Name: Chris Corsano
Nationality: American
Occupation: Drummer, improviser, composer
Current Release: Chris Corsano's The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away]) is out via Drag City.  
Recommendations: I'll go visual for this one. I've really been liking paintings by Carlo Zinelli lately. And the book My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris.

If you enjoyed this Chris Corsano interview and would like to know more about his work and music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram.

Over the course of his career, Chris Corsano has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Paul Flaherty, Nels Cline, Ben Chasny, Nate Wooley, Bill Orcutt, Giovanni Di Domenico, Bill Nace, Mette Rasmussen, Massimo Pupillo, Eddie Prévost, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Ka Baird, Heather Leigh, Christine Abdelnour, and Jim O'Rourke.

[Read our Paul Flaherty interview]
[Read our Nels Cline interview]
[Read our Ben Chasny interview]
[Read our Nate Wooley interview]
[Read our Bill Orcutt interview]
[Read our Giovanni Di Domenico interview]
[Read our Bill Nace interview]
[Read our Mette Rasmussen interview]
[Read our Eddie Prévost interview]
[Read our Ingebrigt Håker Flaten interview]
[Read our Ka Baird interview]
[Read our Heather Leigh interview]
[Read our Jim O'Rourke interview]
[Read our Christine Abdelnour interview]
 


Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in improvisation?

None that I can think of. In fact, I think it was the initial shock that hearing free improvisation delivered that made me such a fan.

Sometimes being unprepared for an experience is the best preparation available.

When did you first consciously start getting interested in musical improvisation? Which artists, teachers, albums or performances involving prominent use of improvisation captured your imagination in the beginning?

My older brother gave me a tape of Ornette Coleman's Live at the Golden Circle Volume 2 when I was about 16 or 17. I bought Ornette's Free Jazz LP maybe a year later (R.I.P. Pier Platters in Hoboken, NJ) and was pretty fascinated by it.



I started seeing live improvisation when I was in my late teens/early 20s and working door at the concert series and festivals that Michael Ehlers was producing in Amherst, Massachusetts in the mid-1990s. Artists like Paul Flaherty & Randall Colbourne, Test, William Parker, Andrea Parkins, and Joe McPhee really opened my eyes to what a living art improvisation is.

At the same time, I was checking out records from earlier periods (the BYG-Actuel series, ESP-Disk, and Impulse were labels that really captivated me) when I worked for Byron Coley, who had a label and record store. Byron is incredibly generous with sharing records and information and turned me on to so many different artists.

Also, seeing Cecil Taylor and Min Tanaka (again, when I was about 19 or 20) was life-changing.

Tell me about your instrument and/or tools, please. What made you seek it out, what makes it “your” instrument, and what are some of the nost important aspects of playing it?

I make a lot of modifications to the instruments I use. And I also spend a lot of time in thrift stores and junk shops looking for objects and materials that hopefully can create some new, unexpected sounds when incorporated into the drumkit. I like when something can change how I relate to the drums.

On the new record, I stretch a silicone rubber string across the snare and place an aluminum can between the string and the skin of the drum. The can acts the same way as a violin or banjo bridge, and it transfers the energy of the string to the drum, and the drum acts like a resonator. The string produces melodic pitches, but since I'm using sticks and it's on a drum, there's also an aspect of percussive sound in the mix.



That relationship between rhythm and melody has always been real central to how I hear music (I like bands where the bassist and drummer are great on their own but the true magic is how they relate to each other - see: The Meters or The Minutemen of Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell).

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument – is it an extension of your self/body, a partner and companion, a creative catalyst, a challenge to be overcome, something else entirely?

It's all these things. And more. And less. (Less in the sense that I don't even think about the instrument sometimes. I'm thinking more about how I'm feeling. If I'm even thinking at all.) But yeah, the instrument can definitely be a catalyst. A thing that you investigate for possibilities. A puzzle. Or an albatross. Or a dance partner. An emotional megaphone and/or an exercise in frustration.

On "I Don't Have Missions" and "The Full-Measure Wash Down", I multi-tracked guitars and electric bass over my usual instrument (drums). I'd say that during the recording process, I interacted with all three instruments in all of the ways listed above.



In the end, I hope that the mechanics of how the record was made vanish a bit and the listener is left with something that's a combination of what I put in it and what they're bringing to it.

Derek Bailey defined improvising as the search for material which is endlessly transformable. What kind of materials have turned to be particularly transformable and stimulating for you?

I want to feel like there will always be more potential, as-yet-undiscovered ideas in whatever material I'm using. I don't ever want to feel like I've reached the end of what's possible. That seems like a very cold place. I've been messing around with stringed-drums for about 20 years now and there will forever be more things for me to learn.

There are a few sections of me bowing a cello string stretched across a snare drum with a banjo bridge underneath on "Collapsed in Four Parts."



One part uses a contact mic and a lot of distortion. The other is acoustic. They're both quite a different sound from the silicone rubber stringed-drum parts on the rest of the record, and I enjoy how variable the results can be that radiate out from a simple idea.

