Winners of the 16th annual Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards are being announced at a gala party this afternoon in New York City (at the Blue Note, 4 to 6 pm, sold out!), and

celebrated in 13 other cities, Auckland to Tucson, all hailing their own local jazz heroes. Why do we (I’m pres of the JJA) do this? I make a stab at explaining in my just-published CityArts-New York column. But basically, ’cause it’s — yes, hard work, but — fun.

And the Awards winners deserve it! Winners will be tweeted live; see hashtag #jjajazzawards. No streaming video from the event this year, but there will be video documentation posted soon as producer Michal Shapiro can edit it all together. We’re sold out at the Blue Note, but the parties in Boston, San Francisco and Tallahassee are wide open (free to all comers), tomorrow in Gainesville (yes! Jazz action is decentralized, not only in the Big Apple), on the 23rd in Chicago, Schenectady, L.A. and Tucson, 24th in Atlanta and Philly, 28th in Detroit (Auckland was last night, Ottawa was Monday 6/18) — you are all invited.

Like the idea of Jazz Awards? Dislike it (yes, we know the exercise has its flaws, including the somewhat arbitrary nature of proclaiming anyone is “best” at anything)? Well, the JJA is trying to gauge the affect of drawing attention to jazz excellence, and looking for new, focused ways to make the statement. So your comments here are much desired.

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I love the conjunction of “free,” “jazz,” “festivals,” “summer” and “New York City”  — though not all free fests are jazz, and not all jazz fests are free (in either of two senses of the word).

For instance, the 17th Vision Festival, which I write up in my CityArts-New York column, has some free shows, and can be aesthetically linked to “free jazz,” but the concerts (for the first time at Roulette in Brooklyn) do have admission charges. Then there’s the Blue Note Jazz Festival 2012, June 10 – 30, performances at the Blue Note, Highline Ballroom, B.B. King’s, the Henry Street Settlement and the Apollo Theater all requiring tickets, and most of the music quite structured — but including one bona fide visitation of a 1960s “Free Jazz” era classic, John Coltrane’s suite “Africa/Brass,” brought to life by original pianist McCoy Tyner and the Charles Tolliver Big Band.

I myself will pontificate freely (and for free) on a Vision Fest panel Thurs., June 14, titled, “Free Music: Why Then/Why Now,” in the estimable company of pianist Dave Burrell, baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, multi-instrumentalist/composer Elliott Sharp, all moderated by Scott Currie. The Blue Note Fest does have one no-fee event on its sched: Groove Theory  with Soulive, Riq and Rah (with strings) and dj Q?estlove at Central Park Summerstage, June 17.

Of course Summerstage, a division of the City Parks Foundation program which kicked off its summer season with a benefit Tribute to the Music of Jimi Hendrix blow out on June 5,

is all free –as are the Celebrate Brooklyn! concerts at the Prospect Park Bandshell, which began June 5 with a visit from reggae popularizer Jimmy Cliff, and also the River to River Festival events (at least most of them), June 17 through July 15, around Manhattan’s lower tip and on Governor’s Island.

None of those series are predominantly jazz, though all of them have their jazz, pre-jazz, post-jazz or just jazzy highlights. I’ll name three: pianist Geri Allen with visual artist Carrie Mae Weems’ “Slow Fade To Black” (with Esperanza Spalding, Terri Lyne Carrington, Lizz Wright and Patrice Rushen, among others, 8 pm, Friday June 15, (Celebrate Brooklyn!);  Eddie Palmieri with his AfroCaribbean Jazz Octet at Rockefeller Park (River to River), 7 pm, June 21;  Orchestre Poly-Rhytmo (jazzy, in the Afro-pop manner) from Benin at Summerstage, 3 pm, June 22 .

There are more — check the schedules. All music is in some sense “free.”

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Google celebrates the late inventor Robert Moog whose electronic music synthesizer still holds universes of unexplored and unexploited potential on his 78th birthday by making its Doodle a working, recordable monophonic (one-tone-at-a-time, though three oscillators so it can be a complex tone) mini-Moog. A video demonstration explains how to use it, and good luck with that! Hours of fun!

I explored a Moog synth studio at Syracuse University and Roosevelt College (Chicago) circa 1970 – ’75 (also Buchlas and Arps at Mills College in ’72), and enjoyed interviewing Moog in 1995. My assignment was never published, so here it is for the first time, a primer in the history and applications of electronic music instruments.

ROBERT MOOG: I head a company named Big Briar, Incorporated, which I founded in 1978 to design and build electronic musical instruments, especially instruments with alternative controllers–controllers other than keyboards. In the music business these days, that’s what’s called an alternative controller. But there have always been alternate controllers. The first electronic instrument, the theremin, was very alternate and was not at all like a keyboard. So we’re designing alternative conrollers for musicians today. You know, throughout the ’30s and ’40s there was a great deal of experimentation with new sorts of electronic music instruments.

None of these became very popular. The best known are the theremin, the ondes

martenot–which actually has a keyboard, but it has other ways of controlling sound, too–and the Trautonium. But there are many, many different control interfaces, things that musicians put their hands on in order to play the instrument.

HOWARD MANDEL: Was the keyboard really an afterthought, for musicians to have something to work with that was familiar to them?

MOOG: In our work it was an afterthought, but it became one of the central features of synthesizers that people use today in making commercial music.

MANDEL: We’ve heard about Leon Theremin, due to the film about his life that came out this year but who developed the ondes martenot?

MOOG: A man named Maurice Martenot, a French inventor. And the Trautonium was a German instrument invented by Friederich Trautwein. It was in between the theremin and the ondes martenot in its design characteristics.

We’re talking about very different control interfaces here. The theremin you play by moving your hands and face around the instrument. The ondes martenot you play from a keyboard that also has a continuous band along it that you could move your fingers on to change the pitch continuously. Today that sort of thing is called a ribbon controller. The Trautonium is primarily a ribbon controller. That’s where the idea for ribbon controllers came from.

These are all monophonic instruments. The ondes martenot has a six-octave keyboard, but it’s monophonic.

MANDEL: What was the invention, the hardware, that made those instruments possible?

MOOG: The vacuum tube. The theremin was invented just a very few years after the vacuum tube was invented. That’s the dawn of electronics, though after Edison. The vacuum tube was invented by Lee DeForest some time around 1910.

MANDEL: Then Theremin was the first person to be inspired to apply electronics to musical uses?

MOOG: I think there were a few other attempts to make musical sounds with electronics before that, but he was the first one to have the clear vision of a new sort of musical instrument, one that would sound completely different and be played completely differently than anything that had existed before that. See, Theremin as a musician as well as a physicist. I’m not sure about Trautwein, I know less about him than I do about Theremin. I imagine Martenot was also a musician, but I know for a fact that Theremin had a high school level degree in cello. In Russia, that meant something.

MANDEL: It translated on the theremin into the kind of vibrato that a cellist is able to achieve?

MOOG: Yes.

MANDEL: What is it about the vacuum tube that is adaptable to these kinds of uses?

MOOG: The vacuum tube is the basic device of electronics. When you talk about electronic technology, you’re talking about things that you can do first with vacuum tubes and then with transistors and integrated circuits. One thing a vacuum tube allowed you to do was to amplify an electrical signal. Another thing it enabled you to do was to shape wave forms differently. Those two things together enable you to design a wide variety of musical instruments.

MANDEL: So those are the foundation inventions, and everything after is a refinement?

MOOG: Well, they’re further developments. The vacuum tubes that were available in 1920 were just the beginning. By 1930 there were many different kinds of vacuum tubes, and by 1940 there were even more, and by the early ’50s you had transistors.

MANDEL: Which are miniaturized, but do the same thing?

MOOG: They’re a lot smaller than vacuum tubes; they also work in different ways than vacuum tubes. But they still allow you to amplify and to shape wave forms.

MANDEL: Is it fair to say that in none of these cases the primary purpose of the invention was to address musical problems?

MOOG: I don’t know what you mean by musical problems. Leon Theremin had in his mind a very clear idea of making a new musical instrument. It wasn’t a problem for musicians generally that a theremin didn’t exist, but it was a problem for Leon Theremin.

MANDEL: I mean to say, the development of transistors, for instance, was in the unfolding of electronics rather than in the unfolding of musical instruments, initially. I gather people like Theremin, Martenot and Trautwein seized on such inventions and understood how they could apply them to music.

MOOG: Yes, that’s right. What has happened throughout human history is that when an innovative musical instrument builder seeks to do something new he uses the most advanced technology of his time. Two or three or four thousand years ago the most advanced technology was making things out of bamboo segments and goatskins and so on. Those were the first musical instruments. In the 16th and 17th centuries, fine woodworking was a very high craft, the top technology of its time. Everything fine was made very carefully out of wood, and that’s where our violins come from.

In the 19th century manufacturing technology was the latest technology, and that’s where pianos and trumpets and so forth come from. In the 20th century the newest technology is electronics, and if you look through the 20th century for new musical instruments you’ll find almost nothing that’s not made with electronic technology.

MANDEL: Continuing on into digital technology?

MOOG: Digital technology is a subset of electronic technology.

