A Q&A With SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director Laurie Anderson
November 9, 2018 | by Richard Scheinin
SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director Laurie Anderson
From downtown lofts to MTV and the Letterman show, Laurie Anderson’s 50-year career has been a remarkable thing to behold. Both avant-gardist and pop celebrity, she is a violinist and composer, storyteller and software designer, author and children’s book illustrator, poet and performance artist, painter and sculptor. She has been an artist-in-residence at NASA and lately has turned her attention to virtual reality.
We spoke to Anderson, 71, about her upcoming debut as a resident artistic director at SFJAZZ. It includes a Listening Party (Nov. 28, sold out); a night of her “Songs for Women” (Nov. 29, with pianist Tammy Hall, also sold out); and an extended piece titled “Lou Reed Drones,” built around the overtones, harmonics and feedback generated by half a dozen of her late husband Lou Reed’s guitars (Nov. 30, at Grace Cathedral). Anderson also performs her “Songs for Men” (Dec. 1, with drummer Scott Amendola) and concludes her residency with a program titled “Scenes from My Radio Play” (Dec. 2, with guitarist Fred Frith).
When we called Anderson on her cell phone, she was trying to find a seat in a crowded coffee shop near her loft in Manhattan. Unable to find an empty spot, she simply plopped down on the floor and answered our questions.
Q: I imagine SFJAZZ offered you a blank canvas – that you can do anything you want with your residency?
A: They did. I’ve done this before. I’ve been a festival director quite a few times and I know it needs to have a certain coherence. It needs to grow in a certain way – basically, you invite all your friends over to play and try to make the situations that create the most fun. I’m basing things on John Zorn’s way of working, which is “don’t come in and do one thing for one show. Come in and do a whole lot of things and see what happens.”
Q: Aside from having fun, how do you create the coherence?
A: I want this residency to feel personal. I once wrote a piece called “Sol” – for Sol LeWitt, my sculpture teacher – and I learned that it’s interesting to create music with a specific person in mind. When I think back on songs I’ve done, many were definitely written with particular people in mind, but I somehow didn’t get that personal detail into the songs and they became a little more abstract. So now I’m thinking about composers who sit at the piano, and how they look at these framed photographs that they set on the piano while they compose. And I kind of aspire to that as I put this series together – that is, to make it very personal music.
Q: “Lou Reed Drones” is pretty personal.
A: That’s going to be an amazing night. Regardless of where you put the guitars, the listeners become kind of helpless, sliding down the walls and onto the floor with all those beautiful overtones and waves. It’s not like listening in a theater, where you have that separation between the audience and what’s on stage. The lines are totally blurred.
Q: Doing it in a cathedral will add to the intensity and the mood, don’t you think?
A: Wherever we do this, it is the same mood of paying attention and being open that you might have in a church – combined with lots and lots of loud sound.
Q: At Grace Cathedral, you’ll have to factor in its famous seven-second reverb. That’s going to add something to the drones.
A: Are you serious? I didn’t know about the reverb. That’s going to be insane! People will really be sliding down the walls.
Q: How much new material will you perform during the residency?
A: I’d say it’ll be 50/50, between the new things and some things I’ve done before. And right now, I’m planning on keeping it simple – no visuals, just music and stories. But that could change. I always change things to the very last second.
Q: You’re the unpredictable type, Laurie.
A: Maybe because I’m working in a lot of distant disciplines – painting, sculpture – I’m not so afraid of changing forms and formats. An aria followed by a guitar solo? That’d be great, you know? I’m not following a program, a formula. I’m just trying to make something that will be surprising for people… I’m just trying to jump in and see what I can stir up.
A staff writer at SFJAZZ, Richard Scheinin is a lifelong journalist. He was the San Jose Mercury News' classical music and jazz critic for more than a decade and has profiled scores of public figures, from Ike Turner to Tony La Russa and the Dalai Lama.