I am not generally a ‘participant-critic.’ (I prefer being seen as the more old-fashioned ‘that-fucking-asshole-what-does-he-know kind of critic.’) But some pieces call for the first-person more than others, so when the opportunity came up to learn about conduction — avant-garde musician Butch Morris’ system of conducting group improvisation — from the inside, ie. Burnt Sugar leader and music journo extraordinaire Greg Tate giving a workshop, I decided to pick up my saxophone and dive in. Does that bias my review of the concert? Probably. Which, if you disagree with it, will get me closer to the school of detached-asshole-criticism I so adore. Isn’t it nice how these things come full circle?

There were about twelve of us in chairs arranged in a half-moon, flanked by members of Burnt Sugar. Most were vocalists; of the non-Burnt Sugar-affiliated instrumentalists, there was one trombonist, a drummer, a guitarist, a sometime-harmonica player (Misha Glouberman, whose own improv session happens tonight) and myself. We were facing a stocky figure with sleepy eyes and a hat shaped like a mushroom. I wondered how many in the group knew him as a writer, or knew Burnt Sugar; it may simply have been Pavlovian effect of his holding the baton, but he instantly commanded our respect.

He laid out the history of conduction: invented by Butch Morris (no relation, I swear) as a way of interacting with notated music on a different level; premiered with David Murray and others in New York; and codified as a series of symbols (which you can see on page 6 of this PDF). And as he explained, Tate weaved in his own personal history with it — how he had seen Morris maybe fifteen times, how he saw conduction as a kind of real-time digital editing, and how his goal with Burnt Sugar was to fashion a band that worked in the freewheeling-yet-organized way Miles Davis’ ‘70s groups had. Of course, Teo Macero organized those jam sessions into recordings after the fact; how was this going to work in real time?

Once Tate taught us the basic commands and we started up, the answer became obvious: the more impatient and sometimes even capricious the conductor, the better the jam. This was no hippie drum circle — when Tate didn’t like something, he quickly cut it off with a wave of his hand. Of course, when he did like something, like a simplified Mingus riff I bleated out partly as an attempt to play something I knew he’d recognize, he’d play with it across the band, juxtaposing different elements against it.

As a player, it presented two distinct and complex opportunities to screw up royally. Giving up control over when and how you play sounds like it could be exciting, and at times it was, but it also made you aware that if you stopped playing the riff you had been frozen into, or altered it, you were no longer upholding your end of the bargain. If as Butch Morris pointed out it was like democracy, then busting out on your own without permission would be the musical equivalent of vigilante justice.

The other problem was that listening to the group got a lot harder — more than in a symphony or a marching band, even. When you’re playing, say, bebop, you listen to the piano player and if he throws you a harmonic curveball, you’d be wise to change up your swing (no pun intended). When you’re being conductioned (?), you can’t change what you’re doing without permission, and you also don’t dare take your eyes off the conductor, so listening to the ensemble as a whole becomes difficult, and changing or reacting to it impossible, unless you’re the one soloing. And at that point, it’s like you and the conductioner (??) are the only ones really jamming. If you’re just Johnny Paycheck repeating a riff, paying rapt attention to the boss but never looking out the window, you’re basically hanging on for retirement. Morris and Tate would probably aruge that the sacrifice there is for the greater good, which is perfectly fine and right-on, but you can understand why a small percentage of participants walk out in disgust — conduction’s version of moving to a shack in Montana with no running water or cable TV.

In the moments where I paused to catch my breath, though, our improvisation felt rich and detailed in a way no group improv session I had experienced had done before. Vocalists squawked in disjointed unison with horns before dancing away from each other to their respective corners, accompanying and blasting off in flights of solo fantasy. And when Burnt Sugar took the stage that night, I don’t feel at all afflicted by bias when I say that seeing top-drawer New York musicians busting out the same techniques over hard funk and funk-rock grooves worthy of their Black Rock Coalition forbears rammed home the strengths of conduction. By its very nature it meandered into places that worked better than others, but there were so many highlights — such as Tate’s laptop synth groove that, combined with frantic drumming and “freakophone” toy synth sax squiggles that really did sound like George Clinton and Kraftwerk (and Sun Ra and Monk) jamming in an elevator, all apologies to Derrick May — that it was worth moments where one might have been tempted to tune out. After a sweaty hour-plus show punctuated by bursts of dancehall toasting, Living Color-esque blasts of metallic guitar and plenty of inspired solos from the horns, the Burnt Sugar show ended without an encore, not that we could have handled one  — consider us collectively burnt out.

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