MANDEL: If we focus on where musical and technological developments intersect, it seems the next juncture was musicians working with tape recorders during the ’30s.

MOOG: No. The tape recorder was invented in Germany towards the end of the Second World War. The very first tape recorder in the U.S was brought over from Germany by soldiers returning to this country. It was called the magnetophone–that’s the German word for tape recorder. Or maybe it was a brand name in Germany. Whatever; in Germany they were a top military secret. During the Second World War they weren’t used for recording music at all, but rather for recording Hitler and playing his speeches back at different times from different places in order to confuse the Allies as to where Hitler was. That was the first use of tape recorders.

The magnetophones that were brought to the States at the end of World War II were delivered to a motor company in Redwood City, California called Ampex, and they became the basis of Ampex tape recorders.

MANDEL: Didn’t music concrête precede World War II?

MOOG: It might have, but you could have made music concrête with wire recording and even disk recording. I never heard of anything but the very occasional theremin before the Second World War. Music concrête  as far as I know, began around 1947 or ’48, in Paris.

MANDEL: John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 1” of 1939 is often referred to as the

first electronic composition not employing any instruments. He used three oscillator-generated tones.

MOOG: I’m not sure it’s the first such composition. There was a lot of experimentation before that. In fact, throughout the ’30s there were performances on electronic musical instruments on radio all the time. After all, the Hammond organ was invented in 1935, by Laurens Hammond, who ran the Hammond Clock Company. They made such good clocks that they never wore out and his market dried up, so in the early ’30s he was looking for something to keep his factory busy and he came up with the Hammond organ.

MANDEL: Was that conceived as a theater instrument or a home instrument, do you know?

MOOG: I don’t think he had in mind to limit it. Some models were appropriate for the home, some for churches, some for theaters.

MANDEL: What was the thing he developed that made it possible? And that’s a keyboard-triggered device, isn’t it?

MOOG: The Hammond organ is a series of very, very tiny electro-mechanical generators; the rotating part of these generators are just the size of a coin. The electricity each of them puts out is of a different frequency, which gives you the different notes when you press different keys, yes, on a keyboard. But the charge is so weak that if you fed it through a loudspeaker you couldn’t hear it.

That much was possible even in the 19th century. What made it practical in 1930 was electronic amplification became available and fairly common, so that every Hammond organ could contain an electronic amplifier and speakers. You know, I recently wrote an article on the technical side of the development of electronic music instruments from the very beginning for The Encyclopedia of Applied Physics; it has a lot of this background in it.

MANDEL: Is most of the interest today in electronic music inventions in the area of applied physics studies and research?

MOOG: The interest is more widespread than that, especially among younger musicians.

MANDEL: Electronic music has permeated popular music culture, and also, since the ’50s, gained a foothold in what we might call contemporary classical and academic music circles, as at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and similar facilities around the country. Was there some technological development in the ’50s that made those academic institutions feasible?

MOOG: Well, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center goes back to 1951 or ’52 when Vladimir Ussachevsky gained access to the first tape recorder in the Columbia

University music department. Without tape recorders, it was very hard to compose with electronic sound. You couldn’t store your sounds anywhere.

MANDEL: So electronic music instruments prior to tape recorders were primarily performance instruments?

MOOG: Of course, anything you could perform you could also record. But in addition to performance instruments there were a few electronic instruments with which you could enter a score then play it back automatically. That goes back to 1929, and the Kuplo Givelay [sp?] synthesizer. It ran from a pneumatic piano roll, a paper roll, just like a player piano. And in fact, the RCA Electric Sound Synthesizer that got a lot of press around 1955 used the same sort of control means, a paper roll onto which a code for the various notes were punched.

MANDEL: When did you get involved with electronic music instruments?

MOOG: I started making theremins when I was 19 years old, and I sold them, as a part-time business, from that time until 1964, when I met a musician named Herbert Deutsch who wanted to compose with electronic sound. He’s still active today; he’s at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island. Building a theremin was a popular hobby project in those days–in fact, it still is. It’s a medium-difficult project, not the easiest thing but something most committed electronic hobbyists can do.

MANDEL: Are you a musician?

MOOG: I’m enough of a musician to know the language, but not enough of a musician to entertain people. I like working with musicians: they’re crazy. Nice crazy. Crazier than electronic engineers, who are a pretty predictable bunch.

MANDEL: Did the generation of electronic music come mostly from musicians saying to electronic engineers, “This is what I want to do, can you give me that?”

MOOG: I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s been an ongoing interaction, and it’s impossible to say which way “most” of the interaction went, who generated “most” of the activity. People like me who like working with musicians and like technology, too, are part of the picture, and musicians who want to have new instruments and make new sounds are the other part. Without either part, you don’t have a complete picture.

Also, there’s the cultural background. By the time you get to the 1960s everybody’s a little bit, shall we say loose, and inclined to try new things.

MANDEL: There’s a spirit of invention.

MOOG: Let’s go back to Leon Theremin. He invented his space-controlled instrument at a time when everybody was optimistic that technology was going to be a tremendous benefit to humanity, and he created a tremendous lot of excitement. Up to 1938 he created an incredible variety of new things, all the way from burglar alarms to televisions to new musical instruments.

But in 1929 and 1930 suddenly all this optimism evaporated. People were broke, times were very conservative, and even though Leon Theremin invented all these things it never did him any good. He wasn’t able to sell them. In 1938 he finally went back to Russia [on Stalin’s orders, Theremin was abducted from his home studio in Manhattan by K.G.B. agents] and stayed there right up until 1989.

So you definitely need times when people are a little bit optimistic and interested in trying new things, and that was more true in the late ’50s and early ’60s more than it was say, in the ’30s.

MANDEL: It was true in post-War Europe where there was rebuilding, and in the U.S. where universities expanded to absorb returning G.I.s, too.

MOOG: Right. Now, computers didn’t figure into electronic music production in universities until much later. Columbia-Princeton didn’t have computers until the ’80s. Before that, it was 100 percent analog technology. When I attended Columbia I was in the engineering school, and I didn’t know about the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. It was in the music department, in another part of campus. I heard about it only through occasional comments by Peter Mauzey, my laboratory instructor, who was the EMC technical director. Vladimir Ussachevsky, the musical director, started off as a musician. He came to this country to get an engineering education, but instead found himself getting a Ph. D. in music. It was fairly common, but not at all universal, for people who got involved in electronic music to have interests in both technology and music: Lejaren Hiller, for example, was a chemist. But I think Ussachevsky considered himself primarily a musician–at one point he thought he might become an engineer, but he never did–and certainly his associate Otto Luening was a musician, a composer, who’d done a lot of composing even before the tape recorder was invented.

MANDEL: Ussachevsky, like Theremin, had come from Russia. Was there international communication about electronic music esthetics and technology? Did the Columbia-Princeton people talk to Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt in Germany, or Pierre Schaeffer and the music concrête people in Paris?

MOOG: It was slight. At one point, Ussachevsky went to Europe to visit the facilities and learn something, but it wasn’t what I’d call a network. There was no E-mail back then; there was barely air mail. The only way to really find out what was going on was to go and see. Ussachevsky made his trip far into the development of the Columbia-Princeton EMC.

MANDEL: Were different kinds of equipment being developed in Darmstadt and in Paris?

MOOG: Yes. Mauzey developed a lot of stuff himself. Lejaren Hiller at University of Illinois developed a lot of stuff. Both of those people were our customers when we first began. There was Myron Schaeffer [CQ] at the University of Toronto, where they had the

services of Hugh Le Caine an engineer interested in electronic musical instrument design who worked for the National Research Council of Canada. He developed a lot of stuff that had a lot of influence on the rest of us.

MANDEL: Wasn’t there also research done at the Bell Labs?

MOOG: That began somewhat later. Max Matthews was at Bell Labs. He was an amateur musician, and under his guidance there were a lot of musicians-in-residence who worked first with tape recorders and then, later, with computers.

MANDEL: To return to when you founded your first synthesizer company…

MOOG: We were making theremins, and I was still a graduate student, and I met Herbert Deutsch, and we began to collaborate. Just for fun. He was interested in having electronic equipment that made new electronic sounds. What I came up with for him turned out to be the basis for the Moog synthesizer. My idea was to have modular components that would either generate or modify different parts of the musical sound. The way you hook these up together determines what the total sound sounds like. Some of these modules already existed, and some of them didn’t. I started with a voltage-controlled oscillator and a voltage-controlled amplifier. This is all covered in my article.

MANDEL: You discovered there was a market for this synthesizer, interest in it, applications for it?

MOOG: Neither Deutsch nor I saw any commercial potential. One Sunday we drove up to Toronto and showed it to Myron Schaeffer, and he gave us a lot of encouragement. More to the point, he told some other people about our stuff. The next thing we knew we were invited to appear at the 1964 Audio Engineering Society convention in New York City. That was the beginning of our being in business. Until then we never thought of a synthesizer business.

Our first customers were experimental musicians in universities and the occasional private experimental musician, somebody who’d be using new technology to make radio commercials. Our very first customer was Alwin Nikolais, the choreographer.

MANDEL: Were these polyphonic instruments?

MOOG: No.

MANDEL: How big were they? Table-sized, stacked up?

