The ring of a bell, a cough, a tickle of piano keys. The whoosh of a bus passing by. Electronic beeps, a rat-a-tat-tat on the drums.
The sound of the door opening to the Lilypad doesn’t disrupt the trio of musicians of Point 01 Percent from their session. They’re part of the soundscape in the legendary Cambridge venue, as percussionist and Point 01 Percent organizer Eric Rosenthal explains.
This is unstructured, improvised, free jazz.
The series Rosenthal runs with Pandelis Karayorgis started at the Lilypad about 13 years ago. They have monthly performances that feature different musicians playing live without composition. In this recent installment, Rosenthal plays percussion with Anthony Coleman on piano and Andrew Neumann on analog electronics.
The buzzing from the old equipment lingers. It grows louder, then quieter, like ocean waves. Dissonant notes clang out from the piano; alarming and tense. Coleman stands up from the bench occasionally to stick his winter hat into the piano belly, altering the vibrations of the strings. Then sometimes he plays gentle cascading near-melodies that dance with Neumann’s sharp beeping tones. The splatters of percussion chase after the plunks of the piano. The drumming tumbles in and out, with sporadic gentle murmurs of the cymbals harmonizing with the electronic humming.
The Point 01 Percent vs. the algorithm
This live soundscape is hardly at risk of being taken over by artificial intelligence, according to Rosenthal, who has played in Boston for about 30 years. Now front and center in pop culture, the debate over how this tech should interact with music has been spurred on because of AI-generated bands like Velvet Sundown’s successful release of two albums on Spotify.
Rosenthal acknowledged that not too many people are making and selling a lot of free jazz records. But he insists there is an industry for it through festivals, performance venue gigs, and series like his—things that AI can’t easily take over.
“It’s an ultimately human experience,” Rosenthal says.
The relationship, or lack of, between the current digital age and the live jazz music scene in Boston reveals a broader issue of convenience versus creativity. Live jazz, specifically live improvisational jazz, or free jazz, perseveres because of its human-driven uniqueness that, according to Rosenthal, is best witnessed in person. The name of his series, Point 01 Percent, was partly inspired by the uniqueness of the genre, as well as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, an international protest against the wealthiest one-percent.
“We’re the 0.01% of the population that is interested in this kind of music,” Rosenthal says. “So, it’s a bit self-effacing, kind of a joke.”
Roots and intuition
Free jazz is defined best by the musician playing it. But it originated in the ’60s via jazz musicians who started pushing the boundaries of what the genre could sound like.
“There’s an African American tradition in jazz where the music evolved to what people came to call ‘free jazz,’” Rosenthal says. “That was expanding the possibilities of performance etiquette and compositional practices beyond traditional melody, harmony, rhythm, time, and blues into more freely expressive forms.”
Fellow Boston drummer and free jazz musician Luther Gray says the free jazz of today is sometimes inspired by this music of the past.
“There are people who I think improvise, kind of like they’re playing regular jazz just without a form or without regular time,” Gray says. “But I think there are other people who, you know, you draw in like how Cecil Taylor organizes his music, or Ornette Coleman, or Art Ensemble, Henry Threadgill, Albert Ayler.”
The music that Rosenthal says he aims to perform with Point 01 Percent is informed by the past and his interest in contemporary classical music from the ’50s and ’60s, like John Cage’s aleatoric music.
“I gravitate towards dry abstraction and I’m very interested in aleatoric sounds, meaning different lines or different musical threads that live contemporaneously in the same space, but they’re not necessarily dependent on each other.”
Kelly Bray, a trumpeter who has played in Point 01 Percent before, says part of the practice of being a musician is developing an intuition for when and how to complement or juxtapose the rest of the ensemble.
“Maybe there’s like dense textures coming from the bass and drums,” Bray says. “What do I do to complement that? Do I take a solo that soars over it, do I contribute to the texture?”
Like there are different types of jazz, there are different types of improvised music, like noise music or improvised music with jazz inflections, Rosenthal explains. With his music, he’s cognizant of structure and the arc of the performance.
“You begin, you have a middle, you have an end,” he says. “Music is music.”
Within the structure, he likes to mentally follow multiple threads. After playing music for over 44 years, he says just one thread isn’t as exciting for him.
“The sounds in the room are coming from here, coming from here … they’re completely unrelated, but they’re not, because they’re all happening in the same space, and they create kind of a level of interest,” Rosenthal says.
‘That’s not my goal’
The qualities of live improvisation are what protect it from being taken over by AI, along with the randomness of the music, according to Gray.
“There’s an excitement when you’re listening to it live because it kind of unfolds in a way that theoretically isn’t predetermined,” he says. “There’s an excitement of experiencing something that is just gonna happen once.”
Gray says he’s heard AI-generated traditional jazz music in a hotel lobby, and to him, it sounded just like regular jazz. He used the example of the invention of the drum machine in the 1930s, which made it easier for musicians to create a beat without a real-life drummer.
“It’s the kind of thing that’ll kind of come,” Gray says. “It’ll displace some people, but the more interesting stuff, I think will stay. … [AI] doesn’t have emotion in it. It can manufacture emotion, but there’s nothing like the feeling that you get when you hear somebody in person.”
At the Lilypad, some audience members sway or nod along to Point 01 Percent, but most just stare at the trio in a trance.
“Some music taps into emotions, sadness, or happiness, or excitement, or just that feeling of being groovy—and that’s not my goal,” Rosenthal says. “I could easily be accused of being intellectual with what I do, but I don’t really think of it that way. What I’m interested in is expansion and mental explosion.”
