemporary way. Still, it does relate to this most ancient and musical of creative cultures, the people of the Ituri forest, the Aka, the Baka. There's a lot of freedom, but you're moving into these small cells of things, smaller things orbiting inside of bigger things. So it's something I explain to the musicians how to do it. Now, these are all musicians who are very familiar with my ostinatos of circularity. They've been performing with me in the Organic Orchestra for years and in Hu Vibrational and my Moving Pictures group. So they know. And the signal rhythms that I use again and again in different ways are just tuning them in and talking with them about how to approach what they do. It relates to the very first thing you were saying earlier about non-dual; it's about non-trying. So a lot of times when we play so-called jazz, it's about let's make it happen and running around the instrument and playing ideas and lifting and getting more excitement and building towards something, and this is like the opposite of that. This is like non-trying. Just sit with your part the way you're interlocked with everybody else. Relax, sit there. Don't try to make anything happen, and organically, it will. That music is going to lift.

The first time I remember seeing Thomas Mapfumo, the great Zimbabwe musician, was when he had his group of Mbira, kalimba, and thumb piano players. And they were playing these incredible, beautiful, simple grooves, and they just laid with it. They weren't pushing. They just lay with it and by itself. So what we're trying to do with these sonic mandalas, by itself, is that the music begins to shift, transform, and lift. It's mystical. We did a concert back in August, and we set up at a place called Public Records. We actually set up, there were seven of us, and we set up in a circle in the middle of the room; it was a room, the audience was all around us, and it was a really beautiful experience; it was different than a concert in that way. And again, relating to this experience in Ghana of wanting to break out of this, okay, we're on stage, you're down there, transactional idea.

LP: And your experiences, and both your lived experience, but as you've educated yourself more and more over the years on different kinds of music and different cultures and the roles that they play in these different cultures, how do you reconcile or think about the notion of vibration, transformation, mysticism, magic, and entertainment? Where do those things serve each other, and where are they a disservice to each other?

Adam Rudolph: I can answer the question in an indirect way, I hope. In our culture, in our society today, music, like many things, has become a commodity in that it's transactional, except nobody pays for it anymore. But you consume it, you download it, you consume it, and you buy a ticket to go to a concert. But let's not forget that music, what we call music, is a human activity that existed prior to any social constructs and cultural constructs. Maybe even before language, even language itself. I'm talking about 50,000 years ago. And it's a mystery, of course, as to what music is about. But it's clearly interwoven with human consciousness, the nature of what human consciousness might be itself, and that human consciousness seems to have an imperative to know itself.

So, in other words, we're communicating ideas now through language, but of course, when we experience music, something's being communicated that is beyond words, right? Or different than words, let's say. And what is that? And that has to do with something intrinsic to nature, of what it means to be human in terms of consciousness itself, which is a mystery. To look at it from another way, if you look at the material realm as horizontal, music and artists, in general, have been pushed way to the periphery in terms of how they're valued in our society. However, if you look at the vertical realm, so the vertical realm, which is that which goes into the cosmos, or maybe if you think down into the unconscious individually and collective unconscious, that vertical realm, what we call music or art, creative expression, is actually right in the center of that. Joseph Campbell said that artists, if they understand the relationship of what they do to, for example, shamanism, is to go outward or inward and bring back that which they discover.

I think about my personal mentors, like Yusef Lateef and Don Cherry, or people I had relationships with, Ornette Coleman and Muhal Richard Abrams, or great artists who I didn't even know personally, like Thelonious Monk. These people are actually the mystics of our time and our place if people would wake up and see it from that perspective. Yes. Everybody's trying to function in some entertainment complex because this is the time and place we live in. So, Thelonious Monk is playing in a nightclub. Still, his music is transcendent of all of that and tells us something about who we are, in our humanity, that is as profound as any music you would find anywhere, anytime, even though it's not overtly so-called spiritual. Coltrane and Yusef, those musicians, made overt in their titles and their conversations that which is inherent in the music, in any case.

LP: Yeah, Coltrane was, you could not have been more explicit.