MOOG: Yeah, they were large. They were studio instruments. It took a long time to set them up.

MANDEL: And to set up particular sounds on them?

MOOG: That took a long time, too.

MANDEL: So how did your company proceed?

MOOG: We began filling orders for universities. We built equipment for the Columbia-Princeton center, and for the University of Illinois. At that time we were the only company building equipment for experimental electronic composers. In the first couple to three years, everything was more or less customized.

MANDEL: How specific would musicians be about what they wanted? Would they talk to you in electronic terms?

MOOG: Ussachevsky gave me a piece of paper with technical specifications on it; he was 100 per cent specific. In other cases, they’d wave their hands. It was different with every musician. And every musician imagined the inventions could do something different for them regarding timbre, rhythm and wave-forms. To the electronic musician at that time it was like one big sandbox. The possibilities were almost unlimited.

MANDEL: I suppose the customization you did eventually influenced other manufacturers to strike out, initially imitating your work?

MOOG: The first competition we had was after Switched-On Bachcame out and our synthesizers became commercially important. The commercial world started buying them and using them to make money rather than to do interesting experiments.

MANDEL: Was Donald Buchla, who worked with touch-sensitive synthesizers, one of your competitors?

MOOG: He began around the same time I did, but with a different group of musicians, also experimentally-minded, on the West Coast. Morton Subotnik and that group. There’s no clear line between one person wanting these and there being a market for it. A few people wanted them, and there was enough money from grants and what-not for it to be a viable business for Buchla. That’s how we began, too.

But our business was not viable until Switched-On Bach. That record showed the world that electronic instruments could play classical compositions, and that electronic music could make money, too. Until then the conventional wisdom in the music business was that you couldn’t make real music with a synthesizer. Real music being music that makes real money. At the end of 1968, Switched-On Bach changed all that.

MANDEL: Did you work closely with Walter Carlos, who made that music?

MOOG: Yes. He had a large, modular synthesizer in his little studio where Switched-On Bach was created, in the corner of his living room. He had the synthesizer, an eight-track Ampex tape recorder, and a very simple mixer. Eight-track recording had just been developed around that time, too. So it was sort of an adjunct invention electronic musicians could run with, and professional recording facilities snapped it up, too. But as far as I know, the Columbia-Princeton center never had an eight-track tape recorder. The most tracks on any of their recorders was four.

MANDEL: So Carlos created electronic renditions of Bach pieces by layering sounds to build complexity, and that was a significant development, too?

MOOG: Yes.

MANDEL: Weren’t these instruments beginning to be used in performance situations like in New York’s Electronic Circus around that time?

MOOG: It was very experimental up until, say, 1970, when Keith Emerson used in on the first Emerson, Lake and Palmer record, and then suddenly it was part of their stage

show. Which was barely feasible. It was a grunt. A typical musician today couldn’t have coped with that mess. It was our standard modular synthesizer; we didn’t make the mini-Moog, the first non-modular instrument, until 1971.

MANDEL: Was the mini-Moog a big compromise in terms of what it could do?

MOOG: Yes. It had fewer voices. But it was very accessible.

MANDEL: Were these instruments also being used for light shows at the time?

MOOG: No. That happens today, sometimes in connection with computers; some of it is similar technology, some of it isn’t. You can apply voltage controls to lighting. Today, with MIDI–Musical Instrument Digital Interface–you can control lighting at the same time you control musical sounds. I don’t think there was a single standard like that before the invention of MIDI in 1983.

MANDEL: Where did that come from?

MOOG: It’s been well-documented in a book called A Comprehensive Introduction by Joseph Rothstein.

MANDEL: MIDI has transformed everything, hasn’t it? It’s the common interface that everybody uses.

MOOG: Yes. We’re just one of many, many companies that supply hardware that works with MIDI. And we work today with both analog and digital equipment. These days digital electronics is used primarily for control and storage; analog technology, if it’s used at all, is used for generating and modifying sounds. Most musicians think that analog-produced sounds sound better than digital sounds.

Everything has to do with the waveform. The waveform is the sound, so any quality of the sound has to do with the waveform. It has to do with very, very fine details of the sound, things that are almost impossible to measure with electronic instruments but that you can hear–musicians can hear–distinctly.

MANDEL: Not only hear, but isolate and address or modify?

MOOG: Yes. The difference between analog and digital sound is like the difference between film and video.

MANDEL: Did your business significantly expand with your introduction of the mini-Moog?

MOOG: Oh, yes. After 1971 if you were a working keyboard player at the local Ramada Inn you had to have a synthesizer; otherwise, you couldn’t get a job. It’s like today if you want to be a secretary you have to know how to use a computer. That’s how it was for musicians in 1971.

MANDEL: Was there resistance to that?

MOOG: The only resistance was that it cost a lot of money to buy that stuff. It was outrageously expensive back then. It’s much cheaper today to get enough hardware together to be a musician.

MANDEL: But every Ramada Inn keyboard player scraped it up somehow.

MOOG: Yes. That’s how the Japanese got into this. They geared up to make inexpensive synthesizers that worked well.

MANDEL: Were they using the principles that you developed?

MOOG: In the beginning, yes. As time went on, less and less. Up until about 1982 the differences between our synthesizers were fine technical details. The Japanese manufacturers just found ways of getting 80 per cent of the sound for 50 per cent of the money. That’s more of a marketing and technical thing than a musical thing. But starting in 1982, Yamaha introduced an all-digital synthesizer. The sound was made digitally, as well as controlled and stored digitally. That was the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. It was a lot different than the technology that we used in the ’60s and ’70s.

MANDEL: Up until then, a lot of your work was to economize and to miniaturize?

MOOG: Yes, and to get new sounds. Everybody was always looking for the latest thing.

MANDEL: To imitate better or more acoustic instruments?

MOOG: To create the sound of the times. The early synthesizers didn’t imitate anything, they had their own sounds. A lot of today’s instruments are designed specifically to imitate orchestral and acoustic sounds, but the instruments of the 1970s, none of them did that.

MANDEL:  Does that date their sounds?

MOOG: Oh, yes, yes. Any musician who is at all knowledgeable about electronic instruments can listen and tell you which model of which manufacturer and what year it was made. A layman may not be able to do that, but a layman can say, “Boy, that’s a ’60s sound” or “That’s a ’70s sound.”

MANDEL:  So the ’80s sound was the introduction of the Yamaha DX7.

MOOG: Yes, with what’s called FM, for “frequency modulation.”

MANDEL: How does that work?

MOOG: It’s a mathematical algorithm that was used to generate the waveforms digitally that came out of the DX7 synthesizer.

MANDEL: Did that put a crimp in your business for a while, sir?

MOOG: Well, I’d been long out of that business by then. I left Moog Music in ’78, when I formed Big Briar. Whereas Moog Music was in the mainstream of new electronic music instruments, Big Briar positioned itself at the very edge, which is where I began in 1964.  And that’s pretty much where we still are.

I’m not inclined to run or be part of a big business here. If we’re going to be a small business, then we have to do something that’s at the edge rather than competing with large manufacturers who are in the mainstream. What we’re interested in doing now is not all that interesting from the point of view of future developments. We’re building theremins because I’m an experienced theremin builder at this point, and there is a market for theremins right now, albeit a very small market.

MANDEL: Is the theremin you build a performance instrument or a studio instrument?

MOOG: It’s a performance instrument. But you can use it in a studio, like using a guitar in a studio. The guitar’s a performance instrument, too. The theremins are performance instruments, but we’re working on equipping them with MIDI, which will make them compatible with all modern hardware and software.

MANDEL: Do well-known bands or performers use theremins onstage today?

MOOG: Among our clientele, Laurie Anderson is fairly well-known. Quite a few groups

use theremins occasionally. It’s still specialty instrument for most people.

MANDEL: So the theremin and the MIDI interface and other alternate triggering devices employing the same kind of principles–hand controlling–this is some of what you’re researching?

MOOG: All control devices work by hand control. The theremin is the only one that works with motion of the hands and space around the instrument, without touch. Other devices we’ve experimented with require touch but, of course, you use your hands. Because the control interface of the theremin was designed almost 75 years ago, while it’s interesting to us, it’s not new. We have ideas for a lot of different control interfaces which are new, but we’re not working on those in terms of introducing new products right now. We have six people here, it’s a very small business, and we’re not trying to constantly do everything new.

MANDEL: Was there a single invention that allowed polyphony to be available?

MOOG: No, it was a slow development of technology. First there were transistors, then there were simple integrated circuits, and more complex integrated circuits, and as the prices went down–it’s all a function of price. We actually built a few experimental polyphonic instruments, which were very expensive, in the ’60s. One we built was a whole rack of circuit boards. You could have its same capability today on a desktop computer.

MANDEL: Is sampling an outgrowth of the digital storing of sonic information?

