milford graves, jazz scientist by MARK JACOBSON
American jazz drummer and percussionist Milford Graves has made more than 24 recordings and performs internationally. A faculty member since 1973, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Down Beat International Award, an NEA grant, and the Critics Award for best drummer. The following excerpt, regarding his study of rhythm’s effect on the body, first appeared in New York Magazine in November 2001.
“ME AND SHAQ O’NEAL?” queries the 180-pound Professor, dead serious. “Anytime. You hurt him where he’s not used to being hurt. Then teach him to heal himself, get him in tune with his natural frequencies.” This is the essence of Graves’s basement project, which he calls “biological music, a synthesis of the physical and mental, a mind-body deal,” for which he won a Guggenheim grant in 2000. “We want to explore the true body rhythms,” Graves says, “people’s vibrations, frequencies. Because people vibrate, and they vibrate differently. There’s a true personal music. Once you get with it—it can make you feel a lot better.” Today a great experiment is underway in the basement on 110th Avenue. It is an inquiry that began in an epiphany 30 years ago, in the medical section of the original Barnes & Noble on 18th Street. “I found this LP, ‘Normal and Abnormal Heart Beats,’” Graves says. “It was a record for cardiologists. It blew my mind. Everyone
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says the heart is the drum and the drum is the heart, but here were the secret rhythms, man…I started woodshedding the concept.” Seeking “to merge the bush guy with the computer guy,” Milford used his Guggenheim grant to bulk up his hardware. He mastered the Labview system, a program used to measure earthquake tremors and Formula One race-car shudder. Attired in his usual homemade baggy pants, Graves attended several tutorials in suburban Holiday Inns with name-tag-wearing engineers. “Guys like that, they’re not usually in my set, man. But I’m comfortable around hard science,” Milford remarks. After a long winter during which his wife wondered when he would “get out of the hole and do some work around the house,” the Professor was ready to “lay on the heavy-duty aesthetic.” His heart research can help anyone, but mostly he works on musicians, “so they hear how they sound naturally, let them compare that with what they’re playing.” Milford’s buddy, reedman Joe Rigby, has arrived at the basement. Also present is Tony Larokko, saxophonist and computer whiz, and downtown guitarist Bruce Eisenbeil. The group is working up a composition based on the collective rhythms of their hearts. “Let’s tune you guys up,” the Professor says, bidding Joe Rigby to open up his shirt and lie down on a gurney-massage table. As Rigby—a distinguished, a generous cat who’s played with Ted Curson, bluesman Johnny Copeland,
and currently teaches music at IS 204 in Long Island City—stretches out, Graves festoons him with EKG leads. “Thank Lord Guggenheim! You’re grooving now, Joe, somewhere in B flat,” Milford pronounces, tuning fork in hand, pressing an electronic stethoscope to Rigby’s chest. Eisenbeil, Larokko, and Graves himself go through the process. A moment later, the musicians are sitting on foldout chairs, watching color-coded readouts of their respective EKGs projected onto a five-foot-high screen. Graves mixes the four heart rhythms into a single thumping meter. “Beats the hell out of the Sci-Fi Channel,” Rigby says. After an exhortatory monologue on how he plans to augment the “prima materia” of the heartbeat with “ancient mathematics” of the Golden Ratio—a printout of a magic number worked out to sixteen decimal places appears on the wall—and an aside concerning the “head deficiencies” of former New York Knick Glen Rice, Milford begins to play. Working with a snare drum and a couple of cymbals, he mimics the ensemble’s heartbeat rhythm. “We start here, then go out,” he says. The group improvises off the beat. The sound, a rising swirl about which no neighbor has ever complained, is fantastic. So-called “free jazz” doesn’t usually translate on disc, but down here, in Milford Graves’s “little hole,” surrounded by the acupuncture ears, jars of tinctures and remedies, and blinking computer terminals—the effect is soul-