Adam Rudolph: Yeah, but it was there already. It was there already. As you can tell, I talk a lot, but I like to speak about what we love, that's what it is, and to help people think about things in different kinds of ways. So that's why I wrote the "Sonic Elements" book. Besides the musical information contained in it, the Cosmograms and Matrices, there are 21 philosophical essays in there too. The whole idea is about cultivating imagination, listening, and sharing. Those are the important things of what we're really trying to do: to keep pushing the boundaries, keep doing research, and keep exploring. And my philosophy in terms of entertainment has always been to shoot the arrow and paint the bullseye around it. You have your creative impulses that take you in a direction, and then we try and figure out how to share it the best way we can.

LP: Your comment about imagination, that, that seems to me from these conversations I have with artists, that seems to be really the role of process, and it's less about any specific set of rules or patterns or prompts or whatever it is that any artist incorporates into their process. It's more about having a tool to unlock and change your reality. Your process sets up a new reality. And when you're in a new reality, different creative energies are unleashed. At least, that's what I've been able to gather from these conversations.

Adam Rudolph: That's a beautiful way of putting it, more succinctly, maybe, than I was even saying it, which I appreciate, and yes, indeed, you have these great artists who, they showed us how to do that. This is part of a young person's artistic evolution, right? You're influenced by, initially, by what these great artists do, like Ornette Coleman or Yusef Lateef, Don Cherry, and Muhal. You move to how they did it. It's not what they did. It's not a style. Don Cherry used to say style is the death of creativity.

You move from what they did to how they did it and what it has to do with the process. Being around these musicians and understanding Yusef was incredible. He could endlessly come up with different ideas of how to organize intervals and ways of putting his music together and keeping it fresh and interesting and moving from the what to the how is even maybe, moving to the why and the why leads us back into the mysticism of it. And definitely, when you speak to musicians like that, like Ornette or Muhal or Yusef, who I knew the best of them all and was really close to, even watching this new documentary about Wayne Shorter, he was obviously, he was clearly a philosophical thinker and that why. The humanity of it, what is it that makes us human? And creative imagination is something special, something particular about human consciousness. We don't know what the consciousness is of the birds, a tree, or a rock. Still, we know that there's something about human consciousness that is related to this idea that has the idea of creative imagination related to it, which manifests through intuition, studiousness, and inspiration. Where does that come from? You're always grateful when it arrives. How do you cultivate yourself to become open to intuition? People are gifted, obviously. Some are more gifted, but it's also something you can cultivate. That has to do with a way of living. That's what I was saying about these great artists. They show us that you don't have to be a musician to realize that they're showing us that when you can be fully yourself as a creative being, then the fullness of your living as a human being becomes manifest.

Duke Ellington said, "It's better to be a number one yourself than a number two somebody else." So you look at someone like Roland Kirk, sometimes, I don't know, have you ever thought what would have happened or what would happen if like musicians like Roland Kirk and Mingus and Thelonious Monk and the list can go on, but these really, Sun Ra, these Don Cherry, Yusef Lateef, who were really so completely themselves as people, if their music had been played widely on the radio and had performed, been able to perform widely, how, I wonder how that would have, would change the culture and the values of the culture. That we live in now because it takes you out of that regimented thinking, right? Of the being in the consumerist box, of being in the worker bee box, all of those things. And that's what they're there for. So the impact is not just okay, wow, that's groovy music. And I noticed that people like yourself and people who are really engaged in so-called creative music, man, they're different kinds of people. They're thinking differently.

LP: Yeah, it's what I try to get at in some of these conversations, which is, were you like this before the music? Did the music make you like this? Or was it some fundamental part of your nature that led you towards the music? I think about that for myself. I spend too much time thinking back on my own musical and philosophical evolutions. And if I'm honest about it, or if I'm clear-eyed about it, it was always there, right? There was always some notion of being interested, to be curious, to want to keep going down other rabbit holes and doorways and corridors of music, and it could have led to something other than high art music or this supremely creative non-traditional music. I know plenty of people who love rock and pop music but have the same mindset. They're just voracious and curious, and they want to follow all the strands, read the notes, see who played with whom, and revel in it. It's exciting—music's fun.

Adam Rudolph: So, are you saying then, do you think for yourself it's, it feeds on itself, right? You have an inclination, but is it cultivated in your environment and your experience? Did you have a mentor in particular who really, or people who really influenced you that way?