MOOG: It is digital storing of sonic information. An outgrowth? Well, the instruments that came out in the late ’70s were not sampling at all. They were analog instruments with digital storage of the settings of the front panel. The settings of the front panel are not the sounds, you know–they are the numbers that determine what the sounds are. It takes a very small amount of digital memory to remember the settings of, say, two dozen front panel controls. It takes a great deal of memory to remember a complete sound, let alone a whole bunch of sounds. So the very first sampling instruments cost thousands of dollars–$50,000, $60,000. These were sampling instruments when computer memory was still expensive, and as time has gone on they’ve become cheaper and cheaper because computer memory has become cheaper and cheaper. Now you can go to your local mall and buy a Soundblaster soundcard with every sound in creation on it–one megabyte of sound–and the whole card costs $250.

MANDEL: Is that an invention that’s different in kind?

MOOG: Storing sounds digitally is considered to be a different technology than storing the settings of panel controls for making analog sounds. They are technologically different.

MANDEL: But in terms of the musical result–

MOOG: Sampling gives you big sounds that are interesting, but they get boring fast. You can’t change them, you can’t mold them. But a synthesizer, something that generates or calculates the waveform as you need it, is something that’s much more malleable, much more subject to experimentation.

MANDEL: Have you found that musicians who are interested in being on the edge of this area of music have become more technologically knowledgeable?

MOOG: Yes. I don’t think any musicians today would seriously consider making it a career without knowing enough about electronics to understand very well how such music is generated and recorded. But I don’t think you should look for evidence that a lot of these guys start off as technicians. A few of them did, but most of them picked up what they needed because that’s what would enable them to do what they wanted to do.

MANDEL: Did they then invent something other people built on in the technological, as opposed to the esthetic, side?

MOOG: Yes.

MANDEL: So if I talked to Richard Teitlebaum about this, I’m headed in the right direction?

MOOG: Yes.

MANDEL: David Behrman?

MOOG: Sure.

MANDEL: George Lewis?

MOOG: Sure.

MANDEL: David Rosenboom?

MOOG: Sure. Oh, yes.

MANDEL: Todd Machover?

MOOG: Yeah. There’s a guy who probably has some technical background because he’s at MIT

MANDEL: Neil Rolnick? Carl Stone?

MOOG: Sure, yes, sure. But these are all old names by now. There are a lot of people out there now, and a lot has happened in the last 75 years. There are festivals–for instance, next week some of Neil Rolnick’s students [from Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York] are going to be at Bard College, where Richard Teitlebaum’s teaching, to give performances–and there’s bound to be some networking there. There are more than enough electronic musicians now to sustain a very active network.

MANDEL: Do you think eventually some of their sort of arcane esthetic developments will seep into the mainstream?

MOOG: Yes.

MANDEL: There was such an explosion of new sounds in the ’60s in rock ‘n roll and jazz and all forms of music…

MOOG: Yes. And there’s very little development of that kind of new sound today. Most musicians, something more than 50 per cent of musicians, are interested in using what would be called “canned sounds,” sounds that somebody else has developed or recorded, put in a machine, and then you just play them. The first time synthesizers with canned sounds were available was in 1978, 1979, when digital technology was used to store the settings for analog sounds, but the sound-producing circuitry was analog.

MANDEL: Did you find that development disappointing?

MOOG: It’s not that I was disappointed–who am I to be disappointed? That’s wha9t the musicians wanted. But not all musicians. There’s a minority of musicians who are interested in doing something new, exploring resources that nobody else has explored.

MANDEL: Are those the people that you feel an affinity with?

MOOG: Yes.

MANDEL: So you think they’ll last?

MOOG: What?

MANDEL: Synthesizers!

MOOG: Well, yes. You remind me of my ex-mother-in-law. I was born and brought up very near LaGuardia Airport, and I took her in the 1980s to LaGuardia. It was the first time she’d ever been there.  She looked around and said, “I guess airplanes are here to stay.” My point is that there are millions and millions of synthesizers out there. They’re

not going to go away. Things don’t go away. Harpsichords don’t go away. African drums don’t go away. What musicians use just keeps expanding, more and more.

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Pianist Marcus Roberts has broad reach and pushme-pullyou ideas, reharmonizing Jelly Roll Morton and improvising freely with banjoist Bela Fleck, as I detail in my latest column in CityArts-New York.

At Jazz at Lincoln Center Robert, the blind visionary, led a sextet that hewed to Morton’s structures while incorporating a handful of solo styles from different jazz eras, and on the album Across the Imaginary Divide he and Fleck compare, contrast and co-join their individually distinct musical directions. The two are currently on tour (backed by Roberts’ trio mates bassist Rodney Jordan and drummer Jason Marsalis), from Maine to San Francisco, making music that (like it or not) stands most genre assumptions upside down.

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Donald “Duck” Dunn, bassist for Booker T. and the MGs, most all the grits ‘n’ greens soul voices who emerged from Memphis’ Stax Records in the 1960s, and dozens of major blues-rock-pop stars during his subsequent career as an LA-based studio musician, died in his sleep at age 70 in the early morning of May 13 while on tour in Japan with his guitarist partner and childhood friend Steve Cropper. He’d performed two shows the night before at the Blue Note Tokyo.

Dunn was among the handful of electric bassists who motivated dancers to rock ‘n’ soul’s brand new beat during the heyday of vernacular music miscegenation (Jerry Jemmott and James Jamerson are two of his peers) . Self-taught by playing along with records, Dunn was as steady and self-effacing as bassists were supposed to be back in that day, while providing the bouncy, accented lines that held together and pushed forward a band grooving on a backbeat. Using a Fender Precision bass (he designed a signature model in 1998), Dunn created syncopated, independent lines that made millions of people shake their booties to the hits of Booker T., Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, the Mar-Kays, the Memphis Horns, Albert King, Wilson Pickett, Creedence Clearwater and, later, the Blues Brothers, Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, most recently Neil Young, countless others.

I find Duck Dunn’s well-articulated low-octave underpinnings fascinating in themselves, though it was his synchronization with Cropper (especially) and drummers including Al Jackson, Jr. of the Stax house band that made his career what it was. As rock bassists like Jack Casady, Phil Lesh and Jack Bruce became more flowing and r&b/soul/funk bassists more emphatic with thumb-popping, Dunn epitomized (at least for me) quick, cool melodies bumping along almost beneath the radar but actually shaking the Sacral Chakra, which according to Hindu tracts governs sexuality and creativity. Thanks to Duck Dunn and his colleagues, listeners from the ’60s on enjoyed an extra burst of energy. Gotta thank the Quiet Guy with the Pipe for  some of that.

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My latest column in CityArts-New York highlights the search for a new location of the Jazz Gallery, a splendid venue that has been responsible for launching some of the most exciting

musicians and freshest projects to emerge in jazz and improvised music over the past 17 years. Commissions, residencies, workshops, rehearsal space and performances not dependent on their audiences eating and drinking.

Jason Moran, Steve Coleman, Miguel Zenon, Dafnis Prieto, Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, the Myra Melford Quintet, Gretchen Parlato, Lionel Loueke, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Orrin Evans’ Captain Black Big Band, Ambrose Akinmusire, Linda Oh and Karl Berger’s Improvisers Orchestra are among those who’ve benefitted from having this stage in the “lower West Village.” The Gallery also exhibits visual art, and the Jazz Journalists Association held one of its first panel discussions there, in 1999, featuring the late Richard Sudhalter, Robert O’Meally Gary Giddins, Bill Milkowski and Sharony Andrews Green discussing their books (I moderated).

Spaces like the Jazz Gallery are few. Reminiscent of the “jazz loft” days of the ’70s and ’80s, when New Yorkers would open their large live-work spaces for public performances. Studio Rivbea, Ladies Fort, Jazz Forum, Cobi Narita’s Jazz Center of New York are fondly remembered for their presentations, but other than the Jazz Gallery and some private salon-like house concerts, there isn’t anything like that happening in Manhattan, where large spaces are all but exclusively for upscale residences and businesses. Spaces like the Jazz Gallery, less formal than concert halls and not quite so commercially driven as clubs have been vital to the creativity of the New York scene. I hope Manhattan can find a way to save arts spaces for musicians for the immediate and longterm future.
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Read my short-hand review, please, in CityArts-New York of the sunset concert of International
Jazz Day in the General Assembly of the UN in New York City. The music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Howlin’ Wolf , Leonard Bernstein and many more was manifest by all-stars of all ages (Esperanza Spalding, 28, to Candido Camero, 91), many ethnic backgrounds and aesthetic leanings (Chaka Khan, say, to Zakir Hussain).

This first International Jazz Day — April 30 2012 — was a phenomenal world-wide event, initiated by composer-pianist Herbie Hancock and reaching at the very least the 195 nations that had musicians playing Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” in tandem with his own performance of it at a sunrise concert in Congo Square, New Orleans. The sunset concert in the hallowed and vast
main hall of the UN was an impressively strong demonstration of jazz’s vitality and diversity, too. Videos of both entire shows as live-streamed (but poorly indexed) are now archived at the website of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which co-sponsored the initiative with UNESCO.

It was amazing and for jazz devotees enormously heartening to watch the Secretary General of

the UN Ban Ki-moon on giant tv screens hung on the front wall of the General Assembly mention that “the UN flag is, after all, kind of blue,” and that he was “in the mood” to “sing sing sing,” thanking those of “take the A-train” to attend an event celebrating music that takes us from “April in Paris to autumn in New York, from a night in tunisia to Ipanema, and Birdland.”

