A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH WALLY SHOUP


The name Wally Shoup should ring bells to anyone is a hardcore free jazz listener. But with his recent releases on Leo Records, Shoup will have a bin card at Tower Records and that is the first step toward the mainstream. Not to worry though, I doubt Shoup is going to sell out. It doesn't fit the M.O. of a man who basically started playing his instrument in his late twenties. And it shows in the humility of the man and the maturity of his playing. I am pleased to introduce Wally Shoup to the Roadshow, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

WALLY SHOUP: I am definitely an exception because I didn't pick up an instrument until I was twenty-seven. My first record was eighty-one when I was almost thirty-seven, so I'm a late bloomer. I became interested in music when I was eight or nine years old. I'm from the South and I got interested listening to black radio. When I was eight or nine years old, I got into black music. Basically, I was a listener of music until the early Seventies, when I made the move from listener/appreciater/obsessive record collector to player. I was basically into black music, blues, R&B, soul music in a big way and then when free jazz came along in the mid to late Sixties, I was also very drawn to that as an extension of my interest in black music in general. It was an opening up period for me musically. I was living in Atlanta, Georgia and that was during the period when music was expanding, rock, free jazz, free improvisation. That was a period of expansion and I opened myself up to all the stuff that was going on then. I was just a sponge. I was really drawn to the free alto players of that era, Marion Brown, Noah Howard, Sonny Simmons, I just found myself really drawn to that sound.


FJ: The alto players that recorded for the ESP label.

WALLY SHOUP: Yeah, definitely, I liked all of that. I liked Ayler of course. I liked all the tenor players like Coltrane, Shepp, and Pharoah and all those people. But for some reason, the alto spoke to me in more of a personal way. Another guy I really liked from that era, because I came into jazz from rock and blues, but there was a record by Soft Machine, Third, that was a British rock/jazz outfit and Elton Dean played alto and saxello and that was another guy that I really just liked. I didn't even know who he was. I just liked the sound and the phrasing. At the same time, because of my upbringing, I wasn't encouraged as a kid to be creative. I never saw myself as being a musician. Since all this music was basically black musicians, I really felt that that was their domain. I didn't feel like I could be an authentic player in that area. So I was more like an appreciater and an obsessive record collector. And then somewhere in the early Seventies, I moved to Colorado and I heard Music Improvisational Company, a record on ECM and it did something different to me. It opened my mind to a whole new area of music. It was bewildering. I couldn't really understand or put my finger on it, but I was fascinated by it. So I started delving more into British free improvisation and as time went on, I started imagining that this could be a music that I could sort of incorporate myself into somehow. I could develop a language and a vocabulary and find like minded people to play with. Slowly, but surely, I found people willing to do this in Colorado. Eventually, I got on a real serious practice regimen and just decided that this was what I wanted to do as a musician. At the same time, I started painting. I decided that I was tired of looking at art. I wanted to make art. I felt like that was the only way that I could start understanding it more. At a certain degree, the same thing with music. I could only go so far as a listener and to understand it further, I was going to need to go inside it and play. So I started painting in a very free form, abstract, self-taught way and did the same thing with the music. Then I decided that this would be a music that I wouldn't have any real goals with in terms of career ambitions. I just would see where it would take me. Here I am talking to you.


FJ: What were you following, the Euro collective improvisations or the black "new thing" in the States?

WALLY SHOUP: Both of those, the black free jazz and the more, sort of, abstract collectivist, "non-idiomatic" European music. I tried to incorporate those languages with a punk spirit. I really, really liked The Stooges in the Seventies. I liked that energy. I like the energy of black free jazz. I like the rhythmic explosiveness of it. In my music today, I try to stay true to that spirit. So I am not really sure if the older guard, in their maturation, may have moved away from that spirit toward a more conservative approach.


FJ: How rigorous was your practice regimen?

WALLY SHOUP: At first, I just sort of practiced, kind of acquainting myself with the horn, learning the mechanics. For a long time, I thought that this was something that I was going to privately do for my own satisfaction. So I practiced all this off the saxophone vocabulary. Then, as I grew and developed and started playing with more skilled players, I basically, over a period of time, have gotten more command, more control of the sax and really started practicing. I started practicing two to four hours a day once I turned fifty. I really get a lot from practicing. I really enjoy it. I find that it is just a very good thing to center me everyday and to feel like I am working on something and enriching my voice as a player. I am one of these people that really believes that art is something that is inside you, inside all of us, but you have to go work hard to get it. You have to work hard to get to it, so you can bring it out.


FJ: I initially caught wind of your art from a live recording in '99 when Hurricane Floyd was basically battering the Eastern seaboard.

WALLY SHOUP: We left Philadelphia that morning to drive to Boston. Talk about nightmare. I knew that the weather was bad on the East Coast, but when we started driving and it kept getting worse (laughing), you could hardly see. Nobody said that the gig was off, so we figured unless it gets to the point where the roads are so wet that we can't drive, we're going to get there. Actually, the interesting thing was when we got to the turnoff when you go into Cambridge, that is when we started worrying that we weren't going to make the gig. The traffic was going nowhere. We were maybe half a mile from this church and thought we weren't going to make it. We finally got there and then I found out the same thing with Thurston. He was coming from North Hampton. All the forces conspired for us to be there and it was a testimony to his drawing power. There were a lot of people there. So when we finally started playing because we had never played together. I played with Toshi many times. I know him from the early Eighties when I lived in Birmingham. He had never played with Thurston and I had never played with Thurston. There we were.


