Two part in depth Paul Motian interview:
An interview conducted with Paul Motian in the early 1990s by drummer Chuck Braman. Includes a discography of recordings related to the topics discussed.
www.drummingpatterns.com
An interview from the early 1990s with Paul Motian sharing his ideas regarding a selection of recordings from various points in his career.
www.drummingpatterns.com
From my first interview with Paul:
Chuck: What’s the attraction of playing free? What appeals to you about that as opposed to a different situation?
Paul: Just that it’s very open and it let’s me play whatever I want to play. If I have an idea and it makes musical sense to do it, then I can go ahead and do it, I’m not restricted in any way to bar lines or form.
Chuck: What do you latch on to, though? For example, if you’re playing time, you know how the beat’s being subdivided, you know what the vocabulary is, you know you can move this here, you can leave this out. But if you’re playing completely free, it’s a completely blank slate. What do you latch on to that’s logical to determine what you play?
Paul: You’re latching on to what you’re hearing, what the other people are playing, what you’re playing, what you started out playing, what melody is going on in your head, everything. You just latch on to whatever you can latch on to, man. And hopefully there’s plenty of things to latch on to.
Chuck: When I listen to you play free, I can tell you obviously find clear ideas to play and I can follow your thinking. But some other drummer playing in the same situation might say, “This music sounds good, but what in the world could I ever play to it?”
Paul: Well, thank god I don’t never think about that. I don’t think like that. I just let it happen. I just go by what I hear and I just let it happen.
Chuck: So you’re not self-conscious…
Paul: No. I’m acting on what I’m hearing and what I’m doing.
Chuck: You have a clear idea of what you should do and shouldn’t do.
Paul: It’s not like what I should do or shouldn’t do, it’s what I do. And I have enough faith and confidence in myself and what I do that it’s right. If I start thinking about what I should do and I shouldn’t do, it would suck. It’s like the story Jimmy Garrison told me about the centipede. He’s walking along on the branch groovin’, and then some f***** monkey looks at him and says “Hey, man, look at how you got all them legs, man, how do you know which leg to put down first?” And as soon as he says that, the mother****** trips and falls off the tree. It’s the same thing. You can’t stop to think about that s***.
Once when I was playing with Charlie Haden, I told him that I couldn’t really get with the music, I can’t find what it is that I should do, whether I should play time or I play free. And Charlie said to me, “well, you’re the one that can do it and whatever you do, you be in control, you do what you think is right, I’m going to take it from what you’re doing.” In other words, instead of me thinking about what I should do or what I shouldn’t do, I should just do, and everything will be OK. And that’s what happened. When I was thinking about what I should do and what I shouldn’t do, s*** wasn’t happening. Wasn’t happening, man. After I talked to Charlie and he said to me whatever I do is OK., and I should be in control, then I felt free to do what I wanted to do. And as soon as I did that, everything fell into place. S*** was swinging like a mother******.
Chuck: Are you switching over from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind?
Paul: Yeah, in a way. In other words, when something starts happening and I start playing time, I’m not debating in my head, “well, I should play time now or I shouldn’t play time.” I just go ahead and do what I feel I should do. And when I do that, it happens, everything falls into place. If I feel like playing a rumba beat on a f***in’ tom-tom, that’s what I do without thinking about it, it’s OK!
Chuck: So it sounds like the key is to get rid of any sort of deliberation.
Paul: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely, man. Oh yeah. Sure. As soon as you start deliberating and thinking it’s that story I just told you, man. That’s the key. Definitely.