Do you feel as though there are at least elements of composition and improvisation which are entirely unique to each? Based on your own work or maybe performances or recordings by other artists, do you feel that there are results which could only have happened through one of them?

I love the immediacy of improvisation, both as an audience member and as a player. Even if you could produce something via composition that sounded more-or-less the same, there is something about the composition-in-real-time nature of improvisation that got me hooked on it 30 years ago.

But I do also love plenty of music that has been pre-composed. And on the new record there are tracks of that approach as well as freely improvised ones.

I didn't feel any particular need to separate the two styles; actually, I was trying to set up some kind of dialogue between them.

When you're improvising, does it actually feel like you're inventing something on the spot – or are you inventively re-arranging patterns from preparations, practise or previous performances? What balance is there between forgetting and remembering in your work?

I think you can lean into one or the other (invention on the spot vs. pattern re-configuration) depending on what you're after. And both can produce incredible (and not-so-incredible) results depending on the players, the situation, the effects of your choices, etc ....

There is, on a micro-level at least, always going to be muscle memory at play and years of practice that somehow are going connect to the present moment. Same way as how I'm using the same old words right now as always, but stringing them together in a way that's responding to your prompts.

Some conditions demand more radical departures from what's come before. It can be an uncomfortable feeling, especially if you're unsure the music is working. But it feels very special when things are flowing and feeling brand new.

I did a record with Christine Abdelnour (Quand Fond La Neige, Où Va Le Blanc) that felt that way. I'm a big fan of Christine's playing and trying to adapt to her sound world was amazing. 



Are you acting out parts of your personality in your improvisations which you couldn't or wouldn't through other musical approaches? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation?

How does the saying go? 'Be the change in the world that you wish to see' or something along those lines? Basically, my approach to improvisation is that. Feel out what the situation needs in the moment and figure out how to provide it for the people you are playing with. The trick is that moments come and go real quick.

I think tapping into the emotional states available to high-energy playing helped with diving into the moment without (hopefully) too much self-consciousness or ego that would hold you back. I'd have to thank all the times playing with Paul Flaherty for that.



In terms of your personal expression and the experience of performance, how does playing solo compare to group improvisations?

Solo sets used to be a lot tougher and felt lonely, like there was a giant chasm between me and the audience. I think after doing a lot of them, I'm more comfortable in that space and I'm starting to disappear a bit (in the sense that you use it in your next question). Or, I'm at least learning how to play around with how awkward it can feel if you let it.
 
In your best improvisations, do you feel a strong sense of personal presence or do you (or your ego) “disappear”?

I don't know if other people would call them my best improvisations, but I personally enjoy that type of ego disappearance. It's a kind of out-of-body experience where you realize you are as much an audience member as anybody else. And everybody in the audience is also part of the performance (even in the simple fact that by being in the room, they are changing the room acoustics).

Or there's the collective-sound experience that happens when it's hard to know who is making what sound. That'll happen quite often when playing with John Butcher and Florian Stoffner.



In a live situation, decisions between creatives often work without words. From your experience and current projects, what does this process feel like and how does it work?

I like how much can be said (musically) when so little is said (verbally).

I think playing with Joe McPhee taught me this. We don't have to discuss anything beforehand, but the level of trust is very high and the music comes out of that.
 


Stewart Copeland said: “Listening is where the cool stuff comes from. And that listening thing, magically, turns all of your chops into gold.” What do you listen for?

I listen for melodic material that I can mutate into some kind of rhythmic/melodic hybrid and send back to the people I'm playing with.

Really, I listen for whatever is going to catch my ear, make me feel excited to be playing in the group, and then I try to reinforce that and see where it can go.
 


I have always been fascinated by the many facets of improvisation but sometimes found it hard to follow them as a listener. Do you have some recommendations for “how to listen” in this regard?

Repeated listens to a record can help. Or just a single track. Or even a section of a track. Finding a thread in the improvisation and then hearing how the other musicians might be reacting to it.

Or, on the other hand, maybe the idea of following an improvisation sets up an expectation that could be keeping you from more deeply understanding the music on a personal level. How do you follow a forest? Sure, you can pick a path in a forest and follow that path, but that's only one of many narratives being imposed on a thing which is beautiful, chaotic, and complex.

Not that I'm against enjoying an improvisation for it's sense of structure and development. I'm just saying, if somebody reading this feels somehow deficient in the way they are trying to enjoy improvisation, then I'd tell them to just find the aspects of it that bring them joy or some kind of strong emotional feeling and lean into those.

I felt physically changed when seeing the band Test in 1996. It was like being given a drug. Heart was racing, my whole field of vision felt like it was pulsating, and I was ecstatic. The notion of "following" the improvisation was far from my mind, but what I got out of it was beyond anything I'd experienced before as a listener. 

In a way, improvisations remind us of the transitory nature of life. When an improvisation ends, is it really gone, just like a cup of coffee? Or does it live on in some form?

Improvisation is an experience and lives on in the memory of those who participated in it (either as performer or witness).

Some affect you more than others, for sure. But that's true too of composed music, or just experiences in general.