Once in a while as a drummer you discover someone so different, so utterly brilliant, that you are forced to reassess your ideas of what drumming is about. Fritz Hauser is just that. I remember reading about him in some magazine and being intrigued by what was written. I searched and found his 1985 recording, Solodrumming. I was stunned. Here was precision and grace, themes and melodies, and not one hint of the American jazz tradition. Fritz was coming from some other source completely. I quickly located other recordings of his and again had the same experience.
This interview was originally published in Modern Drummer in 1996. Since then, Fritz has continued with his solo percussion performances as well as composing for, and working with other drummers and percussion ensembles (Kroumata, Synergy Percussion, Nexus, Speak Percussion). He has also continued to work with other musicians and dancers, as well as architects in sound instalations.
Fritz Hauser: Out Of Sound & Silence
How do you explain the unexplainable? These days it seems everything must be categorized, made easy for mass consumption. Fritz Hauser defies labels-he's not jazz, or rock, or classical. The European press has called him a "virtuoso percussionist" and an "extraordinary composer", even comparing him to Iannis Xenakis. By following his own muse, he has redefined the art of percussion into a very personal statement. "I didn't get started by playing the Basel drumming," explains Fritz. "When people hear of a drummer from Switzerland, especially from Basel, they all think he used to drum at the Faschnacht, the carnival, which I never did. I liked it, but I never did it."
Like many teens in the 60's, he started off listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Then he took lessons, studying the basic rudiments and drum set. While still in his teens, he gathered the best musicians in Basel to form the art-rock band, Circus.They released four recordings and Hauser pursued his musical studies in earnest.
"When I was 19 and had finished school," he says, "my parents left me to become whatever: a lawyer, a doctor-but I was more into music. They said you have to do it the right way. So I went to the Conservatorum in Basel and started studying classical percussion. I was never a be-bop player so I thought I'd get a straight classical education. Then I could do whatever I want, which of course is not very true. After two years, the teacher wanted me to really become a timpani player in the orchestra. I was too much of an individual already and couldn't fall in love with the idea of being the timpani player in the Basel Symphony the rest of my life. So I quit and got into all kinds of projects.
"I had one of my childhood dreams come true: playing in a real circus for a season. Just doing all those rolls while they were up on the tightrope. That was quite an extraordinary experience. Then I felt attracted by mixed media things and started playing with dancers, theater people, for lectures, all kinds of things-bringing the drums into different contexts with all kinds of arts. I also played for openings of art exhibitions. I never painted myself, but felt a very strong connection.
"Then in 1983 I finally decided to create the first solo program. I always had this feeling the drum set could be more than just a rhythm machine. Playing with other musicians I couldn't hear what the drums sounded like. I really love the solitary sound of a cymbal, the solitary sound of a drum resonating-pure drums. Together with other instruments it was always changed. It was difficult to start and sell an idea like this, nobody believed it was possible. They kept asking, 'Are you sure you want to come with just a drum set?' When somebody wants to do a concert with me, I have to explain what I'm doing. Everyone knows about the so called drum solo: 5 minutes or 15 minutes, then it's over. They can't imagine that you can create music for a whole evening with the drum set. You have to fight all these prejudices and just kept doing it. In 1984 I recorded a concert with a cassette player and sent it to Hat-hut records. They said, 'This is okay, we want to do it.' So this was a very good start and over the years Hat-hut has supported me by putting me in different projects."
Fritz's recordings in themselves are events. His debut album, Solodrumming, is a stunning tour-de-force of percussion. It is far from the drums-as-melody solo playing of Max Roach. Hauser produces sounds and textures that play with the 7-second reverberation time inside the massive Martin-Gropius-Bau hall. The space between the notes is as important as the notes themselves. In the longer pieces like "Tic Tac" and "Traumbilder", a simple ostinato pattern is used as a point of reference, with counter rhythms and sharp accents layered on top. "This is a huge building in Berlin," he says. "The Nazi regime had their headquarters there in the Second World War. So the whole thing is very historical. In 1985 they were renovating it and I could only use the space during the night. During the day, work was going on and there was awful noise and dust. At five, they stopped working and I had to wait until eight when the dust had settled so far that you could see in there. Then we came around nine, I set up the drums, the engineer set up the mics and we started recording until about six in the morning. At seven the first workers came. We had to put the things away in insulated rooms to protect them from the dust. When we left, they started banging those big hammers again. So I felt inspired by the silence on one side and the activity which was going on during the day; it was like a feedback on what was happening to the room.
