Jeff Beer (Odin) : une entrevue exclusive

Version française :
Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5 - Page 6
Page 7 - Page 8 - Page 9 - Page 10

 

Flavien Debacker : Jeff, let’s go back to the early years, in your prime youth, you’re interested in art and music. Then, you start your musical career as guitarist and soon organ. How did you get the passion and what were your influences ?

Jeff Beer : Your first question is a kind of fundament or a root to all of the following – therefore, please allow me to go a little deeper into the matter – I am not a friend of maiming abbreviations. I don’t mind if nobody will read this passage because it surely will turn out far too long, but it’s so interesting for me to take your question serious and use it like a time machine trying to have a deep view back into time and space of the very beginnings… And besides I believe that the beginning is the most important of all. It’s the very nucleus… Both music and visual arts – at first foremost drawing and painting – have been with me since my early childhood. I was drawing and painting all the time. Reproductions of the old masters – regardless whether I found them in art books, illustrated bibles or cigar boxes, later in school books where, in those years opposed to today, you could find many excellent old masters – have magically drawn my attention. Born and living in the remote rural countryside of North Eastern Bavaria/Germany I did not have many chances to see original paintings except rare exhibitions of the ‘local heroes’. But some time later an aunt of mine who lived in Munich invited me to spend the summer holidays with her family, and one day she would introduce me to the Old Pianothek – a famous and excellent collection of old masters including work of Altdorfer, Dürer, Brueghel, Rogier van der Weyden, Raphael, Chardin, Van Ruysdael, Rembrandt, Murillo, Rubens and many others – it was a flash for me and I went there as often as I could to study and copy after some striking originals which I had got stuck with.

From the very day on my father had bought a piano for our house I got involved with that instrument. First I began to discover the black and white landscape of its keys just by myself trying to get some melodies in order which I knew. I did not have a teacher yet – only some years later I began working with different piano teachers. Today I think that this early situation was ideal for me – I had had the chance to explore the instrument just by myself without being forced to do something that I did not want or understand, developing my musical imagination, following my ideas and finding ways to express and shape them. If there is an inner force to stay in touch with the instrument you naturally get in touch with improvisation which in the course of time becomes a very rich and subtle significant language which you speak when you want to say something with the never ending tool of spontaneous musical expression. When I was about ten I additionally began to get in touch with playing guitar. There was an old acoustic instrument lying around in our house which nobody played. Influenced by the omnipresent sound of the electric guitar in popular music from the early sixties you were happy if you realised that it was possible to reproduce a guitar riff which you just have heard from one of your heroes and now trying to figure it out on one guitar string or two. I remember that a friend of mine borrowed me the single “I’m a man” by the Yardbirds. On the B-side I found the astonishing and harsh “The train kept a-rollin’ (all night long)” – a kind of revolution for my early teenage hearing – I got stuck with the Yardbirds and I tried to find out what that was! It was more than just a riff and a rhythm – what I was not really conscious of yet was that I foremost was stroke by the phenomenon of the significance of sound, in that case of the unmistakable Yardbirds-sound, their fingerprint! By the way – that riff of “train kept a-rollin” was not so hard to learn – and it was phantastic to play along with it – all night long!...

But to finally come back to your question – it’s actually impossible to answer it precisely because the world of a young and open mind – especially facing youth in the early sixties! – is full of influences. Everything you hear and are impressed with lands somehow on your experimental musical table – we are speaking of music now – regardless if you tried to understand the chords and harmonies of early titles by the Beatles or the Kinks, or learning that within an anonymous three minute song there was an open space for something which generally would be called a “guitar solo” – and that little space was always something very special something for me! The theme “passion” was never a question – the passion was always there, right from the beginning, that burning something that reassures you that you do exist and which keeps kicking you forward…

At the age of 13 I began to have first experiences with playing in sort-of groups, bands with your friends you are going to school with, sharing common musical taste, beginning to try to do some covers of your favourite groups, also experimenting with own material. I still keep some sheets of these years with all the old titles. I played alternating guitar and piano and sang. Soon the music of Jimi Hendrix and his Experience, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck became of my major interest – these guitarists had something which was absolutely unique in their time – foremost Hendrix and Clapton. I studied them quite a lot. Studying somebody’s guitar style in detail is similar to learning a language, but its grammar might be more complex than the rules of an ordinary language which is written in books. I think it was around those years where I began to learn hearing.

