Whose Drumline is it Ayway?
Written by Anushree Majumdar | Published: December 16, 2017 12:18 am ..
Written by Anushree Majumdar | Published: December 16, 2017 12:18 am Jojo Mayer
This is not jazz music,” a man grumbled under his breath a few minutes after Jojo Mayer and his band Nerve took the stage at the recently-concluded Goa International Jazz Festival. But even he seemed transfixed by what he was hearing: improvised live music with electronic textures, and a 54-year-old Swiss drummer whose playing echoed a drum machine. Known for his “reverse engineering” abilities, Mayer and Nerve use jazz’s improvisational techniques to create an interaction between live drumming and electronic music. At the venue, Stone Water Eco Resort, Bogmalo, Mayer talks about creating illusions, the future of performance and magic.
Excerpts from a conversation:
You’re an amateur magician. What got you interested in magic?
Magic to me is a way to reclaim the loss of innocence of childhood. As we grow up and become adults, we become corrupted by knowledge, and magic is a space where we can suspend that knowledge for just a moment. You’ve also said that knowledge, the academic kind, has distorted the narrative around jazz music. The problem with academia is that somehow, it co-opts certain ideas and this becomes a problem when we talk about art, or say, in this case, jazz. There have always been great ideas in religion, politics and art, and it is just a matter of time till those ideas become co-opted by interests that are different from the value that created those ideas. With jazz, if you try and control the rules and the style, then that becomes more important than the expression itself. If you use a knife the same way, the blade becomes dull. What we try with Nerve, is to find a new syntax.
Between 1996-2001, you hosted Prohibited Beatz, a night where live musicians played music traditionally played by a DJ. From jazz to electronic music, how did that shift happen?
In the ’90s, electronic music came about with a new dynamic, and programmed beats that articulate the digital age that we live in. I became obsessed and was trying to find a way to reconcile electronic music with improvisation, and things that a machine cannot do as yet. As a performer, improvisation has been the most fascinating aspect and the most rewarding one, because it’s that zone where you really become creative, in the moment. It’s the opposite of planning, is fuelled by intuition, and that’s what separates us from machines. In music and in life, stepping into the unknown takes courage.
Is that why you named your band Nerve?
Nerve came out of Prohibited Beatz as a collective of musicians who jam and experiment; we started to get a lot of attention very quickly. A journalist from NYT asked me what the name of the band was, and I didn’t really have a name yet. So, I improvised (chuckles) and said Nerve. In retrospect, I think it’s fine, because Nerve is about how information travels through our analog bodies as it relates to the circuitry of a computer — just like our music.
You received your first drum kit when you were two. Fifty two years later, what do you strive for?
Electronic music creates a certain level of perfection that we as humans aren’t able to do. As a drummer, I cannot play like a drum machine, but I realised that I could create the illusion that I can. So, I abandoned the concept of perfection from my artistic vocabulary and replaced it with clarity. They’re related but they’re not the same. Perfectionism implies an egotistical point of view, which can be a trap, whereas clarity is about getting the point across.
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