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KEYBOARD
izard WUnraveling Craig Taborn’s
Electric (And Acoustic) Soundscapes
By Ted Panken
“With Science Friction, there’s a lot of electronics and
reading,” said Taborn, pointing across his living room to a
concert upright Bechstein piano on which Berne’s scores
shared space with piano music by Arnold Schoenberg.
“Sometimes I’ll want to do a particular part on one keyboard,
another part here, then another there. It would be a real problem
to read music and also think about all the knobs and
dials, or to look at a computer screen and problem-solve
while the part is coming.”
Taborn’s penchant for sustaining creative fluency through
a 360-degree span of stylistic taxonomies, in contexts
“inside” and “outside,” acoustic or electronic, makes him a
singular figure among improvisers of his generation. But at
this moment, his keyboard wizardry was posing a peculiar
problem. “I’m still deciding what to bring,” he said. He
wasn’t talking about clothes.
A half-full fiberglass camera case laid at his feet. “Flights
in Europe have been strict on weight,” he said. During his
winter travels he had drastically exceeded the 20-kilogram
limit beyond which a 10 euros per kilogram fee is imposed.
“This case is actually light for its kind,” he said. “Nothing
happens to it—it’s waterproof and you can throw it down the
stairs. But it’s 7 kilos empty, and there’s no way to avoid the
overweight. So now I’m thinking, ‘What do I want to deal
with What do I need and how much do I want to take’”
A possible option would be to place the contents of the
case into the square bag that sat across the room, transforming
it into an unprotected, carry-on satchel. “You get on these
Photo by Bill Douthart
Home in Brooklyn during the first days of spring, Craig Taborn was engaged in research and
development. Among his various tasks was to memorize 10 new Tim Berne compositions
in preparation for an April tour in Europe with Berne’s Science Friction, to which, during
the winter, Taborn had contributed—as he had done with David Torn’s Prezens—slamming grooves
and an orchestral array of sounds from keyboards, synths and home-brewed “junk” electronics.
little connecting flights and they want to hand-check your
stuff,” he said, nixing the notion. “So you’re giving $1,500
worth of stuff to somebody in Italy. You get to the gig, and
it’s just gone.”
Taborn would bring a laptop with a hard drive loaded
with software emulations of all the instruments he plays, and
a contract rider stipulated that each venue would provide a
piano, Rhodes and virtual Hammond organ. “I’ve been trying
to phase out my laptop thing, because it takes me out of
improvising,” he said. “It’s wonderful, but I get more
mileage out of one or two nice things that do something.”
Deciding upon those “nice things” was therefore the task
at hand. One essential was a coil of high-grade electrical cord
in a corner of the case. “This is the thing that makes the
weight,” he said ruefully. Below the cord was a Line 6 Delay
pedal, for echoes, and a Behringer mixer with two stereo and
two mono lines.
“A lot of people send everything to the house soundman,
but I like to mix myself,” he said. “I’ll plug in the Rhodes
and the organ and a couple of synths, then send all the lines
to my own amp, and have them mike the amp. That gives me
complete control over my sound.”
Taborn considered a keyboard and a wood-trimmed,
knob-loaded CreamWare Pro-12 ASB synthesizer, built to
capture the essence of the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, a
popular synth at the cusp of the ’80s.
“I’m an improviser, and I don’t know exactly what sound
I want to make until I hear what’s going on,” he said.
48 DOWNBEAT September 2008