The Book Cooks New Dutch Swing, 2nd edition [ebook] From Chapter 15: Updated Itineraries
Amsterdam pianist Burton Greene comes from Chicago, where he was born in 1937, and began playing jazz in his teens, and where the hippest jazz musicians sound ultra-relaxed, placing a few well-chosen notes way behind the beat: think Von Freeman. Alas, the young Burton would play lots of notes and heavy chords, hard, and would speed up when he got excited. This did not endear him to other musicians. The best lesson he ever got, from local pianist Billy Green, was practical instruction on how to lighten up. Nowadays, in 1998, Burton may play lots of notes and heavy chords, and speed up when excited, but it’s OK. Now he relates it to his mother’s Romanian origins, to gypsy and other rhapsodic East European styles. It took him awhile to figure all this out, but he’s always minded his roots. He visited Romania as early as 1975, but it was no fun. As he wrote in his (then unpublished) autobiography, Memoirs of a Musical “Pesty-Mystic” or From the Ashcan to the Ashram and Back Again..., he was almost jailed over a minor vehicle mishap. Burton Greene is a pioneer by temperament – an early exponent of free improvisation, improvised electronics, the fusion of jazz and Indian music, of music for a “new age” (with his New Age Jazz Chorale, a large group with singers, in the ‘70s), the fusion of jazz and East European and Jewish music. He is a diligent searcher, always seeking a better way. And yet, per Romania, he is not one of the world’s lucky people. In 1966, while living in New York, Greene was victim of one of the meanest personal attacks in jazz literature: a Down Beat column by Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, reprinted in his book Black Music, “The Burton Greene Affair.” Reviewing a gig the pianist had played with saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Marion Brown, Baraka used Greene to attack white free jazzers in general, as weakly attempting to emulate vital, creative black musicians. There was Burton, pummeling the strings or the underside of the piano, as “the beautiful writhe of the black spirit-energy” went on and on, undeflected by anything he did or didn’t do. It was a cheap shot – Burton recalls the piano had so many dead keys, it was good for little except pummeling – and yet there was something memorably snide about the article, turning an old American racial stereotype on its head: The white man follows his simple instincts, to come up with something esthetically naïve and ridiculous. A personal note: Reading Black Music years later, I wondered if this screed haunted Burton Greene. When I met him in 1991, he brought it up within 20 minutes. Burton Greene sometimes talks like he sometimes plays: rushing ahead till he turns himself around. Visiting, say, the office of BVHaast which had released a few CDs by his band Klezmokum, he makes Lt. Columbo exits – says goodbye, walks toward the exit, then turns and comes back with a postscript, once, twice, three times. You could talk to him on his harbor-dockside houseboat for four hours and then find your phone ringing when you got home – something he’d forgotten. – Burton, did you like the old TV show Columbo? “That funny little guy? I’ve always hated it, I don’t know why.” He’s called because he’d forgotten to detail his comeback in America, almost 30 years after he left. He has a new solo CD coming out in the US, Shades of Greene, recorded in Hilversum, Amsterdam and Toronto. He’d just done a homecoming gig in Chicago with trombonist Roswell Rudd, an old friend. Burton’s band Klezmokum went to New York, sold 200 tickets at the Knitting Factory, very respectable. He was the subject of a five-hour retrospective on New York’s scholarly jazz station WKCR; the interviewer unearthed a concert tape by the Freeform Improvisation Ensemble, which Greene and bassist Alan Silva had formed shortly after Burton came east in 1962 (and which would get issued later in 1998). “That was the some of the first documented free music – no written music at all. It had a lot of European/genetic stuff in it: folk elements, jazz, and chamber music. No borders. But after awhile, one of us brought in some compositional ideas, and then we all did, which stopped the process.” Burton made his first records for the prestigious/way out/no money ESP label, then nagged top producer John Hammond till he let Greene make one for Columbia, which company hated free jazz. But there was a catch; after it was recorded, Hammond coaxed Burton into overdubbing (obviously extraneous) synthesizer parts, a new fad. Hammond had remembered Greene’s connection to synth pioneer Robert Moog. Burton had run into him at a musical instruments show, where everyone ignored his strange new keyboard. Burton, always curious, checked it out. “He invited me up to Ithaca where he lived. He said, ‘My wife is a good cook.’” In those lean times, that was a real incentive. “I hitchhiked up there, and after two weekends, I was a Synthesizer Expert.” Presenting Burton Greene from 1968 was easily one of the very first albums mixing jazz and synthesizers, and looked ahead in other ways. On “Ballad in B-Minor” – a tune he’d written in the ‘50s – you could hear glimpses of klezmer jazz to come. In his notes he mentions “a feeling for my Semitic roots.” Also that he’d become a disciple of Swami Satchidananda. In 1970, Greene went on pilgrimage with him, to India and to Ceylon/Sri Lanka – Burton hung out with fellow acolyte Alice Coltrane – and he remains a disciple. Later