Moore is a very highly regarded clarinetist and saxophonist. Born in northern California he studied at the New England Conservatory and after a few years of working in New York found himself working more and more with Dutch musicians. He relocated to Amsterdam in 1985 and since then has been working with some of Holland's finest jazz musicians, most notably with Misha Mengelberg's ICP Orchestra and with Han Bennink and Ernst Reijseger in the Clusone Trio. The interview took place just after the release of two new albums on Ramboy, the small label Moore founded and runs out of Amsterdam. Some (very incomplete) discographical information follows the text of the interview.

Clay Glad: How did the Clusone 3 collaboration come about?

Michael Moore: Well, we'd been playing together since 1982, or somethingwith the ICP, Misha Mengelberg's septet/octet. And a long time ago we had done some concerts as a trio. It didn't really work out.

CG: Musically?

MM: Yeah, it didn't really work out musically, i don't think. We just weren't comfortable, but that was then ... And then maybe about 5 years ago Ernst was asked to make a group for this nice inimate jazz fest in the mountains of Italy, in a place called Clusone. And he invited the two of us and also Guus Jansen to play to piano. So we played as a quartet, and that was nice. And we also did a few more concerts with Guus. At a certain point Guus decided he didn't want to do it anymore because he was afriad that it would take up too much of his time. He spends a lot of time composing every day and he has his own groups. So I think it was understandable that he stopped. We decided rather than replace him we'd just keep going as a chord-less-guy trio.

CG: And since then you've been doing a lot of recording and gigging with these guys ... at least three albums within the past couple of years?

MM: Yeah, well, for a few years there Ernst was bringin his portable DAT recorder to all the concerts, and every once in a while we'd do a radio concert. The first cd was from a radio concert in Geneva, basically just the whole concert - maybe a couple of edits. And the 2nd cd was taken from performances in Europe and in Canada in 91, I think, or 92. Ernst had listened to hours and hours of these tapes that he had made and found the nice muciscal moments and put them together the way he wanted to. And then the third cd is ...

CG: The "concept album" ...

MM: ... the "concept album". Thank you very much, Werner Uelinger! He wanted to record us, but we had to have a "concept"..

CG: Was it Uelinger who came up with the concept?

MM: No, it was actually me. We had been playing some Irving Berlin before that - I'm usually the guy who brings in the jazz tunes. Some of them Han had been playing for years ...

CG: The Irving Berlin?

MM: Yeah, well, he knew the stuff because he used to play those dumb jobs at air force bases when he was 17 years old. His father was also a dance hall musician. So he's very happy when I suggest a tune like "There's No Business Like Show Business", it's right up his alley. And I thought it was a concept that we could find a lot of space in. For me the tunes are really simple and really strong.

It's not the kind of group that lends itself to sensitive harmonic interplay or ... harmonically complicated music. We can play that, like that last piece you played, the Herbie Nichols,but that's not really our forefront. It's more ... we can find other was to mess with material, I think.

CG: There are ots of interesting things in the Clusone 3 book besides Irving Berlin. You play a few Nichols tunes, and then there's a Dewey Redman ... Are you responsible for bringing in these covers?

MM: Yeah, I would say so.

CG: How about the original compositions? Are they mostly coming out of group improvisations, or do you each come in with some compositions?

MM: Well, I guess I bring in a lot of the material. In a given set we improvise and then we come to the material as a point of reference, or a point of rest. And then we go away from the material. Some of it's very specific, the way it's played. And usually those very specific ideas are usually mine, I would say.

CG: You have a number of other projects going on. Is the ICP Orchestra still in existence?

MM: Yeah, I leave tomorrow to go back (to Amsterdam) and most of February is ICP gigs and Clusone 3 gigs for me.

CG: All over Europe or just in Holland?

MM: I think these are mostly in Holland. When I left there had just been a big fight between Han and Misdha over something. So when I left Han was telling Misha that he should find another drummer for ICP, so ...

CG: So you're not sure what you'll go back to?

MM: Well, they're kind of like an old married couple sometimes.

CG: And you also have your own group ... Was it a year or two ago you put out Neglige?

CG: So the group is shrinking ..

CG: And I guess not all of these musicians even live on the same continent.

MM: That's also a problem.

CG: You're working now with Mark Helias, and you played on his album a couple of years ago, and we began the show today with Gerry Hemingway. Are you still working with that group?

