Bayete’s Electric Gospel: ‘Seeking Other Beauty’ (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

What were some of the other forces that influenced you at that time?

I grew up in the church. My maternal grandmother was an evangelist and a minister; she had parishes in three cities at separate times in her life. I refer to my grandmother as a proto-feminist, but very deep into her evangelism. And you hear the [church] organ in Seeking Other Beauty. I’ve always been fascinated by the organ. Of course, I loved Jimmy Smith: not just Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but all of those records that he did with Grady Tate on drums and Kenny Burrell. I also loved Richard “Groove” Holmes; that’s kind of secular organ.

And then the other thing is that I was moving more toward electric. When I played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, he said, “Man, this is cool. But you seem like you’re trying to change the sound of my music.” I was starting to get some rebuff, because that’s where I was going: electric, with the Clavinet, the organ, the electric piano. This is before the electronics came in, before I ventured into becoming a synthesist and electronic musician.

One of the fascinating things about Seeking Other Beauty is the manner in which you electronically treat the instruments. The keyboards don’t always come across with their native, unadorned sound. Were you attempting to redefine the character of those instruments?

I was going with it; I was hearing the possibilities. You could play a combination of notes, let’s say fifths on an acoustic guitar. But then when you wind that up with the electric guitar through Marshall amps or whatever kind of processing, we’re talking about something completely different. The elements of the sound interact with each other in that electric dimension, and that’s completely different than what happens purely in the acoustic.

I’ve always been interested in harmonic languages. And that’s something that came with classical training. And yes, I wanted to push the instruments to other places.

Some of the tracks on Seeking Other Beauty fade out, leaving the impression that the band is continuing to play out into infinity. Was that the case?

Yes, that’s correct. I would think of it in terms of color, and then transitions of color and putting that on a spectrum. And that spectrum is something that is defined by what it is that we hope to convey. We follow those variations, and it becomes very instinctual where you create those transitions and where something seems like it is continuing and it goes on. If we think about it in terms of a new color – not just combinations of colors, but where it comes together to form a new color – I think it lands harder if it’s set up more cleanly.

What kind of direction did you give the players with whom you were working?

I talked to the band members about what we were going to do. I would give ideas about this imaginary space that we were going to create, and then it became a matter of listening. And once that was absorbed, we played. Maybe there was some gesturing that went on as we went through it: a nod, or some kind of hand direction. But basically it was just listening to each other intensely. And I think when that happens, we hold the dimensions of that atmosphere.

For instance, let’s say that within a song it’s sad, and then it becomes happy. Or it’s sad throughout. We can convey that without words. Let’s say there’s a female who would go past the back of your house in a boat by herself, in and out of your view for months and months. You never got to interact with her at all, but you just saw her. To convey that space of seeing this person in a distance and never speaking with them and holding that space over time, that space, that’s an art space.

I do know that we would go very deep. Deep listening, and hearing each other as we formed the music.

When you made Seeking Other Beauty, was it intended solely as a studio project or did you have plans to wheel it out in front of people?

I did want to – and I did – play this music live. And it was really quite something; it took on a completely different dimension live because it was purely electric. It was very strong, and we were loud. The players that I was working with then, I completely enjoyed, not just for their musicality, but for the freeness in their spirit. I had a laboratory collective there in San Francisco of musicians; for some time we would regularly get together and play new music and experiment with different ideas and freely explore creating without a structured outcome in mind. And over time we internalized what that interactivity was.

There was never any organization in San Francisco like the AACM out of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music. But I did have a similar experience with the musicians with whom I interacted, many who have gone on to be world-renowned players. We got together all the time, and there was a constant push and pull of influences. You mentioned Parliament/Funkadelic, and I mentioned Sly Stone and his group. But also I have to bring in what was happening with Dylan and powerful messages that were coming from rock artists and folk artists in the movement. That was all a part of it.

Tell me how the album fits into the counterculture of the time and place in which it was made.

The first aspect of it would have to do with rhythm. Not just the rhythm in music, but rhythm in thought. Because certain concepts require repetition to achieve what they set out to do. If we see ourselves as a part of that shifting landscape, how can we reiterate that thing which is commonplace amongst us? I’m not talking about tribalization; I’m talking about people coming in touch with their individualism, being able to express things that in a less tolerant environment would have to be repressed.

I must say that it had everything to do with the environment that I came up in, and what I was attracted to. I have some very deep bohemian roots, and there was a very strong collective within that. There was identity. It was a time of radical consciousness, but I think that the underlying, less spoken theme of that was that our social and cultural concerns had to shift towards the truth that individually we have to find a way to live without worry and be free. And that’s where our creative instincts are stimulated. I think it was our shared creativity that brought the movement of the civil rights era to a head.

The central theme that I always saw is “one love and one heart.” That’s it. If there’s something occurring that’s in violation of the human spirit anywhere on the planet, we have a responsibility to respond to that. I answered that call, and I have been answering that call. It is more intense and less intense at times, but I’m absolutely listening.