"In a room like this, if you set up in one corner, you have different echo reflections and can't control anything. The room does whatever it wants. When I came to record, I set up in the middle. Then you can push back the room. If you play really intense, the reverb doesn't overwhelm the sound. I like the feedback situation in a room like this very much. A lot of drummers would be frightened of it, but for me it emphasized the sounds I wanted to hear. Like the sustain from a cymbal just goes on a few seconds more, it just fades into nothing, melting with this beautiful reverb. On a drum, the edge between sound and silence gets a little foggy. It's like a very soft change from shadow to light. So it's really from sound and silence, it goes into nothing. Which was very nice to be able to record digitally on a CD, because you can actually hear what's happening, you can really follow the sounds into silence.
"My second album, ZWEI , is German for two and it's all duos, so it's like a double meaning of the title. I recorded six consecutive days with six different people. Some I knew before and some of them I had never met. We improvised the whole day with different approaches and I recorded two or three hours of music with everyone. I had a very poetic feeling about this album. It was more like a collection of little poems then the sometimes powerful Solodrumming.
"The next one was Die Trommel/Die Welle, 'The Drum and The Wave.' This was a radio-phonic work. I had started working for the Swiss radio in 1982. They offered me the possibility to produce (pieces) in whatever abstract way I wanted. The first one was with an actor and the second was Die Trommel: the drum. In their studio there is a control room and two large recording rooms. One of them is very dead for speaking voices and the other more lively. There is also a whole series of small rooms, from a toilet to a telephone booth, from very harsh acoustics to a soft, totally dead silent room. And you have dozens of doors that you can move around, so when they record (a radio play) and somebody wants to open a door they just put one there. You go in and go out but there's no wall, just a door. So I used just one snare drum in all possible recording situations. We tried all kinds of different sounds and rooms. There was a lot of overdubbing, adding one drum on top of another and using all these door effects"
The second composition, "The Wave", was a piece written in 1986 for his Schlagzeugspektakel (Drum Spectacle). "I got 40 people together to create a percussion orchestra," he explains. "People from different fields were involved--professionals, amateurs, students, kids, housewives, everything. It was fascinating. We worked for a week, doing a series of concerts in Basel which were all sold out. We toured through Switzerland and recorded it for the radio. It was performed with 40 players. This gives it tremendous impact, because you have like 35 cymbals being rolled, which creates an absolutely unbelievable sound. It's loud like a jet plane and it can be soft like an ocean. It's beautiful. On the CD I did it with just the minimum set-up of ten players, because it's more transparent. Forty people is like a huge sound that you can't control anymore."
His next solo project was, Pensieri Bianchi, Italian for "White Thoughts", It was recorded in a castle in the northern part of Italy that's owned by five Swiss architects. "In 1988 they invited me to play there in a little festival," he says. "I did two concerts and a year later I came back for a vacation. They had invited a painter, Raimund Girke, to work there for two months. All the work created at the castle is exhibited. I had my drums, so the gallery owner asked me if I would do the opening concert for the show. The painter couldn't believe it was possible to play the drums for his paintings. So I prepared a piece of about 30 minutes dealing with the acoustics and the paintings. Girke calls himself a painter of white. He uses a lot of white, it's always his main interest and it's the silence for me in a way. So philosophically and artistically we had a very strong connection. He's a very famous German and about 60, so you can't really ask a guy like this to paint a cover for an album. But he approached me after the concert saying I should do a recording and he would do the cover. I said, 'What a nice idea.'
He has made two duo recordings, L'énigmatic and DUHO, with Swiss saxophonist Urs Leimgruber. The improvised music is a result of listening and reacting to each other. As on his solo recordings, texture is important. "We met," he says, "when he was playing in an electric jazz group (OM) in Switzerland back when I was with Circus. They were more famous and doing concerts all over the world. We (finally) got together on a Joe McPhee recording for Hat-hut. One morning we were playing as a trio in the studio and it felt good. Urs asked if I would be interested (in forming a trio), he knew a bass player, Adelhard Roidinger. We did some concerts and a recording (Lines) for Hat-hut which the producer didn't like, so didn't put it out. Half a year later the bass player left the group in the middle of a tour and we finished it as a duo. The producer had already booked another recording session, so we got there with no bass player. We felt ready to play as a duo and we've been playing as a duo ever since."
With the success of the duo recordings, Hat-hut finally released Lines in 1994. While not playing jazz time, Fritz manages to imply a swing feel to his often straight 8th note cymbal patterns. "Adelhard is very restricted in a way," says Fritz. "He's a perfect line player, that's why the album is called Lines-- he just keeps playing all those bass lines. Harmonically and melodically beautiful, but he would never play any awkward sound, never experiment. But he has perfect timing and you can play whatever you want. So I didn't have to keep time. I never felt so free playing with a bass player. But I never really dared to play ding-ding-a-ding. I can play it, but it gives me a funny feeling."