It was inspiring to hear U.S. permanent representative to the UN Susan Rice say, “The origins and early developments of jazz are quintessentially American . . .Like democracy itself, jazz has structure, but within it you can say almost anything. . . . Now jazz is everyone’s music.” And she quoted Charlie Parker — “If you haven’t lived it, it can’t come out of your horn.” (Can you imagine George W. Bush’s UN ambassador John Bolton saying such things? Can you imagine these words being spoken on the floor of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives? WHY NOT?)

It was incredible but so beautiful it brought tears to my hard old eyes to hear UNESCO General Director Irina Bokova say that although there is much disagreement and mystery about the origins of the term for our music , “to UNESCO, ‘jazz’ is another word for ‘life’.”

News of the first International Jazz Day events — held in Paris, New Orleans, New York City at the United Nations, some 200 nations in all — ought to be reverberating throughout jazz and other musics’ sites on the internet, but only the AP article, evidently crafted from contributions by music writer Nekesa Mumbi Moody, is besides mine an eyewitness account posted anywhere, so far.

JazzTimes has an advance article  DownBeat doesn’t mention International Jazz Day on its website at all. AllAboutJazz has re-posted R.J. DeLuke‘s blog article, buried in the “news” section under stories about bluesman Sonny Landreth performing and teaching at a festival next August, the Maryland Summer Jazz Festival next July, and an interview with organist Richard “Groove” Holmes (1931-1991, here named “Jazz Musician of the Day”). A Blog Supreme, usually dependable for relevant reports, also has only an advance article (but a nice picture of the UN General Assembly from Getty Images, which I can’t use here).

According to a jazz wife who gets her information first-hand, Herbie Hancock, appointed last year as a UNESCO cultural ambassador, had been walking around the rehearsals saying the U.S. has blown its chance to promote jazz as our own major, enduring contribution to humanity’s

artistic heritage, but fortunately UNESCO has stepped up to embrace jazz for everyone the world-over. Whatever the reason the U.S. is so reluctant to support its artists and acknowledge other-than-commerical or classical arts, our nation has indeed created something in jazz to be proud of.

As UNESCO’s Ms. Bokova, who is Bulgarian, said in her remarks, “Jazz is the music that makes the most of the humanity’s diversity, that crosses all borders and brings people together. Jazz is not something that you only hear, it is something you feel deep inside that bursts forth in joyous expression. There is hardly a better school of sharing and cultural dialog.”

What a joy for those of us who have harbored that idea privately, perhaps thinking we must be delusional or sorely mistaken, to have the unique communicative powers of jazz certified from the podium of the one organization which, for all its flaws, attempts to oversee what’s happening on earth. Jazz is, evidently, a significant enough aspect of all peoples’ activities to rate one day a year out of 365 in its honor. Celebrating by playing it and listening to it globally, jazz people are trying to give back, and keep it going.

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A sunrise concert  in New Orleans’ Congo Square, from which jazz arose, in celebration of UNESCO’s International Jazz Day (spearheaded by Herbie Hancock), is being streamed as I write (Dr. Michael White took the last solo, over the Dirty Dozen Brass Band) at Jazzday.com and at the Thelonious Monk Institute website. Those platforms will also feature tonight’s 7:30 pm EDT concert from UN headquarters in New York City — which I’ll attend in person, and report on in a blog posting tomorrow.

This evening’s concert  features all-stars: pianist Hancock joined by Tony Bennett, Terence Blanchard, Richard Bona (Cameroon), Dee Dee Bridgewater, Candido, Robert Cray, Eli Degibri (Israel), Jack DeJohnette, Sheila E., Jimmy Heath, Zakir Hussain (India), Chaka Khan, Angelique Kidjo (Benin), Lang Lang (China), Romero Lubambo (Brazil), Shankar Mahadevan (India), Wynton Marsalis, Hugh Masekela (South Africa), Christian McBride, Danilo Pérez, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, Hiromi (Japan), and others. George Duke will serve as Musical Director. Confirmed Co-Hosts include Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Quincy Jones.

The Jazz Journlists Association, in conjunction with Jazz Day, has run an international blogathon with several dozen posts about local jazz scenes in New Zealand, Kuwait, Taiwan, Finland, Moscow, Ottawa and elsewhere including all over the U.S. Such showings as Jazz Day inspires may  or may not result be great music, but UNESCO’s Jazz Day is definitely a highly visible endorsement of jazz as a unique, significant, international art form. May jazz long endure, among people who are free.

twitter @intljazzday with hash tag #jazzday;
Facebook: http://facebook.com/intljazzday

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Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation have an idea I adore: Offer grants “directly to individual writers . . .  in recognition of both the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture.”

From the Request for Proposals:

The program, which issues awards for articles, blogs, books, new and alternative media, and short-form writing, aims to support the broad spectrum of writing on contemporary visual art, from general-audience criticism to academic scholarship.

Therein lies the rub — for me, and members of my profession, music journalism. Fur us, nothing like the Warhol Foundation’s program exists.

Please don’t get me wrong: Warhol was a visual and conceptual artist, and his foundation is appropriately working within his legacy. I’m waiting for the wealthy musician who will endow a similar program, out of the recognition that music journalists face the same “precarious financial situation,” also make an “indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture” and, by the way, have advanced rather than inhibited the success of my dream patron and his/her colleagues.

The Warhol grant guidelines make me drool –

[A]n applicant must be an individual; an art historian, artist, critic, curator, journalist, or practitioner in an outside field who is strongly engaged with the contemporary visual arts; a United States citizen, permanent resident of the U.S., or holder of an O-1 visa; at least 25 years old; and a published author (specific publication requirements vary depending on project type category). Please note that work published in college newspapers and undergraduate student-run publications will not be considered toward the published author requirement.

Substitute “music” for “art” re historian, artist, critic, curator, journalist, and a large, talented cohort of equally vital arts journalists qualify. The only other grants (financial grants, not residencies or subsidized academic semesters) that seem open to music journalists are the Guggenheim Fellowships. Congrats to Terry Teachout, read right here in Arts Journal as well as in the Wall Street Journal, for getting as Guggenheim a few days ago. His funding will reportedly help support his work on a biography of Duke Ellington. Other music commentators getting Guggenheims this year were all academics.

ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in Music Journalism are the one honor specific to music journalism. For a long time they had no cash prize attached, although now, according to ASCAP’s website

Several categories of cash prizes are presented to writers of award-winning books and newspaper, journal or magazine articles (includes program notes, liner notes and on-line publications). Awards are also presented to the authors and journalists as well as to their respective publishers.

I believe those prizes are in hundreds, not thousands. The Awards program itself was suspended in 2009, reinstated in 2010, and is currently accepting submissions.

The Warhol/Creative Capital initiative “supports approximately twenty to twenty-five projects each year. Grants range from $3,000 to $50,000, depending on the needs and scope of the project.” I know many members of the Jazz Journalists Association, as well as unaffiliated colleagues writing, photographing, broadcasting, blogging about contemporary composed music, “world music,” the blues, rock, pop, electronic music, whatever people are listening to, who would love love love to be supported in their work, now that music publications have dried up, newspaper gigs disappeared, book publishers mostly turned away (except for some university presses, which are problematic in their own literally non-profit ways).

Just dreaming here, folks — journalists are supposed to be able to fend for themselves in the marketplace of ideas. Music journalists have often been regarded as parasites or publicists-in-disguise.

The old line that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” is dismissively trotted out, with little regard for the fact that dancing is about architecture, the architecture of the body moving through space and time.

Okay, enough whining. I’ve got to get back to my present pre-occupation: fundraising for the 16th annual JJA Jazz Awards. Meanwhile, visual arts writers-readers: Think about your needs, think about your scope, apply.

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My new City Arts column is reviews of newly released recordings by Henry Cole and the Afro-Beat Collective, Steve Lehman Trio, Less Magnetic, Esperanza Spalding, Michael Bates and Wayne Escoffrey. You may have to pick up a hard-copy of the paper for that. But the issue also features my interview with Limor Tomer, the Metropolitan Museum’s recently appointed Curator of Performance.

Like the interviews published in the New York Times magazine, the City Arts Interview is severely edited for space considerations: It’s a compression. Below is the full version of an afternoon discussion I had with Limor, the week the official announcement of the Met’s 2012-2013 schedule of performances — with her programming, exciting in scope and imagination.

Tell me about your new job.

LT: It’s amazing. Awesome. It really is. What can I say? When I was offered the job I was very conflicted. I was at the Whitney. So I took a piece a paper and did a list of pros and cons, like you do. And there was only one item on each side: It’s the Met, and It’s the Met. That is the whole story.

I think that my being there now and what the possibilities are available now are all about Tom Campbell, the new director. He’s been there I think he’s in his third year. Very short in Met terms. And he’s turning this tanker around.

Performance has always been a part of what happens at the Metropolitan Museum. Is it now as a bigger part, more central?

LT: It’s going to a much more integrated part. What Tom wanted to do, if he was going to make a commitment to performance, he wanted it to be part of the museum. It doesn’t make sense otherwise, for the Met to be a concert hall in New York City. The challenge and the opportunity is how do you advance and present performance work – whatever that means, from performantive to moving bodies to sound to stray concerts – in a museum context. How, and where, and why. And what.