the Swamiji gave Burton a new name, Narada. Greene says Baraka’s attack didn’t make him leave America, but was symptomatic of escalating racial tensions in jazz. Through Chicago contacts he’d heard that musicians like Anthony Braxton and the Art Ensemble of Chicago were heading off to Paris. Burton went too, spring ‘69. Paris was the right place at the right time. All these new arrivals soon recorded for the prestigious/way out/no money BYG/Actuel label, as related by Arjen Gorter in Chapter Three. Burton began traveling, gigging here and there. Copenhagen was more open than Paris, but too far north to travel from. In December 1969, Willem Breuker invited him to Amsterdam to play some gigs along with Gorter and Han Bennink. Greene liked the vibe, and the world-crossroads location, and decided to settle in. Jaap de Rijke recalls his first glimpse of the new arrival: very long hair, a very long beard, the white garments of a holy man, and a hippie girl sitting at each foot. Among Amsterdam musicians Burton is famous for his poor Dutch. Even another badly accented American can easily spot his thick accent. In truth there are worse Dutch-speakers among the expats; he makes enough of an effort to have a bilingual message on his answering machine. Still, he has taken some abuse on this score. He tells of approaching one influential musician, whom he had played with some, and who had criticized his Dutch before, who was now booking an Amsterdam venue. Burton humbly asked for a gig, “in my best Dutch.” Je Hollands is niet goed genoeg mijnheer, was Hans Dulfer’s haughty reply: Your Dutch is not good enough, sir. Burton likes to complain a little, but few things rankle him so much as the notion that he is a subsidy freeloader in Holland. He was the first foreigner accepted into the musicians’ union BIM, and thus qualified for the basic BIM/SJIN guaranteed minimum fee for gigs. But he has received major project funding just twice in three decades, and never got an annual stipend. He does, however, repay the community by giving cheap music lessons. He has also been a valuable contact for Dutch players; as Ernst Reijseger related in Chapter Eight, Burton was the first notable musician to hire the cellist, for a ‘70s trio which played variations on Indian ragas for a set, and then a Horace Silver tune as an encore. “Burton got me connected in Amsterdam.” (Michael Moore: “When I first knew Burton in the ‘70s, he was playing eastern scales and calling it Indian music. Now he plays the same scales and calls it klezmer.”) By 1972, thrashing free jazz had worn Greene out. He needed to begin again. “I started to play something nurturing, and it reminded me of ‘Oriental’ scales, but I didn’t know what they were.” Soon after he slid into playing raga-esque improvisations for real, with sitarist Jamaluddin Bhartiya, who became a mentor, and bongo player Daoud Amin. Their East West Trio was early world music, even if others (like England’s John Mayer and Joe Harriott) had fused similar elements already. Years pass. Burton keeps making records for various European labels, and keeps exploring. He visits Israel – to get “re-Jew-venated,” per his book – and Portugal, where he was struck by the Moorish influences, and Russia, where his father’s people are from, and Romania, again, and begins to see how many seemingly divergent cultures that fascinate him are connected. “Of course the same scales figure in Indian ragas, Arabic music and Jewish liturgical music; almost any ‘folklore’ scale can be found in North Indian music. There is a definite cultural continuity. You find the same odd meters in Turkey and Romania, because the Turks were there for hundreds of years.” And so by way of points east Burton gradually rediscovered and reclaimed his Jewish and East European roots. In the early ’90s he assembled Klezmokum, first with traditional clarinetist Marcel Salomon, then Michael Moore (he’s on their nice and eponymous debut CD on BVHaast), and currently with dual clarinetists, klezmer expert Hans Mekel and New York improviser Perry Robinson, another ‘60s ally. The edition with tubist Larry Fishkind, drummer Roberto Haliffi and singer/trumpeter Patricia Beysens recorded Jew-azzic Park in ‘94 and would soon record ReJew-venation for BVHaast. “To call it a klezmer band now is almost a misnomer. More and more we bring in other music – Sephardic and other Jewish traditions, and Semitic music in general, including Armenian and Arabic. And stuff with Balkan and Turkish influences, those odd meters we like.” Whatever it is, it sounds authentic and organic, and it suits the leader very well. He gets to follow his instincts, and thanks to John Zorn’s advocacy of Jewish music in New York, Burton now finds himself on top of a trend that’s marketable back in the homeland. Last year he spent almost half his time there. The end.
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One more thing, almost forgot. A few years previously, Amiri Baraka had come to Amsterdam for a poetry festival. Burton Greene went to his reading. Afterwards, he recalls, Baraka was just kind of standing around. Burton felt sorry for him, figured, what the heck, I’ll be a good guy, and went over. He wound up showing Baraka and his wife around the canals, even bought them some drinks. They’re talking, and finally Burton says, Tell me. Why did you write that nasty stuff about me? And Baraka replied, Oh, that was just black nationalism. Don’t take it personally.
© 2023 Kevin Whitehead
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