Ive long enjoyed harpist Zeena Parkins work, both as an improviser and as a composer who can seamlessly (or

with very cool seams) integrate free or structured improvs with through-composed elements. Some of her many recordings (shes on nearly 100), including Isabelle, PanAcousticon, Mouth-Maul-Betrayer, and Ursas Door, are such fine models of this integrative ability, that I began to wonder why she wasnt mentioned more often in the same breath as masters like Anthony Braxton. Could it be that her activity in the downtown scene had, paradoxically, made her less, rather than more visible as an independent artist? I decided to try to find out. After sending Ms. Parkins a pretty lengthy batch of questions via email, she indicated that she wanted to do a face-to-face supplement. When we got together in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton early last September, I still harbored some hope that she might respond to earlier unaddressed questions, so I tried to think of additional things I hadn'tasked her yet-and mostly stay away from ground I'd already covered in my lengthy email questionnaire. The following will show pretty clearly that I couldn't think of much. It may also reflect the fact that the friend who'd promised to loan me a portable recorder that morning forgot to bring it when she visited, so I'd had to rush over to a Radio Shack to pick one up at the last minute, and was embarrassed about being late at the Ritz. For what ever reasons, it was a generally off-putting colloquy, but not, I think, through any fault of Zeena's: she was forthcoming and articulate. Her occasional defensiveness (partially excised here) I credit to my inability to put her at ease. Perhaps because I didn't know what to ask that I hadn't already asked, I felt unprepared and nervous. For her part, she didn't know who the hell I was, what Bagatellen was, or really, I think, what I was doing in her hotel lobby across from the Commons just after noon on a gloomy Sunday in Boston. She was nearing the end of a grueling three-continent tour with Bjork, and I thought it might be more relaxed to catch her at a bar beforeor after a show, but she, apparently, prefers not to do this sort of thing on a gig day. So it was tea and pastries instead of beer and buzz. But I dont want to blame the absence of background noise. I think it's just that I'm largely incapable of eliciting anything terribly interesting in an interview setting. It's too formal for me, too unnatural. Anyhow, since I never did get answers to any of my previously emailed questions, the following excerpts from our talk are, unfortunately, all Ive got to share with bag readers. W. I just talked to Gary Lucas this morning and he said he met you in Slovenia, and he said you told him you didnt like touringof course you probably werent staying in the Ritz back then.

Z. (Laughs) I mean sometimes touring is really hard, but, Ive been doing it for twenty years so I must kind of like it.

W. Its hard though, isnt it? Your in a different place every... Z. Well, this particular tour I could never say was hard. Weve been doing one, sometimes two shows a week, so basically Ive been staying in one place for at least three days a week, sometimes four or five. And weve been staying in pretty luxurious surroundings and having time off to go to museums, walk around the cities were in, and really take in the environment before we actually do the shows.

W. And how does this compare with the gigs in your early days in the improv scene? Z. Well, touring with bands like No Safety (and Skeleton Crew was a bit like this too), was pretty basic and bare bones, you know, sleeping in peoples homes. But, you know, I never really minded that. Its a whole other thing. Its often the promoter that would put you up in their own home. It was somebody that wanted you to do a gig so much they were willing to open up their home to four or five people, make you a wonderful meal, and took such good care of you. Its different than staying in a fancy hotel, and in some ways...I dont know if its better, but its certainly more personal.

W. Is there any opportunity for improv with Bjork? Z. Not a lot in this batch of material. The song that I wrote with her that were performing has a few places, not so much for improv, but for changes to how its played. And Bjork is incredibly responsive to any changes that I make. Shes an absolutely fantastic listener and responds directly to what she hears as much as any improviser Ive ever played with. W. Theres not a lot of space to improvise in a two-minute tune.