1967 was a kind of key year of my youth. Age 15 now I found myself intensifying to work on own compositions which I began to offer to other bands from the surrounding who played cover programs at a higher level in public dance halls and drew quite some crowd. It was phantastic for me that some of my compositions found their way into their repertoire – in return I had free entrance to their concerts – and sometimes I was asked to come on stage and replace the organist for 10 minutes to join in for one of my titles or two. So it didn’t take long until somebody would ask me if I could imagine to take over the organ part in his group because the organist soon would join the army. That was a kind of change in my life. That group which had asked me was the most reputable in the area – all members had been much elder than me – and after it was sure that I would be their new man they would introduce me into lots of titles, musicians and genres that I had not heard of yet. They were the first band who played soul music which at that time was still rather new. Along with many soul titles which I got to know came a new name: Steve Cropper with his highly influential and crystal clear sound and solo work of his Fender Telecaster guitar from the group Booker T. & the MGs. Quite good teachers for a young musician regarding questions of well arranged and soulful instrumental music, purity, clarity, sound, phrasing, invention. Necessarily I must mention the name Jimmy Smith, the yet unmatched genius of the Hammond Organ, who also was introduced by these musicians as many others, I heard albums of Grant Greene, Baden Powell, Oscar Peterson, etc. – all these names came into my life. That band flooded me with LPs and requests and would hammer me with questions like: “Jeff, do you think you can manage this organ solo by Jimmy Smith in “Respect”, or the solo of “Get out of my life”, or “T-bone-steak”, etc… And I began working, I mean really working, and soon I ordered a large brand new Hammond organ – a dream which had grown in the last years – and from the very day it arrived by truck directly from Hamburg – it was November 27th 1968 – Jimi Hendrix’ birthday! – I really got into playing and increasingly understanding the potential of that phantastic and exciting instrument which – depending on the amplification you would use – could change its sound and take on endless shades of colour like a chameleon and yet never be anything else but a distinctive chameleon!

When I moved to the City of Regensburg two years later I strongly felt for playing in a band with small and concentrated line up, I wanted something completely different to what I had done before, I was seeking for something like Keith Emerson’s NICE-line-up for instance, or Brian Auger’s Trinity, - Hammond organ, Drums and Bass, and I was looking for professional musicians, which I was fortunate to find very soon in the vivid long haired scene still breathing the unique spirit of the late sixties. And to top that experience with my trio which, by the way was called Elastic Grasp – we managed to win the traditional contest, the so called “Golden Guitar” offered to new groups and organized by the Bavarian Broadcasting Station – after all not too bad for an enthusiastic and ambitious beginning!

Flavien : So, your first professional group was Elastic Grasp - in which later you invited Rob Terstall - knows quickly some problems with the musical conceptions and separates. What were the musical directions of this band ?

Jeff Beer  : As I said above, it was a mere instrumental trio featuring the Hammond organ, Drums and Bass. It wouldn’t be wrong to describe the music as experimental Jazz Rock with quite open conception. Besides own material we did some Jimmy Smith numbers, two Nice-adaptations – the famous “Brandenburger” (which was deciding to win the contest mentioned above) and later we also did Jean Sibelius’ “Carelia Suite” in Keith Emerson’s version interpreted by the Nice and the London Symphony Orchestra from the “Five Bridges” live-album), maybe worth mentioning is a very personal and exciting version of “Sunshine of your love” by the Cream from which I still keep recordings of, besides lots of experiments with irregular rhythms and meters. But after intense one-and-a-half years it was time for all members to follow their personal intentions into different musical directions.

Flavien : Thereafter, you convince Rob to reform Germany's former group, Honest Truth, with Ray Brown and Stuart Fordham. Was the music of Honest Truth near to what Odin was going to do ?

