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Behind the scenes with Ken Nordine, creator of Wordjazz
Interview conducted by Johanna Zorn
> What was, and continues to be, your inspiration for Wordjazz?
Thinking thoughts and then rethinking them, and then writing them down to see
how they look in print, then lifting what's on the page off the page by saying
the printed thoughts out loud, hearing how they sound intoned, or half sung, or
just skipping along the way Shaky wanted his actors to speak the lines. Or was
that "trippingly off the tongue?" Then there's the jazz: head music goes well
with think-a-thought, that's why I prefer "jazz" with my "words." And then
comes the real fun: the doing of it for real. This involves going upstairs in
the old house we live in where I have a multitrack dream of a studio to record
with the best players I know whatever has become of the rough draft of a draft
I am working on ... in my attic studio is where what I call "wordjazz" becomes
the finished digital recording.
> Your work takes listeners into your stream of thought, as if we're
eavesdropping on your dreams...is that where you want us to be?
Yup. Radio is the quickest and easiest way to get inside someone's head because
each listener has the involvement of his or her imagination, choreographing the
images somewhere in the amazing upper limbo of the limbic system (the
paleopallium brain, including the hippocampus and the amygdala.) I'll never
forget Amy G Dala ... what a sweet heart she had.
> It was forty years ago that you produced the album Colors. What do you
remember about the experience?
What's funny and incredible looking back to 1967 is that Colors was written and
recorded on old fashioned vinyl in just two afternoons in Chicago's then famous
Studio B of long gone Universal Recording. The stars were in promising
juxtaposition, everything was right and easy. The luck of the draw. We didn't
know what we were doing.
> Can you describe the process of creating a piece of word jazz? For
example, please take us through the making of Cliché Heaven.
I began to feel sorry for cliches, there are so many of them, and people look
down on them, finding fault with how ordinary they are, how over-used,
sometimes as a substitute for being original. Poor things I thought. There are
thousands and thousands of cliches hiding out in Google, people in the know
collect them.... I began to collect them, so I know. Now when I lay me down to
sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep ... I slip off to sleep and put one
cliché on one cloud, another on the next, and before you can shake a stick ...
I'm off to see the man in the moon shiny moon who recites for me my crowd of
cliches while dead to the world I see better days just over the horizon.
> You're moving into the visual arena with your new video pieces. What
is the relationship between the sound and images that accompany Cliché Heaven
and why did you create it?
My mother told me when I was very young that the eye is never filled. She was
right, neither is the ear. There's always more. The "more" I'm looking for now
are the abstract images I can create with vector math in the computer to
accompany the word jazz I do with musicians in the studio, flowing icon images
hypnotizing the eye, what I call morphing pictures that don't get in the way,
lovely slowly evolving dreamlike images that never over power what's being
heard.
> You say your voice is god-given but what advice do you have for
reporters/producers about how to make the most of their voices/delivery?
Learn how to lift words off the page, learn to sound like you're not reading,
that you are just saying what you have to say ... with easy intelligence and
with the emotional feeling you have in your heart. Learn how to elide (glide
over words, sometimes making two words into one.) We do this all the time when
we talk to each other. You're gonna like what you are going to hear. ("gonna"
is the elision of "going to") Eliding is how you create the musical rhythm of
the spoken word.
> People may not know that your radio roots go back to the golden age of
radio in the 40's, and WBEZ (now Chicago Public Radio) when it was owned by the
Chicago Board of Education. Does that experience continue influence you in any
way?
My very first job in radio. I loved being at WBEZ when it was on the 10th floor
of the building that was on the corner of LaSalle and Wacker. I was paid $15.00
a month and my job was running the mimeograph machine and working as an actor
with young greats like Sondra Gair and Jerry Kauffeur, Russ Reed. Those were
the days my friends, we thought they'd never end. A wonderful beginning it was.
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