MM: Yeah, we'll do that in March. He's got a tour of England lined up and after that we go to German-speaking lands ... Austrai, Swizerland and Germany and I think there's a few gigs in Holland as well.

CG: With the same lineup?

MM: Yeah, same group. He's pretty good about finding work for that.

CG: Now tell us about your octet, which I heard for the very first time today, "Available Jelly". Right off the bat you have to explain where on earth that name came from.

MM: Um, you have to ask my brother about that.

CG: Well, he's not here ...

MM: I'd rather not say ...

CG: Okay, that's fine. Really interesting sound - very wide-ranging - lots of different kinds of arrangements from what I could tell from my quick listen.

MM: Well this originated as a musical accompaniment to the Salt Lake City mime troupe, which was in existence for a few years in the late seventies. Very talented mimes and dancers who decided to go their own separate ways, but before they did they did a few tours of Europe, and I originally went to Europe to join them for the summer. Living in NY, that's the thing you do first: try to find a way to get out for the summer. So, that was pretty handy when my brother invited me to come over and play with these musicians. And we had a nice tour of Italy. I think we played for the Fascists that year ... may have been the Communists, I don't know. They all have their own summer festivals. That was when there was politics. And I met some Dutch musicians and I went back-and-forth, but the group has maintained some its eclectic origins. If you play for theater then you end up playing some circus kind of music. It was always a brass band with drums - this kind of thing - so there was no "chord guy",again. So we relied on counterpoint a lot - trying to identify the chords in our own skeletal way. Since then it's become more of a jazz/improvising band and since this cd it's really started flying, I think. Wolter Wierbos has joined us, a couple of people have left.

CG: Another mixed group of American and Dutch musicans ...

MM: Yeah, we should actually do another cd real quick, I think. It's a really nice group right now. There are some really great soloists: Toby Delius, for one, the tenor player. He's a young English/German ... man. He's got a complicated life.

CG: On your new album as a leader you do have a "chord guy" ...

MM: Yeah!

CG: A really different sound than your last couple of albums as a leader, and you say in the liner notes that some of it was inspired by the Jimmy Giuffre Trio and also by some Lee Konitz/Gil Evans duets, which I'm not familiar with ...

MM: You don't know those? Oh, those are great: it's two cds and they're recorded in a Greene St. club in New York in 1980 or '81. Just in front of people ... eating, or something. But they're beautiful and Gil Evans plays so well. He never wanted them released, because he was embarrassed about his piano playing, but it's fantastic, very orchestral-sounding, what he plays, and he leaves a lot to the imagination. I don't know what label that's on ... I think it's on a French label [Remark, issued by Verve in the U.S.]

So, that was a point of departure. This is also, for me, a reaction to playing with the Clusone 3 and that sort of, uh, outlandish expressionism all the time. This is much more contained. I suppose you could say it's romantic, or something.

CG: Was that a sound you were looking for and then went out and found the right musicians, or did you happen to be working with Fred Hersch and Mark Helias and it came together that way?

MM: Well, let's see ... No it's an idea I had in mind, and I made these open structures with the idea in mind. I think I also had Fred and Mark in mind, as well. I actually went to New York for the purposes of making this recording and then they were' cominf over later in the year to play with me, also with the quintet with Herb Robertson and Gerry - first time that ever happened live. So we did some more recording in Bremen.

CG: I do want to ask you about your move to Amsterdam and how that came about and what it's like there. How long have you been living there now?

MM: Well, the first time I came was in 1978. I went back and forth between there and New York for quite a few years. All the time spending more time in Amsterdam because I had more work there ... or more interesting work. Eventually, my girlfriend and I lost our apartment because of primary residence laws. So that was the main sort of ... thing. It was never my intention to go ... "I'm tired of this, I'm moving to Europe!" or something like that.

CG: So you were sort of kicked out of New York?

MM: Yeah, I mean I was never really comfortable there, anyway. I'm not that aggressive ... I sort of wonder what I would be doing if I had stayed there, but ... I can sort of imagine it might be something like along the lines of what Marty Ehrlich is doing. . Because he was a guy I went to school with.

I played with a lot of people who live there, [Amsterdam] anyway. But there are a lot of really good musicians there.

CG: Who were the first ones you played with?

MM: Ernst [Reijseger] ... When I first went there I played a lot with Ernst and Michael Vatcher, as a trio. And later on I played in a group led by a tenor saxophonist named Geiss Hendricks, who's quite a good player but he's very ... sort of irascible and ... defensive. Who else? A lot of people. I did a lot of dance and theatre and ... eventually started playing with Han and Misha and ...