How did you approach all of that?

LT: So I’m sitting there, it’s the summer, the current season is done, the brochures are out, and everyone is asking me, “What are you going to do?” I decided to not even think about which artists, which ensembles, I decided not to start from there. I decided to live with it a little while and to develop some organizing principles. And I came up with four, over my process. It was six months, maybe, of living in the museum, observing, meeting the curators. I came up with four principles which I think will not only inform the current 12-13 season, but will really take me through. So the four organizing principles:

The the first one is about the Met itself. What I call Only at the Met. What can we do that’s unique to the Met, that can only happen there that can’t happen anywhere else, or that can’t happen in a certain way. That includes a lot of things. So you’ll see a lot of performances in galleries, or performances that resonate with exhibitions, or performances that initiate exhibitions. Or iconic moments in the history of the City. It sounds a little nebulous, but things that are really important, that the Met can do in certain way.

For instance, in this year, big Phillip Glass anniversary year, orchestras and concerts at Carnegie and this and that – but we get to present Philip himself, playing with violinist Tim Fain, in the Temple of Dendur. That can’t happen anywhere else. Not only did he chose to do the only performance he’s doing for the met, he could have done it anywhere else, but also we’re presenting in that extraordinary space. Those kinds of moments. That’s “Only at the Met.”

The second thing is “The Artists’ Voice.” I was very interested to see what would happen if we introduced living artists into the mix. What they would bring, and how we would do that. I’ve developed several different ways, ranging from inviting performance-oriented artists, like choreographers, to lead gallery tours, which is unbelievable! It felt like a good idea when I thought of it, but then when we actually do it!

We had Mark Morris gave a gallery tour of the New American Wing painting galleries, just last Monday. And it was unbelievable. What he chose to talk about, and what he choose not to talk about. We went into the gallery with Madame X, and he’s not even looking at Madame X. He’s looking at some small bronze object, that is of interest to him because of the gesture. He commented on the floor – the floor in the galleries is soft. I’ve walked through the galleries 80,000 times, did I notice?

So next year, there will be more, which we already confirmed. We invited two choreographers to lead gallery tours: Bill T. Jones will lead the gallery tour of the same, the American Paintings Gallery, because they’re new, they just opened, there’s a lot of energy. He specifically is interested in looking at the history of that collection, the American paintings, and the role it played in the founding of the museum, the met, as a response or counter to the Civil War. Which I knew nothing about. I’m learning.

Is that a reason the Met started?

LT: It’s at least a theory. I don’t want to talk much about that, because I don’t know anything about it, but he does. And the curator does. And they will co-lead a tour. And it’s going to be an amazing thing. And also a young choregrapher, whose name is Miguel Guitarrez, is going to co-lead a tour of a big Warhol sow, called “50 Artists, 50 Years,” Warhol’s impact on 50 years of artists. That’s one way.

I mean, it’s astounding. As part of my idea of introducting the artists voice I spent the entire summer last summer inviting all my friends, the artists, to come and walk with me through the museum on Mondays, when it’s closed, and see what sparks. I was walking through with John Zorn, and it turns out he comes to the Museum once a week, every week. We were walking through with Zorn and he said — this was three days after the Renaissance portrait show opened — he said, “Have you seen it? It’s amazing!” He knew every room in that museum. He was taking me through the period rooms in the American wing, you can’t even find it, and he knows every object.. . .

Another way was I was walking through the museum with DJ Spooky, the Oceanic Gallery, and he was talking about his experience in Vanuatu, and his work with Oceanic instruments. Then we go to the Asian gallery, and he talks about what he’s done with Asian film. It’s endless. Out of that walk through and further conversations, we realized we actually could create an artists residency. So we launched the first-ever artist’s residency in the history of the Met. DJ Spooky will basically be there – not physically, he doesn’t have a physical space, but he’ll have an ID, and a connection.

He’ll do five different performances that all connect with either galleries or collections or particular objects. He’ll do at least four panel discussions that connect with the contemporary residences of whatever the work it, Korea, or Oceanic or there’s this big Civil War photography show that he will use the images from to create a new piece. And then he will also be working with different constituencies that the museum works with, like the NYC public school teachers. He’ll do workshops with public school teachers, he’ll create audio guides, he’ll infiltrate a lot of different areas that the museum is working in.

That’s a big way to introduce an artist’s voice. A lot of time what gets called a “residency” in New York City is some guaranteed gigs in New York City. And that’s great, it’s not bad, but it’s not what you really should call a residency – it’s not cohesive, not integrated . . .

Have you worked with Spooky before?

LT: Yes, many times. It certainly adds to my level of comfort, knowing him, knowing how to work with him, what he can bring. I was at Lincoln Center when he did “The Rebirth of a Nation.” I invited him to remix Varese with the Whitney. I don’t remember why we were doing Varese at the Whitney, but there was some connection.

That’s two.

LT: My third one principle is more linear, straightforward – how do we work with what’s going on in the museum? Again I turned to the curators. And the curators who have shows coming up. Together we designed brainstormed or came up with these suites of programming, both performative and straight lecture, panels, conversations, film screenings, that deal directly with the shows they have coming up. That is the heart and soul of this job: Working with the curators.

How many curators are there at the museum?

LT: 200.

200! Have you met them all?

LT: Oh no-no-no-no. Not even close. But I am working closely with Maxwell Hearn, who is Chairman of the Asian Art Department, for instance. His specialty is China but he heads the entire Asian art department and he and I put together a performance of “The Peony Pavilion,” the famous Chinese opera, which will be staged in the Astor Court, the Chinese scholar garden at the Met. It’s Tan Dun’s version. He created his version from an excerpt of the entire opera. And then out of that work Mike is going to create a contextual show about Chinese gardens in China. So in this case, performance drives what’s in the galleries. It goes both ways. That’s amazing.

You’ve been at the Museum just a year, right?

LT: I got there last July. Less than a year. There’s a lot of new energy. Maxwell Hearn had been in the museum many years, but he was appointed head of the department by Tom. There have been a lot of of big, big changes.

My fourth principle is about how we deal with classics. The idea of a classic piece, or a masterpiece.

I was thinking, “How does the Met deal with the classics? How do they deal with Rembrandt?” Well, they’ll do a Rembrandt show, and they’ll do Rembrandt show after Rembrandt show, and every one of them will move the scholarship forward, because they’ll do it from this angle, or from that angle. They’re going to do Bernini, I’m sure they’ve done many Bernini shows, but this one is about his process of working with models, so they’ll be showing both his sketches and clay models. Right now they have Degas and Rembrandt side by side, portraits. Showing how influenced Degas was by Rembrandt. So those shows happen, but every time they happen they happen in a way that moves the scholarship forward.

I thought “Ok, what’s a great body of work that commands that kind of constant revisiting?” I said, “Ok, we’ve just had a Beethoven Quartet cycle — we’re going to have another one! And now we’re going to look at it from a different perspective, we’re going to do it differently.” Instead of having six concerts over the course of a season, we’re doing it as a two-weekend marathon. Total immersion. So the format is different. We’ve invited one of the most renown British quartets, very famous in Europe but unknown in this country, so we’re adding that element to it. It’s not a quartet you can hear regularly at Lincoln Center or Carnegie. And then on top of that, I’m working with the curators of European paintings to create a context of lectures that deal with Beethoven at the nexus of the death of neo-classicism, and the launch of the genius myth and Romanticism. So you could go to that lecture if you want to, or the panel, you can go to the concert, and you can go look at the Davids.

And we’re going to build it out that way. The next step would be, I’m working with colleagues in the education department to create some sort of a mechanism, something we email or you can download from the museum website before the concert that gives you six objects to look at that relates somehow to the concert you’re going to hear.

You have all the interactive media going on, too. Do you have a staff for all this?

LT: I do. And the staff is great. It’s undergone a lot of change.

Did you not have staff at the Whitney?

LT: At the Whitney my staff was tiny. First of all, at the Breuer building there isn’t really a proper venue, At the Met there’s a 700-seat auditorium plus a lot of galleries that can hold performances. But at the Whitney is was me, part-time and I had an incredible producer, part-time. That was all that was needed.

The Met is a much bigger operation. This is a $3 million-dollar-a-year, free-standing concert series with 60 to 70 lectures a year, and something like 50 concerts a year. Now this concert series, when I was a student I used to go all the time. It was definitely one of the most important classical chamber music series in the city. It just wasn’t integrated into the Met or any way connected to the Met. So for me it isn’t about whether we’re going to do this genre or that genre, it’s all driven by what is unique to the Met. What can I come up with that makes sense in the context of this place?

What is the lead-time for your programming?

LT: I just finished the 2012-2013 season, and I’m beginning to work on the 2013-2014 season. I’m on the exhibition timeline.

It sounds like a dream job.