Z. No, but I mean in these situations its not necessary to have improvisation, theyre not constructed to have it. But there is construction for interpreting the songs in various ways. And shes very responsive to that, which makes it interesting to play the same songs over and over again as you do on a tour like this. W. Youre about to have a chamber opera of yours premiered, right? Z. Yeah, Im working on a piece called Yen Zeitz. Its an all-German production with Elliot Sharp and myself as the composer and musicians performing on stage with one actor. Its being produced by an American woman dramateur who is responsible for putting this all together. W. Did she write the libretto? Z. No, the libretto was written by the German playwright/writer Walter Frisch, and its being directed by Tomas Kupa (?) whos a young, up-andcoming director. Its being produced by Theatre Bonn, which is a big opera theater in Bonnthey have a smaller more experimental they use for productions like this. It opens on the 26th of September for eight shows. W. Exciting. And what are the instrumental forces? Z. Its orchestrated for Elliot on bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, acoustic and electric guitars and laptop; and Im playing acoustic harp, electric harp, synthesizer, piano and accordion. Actually, the orchestration is pretty diverse, considering its just two people. W. The only work like this I know of yours is Opium Wars. Z. Yeah, this project is different in a number of ways. This is a cocomposer project, so, out-of-the-gate, its a very different. W. Is any of it sung? The Opium Wars is mostly incidental music, isnt it?

Z. Well, there are a couple songs in Opium Wars, but I dont think there are going to be any songs in this. Theres some speech-singing, but theres no song proper in it. The text is quite dense and the actor isnt really a singer. He does vocalise some, but hes not really someone who would want to be singing a song on stage. Like an opera, though, music is carrying emotional weight in this piece, so in that sense, were sticking to our guns and calling it an opera. W. I notice that in the recording, some of charactersall ostensibly of the same family have heavy Latino accents, while others have none. Is that intentional? Are the accents real? Z. Oh yes. It was a multi-cultural cast. Nobody was faking any accents. W. What do you make of the New York City scene today? I have this sense of it being what a friend of mind has called an a la carte culture now. Someones favorite musicians might be John Lennon and Alvin Lucier, or, for poets, Snoop Doggy Dog, Yeats, and Dr. Seuss. Its very open and democratic, but theres no real connection. Z. In a way I think its fantastic. How great that someone would listen to John Lennon and Alvin Lucier, that even they could be in someones same breath? I mean, they know about musique concrete, they listen to Matmos, its so open. Maybe its because of the internet: theres so much information available that was never really at peoples fingertips in the past. W. But I wonder if so-called creds matter anymore. You know, the background, the study. You know someone can just hook a microphone to their chest for a couple of hour, and get a standing ovation for, you know, breathing. Is there no more need to make any connection with the past greats, to study your art? Z. I dont know. I think people find ways to make music, and some people have really great musical minds, and it doesnt matter if theyve studied formally or not. Other people can study for years and will never something profound come out of them. I say this kind of coming from both places. I come from a really musical family thats highly trained. My mom is a pianist and piano teacher who still performs. My sisters went to Juilliard and were super highly trained. I sort of went to a certain point. I studied in college in a music school, but abandoned it, so Im really familiar with what that training is. But on the other hand, Im also

really familiar with what that training doesnt provide. So youll never convince me that you need to be trained to make something profound. On the other hand, yeah, there are certainly a lot of people sitting in front of laptops, and its completely uninspiring both performatively and musically. So you could say it swings both ways. Basically, like with everything, you just have to judge it one artist at a time. There are some great musical laptop artists and there are some that are just, you know, playing pre-sets. The same is true for sax players, piano players, everybody. Pre-sets get equated to riffs when youre talking about acoustic instruments. W. I sometimes get the feeling that people are very moved by ambient sounds. A subway station, a hotel lobby, a swimming pooltheyre moved by that. And their goal is to somehow reproduce that in some way. Some people attempt it by writing string quartets, others by making field recordings of, well, subway stations and swimming pools.... Z. Well, the whole concept of what Erik Satie called furniture music which is background music that you dont really notice. All these fairly old ideas are in the foreground today. You can think of a hotel lobby as a sound environment that could be musical. And, again, its what you do with it, you know? Theres a guy named Chris Watson that makes these amazing recordings of nature. Every microphone is considered, placement is considered. He does close-ups of animals breathing, and its completely musical and a beautiful listening experience. But it depends on your intent and how you shape your content. Theres a big awareness that anything can be artany sound can be put in a musical environment now. Anythings up for grabs. W. And youre obviously excited by this development. Certainly you dont find it at all disturbing. Z. Well it doesnt seem particularly like a new idea. I mean its not a new idea. Its at least fifty years old if not more. Guys in the mid-last century, Schaffer and the whole French school and Stockhausen in Germany. I mean this is stuff thats been floating around for years. Its not like its the latest new thing! Its just that computer today makes easy what wasnt easy to do then. Now it can be done with the push of a button. W. Your own work ranges over an incredibly wide range of styles, from small, written song forms, to night-long improvs, psychedelic jams to through-written chamber works, solos to orchestral. Is it a conscious

