"Am I chasing windmills
here?" asks Mark Dresser, pausing after providing a detailed rundown
of the sophisticated equipment he uses to capture the astonishing bitones
and subharmonics he coaxes from his contrabass. "You do wonder
if it's a Don Quixote thing. At the same time, I have no choice. I've
got to do it, I'm compelled."
Well known to avant-garde
jazz audiences for his nine-year tenure in composer and saxophonist
Anthony Braxton's quartet, Dresser is one of a handful of acoustic bassists
advancing the instrument's role in both contemporary composition and
improvisation. His trailblazing involves not only a staggering variety
of extended arco and pizzicato techniques, but also a radical assortment
of custom-made electronics and preamplifiers.
Dresser's flair for innovation
has made him a most valuable player in the "creative music"
circles that overlap between jazz and modern classical music. He has
recorded with saxophonists John Zorn and Jane Ira Bloom, trumpeter Dave
Douglas, trombonist Ray Anderson, bassist Mark Helias, percussionist
Susie Ibarra, pianists Marilyn Crispell and Satoko Fujii, guitarist
Nels Cline, cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, and pop performance star Laurie
Anderson. He also has composed music for solo bass and ensembles that
include tuba, cello, violin, clarinet, steel drums, and contrabass flute,
and he's created newly minted original scores for the classic silent
films Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and for contemporary avant-garde videos by Tom Leeser (Sonomanopaeia),
the Kunst Brothers (Subtonium), and animator Sarah Jane Lapp
(Chronicles of an Asthmatic Stripper).
Last fall, he ascended in
lofty social circles when he played a private gig for the president
of the World Bank that featured a piece arranged by rock star Bono (based
on a Yeats poem) and performances by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist/National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
But if anything excites
him more than collaboration it's the instrument itself. "The contrabass
is a sound machine," says the 51-year-old Los Angeles native. "It's
incredibly expressive and the physical joy of playing it has sustained
me for over 40 years. Socially, the bass has been a fantastic instrument
for me. When I was growing up, it put me at social ease in a way that
my personality alone wouldn't have."
At 16, Dresser first heard
contrabass master Bertram Turetzky, who would become his primary mentor.
"He would do this thing called a double glissando, where he would
tremolo on both sides of his finger, and get ascending and descending
glisses at the same time," Dresser recalls. "Once I started
finding all this real cool stuff, like noticing that when I would hammer-on
a B flat on the G string I'd get a minor ninth and it sounded like [Jimi
Hendrix's] 'Foxy Lady,' I became terminal."
While living in southern
California, Dresser played avant-garde jazz in LA with cornetist Bobby
Bradford, flutist James Newton, and others; performed with the San Diego
Symphony; and earned his BA and MA from the University of California
at San Diego. In 1986, after traveling to Italy on a Fulbright Fellowship,
he settled in New York City to join Braxton's quartet. While playing
in Tambastics—with flutist Robert Dick and percussionist Gerry
Hemingway—and Arcado—with violinist Mark Feldman and cellist
Hank Roberts—he deepened the explorations of solo bass that had
produced his 1980 debut CD Invocation (Knitting Factory, 173).
"You take a string
and divide it in half and suddenly you're dealing with proportions of
strings and all the resultant pitches," he says. "Then if
you start dividing the string with two hands, you're talking about three
different lengths of string and playing them in tune. It can get mentally
pretty wacky. Of course, it all disappears when I play with someone
else, so the question becomes how to amplify it."
Although Dresser used them
initially in Arcado, he quickly lost interest in the "classic processing"
techniques of digital delay and harmonization. "If it's just an
effect, it's shallow and I let it go," he says. "I'm interested
in amplifying what's already there in the qualities of the instrument."
From a strap-on pickup that
he called the "giffus," heard on 2002's Aquifer (Cryptogramophone,
111) by the Mark Dresser Trio (with Matthias Ziegler on electro-acoustic
flutes and Denman Maroney on prepared "hyperpiano"), Dresser
has advanced to a rig that includes two low-impedance pickups (made
by bassist/engineer Kent McLagan) built into the fingerboard and a high-impedance
David Gage pickup at the bridge, feeding signals into a preamplifier
(built by Jim Hemingway). He has the same system installed in both his
modern Hungarian bass "with a fake Italian label" and his
main instrument, a 1901 Hawkes Professor.
"This has been a 20-year
science project," he says. "But it's not like a tunnel I'm
going into alone. My friends Denman and Matthias in particular have
done similar things on their respective instruments. But you don't have
any idea where it's going, and you wonder if it has bigger resonance
for other composers and bass players, or if it's just another eccentric
idea in the history of music."
