The Story of The Revolution Ensemble and Kabbalah Blues

An Interview with TRE Founder and Composer Peter Saltzman

Why the Revolution Ensemble ?

The idea had been running around my head since the early 1990's. I had a band in the late 80's, called the Peter Zak Band, which was my stage name at the time. When I dissolved that group in 1988 and moved to LA with my wife, the thought kept running through my head, "what kind of group do I want to do next?" The thing is, The Peter Zak band started out as a fairly standard original pop tune band. The songs were all mine, but it was fairly standard 80s pop—well probably better than that! But as we played out and recorded more, the music became increasingly expansive, breaking the pop boundaries with extended forms, odd meters, instrumentals, etc. Part of it, to be honest, was shear boredom; staying strictly within the pop song form gets tiresome, particularly after playing the same songs over and over. So, as that band evolved, even though the instrumentation was standard pop/rock, I was increasingly experimenting with the format. This was in large part due to the fact that I grew up performing and studying jazz and classical music; I couldn't simply throw out all of that musical sophistication—and history.

And why should you?

Exactly. There has always been a kind of peer pressure in pop music—and jazz and classical for that matter, which our the three genres I've worked in—to stick to the formula. It's partly the external force of the larger music industry and other musicians, but in the end it's an internal decision based on the artists own fear of rocking the boat. In truth it's even deeper than that: it's the fear of revealing too much of your soul.

So, did you go right from the Peter Zak Band to TRE?

Definitely not. It took me almost another decade before I put together TRE. In my five years in L.A. I did a lot of writing, but very little performing, and I had no regular band. I did write a pop opera that was performed in Santa Monica. That piece, Conneat, had a lot of influence on my subsequent writing.

How so?

Well, it definitively put me in the mindset of large scale structures, which is where I wanted to move, and where I couldn't move as long as I stayed in the pop song format. At the same time it stayed very much within the pop/jazz/r&b/rock/funk musical language. In truth, all of my larger structures are based on American song and dance forms. This is less a conscious decission than a matter of necessity; I just don't know how to write any other way. And it was really this idea—that you could build large scale forms with our "native" musical language—that was the impetus behind TRE.

When you formed TRE, were you looking for a particular type of musician?

Yes...and it took a while to find them. The group represented on this CD was not the first iteration of TRE. In fact the makeup of the group was quite fluid for a while. Believe it or not I started TRE with a 30 piece hybrid-orchestra that combined standard orchestral instruments with electric bass and guitars, drums, keyboards, etc. Many of the players in the KBQF group were part of that initial group, but there were obviously many more. In any case, from the beginning I was looking for the type of players who were comfortable in multiple genres. I don't mean simply reading the notes, but playing them with an authentic feel. There is some very difficult writing here, and I absolutely required the highest level of musicianship which I got—but a great deal more on top of that. Many of the players in the group, and not just those on "jazz" instruments, are fluent improvisors and of course that is important. But it really even goes beyond that: ultimately I was looking for, and found, highly creative and open minded players. There are plenty of automatons in both the jazz and classical worlds. Just because you can "blow" on some changes, doesn't necessarily make you creative. By creative, I really mean, players who aren't afraid to come up with their own ideas. It is not at all accidental that in addition to me, there are 4 other composers/songwriters in the group. Three of them, Katherine, Jim and Ben, premiered compositions of their own with TRE at one time or another. Jim Gailloreto, in particular, is a very prolific composer. But, the point is, by having a bunch of creative musicians in the room, we could make things happen, that otherwise could not have happened. Believe me, there were plenty of times when rehearsing Kabbalah Blues (and other muisic) where somebody else was essentially running the rehearsals or recording sessions. It's the way I prefer it—I'm not an autocratic type of leader.

So how did you come up with Kabbalah Blues/Quantum Funk? Both the title and the actual music?

