Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Jason Kao Hwang: Soliloquies
Jason Kao Hwang, © 2024 Michael Wilderman
Solo violin recordings in jazz and improvised music are few and far between, even in comparison with albums of solo saxophone. Although Joe Venuti occasionally used unaccompanied solos to highlight his ability to simultaneously bow all four strings, it is not until the late 1970s that the data points began to accumulate with Leroy Jenkins’ Solo Concert in ‘77, Jon Rose’s two volumes of Solo Violin Improvisations in ‘78, Polly Bradfield’s Solo Violin Improvisations in ‘79, and Billy Bang’s Distinction Without a Difference and Malcolm Goldstein’s Soundings in ‘80. Since then, an interesting cross section of violinists like Mark Feldman, Zbigniew Seifert, and Carlos Zingaro have contributed to the data set, one easily expanded to include doublers on viola like Mat Maneri and Mary Oliver, and Phil Wachsmann for his use of electronics.
However, none of the aforementioned violinists recorded an entire album of improvisations foregoing the bow altogether. It is only with the release of Jason Kao Hwang’s Soliloquies: Unaccompanied Pizzicato Violin Improvisations that this basic technique has been so boldly foregrounded. Recorded over two days in January, this album of 12 improvisations is revolutionary in a counterintuitive way. Instead of introducing new means for expression – think circular breathing or signal processing – Hwang simply eliminated a large swath of the violin’s emotive capacity. It is the type of pronounced limitation that calls to mind Ravel’s piano concerto for the left hand, or Maarten Altena’s Handicaps, the solo album he recorded with a cast on his broken left wrist and a cast that covered half the neck of his bass. In both cases, the limitations forced new ways to create rewarding music.
Hwang has done much the same on Soliloquies. The all-pizz tip cannot be overstated – particularly since he is capable of such intensely evocative music with the bow – but it is only part of the story. Although it was not top of mind when he began the project, Hwang eventually delved into his own experiences of the dynamics of an Asian American family with bi-lingual parents and English-only speaking children. This became more the driving force of Hwang’s project than his technical choices, and it results in frequently poignant music. Everything about playing pizzicato – particularly the short decay, relative to other Asian string instruments like, say, the shamisen – reinforced his investigation into life experiences, even though it was initially about the instrument and what could be wrung from it.
“I don’t think I had a forethought or plan before I started to record,” Hwang related during a recent conversation. “When I started in January, I thought I would be playing arco as well as pizz, but I started out playing pizz, and I guess I just got inspired. I recorded probably another three hours straight of pizzicato. After I absorbed that, I recorded another hour and a half, maybe two hours. I probably recorded about 30 tracks. Then I went through the process of picking tracks and sequencing them, and ended up with 12.
“Playing solo wasn’t a new concept to me. Solo concerts were part of the scene when I was beginning in the music, when the loft scene was winding down in the early ‘80s. I was a young musician finding my direction in a scene that was fading, precipitously gone, I would say, by 1984. So many places closed; so many people stopped playing. But what emerged at that time was a movement by Henry Threadgill, Deidre Murray, and others to compose pieces that included improvisation. Henry’s autobiography was interesting because he defined himself as a composer. I played in some of Henry’s groups and some of his oratorios and some of Deidre Murray’s too. Butch Morris was developing a piece he called ‘Modette’ that had several workshop performances but was never completed or recorded. So, there was this movement of people who were complete improvisers who were moving into composition, and being there, exploring those possibilities, it got into my bones.”
Hwang used these early experiences to guide his own compositional processes, which he applied to ensembles of various sizes, ranging from his Critical Response trio and his Burning Bridge octet to his Spontaneous River string orchestra. “Part of composing is organizing the flow with other people to make something happen in a vertical or rhythmic way,” Hwang explained. “You may have something written to coordinate that, and try to make the flow of connections through a piece like a landscape. Complete improvisation is your language; you’re diving into the essence of who you are, without any preconceived notions. I’ve done plenty of concerts like that but I have never recorded that type of music. I have to say that there are certain places, certain territories, that could not be reached if everyone had written music in front of them. You need people who really know how to play, how to listen. Everything that a composition does as far as flow, proportion, development, transformation – with people who know how to play, that can happen with improvisation. That is no less or no better than when you write compositions. It’s another modality.
“So, when I first recorded the solo record, it was without any preconceived notions. When you record something, you say, ‘Hey, what did I do?’ It’s evidence of where you are at that time, what you’re thinking or feeling, and then I am able to put into words what the music meant to me – why I played it. I do remember while I was recording this music that I was thinking of my parents quite a bit. It was right after the holidays. I was thinking about their lives and our family.
“The pizzicato thing started in the early ‘80s. There was an organization called Basement Workshop, an Asian American movement cultural center that’s now widely studied in Asian American Studies departments. I worked with a choreographer named Teddy Yoshikami and played with her dance company. That’s where I started playing pizzicato, trying to get the sound for her dances. More recently, I was doing a lot of somewhat soloish stuff with Yoshiko Chuma. We had a run at LaMama last year. We had three weeks. I forget how many shows a week we did. I hadn’t done that in a long time. It’s really great to do a run for me and for her, because she has a lot of dancers and not a lot of rehearsal time. Everybody finds their way a little bit at a time, with their movements, their entrances, and their exits. By the time of our fourth show, it was special. That project fed into my wanting to make this solo recording.