CG: So it was through Reijseger that you bet Bennink and Mengelberg and the rest of that crowd?

MM: Yeah.

CG: Is that a pretty tight-knit community?

MM: It is, yeah. It sort of has to be. Because what they're doing is not ... commercially exploitable. There's always been - to varying degrees - some kind of a union around these improvisors there.

CG: An actual, organized labor union?

CG: Who are the driving forces behind that organization?

MM: The people who started it, I think, were Misha and Willem Brueker, and Hans Dulfer.

CG: Who?

MM: Oh, well, Hans Dulfer is probably known more know as being the father of Candy Dulfer.

CG: Ah.

MM: Oh! Yeah! He's kind of a "ride" tenor player who recently put out sort of a hip-hop album. Selling quite well locally. But of those guys Misha's the only one who's sort of marginally still involved because the other guys just got fed-up with either the direction it was going or, in the case of Willem, couldn't really be bothered with it so just went off on his own.

CG: What size a city is Amsterdam?

MM: About the population of San Francisco, 700,000.

CG: How many venues could one expect to hear this kind of jazz there? There are some famous ones, of course. The Bimhuis ...

MM: Surprisingly few in Amsterdam. So, most of the work isn't there. We'll play at the Bimhuis and then once in a while we'll play at a place called the Icebreaker ... or the Paradiso, or the Felix Meritus (pictured on the Available Jelly cd), which used to be the old concert hall before they built the Concertgebouw. But there's really very little going on except the Bimhuis. That's the only place that really has regular programming for this kind of music. And that's a place where you really have to book four or five months in advance, so ... Unfortunately, there's no place to go if you have an idea you can say, well, I want to present this quickly. Which is kind of sad. But there are a lot of other places in Holland where you can go play. The fact that it's such a small country with a lot of people ... You can drive an hour and play in a club in Utrecht, or den Haag. Which is very handy for making a living.

CG: Are the the smaller cities as cosmopolitan? Do you find the same kinds of audiences that you do in Amsterdam?

MM: I would say so. The Dutch audiences are pretty blase at this point. They hear everything. If you live in Amsterdam and wait long enough you can hear everything. Everything comes through there. All the African musicians who come and play in Europe and all the Americans ... A whole lot of Asian music. All kinds of stuff. So, in that respect it's a good place to live, but then it's nice to go other places to play where you really feel like people appreciate the fact that you've actually come here to play.

CG: So, like everywhere else there really isn't as much appreciation for local musicians, I suppose.

MM: Yeah. There is in Amsterdam definately a "fan club" ... like here. You have a little circle of friends who are interested in supporting these fantasies we have. Which is really important!

CG: Do you find much work in European cities outside of Holland?

MM: We play a lot in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and in Italy in the last few years. Not so much in France. They have their own heroes, I guess. The French are a bit more protective, perhpas like the United States in that respect. And in the last few years we've been going to Canada.

CG: But not the United States because ... well, that's a complicated matter, I guess ...

MM: I don't know, there's not enough interest, or something! We were once invited to come to play at the KF, but then we found out it was a festival and we'd be splitting the door money with four other groups and we'd have to be finding our own hotels and stuff, so it would have cost us a whole lot of money.

CG: Are there many other expatriate musicians in Amsterdam?

MM: There are quite a few Americans, and South Africans, English ... a few Germans. It's a pretty cosmopolitan scene.

CG: Are the Dutch musicians pretty open to playing with anyone who comes to town?

MM: Much more so than in other countires, I would say. Especially if you compare it to France, for instance. The Dutch are really sort of like ... When I went there they were curious about how I could play. They weren't afraid that I was going to steal their work, or something like that. So that was really refreshing. And now there's a lot of Russians coming. I don't know if you know the names Tristan Honsinger ... and Sean Bergin, who's a burly white South African saxophone player ... and people that I play with a lot: Michael Vatcher ...

CG: Also an American.

MM: Yeah, he's also from Humbolt County! But they make a very valuable contribution. There are also people from ex-colonies of Holland, from Curacao and Surinam ... These guys from the Carribean really have an impact on the scene. It's really interesting.

CG: Not too long ago we had Glenn Spearmann on KZSU for an interview and, like a lot of American jazz musicians at the time he found himself going to Europe to try to make a living. His reaction was that it was wonderful: he had a steady teaching job, he was treated like an artist for the first time in his life. But he said that in the end he had to come back to the U.S. to get back to "the source", and made that sound as if there was something missing musically or spiritually for him in Europe. I wonder what your response is to that.