LP: Interesting. It's a very good question. There are a couple of questions there. One is that some people, without realizing it, are prone to magical thinking. And that's the first principle. There's a lot to unpack with that, but if I remember my earliest memories, magical thinking has always been there. It was first channeled into music. I only had mentors later in life. I grew up as an only child for the first ten years of my life. My mother was very into music, but she didn't teach me about music per se. There was just music was a presence. I always had my own interests at a very young age, and they were indulged. So I was given records for presents, or there was just always music available. And I would say even my first mentors were not people I knew. The music artists I liked who were mentors were guideposts for me. And Laswell was actually one of those for me. I followed his work forward and backward because I came into him a little over 30 years ago, so he already had a body of work. He opened me to a lot of worlds. Which probably led to this conversation.

Adam Rudolph: Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's beautiful. Mentors, like you said, what is it? It's nature and nurture. Are some people more inclined to be receptive to music or inclined to, you call it, magical thinking, open to intuitive thinking? It's hard to explain, but at some point, there's usually somebody or some environment that really nourishes that seed.

LP: Whatever it was and whatever it is, I'm very grateful for it because it's led to such a rich experience of the universe. I couldn't imagine experiencing or trying to make sense of this universe without it.

Adam Rudolph: Exactly. Yeah. It's just a matter of you getting older. It's just a matter of a sense of what it means to be alive. This is why I never understood musicians or people saying, "I like this music, and I don't like that music." There's a pie, and there's only so much you're allowed to like. I never understood that. More is more. Man, I remember my daughter, when she was a teenager, she turned me on to this group called the Blood Brothers, which is like this sort of thrash, man. They had something going on.

I've never been a jazz snob or anything like that. Man, if it's got the vibe, there is a personal process of cultivating openness and a depth of experience so that you can hear all the music, which is not the same either. So what is it that you're listening for, and what is it you're resonating with? Yeah, to hear the humanity in all of it. I remember when I first heard Umm Kulthum, the great Egyptian singer. I didn't know what, I still don't really know, what she was singing, but you can hear the soulfulness in it for sure. Yeah. How do you cultivate that in yourself?

LP: When you were talking earlier about the simplistic laws of physics at the higher dimensions, the thought that popped into my head was, at the highest level, it's probably love, however that gets manifested or measured or expressed at that highest dimension. Like these other constructs really do start to break down, right? And that was how I heard what you were articulating: the simplification is a shedding of complexity. Still, it's a breaking down of structure and artifice and all these things we've, especially in the West, built on top of it.

Adam Rudolph: It's moving to essence. It's moving to an essence, and that essence. Yeah, in a scientific or physical manifestation of energy, we call it vibration. But love, that's a beautiful way of putting it, is love is there because it is a vibrational energy that is the most mysterious and most profound energy that there is, and to cultivate that in ourselves and to understand it's an essence. Still, it also has its own colorations, right? You obviously had a partner who you made your child with, and you had your parents. Then your partner, and then a child, that love, and then loving a tree and loving music or loving a particular music, all these different things, these different manifestations or colorations of love, is really fantastic. And, of course, the mystic's path, what we would hope to move towards, is universal love or universal consciousness. And it's funny because that process is not an adding-in, but it's a letting go. You were saying that this idea twice essence, letting go. We're back to square one: what you were you saying about dualism. I like this experience. I don't like that experience. I like this person. I don't like that. I like green. I don't like blue. These are my people; those aren't my people, and of course, we live in a world of sensual and intellectual discernment. As you let go of all those things and realize the radiance of gratitude for breath, you don't need to belong to any club or religion to be grateful and realize that love, in fact, you let go of all those things, that is at the energetic center of it all. I'm saying this: of course, I'm not. Don't get me wrong, I'm speculating on it. We're all like caught up in our trips, but I will say this. I met Yusef in 1988; he was the age I am now, 68 when I met him. We did a concert; the first time we met was in preparation; I was living in Don Cherry's loft in Long Island City, and we met to rehearse for a concert we were doing that summer with the group Eternal Wind and Cecil McBee and Yusef. He had invited us to do a concert. He was a really radiant, very peaceful, gentle person, as everybody who knew him attested to. But it's really interesting, I knew him, and we worked together subsequently for 25 years.

