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.
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: