Portland, Part I

My reasons for moving to Portland, Oregon on Halloween of 2005 were fairly simple: I knew people there, it was on the west coast and I needed to get out of the San Francisco Bay Area rat race. My primary goal upon arriving in Portland was to entrench myself in the local experimental music scene. I was both excited and confident in the development of my personal musical vision that had been formed over five years of intensive listening, practice and performance while in the Bay Area, which offered an atmosphere of many talented, educated and/or veteran musicians hungry to discover sonic potentialities, both improvised and compositional. Upwards of a hundred of us bounced between several underground clubs, aggressively pushing boundaries and challenging conventions. We intentionally tortured our instruments with alternate tunings, techniques and all manner of objects. We liked things fractured, microtonal and transitory.

Among the first people I met in Portland, at a competent music performance I attended the Friday after my arrival, was a welcoming girl named Whitney. She was taking money at the door. I paid in loose change representing, very literally, the last of my life’s savings. When I mentioned I was a drummer and new in town, she invited me to play along as atmospheric accompaniment for a contact dance group on Monday night. I didn’t know what contact dance was, but it proved an interesting opportunity to explore percussive textures and ambiences. Afterwards, Whitney invited me to join a housewarming party at the yurt she was moving into on the outskirts of town. Yep- a yurt. It was actually in a sheep pasture, and you had to be wary of the ram on the walk in.

Whitney had said she was going to spend that day hiking a trail near her novel dwelling and anyone was free to join her, but I was the only person that showed up for that. We talked about our somewhat sympathetic, somewhat divergent plans for the future as we walked. Whitney was never shy about voicing her views but also listened respectfully to my overly-opinionated opinions. She was focused, but didn’t take herself seriously. I never worried about offending her and vice versa. After the walk, a group of around a dozen or so gathered in the yurt and we spent the evening eating snacks, stoking the wood fire and playing the card game “Mafia.” It was one of the best nights I would ever spend in Portland, and it was my second weekend there….

Not long after, I attended a gathering in a warehouse featuring a cast of musicians and dancers in a continuous 12 hour performance, perhaps to celebrate the winter solstice, although I don’t exactly recall. The possibilities in exploration and experimentation over such a long period promised to bring out the best in what Portland musicians had to offer. Instead, they just spent the seven hours I was there playing un-interactive atmospheric whole tones. My approach would have been to drain all of my energy into the music and then find a way to keep going; theirs was to conserve as much energy as possible. I suppose they were envisioning a meditation on understatement and simplicity, but I found it absolutely appalling.

The bulk of the “fringe” musicians in Portland were either into contemporary hip-hop like Kanye West or late 19th and 20th Century French Classical composers such as Messiaen and Saint-Saens. (There was also a strong interest in Indian Classical music, which I adore, but the pretentiousness of those who attended such events was through the roof.) Portlanders preferred pure tones, rustic melodies and soothing harmonies. It soon became evident that nobody was interested in my musical vision, which was heavily influenced by mid 20th century European improv., spearheaded by the likes of Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker and Alexander von Schlippenbach. To the uninitiated, it sounds like noise, and indeed the musicians I encountered who attempted pure improv. did so by simply making noise, which I found infuriating and they observed to be pointless.

I decided to take things into my own hands and developed a monthly class introducing improvisational music concepts, expanding on a project I had curated at a venue in Oakland before it got turned into a parking lot. I held these workshops, thanks to Noah Mickens, in one of the surprisingly few performance venues in town. It lasted for about four sessions, and then Noah was fired as the promoter for that club.

I was invited to participate as part of a series of duet performances organized by Tim DuRoche, who was essentially the only jazz drummer in town and also someone familiar with the Bay Area scene. I had continued to join and play along with Whitney and the other contact dancers every Monday, and chose one of them to be the other half of my duet. I think Whitney was a bit miffed I didn’t choose her, but her dancing style was hip, elegant and suave, whereas the girl I wanted to work with was intense, abrupt and somewhat bipolar. Because Music and Dance by Derek Bailey and Min Tanaka is one of those pieces that had profoundly affected me about five years prior, I was very keen on the prospect, and indeed I thought our performance was fantastic.

Playing music is controlling an avalanche of moments in time. I endeavored to pour my entire being into each one of those moments. There were times when I felt this task had been successful to the point that I’d feel as I’d become detached from my body or begin seeing the music as colors or creatures, and whenever that occurred, I sort of had this anticipation, when the music finally stopped, that the entire universe would have been somehow radically changed. Perhaps the audience would be so alight with epiphanies they’d begin floating toward the ceiling or something. Instead, in California anyway, these moments would be met with polite applause. In Portland, they were met with the audience politely asking each other if there was any way to politely remove themselves from earshot as quickly as possible.

After the duet performance, the dancer said she was not interested in doing any other work together. I contacted and played with every musician whose name and number I could get a hold of, but nothing developed. I played several times with a girl who sang with an almost-absurd child-like voice, and finally she explained she was looking for a drummer like the one that played for Neutral Milk Hotel. After listening to one of their albums, I suggested she should find a young, inexperienced drummer enthusiastic about showing off the one lick they had learned, and she did.

In the meanwhile, I had quickly acquired a job a few blocks from the room-share where I lived, at a UPS Store. It was a really dumb job and I had to work weekend. Despite that, I kept a busy social life that first winter in Portland, due to Whitney always including me on various group excursions. I would not realize how novel being sociable during the winter was in Portland until later. Also, the weekend work was relatively fun because the managers weren’t there and my co-workers were often just Rachel and Cole, and the three of us got along famously.

Whitney was originally from Illinois, and I don’t even think she had been in Portland very long, but because she was the first person I met there, she had completely skewed my perception of the so-called City of Roses. In the spring, she moved away and joined a successful dance troupe based in New York City. I stopped going to the Monday night contact dance thing and gave up looking for musicians to play with. I finished up a manual on drumming insights that I had begun shortly after moving to the Bay Area back in 2000. For many years now, music had been more important to me than life itself. It seemed now that all music was good for was making me delusional. It was time to change that paradigm, and learn to enjoy living.

Rachel and I decided we should get jobs where we had the weekends free. After doing so, we spent the summer camping in the various environments offered throughout Oregon and Washington. It was sublime.