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Roll over, Stravinsky

Don Preston follows his wild electronic muse
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
August 8th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Even the jazz veteran and ex-Mother of Invention can't define his new music.
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Don Preston

Akashic Ensemble
When: Thursday, Aug. 9, at 9
Where: Lucerna Music Bar
Tickets: 290–460 Kč, available through Ticketpro, Ticketstream and at the venue

“There was this one tenor player, I used to drive him up to the edge of a huge forest. He’d jump out of the car and say, ‘See you in a couple of weeks,’ ” Don Preston says about the unusual jazz talent he met when he migrated in 1957 from Detroit to Los Angeles.
Speaking on the phone from his Southern California recording studio, Preston cheerily recalls, “When I first got here, there were some great places for after-hours jam sessions — which were always a great learning tool for everyone, because you got to sit there and play with people like Ornette Coleman and Billy Higgins.”
It was while hosting one of these experimental sessions that Preston first played with the legend who would later become his employer, Frank Zappa.
Speaking of his crossover style, Preston says, “Zappa was very unique in that his background was a combination of listening to new music and listening to R&B. Especially the weird Mexican and black R&B he was listening to, that was a different take on the music. That’s a lot of the part that people don’t understand about the Mothers of Invention. Sometimes it’s one way or the other: You’ll find [Mothers-inspired] bands that play the strange and difficult passages, but they don’t have the R&B. Then you have bands that got the R&B stuff, but they don’t have a clue about 20th-century new music, so they miss out on that whole thing.”
As a seasoned jazz player, Preston added needed skills to bridge the R&B expertise of the likes of Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada with Zappa’s ambition to launch rock into the realm of Eric Dolphy, Edgar Varese and Béla Bartók.
Always on the forefront, Preston in the ’60s was also comparing notes with the late 20th-century composer Harry Partch, and contributed much to Meredith Monk’s early recording career. During that time, Preston also began a friendship with the late musical instrument inventor Robert Moog. When Moog died in 2005, Preston said, “Bob Moog made the transition to the next dimension. Not only will he be remembered for changing the face of music, but also as one of the warmest people I have ever known.” Preston may have been the first musician to use a synthesizer in a rock band, and even today seldom leaves the house without a Moog keyboard in tow.
With his 1993 solo recording Vile Foamy Ectoplasm and 2007 compilation Works (both on the Crossfire label), Preston continues to break loose in the intersections of jazz and new music. As usual, he’s still gloriously bent by his wild electronic muse. Throughout his solo work, Mothers fans can usually find familiar territory. Still, the originality on tracks like Ectoplasm’s “Loki (The Thrones of Saturn)” and Works’ decidedly avant-garde anthology open up territories that even Preston finds hard to explain.
Contemplating the complexity of it all, Preston says, “You know, it’s funny, I just don’t know what to call the music, especially with the Akashic Ensemble. Sometimes during the concerts I just play acoustic, playing some kind of jazz with a bit of Mothers music on solo piano. So it’s all a bit like saying, ‘Were the Mothers of Invention a jazz group?’ Probably not, because the bass player and drummer weren’t jazz musicians. It’s like that now. The dividing lines have become real blurred. We’re talking about doing [Stravinsky’s] Rite of Spring on this tour — not the whole piece, but at least ‘Dance of the Adolescents.’ ”
Helping Preston transverse musical lines on the current tour are the New Jersey ambient duo JFK’s LSD UFO, guitarist André Cholmondeley and electronic percussionist Cheri Jiosne. Cholmondeley, who lists influences ranging from John McLaughlin to Adrian Belew, has also been playing with the Zappa tribute band Project Object.
Amperage, though, is only part of Akashic Ensemble’s direction. As Preston says, “It goes a little beyond electronics. There are Zappa overtones, some R&B overtones, some jazz; maybe we will introduce some Stravinsky and a couple of Steve Reich pieces. And maybe a raga or two; it’s very diversified.”
In all the diversity, audiences can count on one thing, Preston says: “Expect the unexpected, because that is always going to happen.”

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (8/08/2007):

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