LT: I have to tell you one more thing about the classics, which will be especially interesting to you. One of the things the Met does it focuses on iconic people, performers or creators. So in the 2012 – ’13 season we’re going to have Charles Lloyd, having his only concert in NY of the season, it will be with his current trio with Jason Moran and Eric Harland, and also this incredible Greek singer whose name is Maria Farnatu. She actually brings a lot of Byzantine chants into the mix, and it connects, though it’s marginal, but it does connect with the big Byzantium show we’re going to have. And we’re not doing it because we want to have more jazz. We’re presenting Charles Lloyd because he’s an extraordinary American artist who warrants this kind of consideration.

Tell me more about how this connects with what you’ve been doing, your own training.

LT: I have a black belt in classical piano.

What was your repertoire?

LT: Oh, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Shumann, and Henry Cowell – wooowooowooowoo! Luckily I had one teacher at Juilliard who was the modern music specialist and taught me about John Cage and Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Lou Harrison, all that. So I am conservatory- trained, and played classical piano for 10 years. Then in 1984 I went to see “Einstein on the Beach” and I left the theater after four hours, and I couldn’t remember why I was practicing Chopin études anymore. It was a complete crisis of confidence. But it came at the right age. Within a few years I’d turned my life around, I quit playing piano, I went to work with Harvey Lichtenstein at BAM, I just put myself in a very different trajectory that had to do with living artists and very contemporary work.

May I ask how old you are?

LT: 49.

Did you have a background, your family being artistically inclined?

LT: No. A lot of academics and scientists.

What were you like growing up in Israel?

LT: I was the girl who played piano. I lived in a little suburb just outside of Tel Aviv. And yeah, came to New York at 13, went to Juilliard pre-college, college. It’s funny, because it was really my experiences going to BAM that . . . Because we were pretty bourgie, and I was playing piano, so my mother thought we should have a subscription to the Philharmonic. And we did have one for one year, but we really couldn’t afford it. So she noticed there was something called the Brooklyn Philharmonic, which was a quarter of the price. So she bought me the subscription and I would get on the 2 and 3 trains and trundle down there, during high school. And she didn’t know this but it was the heyday of Lukas Foss. And I was hearing Penderecki, and just completely insane music. . .and that started to open me up, in a way that really set the stage for my curiosity.

You did post-grad work in esthetics?

LT: At NYU. That was more out of fear than anything. Fear of life. Fear of having to be out of school. For someone who’s been at school all their life, it’s suddenly – Okay! And also, when I was at Juilliard, it was a very different time than it is now. I felt that I needed to get educated. I really did. I didn’t sign up for esthetics for any particular reason. It was the program that made the most sense that was music-based but academic. I didn’t want another music conservatory thing. I needed to read books, to find out who Heidegger is, to understand literary theory and other things that people need to be in the world.

Do you think it informed you?

LT: Oh my God yes, absolutely! It was critical. I did all the course work, I got pretty far and I wrote a proposal for a dissertation, and I realized at that point I wasn’t going to spend seven years writing a dissertation to become an academic. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. But the education I got there was critical. At that time in the late ’80s you didn’t come out of Juilliard with a good education. Now you do. I see the kids now and they know a lot of stuff.

What else has changed in NYC since the late ’80s?

LT: I think Harvey’s Lichtenstein’s legacy has taken hold. You have new music, contemporary music, living composers everywhere. Carnegie, Lincoln Center – Lincoln Center festival is a direct result and outgrown of it. All that stuff used to only happen at BAM. The other thing that I feel is there’s no longer such a thing as uptown and downtown. It’s just gone. It’s everywhere. And another thing, because of the tough economic situation, it’s really the larger institutions that can afford to take risks. The smaller institutions that can’t take rists will continue to present Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. But the Met Opera can be the one that’s doing new opera, and the NY Phil can start a new music series, and Lincoln Center can start the White Light festival – they can afford it. It’s really exciting!

I’m interested in what’s happening at smaller institutions, such as Roulette.

LT: I love Roulette. It’s places like Roulette that led the contemporary revolution, they have to look at what’s now. Who are the people who they were championing in Tribeca, and champion them now, but of course at that time the overhead was a lot lower.

It’s a challenge, I’m sure — but not one you have to deal with right now. You sort of winced when I asked about a staff. Is it hard for you to be a manager?

LT: Not really. It’s new. But I’m collaborative in a really deep way. And I’m not hierarchical. I like to work with very special people. And I had that at the Whitney, and at my radio job. It’s us sitting in a room, asking what would be incredible new and fun and challenging, and who is the best person to do it.

You’re looking for creative people and input, you don’t feel you have to be dictating everything, you’re looking for ideas. Is that the way Harvey worked too?

LT: Yes and no. In the realm of ideas, yes, and when there were big decisions about the trajectory, he would hash it out with his senior staff. The other thing I learned from Harvey was to listen, listen. Have your door open and talk to artists all day long. Don’t be afraid of it.

Is that how you keep up?

LT: Yeah. That and going out a lot.

Are you out every night?

LT: In the fall I was out every night, then I put a moratorium on it, and I was out the nights a week, either because they were my own shows or things I absolutely had to go to. But it’s tough, it’s really tough.

Where do you like to go?

LT: The only place it’s hard for me to get to is Williamsburg, because of the trains. But other than that, I go wherever the thing is. Zankel, Roulette, wherever.

I love the Studio Museum. They just came over and we had a great conversation about the things we could do together I’m not as connected to what’s going on in Harlem right now as I was. I was a freelancer for a lot of years, and at that time I worked for a lot of different places. One of those places was Symphony Space. When I worked at Symphony Space I was really plugged in because it was really about the uptown neighborhood. But now I’m not as connected to it.

And you listen broadly, too?

LT: Right now I have a really good opportunity to revisit the classical repertoire, because my daughter is nine. We put on the Beethoven violin concerto and her mind is blown.

Does she play?

LT: She does, she plays violin and started to play French horn. And this is completely off topic, but – you know, the Met was struggling with what to do about children’s programming, and I thought about it for months. And I decided what I really want to do is focus on the older childhood ages, six to 13 and partner with parents. At that age the kids are old enough to sit, and they’re not old enough to not go with you. And that’s what I know how to do, I think.

So we’re gearing a lot of our hard-core classical concerts and our other concerts – a lot of our concerts are ready for that age. They start at 7 pm, they’re on Fridays and Saturdays, We instituted a new price for kids that age, starting at seven and up: $1 – zero risk. We’re doing away with intermissions whenever possible. Straight through, 70 minutes, 90 minutes – if we need intermissions, we’ll do them, but a lot of the concerts are just like that.

Parents need a couple of things. First of all, they have no idea where to take their kids. Parents don’t know where to go, but the Met is a brand name. Another thing that I think people forget that keeps people from coming to concerts, if you work like a dog like everybody does in New York and you’re out and work late, you don’t want to get a baby sitter and not spend the night with your kid. You want to spend the night with your kid. So what if you come to the museum with your kid? You can have a snack, you can go to the concert, and if the kids get bored, you go to the Arms and Armor court, it’s right there. The museum is open ’til 9 on Fridays and Saturdays when we do our concerts. Our concerts start at 7. It’s a whole package.

Is the audience at the Met reflective of all the constituencies in town?

LT: I want to answer that a little differently, then you can ask it another way if you want. I want to talk about the difference between the music audience and the visual art audience, which I found out working at both the Whitney and now the Met. Visual art audiences are much more curious and very open to looking at contemporary work. They love their classics and their El Grecos but they’ll also walk through the contemporary galleries, and it’s not a big deal. If they hate the work, they’ll say “I hated that work. I’m going next week to see another show.”

Can you imagine that happening in a concert hall? If you go to a concert and somebody programs a Boulez piece, you’ll say you’ll never go to a concert again, and that’s it. I don’t know why that is. But I find the visual arts audience is much more tolerant about stuff that stinks, or that they don’t like, that’s not their thing – they’ll come out and try again.

They want to go to the lectures, and learn more about it. They’re curious. That was an amazing thing to me when I understood it. I don’t know why people who are hardcore music lovers who go to the Chamber Music Socity of Lincoln Center, why they are so resistant to music they don’t already know. That drives me mad.

Music does seem to impose more time demands than visual arts.

LT: Time-based arts. Yes, you can’t leave in the middle.

And sometimes it seems classical listeners have a more rigid mindset. If you listen to classical music, that’s it, that’s what music is. Anything else – no. Visual arts are more plastic. . .

LT: There’s much more flow.

Do you have plans to engender more curiosity among audiences?

LT: I’m all about curiosity. I don’t know if I’ll be successful in actually creating curiosity, but I’m hoping . . . At the the press conference I described the DJ Spooky residency, and someone said, “Oh, so you’re interested in attracting a younger demographic?” I said I’m not interested in a younger demographic per se. I’m interested in a curious demographic. That’s the heart of it.

I want to find ways to engage with that curious audience. Maybe it’s a curious audience that goes to the 11 o’clock lecture, but doesn’t think to go to the concert, and maybe we can make a connection to make them think about going to the concert. Or maybe it’s the audience that comes to the Warhol or Bernini show, and we can kind of interest them in the performative thing, whether it’s a concert or a dance piece or whatever. Something that’s actually on a digital platform, where the venue is online. And create something like that. Really just expand people’s knowledge and engage that curiosity. I don’t know if it’s possible to make someone who’s not curious curious. But I hope we can.

Does the Met draw across the city’s economic spectrum?