Jeff Beer : It was not me who convinced Rob to get his former group “Honest Truth” together again, it was more the opposite, but he didn’t have a hard job to convince me, because I had already heard phantastic things about “Honest Truth” in the music scene of Regensburg where they also had given concerts before their break up, and of course I was absolutely enthusiastic about that idea, besides being a young guy of 18 years I felt very honoured to be asked to play the Hammond organ among these prestigious musicians. By the way – Honest Truth was not a German group, they only toured some time in Germany. Ray Brown on bass and Stuart Fordham the drummer came from England, Jimmy Patterson, vocals, was American. Their guitarist – Rob Terstall – came from the Nethelands. The organist Hannas was Hungarian. Regarding the music of Honest Truth – later, in the beginning of ODIN, we used of course some of their former repertoire to be able to get on stage as soon as possible, as we also used some of the organ pieces which I brought in from the repertoire of my former band Elastic Grasp. But very soon we began to work on own material.

Flavien : Odin is on his way on the summer of ‘71, and plays extensively live. It seems to me that at that time you did a lot of covers. How do you decide which artists you played?

Jeff Beer : When you have a new formation which never has played in that line up before, oriented for something totally new, you need some time to grow together. The best what you can do is getting on stage as soon as possible because due to the presence of the audience you have a different tension and expression on stage than in the practise room. What we did to start of was making a list of challenging numbers of our favourite groups or composers and learnt or transformed them into our requirements.

Flavien : When we listen to your debut, you can feel the influence of numerous bands like The Nice, experimental music and of course Frank Zappa. This is a major influence for Odin and the album, am I wrong ?

Jeff Beer : No, you are absolutely right! Frank Zappa surely was a major influence for us, we played quite some numbers from him in a time where you did not hear any Zappa- interpretations elsewhere – I personally never have heard another band taking the risk to do Zappa’s tricky pieces live on stage in the early seventies! – we simply loved and admired his wide spread musical ideas, his amazing wit and his unpredictability. Each new album would assure you surprise! In my little track “Tribute to Frank” on the ODIN-album it is of course nobody else but Frank Zappa whom I wanted to credit with that zappaesque invention.

Keith Emerson was an important influence for me for some time when I was with Elastic Grasp. I had studied him thoroughly and transcribed some of his famous and rather complicated solos down to the very detail, I even made scores of them to see what he was exactly doing. At that time there was no Youtube and nothing. You had to find out everything yourself! I remember listening to his solos on my Philips tape recorder lowered down to quarter speed to follow each micro-event of his musical excursions. When later Keith Emerson – in my point of view – got too mechanical I lost interest in his work. Brian Auger whom I had liked in a long time began to be a new inspiration for me, especially after we had played with him and meeting him personally a couple of times. A great guy and a marvellous musician! King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator, Gentle Giant, Yes, John McLaughlin and his Mahavishnu Orchestra had as well been inspiring the beginnings of ODIN.

Flavien : Generally referred to you as the leader of the band, but you were not the only singer. Who was the lead singer in Odin and are you’re the lead singer on the album ?

Jeff Beer : Odin’s main vocal voice was Ray Brown, I would say. I liked his rough and yet warm voice and he got better and better, but I’m sure he wouldn’t agree with my compliments. Rob Terstall sang some tunes, too, as I did also. But except some feature titles Rob and me did more the harmony voices. How our vocal conception might have changed if ODIN would have had more of a musical future it can be heard on the ODIN album where – except one track – Gemini – which was a request by the record company to have it on the album, you can realise certain tendencies which point into a future which we already had began to work out planning a second album – but as we know ODIN’s fate didn’t let us get that far…  So – who sang what on the album? Ray and I sang in the opener “Life is only”, Ray starting with the first verse, me following in the higher register after changing to the subdominant – you easily can differ the two voices. I also sang in “Clown” – together with Ray. In the beginning in unison with him, from the second verse I switch up one third higher to continue, etc. Ray sang the main part of “Gemini”, Rob did the main vocal part in “Be the man you are”. All the other voices you can hear are backing voices and mostly done by more or less the three of us who were singing in the band.

Flavien : Your one and only LP was released in 1972. Tell us about this recording sessions. Were you happy to be on the same label as Black Sabbath or Uriah Heep ?

