E-Mail This Article to a Friend Freedom by design Butch Morris’s conductions leave little to chance BY JON GARELICK

The relationship between improvisation and composition is as old as jazz itself. The piece could be a detailed arrangement by Jelly Roll Morton or John Coltrane’s "Chasin’ the Trane" — an improvised performance with nothing agreed upon in advance except the tempo and the blues form. Charles Mingus — a fastidious, demanding jazz composer — looked to free his musicians from written scores and inspire more spontaneity by teaching them his music by ear. But perhaps no one in jazz has taken the idea of improvised compositions as far as Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris with his "conduction" technique — conducted improvisations. Now celebrating 20 years of that technique, Morris will perform three nights of conductions with a mix of Boston and New York musicians at the Green Street Grill June 15 through 17.

A California-bred cornettist and composer, Morris first came to the fore in the ’70s/early-’80s New York jazz loft scene, and then in his work as arranger and composer with saxophonist David Murray’s octet and big band. He says he began conductions as an outgrowth of his composing. "I realized that no matter what I was writing, I wanted to change it every time I played it," he tells me over the phone from New York. "To figure out how to reorchestrate it every time, or rearrange it every time — it became very important to me."

It’s not that the idea of spontaneous improvisation for large ensembles is altogether new. Sun Ra, Alan Silva, and others have explored conducted collected improvisations on the bandstand. But Morris has made it his own procedure.

How does conduction work? Rehearsing with an ensemble, Morris teaches the players his system of gestural notation — a vocabulary of hand, baton, and body language that can indicate dynamics, rhythm, repeats, and a variety of timbral and coloristic effects. He estimates that he has about 20 signs or gestures — though the number he uses is often limited to what can be learned during rehearsals. On performance night, he and the band make up a piece on the spot. The ensemble are not asked to recall any specific music or motifs from rehearsal — "I don’t call on anyone to remember anything we’re not doing at the time." The only thing they’re asked to remember at certain points is the music they’re creating during the performance.

Although he’d been experimenting with the idea of conduction for several years — pretty much since he saw drummer and educator Charles Moffett leading a rehearsal in a similar fashion out in Oakland in the early ’70s — Morris dates the first "full conduction" as a performance at New York’s Kitchen in 1985: "Conduction No. 1, Current Trends in Racism in Modern America," with a mix of downtown jazz and contemporary improv players like Frank Lowe, John Zorn, Thurman Barker, harpist Zeena Parkins, cello player Tom Cora, guitarist Brandon Ross, and modern-art turntablist Christian Marclay. He’s since performed conductions all over the world (a recent count put the total at 143), including one at Tufts University, where he was an artist in residence, in 1988. In 1995, New World Records released the 10-CD set Testament: A Conduction Collection, documenting 16 conduction performances beginning in 1988 in San Francisco with a group centered on the ROVA Saxophone Quartet (Conduction No. 11) and continuing through 1995 in Tokyo with a group playing strings, piano, electronics, and traditional Oriental instruments like koto and zheng (No. 50). This past February in New York, Morris took part in a month-long series of conduction residencies — every Monday with "a kind of funk-R&B band," Tuesdays with two different big bands, Wednesdays with an a cappella vocal group, Thursdays with an "electro-acoustic" ensemble, and Fridays with a jazz-oriented outfit that played blues and tangos.

A quick sampling of the New World set shows that, even though, as Morris says, "I don’t discuss tonalities, I don’t discuss keys, I don’t discuss melodic figures," the ensembles — and therefore the pieces — tend to settle into their own tonal-specific gravities. Morris often begins with a pianissimo sustain that builds and develops. The ROVA conductions show his taste for alternating crescendi and diminuendi and for dividing sections of development with unison staccato exclamations. At its most discordant, with sections of the ensemble grinding against each other, the ROVA piece recalls Michael Mantler’s old Jazz Composer’s Orchestra recordings of the late ’60s with the likes of Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry.