thing to try to do a little of this and then move to a little of that, to move forward on all fronts in turn? Z. No, no, I dont work like that at all. Because a lot of the work I do is collaborations, especially with choreographers and video artists, a lot of the work that ends up coming out on record is a product of a specific project that Ive been doing that sort of inspires a certain kind of orchestration or a certain kind of way of making the music. And theres some other projects that I did with Zorn which was more like OK, I have this group of musicians and so I made what I consider this trilogy which consists of Isabelle, Mouth-Maul-Betrayer, and Pan-Acousticon which was working with strings and percussion plus the harps and samplers. W. I love those. Z. Theyre three attempts to work with the same general orchestration in extended forms. Its not random. Generally, theres a request or a reason or something that Im exploring at the time that demands that I use a certain orchestration or certain form. W. The styles also vary. Z. They do a bit, yeah, but I think, generally, you can tell. Certainly when you hear the harp you always know its me. My playing is very distinctive, so thats very identifiable, but I think in a way even the writing, how I combine the elements is also recognizable. As I see it, the way you hear that its me playing harp is the way that you see that its me doing some of the writing. W. Yeah, well anyway I certainly find that I like pretty much all of it. Whether its the purely improvised stuff like Live in Easthampton or the stuff thats largely written, so theres obviously some sensibility thats in common there. Regarding the Zorn projects, did he push the Jewish thing, or was that something you were already investigating? Z. No, he offered me the project, and if I wanted to be on that little part of his label it had to be Jewish. Actually, I didnt necessarily feel compelled to do a project like that until I kind of figured out the subject. I mean, Id thought about it, and I knew what I wanted to stay away from, but I didnt immediately know what I was going to do until I got the idea for the

Jewish gangsters. My friend Anthony Coleman was the one who told me about Rotwelsch So, between those two things, thats when it came together, and it was like Yes! Thats what Ill do, that makes so much sense to me as a topic for this part of his label! So it wasnt like I was knocking on Zorns door and saying Ive got this great idea for a Jewish record. It definitely didnt work like that. W. Was your up-bringing particularly religious? Z. No, my paternal grandfather was a rabbi, but we were more into the historical than the religious point of view. W. It sounds like theres a Shtetl tune at the beginning of Mouth-MaulBetrayer. Z. Its actually a Russian folksong. Its something my dad used to sing, so its not Klezmer at all. It comes from deep in the heart of Russia. My father was born in Russia. While we were growing up, he had this whole repertoire of songs hed constantly sing. W. Is there any other folk music in there? Z. Not in that one. W. In your other works? Z. Well, in Isabelle theres some folk music from North Africa, if you want to call it that. Other than that, no. W. Youve done so much work over the year with guitarists, particularly electric guitarists. This seems, in a way, like a counter-intuitive ensemble, e-harp and e-guitar. How did this come about--was it just accidental Z. I guess its my fascination with strings again. Most of the guitarists Ive worked with are really doing different kinds of things with guitar as well, and Ive always had kind of an extended ideawhether its with alternative tunings, or alternative ways of playing, or using preparations, or playing guitar on a tabletop or your lap. I just try to find guitarists that

have equally extended ways of thinking about their instrument as I have with the harp. So it seemed like a natural fit. I wasnt consciously pursuing this strings thing, but once you see all these connections, it seems like nothing is really random. Ive done a lot of things with percussion too, and these Tzadik recordings seem like extensions of a lot of the other things Ive been doing. W. Do you think that the many great guitarists youve worked with Frith, Sharp, Moore, Renaldo, Nels Clinehave other things in common besides that desire to extend their instruments capability that youve been talking about? Z. Theyre only similar in their notion that theres no right way to play guitar. They each have a particular, individual vocabulary thats completely distinctive. But that no right way vision ties themand me together.