MM: No. I don't think there's anything inherint in the land of the United States itself. Perhaps cultures. I can understand wanting to come back to this culture. Because, well, it's very known. And there's a lot of things you can do here on a grass-roots level to help the situation, which is pretty bad, I'd say. And .. yeah, to maintin your relationship to the struggle that's going on here I think would be pretty helpful. But in terms of actually hearing the musical information I think you can do that pretty much anywhere at this point. If you have access to a halfway decent record store or radio station.

CG: But I think that most people would say that Dutch jazz has a very particular character ...

MM: Oh yeah. There's all kinds of nationalistic tendencies over there, whether they like it or not. Especially if you go into the realm of really free improvisation. The Dutch have a tendency to be to play these very short things and juxtapose various idioms with each other. Lots of games. Very playful.

CG: Do you think that that aesthetic is at all akin to what was going on in the downtown New York scene for quite a while, or maybe still is?

MM: I think that when you say that you're speaking about John Zorn.

CG: Primarily.

MM: I don't know of anyone else who was doing it then ... actually studying game theory ...

CG: Well, I might be able to think of a few people, but all will be Zorn cohorts.

MM: Chadborne, perhaps, yeah. It's like that. There's a couple of people who make wonderful games for improvisors. Misha is one and Guus Jansen is another. Just fantastic sets of cues and responses, and these kinds of things that really make what otherwise would be probably pretty mediocre improvisations sort of come alive.

CG: How do they compare with something like Zorn's Cobra?

MM: At a certain point I think Zorn decided to take ... well, with his pieces he has one "conductor" who receives information from all the players and he's rather passive. What happens in Cobra, for instance, is that there's no preconceived musical structure. It all happens on the spot. I don't think anyone in Holland had gone to that extreme, in terms of just thinking about the possibilities ... they're more interested in making pieces that sound a certain way. But that have a lot of freedom in them. I think that would be the main difference.

CG: Is it very different working with Europeans other than the Dutch?

MM: Well there's certainly different reference points, I would say. The English guys grew up with different role models. Of course, they were influenced by the Dutch musicians, too, but there was always - who? - oh, Evan Parker and Derek Bailey and John Surman, and - who's this other drummer that I'm thinking of?

CG: John Stevens?

CG: But Grawe doesn't really fit that characterization so much ...

MM: No. He's more into a kind of an improvised chamber music idea. A very good musician and composer.

CG: Tell us a little bit about your label and how that came to be. Just too much trouble dealing with the record business, I suppose.

MM: That's right. I started about four years ago. I had these two recordings - the American quintet and the Clusone 3 - that I really wanted to put out and I just couldn't be bothered with trying to shopping them around to the various labels that I felt that I had a chance with. And I had a few bucks left over so I decided just to put them out myself. I kind of enjoy it because I have complete control over it. I know exactly where they're going ... though I'm surprised to see them showing up at KZSU. And nobody tells me that they can't use this, or ... I HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL!! But it's just a way to get my music out.

CG: Do you have any interest in recording anyone else?

MM: Well, that remains to be seen. I've stopped for a while. I've put out seven cds and all of them are rather different. there's are different textures on all of them. Distribution is the problem, of course. As far as recording other people, that's a possibility. I might have to run out of ideas first, I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of things I still want to record!

CG: There seems to be a pretty strong tradition among these musicians in Holland to put out their own stuff. Was that an inspiration or a model for Ramboy?

MM: Well, ICP is still going. Misha recently put out a solo cd. Yeah, that was an inspiration. I didn't really discuss the technical aspects of pressing plants and stuff with them, I did ask for some advice but eventually found my own solutions. It's quite a simple process. And Willem was helpful in the BVHaast, which is affiliated with North Country distributors here. So that is a kind of passive distribution. They dont' go out and try to sell the things like hotcakes, or something. It's more like if someone phones them up and asks for it they'll send it to them.

CG: I know you have to get back to a very wet Holland, so we won't keep you any longer ... So ,thanks. Any young musicians in Holland or elsewhere that we should be looking out for?

MM: Oh, um ... There's a lot of old musicians you should be looking out for!

CG: Okay, I won't put you on the spot. I do hope we get to hear one of your groups in the U.S. sometime soon.

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