Frank Presley's interview with saxophonist/composer Paul Cutlan 29

Historical article recovered from a Wayback capture dated 2018-02-24.

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May 2005

“It’s the intensity of the words that really gets to me as a musician.”

Frank Presley:

Paul when you were composing music for the ‘Birth of the Cool’ did you have any artists in mind from the Beatnik period?

Paul Cutlan:

Oh yes. I am a great admirer of Charlie Parker’s music and Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie and all those guys around that time. I could have happily chosen heaps of repertoire that would have gone with different poems. It was good that Camilla and John came up and said that I had to write original music. So some of the time I was happy to evoke the music of the period and at other times I tried to write music that’s just evocative of what’s happening in the action of the poetry generally. The quintessential chase music or sexual liaison music or romantic music. Not necessarily of the period but the fact that we’ve got bass and drums and saxophone. The drummer can play percussion and vibraphone so there’s a lot to choose from there and all of that is very evocative of the jazz trio of the 40’s and the 50’s. So I had a lot of fun with the variety of that. The vibraphone is such a cool sound. We could only have three musicians. Luckily Fabian Hevia is such a versatile musician, he can play vibraphone and bongos and congas fantastic, South American percussion and a fantastic drummer.

FP:

Did you have to do any special research? Did you read the ‘Naked Lunch’ before you started composing music for ‘Birth of the Cool’?

PC:

I was a complete novice to all of this. I read ‘On the Road’. The poetry I was faced with in the script was enough for me to get into. I read ‘Howl’ in it’s entirety and it took a while for me to get used it and to warm to it and to see the intensity of the words. It’s the intensity of the words that really gets to me as a musician and they suggest things for us to do in the music. So I have tried to leave lots of space for improvisation or for Steve and Fabian and myself to respond night after night slightly differently to how John performs.

FP:

What is mix of what’s scored and what’s improvised on a nightly basis?

PC:

Suffice to say it will be very hard to present the score to different musicians and say here is a show play it or do it. You actually need to choose musicians who you know are going to be good improvisers and prophetic and that you’ve worked out a bit of a rapport with and that you trust. So there is in every piece there’s a lot that is written but there’s a lot that’s left to the imagination. I’ll say to Fabian - Can you supply a jungle safari beat under here and Steve and I are just going to place a few multiphonics at the most stinky words.

FP:

I often refer to you as being under recorded in this country. For a saxophonist of the calibre of yourself, your name just doesn’t appear enough on recordings. Who are you working with mostly at the moment? I saw you most recently with Sandy Evan’s Gest8.

PC:

A fantastic ensemble which I really enjoy however it’s only done two concerts. At the moment I am very busy with ‘Mara’, a world music group that specialises in Bulgarian, Macedonian, Greek, Turkish styles of folk music with our own original focus. This band has been going since 1984 I think and we’re just about to go on another European tour. We’ve been doing a lot of schools concerts for Musica Viva in schools, which is behind the scenes stuff too. But we’ve got a couple of concerts next week in preparation for this European tour. Another band is the Australian Art Orchestra which you don’t see much in Sydney. You don’t actually see it much anywhere. It’s based in Melbourne and it’s just been to Mexico recently with a program of music that was written by the orchestra quite a while ago with our good friends Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter who have recently started collaborating with the band with a program of their own music ‘Ruby’s Story’. There are two CD’s about to come out. One from each of those bands. ‘Ruby’s Story’ is going to be a really great album when that comes out and “Mara’s” next studio album which we actually recorded last year. I’ll be on both of those and very happy to be.