Jeff Beer : It was phantastic for us to get that soon a recording contract after just having founded a new band – even better though that our company was Phonogram who put us on the prestigious Vertigo-label! I didn’t think that much of Black Sabbath or Uriah Heep, I more felt honoured to be on the same label as Gentle Giant, unique in style and of high talent which I still admire a lot. Regarding the recording sessions you can be sure that it was extremely exciting to load all our equipment into the van and drive all the way up to Northern Germany to record our first album at the Windrose Studios in Hamburg on a 16track reel to reel. Georg Grosse had been our engineer. We were well prepared and got rather quick from track to track which was good for the music because fluent recording guarantees overall freshness and inspired solo work. Of course there were the typical problems, too. For the track “Clown” for instance I wanted a special Moog-type sound for one melodic detail, but it was not possible to find exactly that sound on some electronic gear I had hired from a local music store. The things I found would not satisfy me at all. So I finally ended up playing that detail on the Hammond organ. Something similar happened with the small instrumental tune “Eucalyptus” where I also had a different sound conception. I was not really happy with the result then – but today I see it different. Sometimes the circumstances are wiser than one’s conceptions.

Flavien:  You're the only German in the band but as you all lived in Germany, your group is generally assimilated to the Krautrock movement, do you agree with this designation ? do you feel close to the other Kraut’s bands ?

Jeff Beer : It’s surely wrong to add ODIN into the Krautrock-scene. In fact I was the only German in the band. We easily could have lived and worked in England also. But the circumstances finally led us to begin working in Germany. But touring throughout Germany we nevertheless inevitably got in contact rather soon to many other bands from the German Scene. I am thinking of Kraan, Atlantis, Embryo, Amon Düül, Epitaph, Birth Controll, Puppenhaus, Karthago, Missus Beastly, Guru Guru, etc. – we played with them or met them on festivals, and of course you increasingly make friends and even visit each other.

Flavien : How many copies of the album were sold ? These days, it seems to have become a real collector item !

Jeff Beer : To be honest – I forgot about the total number of prints of the edition. I just know that it was already sold out before ODIN had split. The people I know who still keep the album tell me that they never would give it away, even more since you can check it out in the internet how much some collectors are willing to pay for an ODIN vinyl album in good condition.

Flavien : How do you feel when you see that the original vinyl album (with poster), tears to several hundred euros on the internet?

Jeff Beer : I only can say that for me the emphasis places on the fact that it is touching and amazing that this musical legacy of four friends, emerging from a certain period of rock music, did not disappear from the planet, but somehow still seems to be alive.

Flavien : After other recordings which will not be released and a lot of concerts, the band broke up finally in 1974. What were the reasons ? What happened to the other members later ?

Jeff Beer : As always in human relations there were more but a few reasons which finally lead to a point which all of a sudden seems to be without return. I see the main reason of ODIN’s split in different personal musical developments, which after a while begin to be a problem, because one feels that the things you are composing and intending to perform somebody else in the band might not be so enthusiastic about, and the other way round. But that’s the most natural and musical reason I can think of – to regard it properly I even would go so far to say that this in a way is creative although it might lead an exciting group to its end. There were other reasons which I regard as much unhappier, e.g. such as existential problems arousing from trying to keep a group alive week for week, month for month, year for year, which can be frustrating in times when you have a well reviewed record on the market and quite some broadcasts and interviews on the radio.

There were periods where it was really hard to book the band continuously. I can’t tell you why we never found a management which we would happy with. So I finally ended up with doing our management on my own. Definitely one of the darkest moments of the band appeared when we had been invited to a tour in England – a hammer of a message at first place! I flew to London several times to negotiate with an English agency who was in charge for the whole planning and booking procedure. The tour would have opened in the famous “Marquee”-Club in London! The date was already fixed. But we crashed straight into the energy crises of 1973 which introduced temporarily general ban on motorised traffic and other complications which are hell conditions to complete planning a tour through England – so at the end the project was put on ice. And when we parallel were about to negotiate the conditions for the second Odin album – our German record company, being worried with the arguments from England, would withdraw their promises which to us were nothing less but a slap in the face. Nine months later Odin played its last performance on May 1st, 1974 at the Theatre Hall in Würzburg.