As with the Revolution Ensemble itself, this was a piece of music that had been running around in my head, on some level, for years. For a long time I've been interested in Kabbalah, which is the general term for Jewish mysticism, and equally strong interest in physics, particularly quantum physics and string theory. While I don't claim to be anything close to a scholar in either of these fields, I've done quite a bit or reading on both topics since I was a teenager. In many ways, my interest stems from the same source in both cases—trying to understand the universe on the deepest level possible. Each one, is essentially a language whose purpose is to explain how or why the universe works. Kabbalah is obviously more concerned with the "why" whereas physics is mostly concerned with the how, though I think ultimately the two questions converge. It's interesting to me that even some physicists, who tend to eschew the idea of God in creation, when asked why the universe was created say that there was no other choice, even "God" had no other choice, which is what the Kabbalists say. Music itself, at least for me, is one of the most profound languages for understanding the universe, and perhaps the language that best converges the how and why questions into something beyond knowing altogether.

But getting back to the origins of KBQF (as opposed to the universe). As I said, an idea for this kind of work had been in my thoughts for years, but the specific impetus came when the Chicago Humanities Festival commissioned me to write a new work for their 1999 program. Each year CHF has a theme that they want presenters to address, and in 1999 it was "New and Old". It seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to combine Kabbalah (old) and physics (new)...so I did.

As for the title, it obviously has some double meanings. The "Blues" refers, of course, to the blues itself, which plays an important part in the piece, particularly toward the end, but also refers the even older sense of "blues" feeling in the Kabbalah and Jewish liturgy in general—the blues that comes from separation, separation from God, exile, etc. John Lee Hooker, the great bluesman, once said that the blues originated when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, that ultimately blues is about being separated from our source—God. The "Funk" part refers both to the music, and the feeling of being in a funk. But to me there is also a relation between funk music and quantum physics.

Between funk music and quantum physics?

No, really. An important attribute of quantum physics is "indeterminacy", "uncertainty" and even randomness. It's the Heisenberg Uncertainty principal—that at the sub-atomic level there is a high degree of randomness, that you can't both determine a particles position and momentum...all that stuff. I like to think that those are important aspects of funk, with the kind of randomly syncopated 16th notes, but also American music in general. American music, like quantum physics in science, re-introduced the idea of non-determinism back into music. European music had become increasingly deterministic, to a fault, in my mind. Everything seemed overly weighed down by "purpose". American music brought back the idea of spontaneity back into music.

What is the future of TRE and KBQF?

Neither is active at this time. But the Revolution Ensemble is really an idea, and for me, as well as many other composers, the idea is always active. I continue to be involved with many of the players in the group—for example, I co-wrote and co-produced Katherine Hughes' CD "Four Seasons", which in many ways is her personal response to KBQF (I think.) As for KBQF, we will no doubt bring it back at some point. But I am really thinking of expanding it into a full-length musical theater piece.

Finally, what's the cover image all about?

Ah yes, that. That's my take on the ten sefirot of classical Kabbalah. I did it myself in Photoshop. I'm certainly have no drawing skills (or talent) whatsoever, but I do know my way around Photoshop. Anyway, without going into a long discourse on the meaning of the sefirot, they are basically a representation of the 10 divine emanations that came about when God created the universe a few years back. Only the top three (Keter,Chokhma and Binah) survived creation in perfect shape, while the others are the broken vessels whose shards litter (so to speak) creation with the somewhat broken spirit of the divine. Put another way, creation is indeed filled with the divine spirit, but it is not whole, complete. It is our role as humans to repair the rift that took place in at the beginning universe, gather up the broken pieces and glue them together to make all of us whole again. The rift, by the way, was a necessary condition in the creation of the universe—because God could either have perfection and loneliness or imperfection and a whole lot of flawed company like us, but, unfortunately for him and even more so for us...not both.

Did I say I wasn't going to go into a long discourse on the meaning of the sefirot? Well, I'm not done yet. I've gotten plenty of comments from people about the cover image, saying it really looked like some kind of space ship. I honestly don't remember if that was done consciously or not, but it makes sense given the fact that the secondary theme of the piece is quantum physics. In any case, whether intended or not, it has taken on the extra meaning for me—I mean the combination of sefirot and physics. It's also given me an idea, which I've sketched, for sci-fi film based on KBQF. But I'll save that for later. I've said enough for now.