A similar experience for him was trumpeter Franz Koglmann's, About Yesterday's Ezzthetics. This was a fairly traditional jazz setting. "That's a pretty weird recording too," he says. "I was invited to play with Franz and saxophonist Steve Lacy. I said that I wouldn't be able to do that, because they're playing jazz standards. But the idea was to use a different approach. I was called on Thursday and went to Vienna an Tuesday to record. I had never played with them and could only bring my snare, hi-hat and a couple of cymbals on the plane. Since I didn't have a bass drum, I used the bass player as the bass drum. This was very good training. I used strange approaches to these standards and like this recording very much."
His newest CD with Urs, Behind The Night, is the result of a project they did in 1994 with three piano players: Hildegard Clate, Marilyn Crispell and Elvira Plenar. "We were asked to play as a wild card," he says, "at a classical music festival in Lucerne and proposed doing it with the three pianos. Where else could you get three Steinways together for a concert without a problem? We had 3-1/2 days to prepare it and then performed it twice. It's a conceptual piece with lighting. The atmosphere is very specific. I like it a lot. We've always enjoyed working with women because they approach music differently, it's not who's better or faster. Imagine a version with three men on three pianos-I would quit right away! It's not possible. The women were fabulous, they listened so carefully and gave each other freedom. They were only interested in creating good music, it was beautiful."
"Last year," he says, "I got to know a guy who makes incredible masks for the theater, some of the best in Europe. I was always interested in playing with a mask. He couldn't imagine how this would work. He usually creates masks for two or more people, so the masks react to each other. I said the music could be a partner to the mask. So he created two masks for me and I worked with a director, she's also a drummer. We created two pieces, one which is more theatrical where the other guy is playing a roll very fast and then slowing it down. But you don't really hear any time relation, it would just slow down over twenty minutes. With this mask you could only see the eyes--people were freaking out, it was too much for them. But they liked it.
"Right now I'm writing a piece commissioned by the Swiss Cultural Foundation. It's a quartet for a percussion ensemble from Geneva. When I'm writing, I like to have a general idea about the whole piece. So this slowing down aspect is something I really like. The piece is thirty minutes, and it's called Double Image. There's a thing through the four players that is slowing down and another level that is not slowing down--it just appears and disappears behind and in front of the slowing down thing. The whole feeling is slowing down but you can never say who is slowing down."
His newest solo release is 22132434141. For it, he commissioned eleven different drummers and composers to write pieces for his specially designed drum set. "The idea," he says, "was to get rid of the responsibility for both playing and writing. I was interested in going out on a stage and playing a piece I hadn't written, I would just have to stand up for my interpretation. If they didn't like it, I could say, 'I'm trying to play it the best I can, I didn't write it.' It was quite a job. I played it all by heart, and 90% of it is written; so there were a lot of notes in my head."
For this recording, Fritz had created a unique drum set. "There's an artistic concept and a pragmatic concept," he explains. "The artistic concept is that I'm always using the traditional drum set. There are others in Europe, like Pierre Favre, who started using all kinds of exotic instruments. I always felt distracted by instruments I don't know. I think that some people just love it because it's different. I felt attracted by using a traditional set in a different way. On Solodrumming, one bass drum was 28" and the other was 20" and the toms were much bigger than now. This is the pragmatic side. I used to travel by car, but when I started playing in the trio with Urs and Adelhard, they went by train. This was a problem with a drum set, so I designed one as small as possible. I could carry it easily and I fell in love with traveling on trains."
While Fritz had a new Ayotte set made last year, he still hasn't used them. "I'm working with a mechanic," he says, "who is designing the hardware for the stands. He's very precise, but puts my work to the side. I'm meeting with him next week and hope to start using them next month. I've been using the snare for half a year, but not the toms. I can take apart the 18" bass drum and put the 12" snare and a tom inside and carry it. I'm not using two bass drums anymore. I'm using a double pedal now. I didn't like it at first because I like the two bass drum sounds. But I can use it to dampen the head and change the tuning, so it makes up for the other bass drum."
After working in so many different contexts, he's interested in playing at some of the drum functions that are held each year. "I'm a Zildjian endorser," he says, "and I keep pushing the Zildjian guy in Switzerland to invite me to one of those drummer meetings. It's about time that somebody else is playing the drums there. I like those drummers, but they all sound a little bit the same. They should present something a little different. But it takes time, they need people to tell them to check out something different." Fritz and Urs may be back in the States and Canada this fall for a series of concerts. Check them out if you can.
Fritz on the web:
