LOLA DANZA: NEW ALBUM "LIVE FREE"

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Avant-garde free jazz singer Lola Danza, who is Brooklyn-based, released a new album in late February 2009. The record includes drumming from the legendary Rakalam Bob Moses. The singer has a recent interview published in www.allaboutjazz.com (the world's greatest jazz website)

Some excerpts are below. Lola had some interesting things to say about the nature of free music, and the voice ...

Lola On Free Improvisation

"... and from practising all those things, when you get musicians that are at this caliber, at such a high caliber, like RaKaLam (Moses) and Matt Langley and Wes Brown, it's so easy ... they put something out there and you respond off of what they're doing. So Simon, you said something about the response that was going on, and that's exactly what's happening. I mean, for me when I'm listening to these players and being inside of the music, there are four individual and equal voices and I'm just speaking to these other players and they're speaking to me and we're responding and not responding off of each other."

What about singing in different keys?

"You know I don't even know because I'm not even thinking in those terms ... but this music, you know it transcends paper. It's not about that. I just like the different transitions ... it goes through that we're creating together. We're composing together in the moment. No one is thinking about what key to play in … it's another type of playing … it's another type of hearing".

Did she give the others signals at all?

"No I don't give any signals. The signals that I give are with my voice, and these musicians, because they know how to hear ... I mean, there is a very important element of hearing in this type of music. Because I don't deal with pre-planned forms or compositions, it's all about hearing, so it's about hearing and accepting the player as they are. With these guys I am not trying to tell them, 'Hey, play this for me so that I can hear this and do that'. I don't do that and I don't like that. They come in, they know that I'm hearing, I'm accepting their playing as it is. I'm not trying to hear something or make it into something else. I just allow those guys to play what they love to play and I'm hearing ... and I choose these players because they're brilliant and sensitive and they understand music."

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"It's about another way of hearing music, it's a different way of listening, so when I'm hearing this music, I just hear the notes, the sounds, and I accept the sounds as they are, and then when you can do that, then you start to hear in a whole different way and it opens up your hearing and you hear behind the note. Because there is a whole concept - I mean just like when you're speaking to someone, the way you speak to a person, you can hear ... you don't even have to know the words they're saying, you can hear from the nuances within their voice … the sudden changes in pitch when they speak. You can hear certain sounds that go beyond verbalisation. So you don't have to actually say it. It just comes out. So that's the same thing with this type of playing."

Lola On Singing And The Voice As An Instrument

Who are her influences, as a singer? She mentions Maria Callas, Bjork, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O'Day, Aretha Franklin, Jeanne Lee, and Nina Simone. Danza: "Jeanne Lee is an avant garde jazz singer, really incredible. And she's one of my favorites. She has a great album called <em>Conspiracy<em/> (Earthforms, 1974) and there's another one with her and Ran Blake, a pianist - really great."

She also acknowledged, after another observation ventured by this writer, that at times on the new album she "does get into some tribal influence. I feel like the voice is a very flexible instrument. It's mind boggling. There's not a lot that has been explored as far as the palate of different sounds go, because there is such a vast palate of sounds that you can make with the voice. And if you look back through history, talking about tribal things around the world, the voice, the larynx, has about fifty five sets of different muscles within the larynx itself.

And if you talk to any linguistic specialist or what not, they'll tell you that when you are young you get used to using certain types of muscles within the voice, and that creates an accent so you have a certain style of talking because you are around certain areas or groups or whatever, so... a French person sounds very different from an Asian person or an African person or an American person... because we're using different parts of the throat and different muscles to create these sounds. So basically, what I think can happen through this type of music is the exploration of using different sounds with the voice to create, because if you think about it if you listen to a piano it has a certain type of sound, a saxophone has a certain type of sound. For instance, at a recent benefit concert that featured John Zorn, there was a pianist in his trio, Sylvie Courvoisier, who used mallets and duct tape on the strings of the piano to transcend the instrument.

Hal Crook does it with his Harmonizer on the Trombone. As an artist you try to transcend your instrument. Piano is a hard instrument to get different types of sounds out of it. I mean, if you look at someone like, in my opinion, Lowell Davison, a piano player, or even someone like Cecil Taylor, they have been able to transcend the piano sound by having so much technique, so many different imaginative ideas, and the ability to create so much within the moment. So, looking at the voice, what I'm hearing is ... At home, I'm practising how to make these different types of sounds with the voice and put them into a musical context and just explore the flexibility. The possibility of using the voice within music is limitless. I mean, it can be written into a symphony ... For example, Berlioz: I love his Requiem. He is actually having the choir comp for the (orchestra) - in Latin - and it's a trip to listen to 'cause he's using the instrumentation in a totally different way! So when I heard that, I thought ... that's another possibility. So what I'm looking for is the possibilities and the impossibilities of what the voice can do."

"The human voice is limitless and has not been fully explored, not by any means ... The human voice is capable of so many different things. And also for me, the human voice is really the connection, the essence of our being, of who we are, so in this music that's what I'm doing, I am allowing that connection to be seen no matter how personal ... it's who I am, and I am just allowing that to come out in this music."