Looking back on it now, I can see how he became more and more radiant and let go of a lot of attachments and judgments. It was really interesting to see somebody who was already a very spiritually inclined person but became more and more that way as time passed. And to really, now that I look back on it, to actually see that. So that gives me hope for myself and all of us. We are who we are, and we all have our character and personality. It's an interesting thought, too, that these musicians who become more in tune, more developed into the uniqueness of their sound and approach, that their music becomes universal, which is also an interesting thing about the evolution. John Coltrane is an amazing example, as he sounded more and more like himself and went deeper into his mystical journey, his spiritual journey. His music became more and more prototypical in particular, but then it became more universal at the same time. Does that make sense?

LP: Yeah, for sure. On a mundane level, the initial manifestations would be through the incorporation of other music. That's like the first step to universalism is genre expansion, but it's more like the black hole consuming all the genres. Like ultimately, he's taking in and taking in, but he's not putting out Indian classical music. He's not putting out any traditional African style of music, but it's all just being reflected in the light that's coming out of his music. That is, yeah, there's a truism to what you're saying there.

Adam Rudolph: I think he had an attitude, and Yusef and one of the things I gleaned from those musicians is you want to learn everything you can about every kind of music. That one lifetime isn't enough, but you learn, you study, and you're open to it. I look at it more than reflecting, almost like eating it. You eat it. It becomes part of you, and you have to be deep enough into it and studious enough to glean something about some essential qualities, humanistically and musically. Still, you eat it, and it becomes just part of what you do. With this "Timeless" record we're talking about, it's not like I'm like, oh, I'm going to do, this is going to be Indian sounding part, and this is going to be African sound. It's not like that. It's five decades of being immersed in these things. It comes out that way. You eat it. It's in your DNA and becomes your cellular structure. And that's always been the tradition. When I hear Yusef Lateef, how is it that he sounds a hundred percent Yusef Lateef? I hear him, and I recognize him in one note, but I also recognize Ben Webster, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins. I'm hearing them in there, and at the same time, it's a hundred percent Yusef Lateef. This is a phenomenon also, and it has to do with digesting it and integrating things in a deep enough way. And it's not about gathering styles and adding something on, just adding this little coloration. It's not like that. It's about studiousness.

One thing I learned from the musicians from Detroit, starting with Charles Moore and then later with Yusef, was they were very studious, that studying everything about music that you can. Yusef picked up he was 60 years old, and he picked up, and he moved to Nigeria for four years. He studied and taught there. Don Cherry, at the pinnacle of his career, was working with Sonny Rollins and recording with Coltrane, Ornette, and Albert Ayler, and he had a so-called reputation. He goes to India, and he sits and humbles himself to be a beginner in learning Hindustani classical Indian singing and tabla. This kind of attitude of humility and openness is so important. And again, it's a lack of hubris. It's a humility that serves you as a way of living. Again, man, we're learning from each other right now, right? Yeah.

LP: That's why I do these conversations, arguably on the avatar of the listener. I'm trying to bring information, but really, it's ultimately very selfish.

Adam Rudolph: Sure, it's selfish in the way that people talk about it; if you practice yoga or qigong or meditation, they call it self-care. But if you don't have self-care and self-love, you can't love and care for others. People misunderstand that. It's not selfishness. It's about centeredness and knowing who you are as what we call a spiritual being. And, of course, by spiritual, we're not talking about religion. The great Congo scholar Bunseki Fu-Kiau said, "Born spiritual, we learn religion." It's just about acknowledging that there's a mystery to where we come from and where we go and acknowledging that we don't know everything. That's all that means.

LP: I think on that note, I'm going to say goodbye for now.

Adam Rudolph: Yeah, me too. Yeah, it's actually perfect timing. It's great anytime. I would like to talk more about these things. And I should send you this book, this "Sonic Elements" book. Are you a musician yourself, by the way? Yeah, I, yeah.

LP: I, yeah, I create some music, but I don't, I'm not, it's not. To be honest with you, I might buy the book. I like to read books, so I think I might buy the book.

Adam Rudolph: Yeah. It's on the Bandcamp page. If you're a musician, the cool thing for you is that there's not any Western notation in it at all. It's all cosmograms and matrices, so you don't need to read; you don't have to be a Western classical kind of guy to get into it because there's a lot of different aspects of this, of these conversations that, to me, are really fascinating.

LP: I'll tell you what, let me order the book and read it, and we'll get together and do it again.

Adam Rudolph: That sounds like a good plan. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, brother. Be well. You, too, man. A pleasure.

LP: Likewise. Cheers.