FJ: And then there is the new Leo session recorded live at Tonic, which features underground superhero Paul Flaherty.

WALLY SHOUP: I knew of Paul. There were a few guys that I would see as my peers age wise and he is one of them. Jack Wright would be one. Guys that have dedicated their playing to free playing, almost exclusively, and also playing saxophone. I knew of Paul. I had heard some of his stuff back in the Eighties on cassette. I knew some people that had moved to Seattle from Hartford, who when they heard me would ask me if I had heard of Paul Flaherty. But I had never played with him and never corresponded with him. But Thurston had played with him and Chris definitely had. He and Chris had been playing as a duo for a while. Chris set this up along with Thurston to put together a quartet with me and Paul on the assumption that some sparks would fly when we played and that we would also, based on their knowledge of both of us, that we would enjoy getting to know each other and exchanging war stories, etc. There is roughly two and a half more hours of that quartet. If anything, the studio recordings are more intense than the gig. I hope some of that stuff comes out at some point because it is actually better recorded and Chris or somebody can mix it so we get a real good balance. The CD was recorded by a documentarian of Sonic Youth, Chris Habib. That was done with a video mic, video camera mic, which I think is remarkable. It is a remarkably faithful recording. Usually live recordings, particularly when you have that much firepower on stage and an amplified instrument, usually, it may sound good at the gig, but it is hard to get that same sound with a live recording. But when I heard it, I thought it was great.


FJ: Have you and Thurston established a familiarity there?

WALLY SHOUP: A little, but not totally because we played a trio, me, him, and Chris during this tour, the one gig that we didn't play with Paul. To backtrack, I played a couple of other trios with him and Toshi after the Hurricane. Hurricane Floyd is interesting because that is a document of the very first time the three of us had played from the first note on. That was truly improvised. As we played together, I got a little more familiar with how he works, but this last time when we played in this trio with Chris, he will come up with things that will surprise me. He has a way of working, but he is also a developing improviser in the sense that he will try different things and I think he is becoming comfortable enough with me to where he can throw out different things and I can try to respond or incorporate what he is doing to the next phase of the improv. I think we are both comfortable that we can both get on stage and start playing. We started in the middle so to speak.


FJ: And you also have another new Leo recording with your trio.

WALLY SHOUP: Reuben Radding moved to New York. He was from New York and he was out in Seattle for about five years. We teamed up with this young drummer Bob Rees and played a number of gigs during 2001 and 2002 and then he left. I work with other drum-based configurations in Seattle, but that group, the one that is documented on Leo, probably won't exist as a working trio.


FJ: Improvised music in Seattle, particularly "new thing" or Euro improv, is flourishing.

WALLY SHOUP: Right now, it is quite interesting. It moves in waves. I have been out here since '85 and there has always been improvising scenes and places where the music can be played, but they come and go to a certain degree. Right now, it is a high point because there is a place in town called Polestar Music Gallery that is run by a fellow named henry Hughes, who is a real champion of the music. It is a dedicated space. It is a space just for out music. He helped produce this Leo CD for the trio. A lot is going on there as a place where people who are coming through Seattle can play and also where people in Seattle can play. Right now, there is a bumper crop of young guys in their early to mid-twenties, who are skilled on their instruments and are really aware of the history of this music and are exciting. I can say this, that it is lively and there is always something going on. The downside is that sometimes a nice venue will just quit and that is subject to the vagaries of economics.


FJ: Both the Earshot and the Improvised Music Festival feature creative avant-improv.

WALLY SHOUP: I have been an organizer. We just had our eighteenth Seattle Improvised Music Festival in February. I have been part of that since '85 and putting that on. We had Lovens, Rudi Mahall and Jeb Bishop and Torsten Mueller. Torsten Mueller is now living in Vancouver. There is some interesting things going on in Vancouver because you have Dylan van der Schyff up there and Peggy Lee. Between Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, there is a pretty nice mix right now.


FJ: And the future?

WALLY SHOUP: There is some stuff in the can and I am planning some recordings in the next couple of months. A lot of it has to do with the financial aspect of putting records out. I have been documenting my work since '81, when I put out this first LP. Getting music out sometimes requires a financial infusion from the player or someone else and that isn't always forthcoming. Also, my orientation playing this music has been from day one, playing this music with other people in real time. The recordings are important and people come to recognize you, but the recordings are, to me, secondary to live playing and the main thing I would want out of recordings is that that might be added incentive for me to keep playing this game and to find people that like to play and want to play with me. I see it as not so much as a career or building a catalog, but a way to keep this game vital and alive as an artist. I look at it as a very positive thing because by playing with Thurston, people are more interested in what I am doing. Hopefully, that will
lead to some more stuff in the future.

Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is Wang Chunging tonight. Comments? Email Him