“I was influenced by bass players,” Hwang remarked about the rarity of pizzicato violin music. “I started working with Reggie Workman again, which I did when I was younger. His sound, that eloquence of his sound, and the sustain of his tone. I was impressed by Joe Pass, those solo albums where he could accompany himself. Of course, I can’t do nearly anything like that but I was really interested in that. And I work with musicians like Sun Li, who plays the pipa, Tang Liang-xing, and Min Xiao-Fen, so I have had a lot of exposure to that instrument. And guitarists – I love Jeff Beck. And the kayagum, Sang-Won Park and Rami Seo. Their sound comes from here [points to his solar plexus], a guttural sound. All of those things influenced me.”
Hwang’s reflections about his family did not result in a stereotypical stroll down Memory Lane or the nostalgia of looking through a shoe box of Polaroids on Soliloquies. Instead, he used the reduced dynamics and sustain of pizzicato playing to create a quiet intensity at times, and a negotiated calm at others. There is a realness to the work that doesn’t require a backstory. “In the art of improvisation, what I do is evidence of who I am,” Hwang stated. “That sort of wonder – How did I get there? What influenced that movement or decision? And from there, you delve into your autobiography. I was working with a choreographer, Yoshiko Chuma. She’s not only a dancer. She breaks barriers everywhere with dance and theater. She interviewed her young dancers as part of the piece. She asked each of them: Why do you dance? Each of them in their own way said: To find out who I am. And I thought: Yes, that’s the answer. That’s why people do what they do.”
Yet, to do what Hwang does, expanding a body of music for more than 40 years, first requires a grasp of the long horizon and the effort needed to reach it. This is daunting at the outset when getting the next gig is iffy. The accumulation of resources, connections, and wherewithal necessary to realize an artistic vision can take years, even decades, which makes Hwang’s discography an instructive document, as it follows a trajectory from a disappearing loft jazz scene to the present environment where he can present large ensembles like Spontaneous River.
“It’s about the growth of language,” Hwang said of the long haul, emphasizing creativity over career path. “When you start a project, you’re creating with other people, striving for a complete state of empathy, so that I can support them, they can support me. When it’s my time, I can offer a way forward, they’ll follow, and it becomes fluid like water. To have that empathy, that state of listening, you start taking parts of other people’s languages and bring them into your own. That synergy creates a mutual growth, a growth of the interaction within the ensemble, and each individual. They will pick up something. ‘I really liked that. How can I make a sound to go with that’ or ‘I hear something you’re doing that I’m reaching for. I see how you got there. Let me try this.’ I think that process can be very organic and revelatory. That sort of process, though, is hard to commodify in an educational system. You have to create a curriculum; you have to create a syllabus. You have to have students starting from year one to graduation with a degree. There are all these books with things you have to memorize, transcriptions, and that becomes a hardened set of mannerisms that really talented people can absorb and still have their own voice. I think a very abundant way to grow is through your interactions with others, through reaching that state of empathy. All of my projects, in some way, are spawned by working with a circle of people, and then another circle of people, and then it blossoms.”
Hwang has maintained circles of collaborators for years on end, a prime example being bassist Ken Filiano and percussionist Andrew Drury, who have been central to projects like Edge (the quartet rounded out by cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum), Human Rites Trio, Sing House (a quintet with trombonist Steve Swell and pianist Chris Forbes), and Burning Bridge, an octet with Bynum, Swell, tuba player Joseph Daley, Sun Li on pipa, and Wang Guowei on erhu. “I remember our early rehearsals,” Hwang recalled when he first began working with Filiano and Drury more than twenty years ago. “I would bring in a piece and it wasn’t really working, so I would revise it several times and workshop it at little gigs around the city. It took a while, but now I know how to write for them and they know how to interpret it. It has taken time, but Ken and Andrew play so wonderfully. That’s something that I learned from Will Connell, Jr. when I started playing in Commitment. Will would always say that the great groups stayed together, that the longer you played together the more fruit it would bear. He was in Horace Tapscott’s Arkestra. Will was kind of disillusioned with that scene and when he came to New York I think he was trying to recreate the idealism that he had in LA. He had very rooted ideas about groups staying together and developing. We talk a lot about the democracy of improvisation, where everyone is equal, functioning through empathy. A lot of those ideas continue to guide me.”
These influences keep Hwang on the move. No sooner than Soliloquies was issued, Hwang was putting the finishing touches on the mix for what he plans to be his next album – The Myths of Origin, with the 24-piece string orchestra that performed at the 2022 Vision Festival. “I was thinking about how Hazrat Inayat Khan talks about everything being vibrations, emotions, light,” Hwang recalled about his inspirations for the work. “I heard the poet Fred Moten talking about looking at the sky and seeing the stars, and that’s history because it has taken millions of years for their light to reach us. I’m trying to put together the idea that vibrations are eternal, that the law of the conservation of energy – that nothing is created nor destroyed – so that our voices, our sounds, maybe they become light, maybe heat, and, in a way, when we play music, we’re drawing from that history, those vibrations, and bringing them into the audible realm again. In this way, it makes sense. I was reading Steven Pincus’ book on language, and how there are words that have fragments of ancient languages that have been forgotten. We do something similar with sounds, we recontextualize them. I’m trying to work with some of these ideas, how we process them. We talk about the music coming through us if we open ourselves to it. I think that’s part of the laws of nature; so, to be an instrument of that, to tune ourselves to that, you do have to let go of fear, ambition, all of these external, extraneous things to receive those vibrations. I try to focus on that.”
Hwang was surprised when told that, in the times of Dante, looking at the stars was considered looking inward to the point of the creation, instead of looking out to a seemingly infinite vastness. “Wow. That’s very thought provoking,” he said smiling, his eyes lighting up.