Flavien : After, you’re back to classical music, piano, percussion and composition. You receive numerous awards and teach at the Frankfurt Conservatory of Music. Tell us about this part of your life.

Jeff Beer : It’s almost impossible to go deeper into that question because in these first years after ODIN so much happened in my life. Additionally I should mention that already during the ODIN-period (1971-1974) I had began to study music at the State Conservatory of Music in Würzburg. But of course my focus was set on ODIN then. After the band had split it was ideal for me to sort of go “back to school” – it was the perfect contrast and there was so much to learn. I was highly motivated, had many many questions regarding composition and form and was keen on getting deeper into the scores of the masters beginning from early music down to the approach of the avantgarde. Besides I developed my own score writing which was anyhow obligatory once you study composition. Coming from my masters Bela Bartok and Igor Strawinsky I would now increasingly discover the newer languages of musical expression – soon I discovered the Oeuvre of Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti – to name the composers which impressed me most in that time enriching and inspiring my compositorical thinking, not only with their music, but also with their complex music theories which I got to know in the lectures and seminaries of the Conservatory. My scores changed quite a bit in these years, my vocabulary of harmonious and rhythmical thinking increased and was influencing my experiments both working with instruments and in developing ideas for my scores.

Thanks to the fact that soon I became a member of the well reputed percussion ensemble of my percussion teacher – Prof. Siegfried Fink – I got the chance to do lots of performing, travelling and recording a large scale of the contemporary and classical percussion repertoire. Discovering the huge world of the percussion instruments in these years, it was something like love on first sight – not only regarding the rhythmical aspects. There was also this extreme wide field of expression due to the different materials and sound characters you can find in all these hundreds of drum types from different cultures all over the world, all the cymbals, gongs, tam tams, mallet-instruments, lithophones, etc etc – being made of metal, wood, skin, glass, stone, and so on. Also of high importance was the fact that you as a percussionist are physically always very close to the production of each individual sound. Playing for instance a piano you will – once regular played – never touch the hammers nor the strings or muffler to produce your tone – imagine how different it is to stand now close to a large chinese gong, touching it with your hands first to carefully preprare a certain sector of its overtone resonance range which you would hear appearing subsequently after you have executed a certain stroke with a certain beater in the right spot on the surface of the heavy instrument executed with a very distinct stroke-power which you have found and developed and worked on in your dialogue with the instrument in many years…

Besides working for several years with a duo performing own compositions for percussion and piano with the composer and pianist Jürgen Schmitt I meanwhile had developed a repertoire for solo percussion and began performing solo concerts. In 1977 I participated the most prestigeous contest of the classical German music scene, the “Deutsche Musikwettbewerb” (German Music Competion) in Bonn, Beethovenhalle and ended up in winning the First Prize including some scholarships. This important competition opened many doors to the international concert scene and lead me to many invitations to perform concertos for solo percussion and symphony orchestra or giving solo evenings in wich I more and more began to integrate own compositions for my wide variety of instruments. One year later I obtained the First Prize at the National Competition of the German Conservatories of Music in the Category percussion solo. And in 1980 I won the Troisième Prix and the Prix Speciale at the Concours Internationale d’Interprétation de la musique Contemporain at Radio France Paris – the first prize had not been awarded. That was a phantastic week with a hell of an obligatory programme – this competition was the high point of my musical competition experience. Performing with the Symphonic Orchestra of Radio France at the final round conducted by Peter Eötvös (who in that time was the assistant of Pierre Boulez at IRCAM Paris) in front of a large audience was unforgettable. At that time I did not know yet that less than two years later I would move to Paris to continue my painting…

Flavien : In the late 70s, you work with Pierre Boulez, as Frank Zappa did too. At that time, is Zappa still an influence for you ?

Jeff Beer : Zappa was getting even more interesting then, because with the years the complexity of his work became more and more conscious to me. So my attention for Zappa’s development was more or less always present, as I never lost interest in the phantastic work of Pierre Boulez, and for many others. Apart from the big difference between their aesthetics and styles – yet both composers to me have something in common. I am speaking of their deep interest for complex transformations and the metamorphosis of the musical material. And both have a highly differentiated approach to sophisticated use of rhythm. It was phantastic to hear that these two protagonists of contemporary music – the angry genious and revolutionary Pierre Boulez and the unadjusted rebel from the experimental rock music – the founder of the Mothers of Invention – Frank Zappa – had got together for several cooperations. When I began my studies of composition at the State Conservatory of Music nobody knew Frank Zappa. If would play them the records nobody would take you serious if you were enthusiastic about his provocative musical extremes between early doo-wop-persiflages and experimental albums like “Uncle Meat”, or the complex Music-Movie “Two Hundred Motels” with the Mothers of Invention and the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. One decade later everybody knew Frank Zappa, even when one didn’t have any rock background. I think – a great deal of this positive change in the public recognition for Zappa was due to the support of the open minded Pierre Boulez.

Flavien : During the 80’s, you're not only a musician, but a photographer, a painter, a sculptor. You travel all around the world and make many exhibitions and meetings. Can you tell more about this period?

Jeff Beer : My interest was drawn by different arts right from the beginning, but the fields and intensities gradually grew – what had been playing first now had become serious and increasingly conscious – without losing the sense for playing which might be the true origin and human fundament for all of the arts. But you are right – some years before I had finished my studies at the Conservatory – so I felt free now to let my hunger and need for the visual arts stream back into my life. Changing addresses with extreme geographic contrasts – moving from the cities to the remote country side and thanks to some scholarships back to the cities during the eighties had been strong new impacts for me, pushing my questioning and work, definitely when I moved to Paris to live there for more than a year at the Cité Internationale des Arts where I was provided with a great atelier at Quai de l’Hotel de Ville, facing the cathedral of Notre Dame across. And one year later being invited to perform two concerts with Hugh Levick’s Imago Ensemble at the Centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York after which I spontaneously decided not to return home but to stay as long as possible, especially since by coincidence the German customs had certificated official working permission to me which I would find out about not until New York. So I could make my living by playing piano and percussion in several Modern Dance Classes at different Universities and Colleges, and besides continue my art work and studies visiting museums, galleries, concerts, ateliers of artists, etc.

Both periods strongly supported my visual arts – One year before in Paris I had worked foremost on my painting. Everything got freer, opened up, the strokes and lines spoke a new and clearer language in my linear work, the sizes of the paintings became larger. In New York a tendency to finally enter sculpture too broke through, and I systematically prepared myself with all the tools you can have in doing your personal research in a manner which is necessary for you. After returning home to Europe I immediately began to transpose my ideas and sketches from the dozens of “New York Sketchbooks” into the three dimensional. But it took me two more years to finally find my major material which is still dominating my sculptural approach: Iron! I grew up with iron and had forgot all about it. I had learnt the techniques how to treat and shape or weld iron from my father who was a mechanic. Iron, blacksmiths, fire, hammering, knowledge, skill – but also subtleness like the elasticity of a blade of grass or of a flower. My father’s father had been a blacksmith – there was the root! And it had taken me so long to find what had been waiting so close.

It was unbelievable that already in the first year after having begun to build iron sculptures – it was in 1985 – I had got in contact to an important Fine Arts Gallery in Berlin – the Gallery of Folker Skulima – it was him who took me into his programme and presented my sculptures already one year later in a one man show in Berlin. From there on many exhibitions would follow – the sculptures went from several exhibitions in Germany on to Paris, Madrid, Basel, Chicago, New York, Osaka, Tokyo, Prague, etc.

Flavien : It seems you love to play on visual art, metal and working with wood. You’re a director too ! How do you find all the inspiration and time to work on many projects ?

Jeff Beer : All my workfields are connected subsurfacely and originate from the same root – even though one shouldn’t imagine this ‘mycelium’ as simple. Colour and sound phenomena do have a lot in common for instance. Rhythmical structures you can find everywhere – our physiological processes are full of rhythmical processes, etc. It’s a complex correspondence and correlation between the different art fields and music which each of them actually is a world on its own of course. There is endlessly much to discover – one of the magic words is “being interested”. Along with deepening concern and serious questioning necessarely inspiration will appear at a certain point. I think the two inevitably are connected…

But to be honest it took me many years to learn how to use the tools of multifaceted talent. I think the more you are seriously envolved with interdisciplinarity the more discipline you need. You really have to work hard to harvest what you have sown. If you are not capable to use your potential fruits you easily can feel blocked. That in times had been a problem – but having felt quite early that I cannot escape from being connected intensely with different things, I had quite some time to learn how to deal with such a personal dispostion – I would say it gets better and better - and meanwhile I can say that doing what I do – living the life I live – is nothing less but full of awareness, surprise and excitement. I love my life with visual arts, language and music – my experience is that loving what you are doing teaches you everything you need to get on.

Flavien : These days you often give solo concerts. What kind of music should we expect to hear when we go to see Jeff Beer on stage today. Classical music? Jazz? Do you still love and play Rock music?

Jeff Beer : For quite a long time it was a dream of mine to perform only my personal music. But it is not easy at all to invent structures and forms which really work for the large variety of different percussive instruments. For instance when I met the grand french master of composition – Olivier Messiaen – I asked him why there still was no piece for percussion solo from him although he loved the percussion instruments so much, using them in almost all of his chamber and orchestra music – he said to me: “Oh – it’s so difficult, very very difficult”! He never wrote one. Nor did Pierre Boulez – as far as I know.

Percussion instruments have certain idiomatic difficulties – you need to know more about them than merely about rhythm! It’s very hard to integrate them into well blending sound groups. You need to find matching colors between several instruments and use common frequencies as bridges to span your melodic and harmonic invention and timbre from one to the other. It takes many years to make their potential become music and shape. To make them speak and still feel that it is your awareness and questioning that makes them speak. Your dream is to find your own music on percussion music which is good enough to feel challenged and home. I needed that general introduction to give you an idea what I am searching for.

When you go to see and hear a concert of mine nowadays you will hear a programme which is built on contrasts between solo pieces for larger set ups from 20 up to 50 or more instruments, and solo pieces featuring certain solo instruments which I am working and researching already in many years – such as the solo bass drum, the marimba (a kind of large xylophon with registers from very low to high and a warm and relatively long tone), the african djémbé drum, a small metal drum, bronze bowls, etc. – Each piece has its own character and style – each is a kind of current resumée for my dialogue with the instrument it was performed with. The longer I play these pieces the clearer they seem to become – amazing that they still are growing. Each of them is a challenge for the performer which gives the concerts a strong physical presence, a wide range of individual sounds and soundscapes, and I would say even something I feel calling an existential tone or fundament.

Flavien : Let’s go back to Odin. The LP was reissued on CD in 2007 by Long Hair Music. Is it the first official new edition ?

Jeff Beer : Yes. This is something what one really would want to call «official new edition» ! Manfred Steinheuer from Long Hair Music had got in contact with me to introduce their project of preparing and publishing three CDs in a row – to start off with the ODIN album first which was not only a simple copy of the old venyl LP as it was done some years before by another label which I don’t want to mention here. Long Hair Music even had taken the effort to search for the lost old master tape – 35 years after the recording of the album! I couldn’t believe it – they found it and invited me into their studio in munich to assist the remastering sessions and then doing the maximum to get to the fine result which – thanks to the phantastic audio ingeneer Jürgen Scheuermann – we find now on the CDs of the ODIN-tryptich. And surplus they did marvelous booklets coming along with the disc including new texts and photos from the original ODIN-archive which never had been shown and published before.

Flavien : Two other albums are released the same year on the label : “SWF Sessions” and “Live At The Maxim”. Regarding your album became a cult, is this new edition an answer to a large public demand or a personal desire ?

Jeff Beer : Maybe both, surely in terms of my personal requests. I was truly surprised how the new edition was selling – so there must be a major interest in this music. But without the push of Long Hair Music and their enduring inquiry there would be non such.

Flavien : Unfortunately, Stuart passed away in 2003. You dedicated the two albums to him. Do you still have contacts with Rob and Ray ?

Jeff Beer : Yes, finally we do have contact again. In many years I had tried to find my former mates from ODIN, but without success. Finally – one day – thanks to the internet, I got answer from a person called “Stuart Fordham” – I was not sure if this name was identical with the name of the ex-drummer of ODIN who’s name I had found in a field which didn’t point directly in a musical surrounding. He answered by mail: “Who is it that I am speaking to?” – I replied “It’s Jeff from Odin”… It was him! – unbelievable!… We had found each other again. But unfortunately I never met Stuart again since then. Indeed we spoke on the phone and exchanged many letters. I helped him with lots of ODIN-material for his project of a personal musical biography which he was about to write. But he died before we could meet again. Tragic! But a few years ago I invited Rob and Ray and their wives to my house in Bavaria. The first reunion after so many years! Apart of all the stories we needed to exchange mutually we also felt the for jamming together and playing some of our favourite old tunes which each one of us had prepared – certainly including some Zappas…

Flavien : More and more people, including many young people are now discovering the music of Odin through the internet. What’s your feeling about that ? Can we hope for the release of other archives, or why not vinyl reissues of the album ?

Jeff Beer : It’s amazing to witness the new attention for the music of the late sixties and early seventies of similar attitudes – especially among younger people and musicians. If you compare the styles within the history of post war popular music and discuss it with young people you can realise that this period we are talking about contains a distinctive and rare concentration of qualities – both in musical sound and instrumental skills as in the lyrics – which seems to be able to speak to a certain open minded attitude in our young generation. That’s the most interesting phenomenon for me. It’s not only an audience who is around age 60 now or beyond and looking nostalgically back into the years of flower power and pre- or post Woodstock attitude of life. Maybe because there is something authentic and personal and direct in that music which intuitively appeals to the listener’s imagination – encouraging him to feel and dream of things which might not be present so certainly in a life which seems to be flooded by impressions images and an increasing ‘philosophy’ of fast copying and fake…

There are still audio documents in the ODIN archive which I would assume to be highly interesting – and I would be open to any serious request in order to continue what the valued edition of Long Hair Music has begun – including your suggest of a Venyl reissue of the album – but then to take the extra step of a refined print documentation of the band’s history to end up with more than only a copy of the old album – but rather a worthwhile abundantly illustrated document of four musicians and their musical approach who have been part of the Zeitgeist (spirit of time) which – for very certain reasons – humbly is about to rise from the ashes like a phoenix …

Flavien : Finally, you are probably the most multi-faceted artist I know. What will be the next step for Jeff Beer ? Are there any areas you would like to explore ?

Jeff Beer : I can clearly answer that question. One never gets near enough to the goals of one’s intentions – one is never satisfied, one hardly reaches the real peak of one’s dreams – so you keep on searching, working, experimenting, learning, deepening and concentrating your questioning and quality of seek. And – to speak practically now – I have renovated a large section of my house – a former farm house – to improve my working conditions here in the country where I live and work, and very soon I will be able to use new and better atelier spaces but also have an own phantastic historical showroom including vaulted ceiling and granite columns and excellent gallery lighting – which finally will enable me to invite people if I feel for present exhibitions or concerts, readings, symposiums, show films etc. – that will be a new quality in my life with a strong accent on dialogue and exchange.

And – to finish off – I don’t want to forget mentioning that, besides continuing my work fields – I never left off dreaming about making films and continue to write own rock music in which when recording it in a studio I think of playing all instruments by myself – except playing the violin which I preferably would invite my younger daughter Raphaela to feature her voice and instrument as she invites me at present to contribute some organ solos and bass drum or Djémbé features on her CDs (which by the way you can find serveral titles on Youtube under Raphaela Beer with her band “Crystal Ocean Shore” – click for example “The worst is yet to come”).

To me rock music is like a very personal language which allows me to express certain things and attitudes which cannot be expressed so directly and clear in any other language – maybe because it was the music I grew up with, keeping certain attitudes of life eternally fresh like the snow of Siberia keeping and saving each hair of the miraculous frozen mammoth untouched and fresh since ten thousands of years…

Entrevue réalisée par Flavien Debacker

Photo 1 : Wolfgang Zielonkowski

Photo 5 : Pavel Korbou