LT: I don’t think I’ve been there long enough to answer that question. When I walk around the galleries it looks that way: Tourists, and young people and school groups, every demographic and ethnic group you can imagine. The concerts are fairly pricey, which one of the things I’m doing about that is – well, I’ve started with a tiny bit but intend to do a ton of stuff that’s free with museum admission. That was the model at the Whitney, performance was just something that happened in the gallery, Everything was free with museum admission. Even most of the performances at the Biennial are like that. Some are ticketed — I think that has more to do with crowd control. So we’ve already done a couple of things that were free with museum admission.

The biggest was three weeks after I got to the Met – we did a big concert at the Temple of Dendur for the September 11 anniversary that was free with museum admission, and then for the opening of the American painting galleries we had a performance in the America scuplture court that was beyond free admission. It kind of just happened. It was the Asphalt Orchestra: Two members started playing out of the blue in the great hall, in the lobby. It was like, “What?”

The volunteers are starting to call security. They started playing and then they came together, and people were like following them, and they played, and then they started walking while playing, and led 200 people with them through the Egyptian halls through the Temple, back into the American wing, 200 people following them saying, “What is going on?” and when they got to the American wing the rest of the band was there pretending to be sitting in the café, and then they got up and the performance started. It was fantastic.

I can’t pull that off without the curatorial group that controls the American wing. I don’t have that kind of range. So I go to the curators and say, “Let’s do this.” And the curators in the American wing were all over it. They’d never heard of the Asphalt Orchestra, they’d never heard of any of this, but they got it, and they were delighted. As long as we do it carefully, with respect for all the objects, they’re completely thrilled to collaborate.

Do you remember when you first visited the Met?

LT: My first trip to the Met in my life? Yes.

I walked through the park, I was 13, I had just gotten to New York that summer. I think I was with my uncle who was visiting from Israel. We went through the Egyptian wing, we went through the old Greek and Roman halls, I think the Temple of Dendur had just opened, it was pretty new. We didn’t do the American wing, I don’t know what shape the American wing was in – it has just now finished a 10-year renovation. Then we went upstairs and looked at the European paintings galleries. And I was exhausted, and then we walked home.

You can’t do the Met in one day.

LT: Listen, I can’t even go upstairs. I’ll get lost. I confine myself to the ground floor.

What do you go to there for, yourself?

LT: There are two ways I must answer that: for myself and with my daughter. For myself, I go to the Asian wing. I have a lot to learn. I don’t know enough or anything about that work. I’m starting, I’m trying to learn. Again one of the things that happened we walked through in the summer, I was walking through with Peter Sellars and it was really the objects in the Asian department that sparked him. He was just effervescent. Something about those galleries, I find myself there a lot.

They’re very peaceful.

LT: Yes, there are fewer visitors there.

And with your daughter?

LT: I mostly take her to the European paintings. I want her to get that in the DNA. I had the opportunity to go through the Louvre and the British Museum and the Prado when I was young. It just lowers the threshold of entry for your whole life. Then you’re not just intimidated. The museum belongs to you. And museum. You just go.

Is the trend now to bring people into the museum in through performance, and to use performance to air the art out?

LT: On the positive side, I think performance can and needs to be completely integrated into the museum context and can be done in a really authentic way. It needs to be done. Especially if you’re dealing with contemporary work. The artists are going that way and have been for 30 years. It’s not new. You have to allow for that. And there are museums that deal with performance curatorially, and it becomes part of the mix. Like the Met now, MOMA now, and the Whitney always, always, always. In the ’60s and ’70s before the letters B-A-M were ever put together, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown Steve Reich, Phil Glass, Meredith Monk, Bruce Neumann, all those guys were performing at the Whitney.

Then there’s the fact that museums want to respond to the way people choose their leisure time, and why they go to museums, how to get them to go to museums. “Well, people like performance, and they like the experience of a social thing, so let’s have a Friday night thing!” And those programs sometimes get run out of the visitors services area, or the outreach areas and its’ not really thought of curatorially, and that is kind of less interesting to me. Also the museums that tend to do that, they don’t have a lot of experience with performance, they don’t understand the economics of it and how much money they’re going to loose. They just see people – “Indie rock is really big, let’s do an indie rock series!” But they don’t realize how much something is going to cost them. And if they don’t have an auditorium, it becomes a whole other thing.

Is performance always a money looser?

LT: Performance? Of course! Performance is not something you can acquire or gift or transact – you’re selling experience. As you probably know, ticket prices account for a very small percentage of the overhead of a perforamnce. You have to make up the rest. One way or another.

Are you responsible for fundraising also?

LT: I am up to my eyeballs with my colleagues in development, yes. We are like this.

But you’re not thinking about the next thing you’re going to do.

LT: I am so into what I’m doing now. Also: the Met thinks in decades. You don’t go to the Met for five or six years. I mean, you just don’t know, I don’t know, I may be gone in five or six years. But the intention is that this place moves deliberately, and over time. What I’ve found is it can turn on a dime when it wants to. I pulled off some crazee stuff in my first few months. The free-with-admission concert was very complicated – the September 11concert – with four pieces, all living composers, lots of electronics, very complicated. Then we began last summer with a tabla symphony, 22 tabla players and singers on the steps of the Met, outside. Unfortunately just when it was going to start it started to rain, and we had to reschedual it for Oct in the Great hHll. But the same thing with Asphalt Orchestra: Very complicated, very serious. Moving big tubas and wearable drum kits in the sculpture garden? Let’s do it. Funding was found, rehearsal time was found, and it just rolled out. But in terms of impact and developing programs and building something – yes, I’m thinking long term, definitely.

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My Brooklyn neighborhood, called Kensington, is full of musicians, because residences are large and still semi-affordable. So I hear the guitarist across the street get excited while practicing, run into NEA Jazz Master pianist Kenny Barron when walking to the bakery and go to Sycamore, a flower shop-bar with basement recital room where  on Sunday nights the Brooklyn Jazz Underground stages intimate, advanced concerts, one of my favorites being the Schoenbeck Eisenstadt Family, featuring drummer Harris E. and his wife bassoonist Sara S., with good buddies Mike McGinnis on clarinet and Marika Hughes, cello (young Owen Eisenstadt was left at home, which is nearby, with a sitter).

The local scene is unique, but also akin to jazz communities across the country and throughout the world, as the Jazz Journalists Association highlights with its first Jazz Day Blogathon.

Jazz Day — April 13 — was designated as such by the U.S. Council of Mayors; go to the blogathon to read reports (or watch brief eyeJAZZ style videos) of activities in Kuwait (!), Italy, Finland, Sweden, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Spartanburg SC, Philly and Ambler PA, Ottawa, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Cambridge MA, not to mention Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Washington Heights neighborhoods  — all posted just in the first 24 hours of an online “event” that will last through April 30 (“International Jazz Day” as designated by UNESCO, thanks to Herbie Hancock).

What all the communities reporting in share is that local folks live the jazz they play and listen to. Jazzers in every community are scrappy, unpretentious, meritocritical (word?), fun-seekers. Jazz isn’t all they do, but jazzers are self-defined by keeping jazz very much in mind. We accept that jazz isn’t the commercial blockbusting, mainstream media darling that other musical forms can boast of being . . . and we tend to think that’s cool, as long as our music isn’t threatened by extinction, because we tend to think it has to last. Jazz has, after all, lasted for 100 or so years without being for most of them highly regarded much less generally respected or richly rewarded. But it rewards those of us involved in it, because the music, the process of creating it, the world-view it reflects seems to ring with something honest and true.

Which is not to say jazz communities can thrive without a little do-re-me, but on the other hand jazz activists learn how to make big fun out of what’s at hand. And we recognize each other wherever we go, so I’ve been able to make good friends fast on the island of Ponta Delgado in the Azores, in Amman, Jordan, in Kiev and Armenia, Cuba and Mexico, Gambia and London and Paris and Siena. Of course I really work at it — and I’m communitarianly (not so much communally) oriented. I still feel like part of the jazz community in Chicago where I grew up, though I moved out 30 years ago (I go back regularly). I have a stake in the jazz community in D.C., where I lived for only six months, decades back, and in San Francisco, Portland OR, Boston and New Orleans, all of which I like to visit. The ‘net lets us cast our communities broadly, and sustain ties cheaply, with ease — all to the good.

Some jazzers swear by the Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer standard, “Free and Easy,” with its tagline “Any place I hang my hat is home.”  Personally, I don’t go that far. Home is where I store my books and cds, snuggle up to my baby, keep my flutes, bang on the piano, sit at my desk, do the cooking. My current neighborhood is probably the most diverse, ethnically speaking, I’ve ever lived in, with an African Apostolic church on the corner, Russian emigrés up and down the block, our nice landlord and his large family representative of the greater Bangladeshi settlement around here, Hassids next door, people from the Caribbean isles and Mexico, cab drivers from everywhere and an influx of hipster refugees priced out of Manhattan. I ride my bike through this community, shop in its stores, explore its potential, try to be part of it, but in truth I only sorta fit in. Whereas my jazz community — I’m pretty comfortable in that.  It’s not just a Brooklyn jazz underground; it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere. As the JJA blogathon starts to show.

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