But on the whole, Morris’s conductions can be quite delicate, less like hard-blowing ’60s free jazz than like a jazz interpretation of Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen. He likes timbral variety along with dynamic range, and he’ll pit strummed harp against piano, high strings, and guitar. Although he calls the conductions "ensemble music," the occasional solo does poke its head out. Many of the conductions are 20 to 30 minutes long. Performed with a Florida State University School of Music group, Conduction No. 41 ("New World, New World"), after a 27-minute section, breaks down into four pieces all under eight minutes. In one of these, a little eight-note unison brass figure emerges as a kind of rhythmic backdrop for the various independent melodic lines buzzing about. In Conduction No. 15 ("Where Music Goes II"), where the line-up is heavily weighted toward New York jazz musicians, it’s Morris’s frequent collaborator J.A. Deane who provides much of the piece’s singular character, his electronics and samples bringing in famous snippets of old jazz pieces, like the ghosts of jazz past. And in Part III of the piece, the great alto-saxophonist Arthur Blythe enters as a soloist against the dreamlike ambiance — the closest Morris comes in his conductions to a conventional jazz solo feature.

"I think one of the reasons I put out the [New World] box is not because all of it is really great music but that it shows how some ensembles are ensembles," he says — and how the same vocabulary can elicit different results, and how a single ensemble can change over the course of several performances. "The character of the ensemble begins to show."

The success of the conductions depends on Morris’s ability to find compatible musicians and get enough rehearsal time. In Boston, he’ll have local clarinettist Todd Brunel, with whom he’s worked before, as well as a couple of musicians from New York, including accordionist Andrea Parkins. When we talked, he was still recruiting a bassoonist and a violist.

"I learned that once you take away a music stand and a piece of music from a musician, that’s when you find out who he really is," he points out. And despite the freedom of the improvisations, and the unpredictability of the results, he does want to "compose" a piece with his conduction ensembles. "I’m not interested in random, I’m not interested in chance. I’m really interested in a certain amount of risk, of course. However, there’s a great difference between risk and chance."

At this point, Morris has core groups of musicians all over the world whom he can call on when he tours. Individual orchestras are called Skyscrapers — Paris Skyscraper, Tokyo Skyscraper, New York Skyscraper. "The first thing I tell the musicians is, ‘After two hours of doing this, you’ll know whether you want to participate or not.’ Because a lot of musicians just cannot do this."

Or won’t. He tells the story of working with the classical Orchestra della Toscana for Conductions Nos. 57/58/59 ("Holy Sea") in the late ’90s. He’d been resisting an invitation from the orchestra because it wouldn’t give him enough rehearsal time. "Finally I said, ‘It will be a challenge I may never get again, so let me just go do it.’ " The first day of rehearsal was a disaster. Morris had removed the music stands and provided no music. "They came into the room and said, ‘Well, what are we going to do if we’re not going to read any music?’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re going to interpret this symbolic information.’ We fought. They were just going on, ‘This is not possible. This is not possible, you’re out of your mind, blah blah blah.’ "

The first day of the scheduled two-day rehearsal was a wash. When the arguments continued on the second day, Morris finally said, " ‘Listen, you’re the great Orchestra della Toscana, right?’ And they said, ‘Well, yes, we are, we have a great reputation in Italy.’ And I said, ‘Listen, I have no reputation in Italy — you give a bad concert, it’s on your conscience, not mine.’ And you know, they went out to have a coffee, and they came back ready to play." The result, he says, was "magical," one of his most satisfying conductions.

"Someone asked me some time ago, ‘What do you consider the difference between a good conduction and a bad conduction,’ and I think my only response is understanding — how much the musicians understand what they’re doing and where it’s going. Because a lot of times, unfortunately, musicians forget what they’re supposed to be doing. And the only thing they’re supposed to be doing is making music. That’s the only thing they’re supposed to be doing. Often musicians think I’m trying to make them do something, and the only thing I’m trying to make them do is make music."

Butch Morris leads conduction performances June 15 at 10:30 p.m., June 16 at 11 p.m., and June 17 at 11:30 p.m. at the Green Street Grill, 280 Green Street in Central Square; call (617) 876-1655.