For lovers of the experimental and avant-garde, cellist Hank Roberts is a local treasure. Although he plays rock, folk, and classical music with equal adeptness, Roberts is best known for his contribution to the avant-garde jazz tradition. For nearly 30 years, Roberts has been upending our conventional notions of the cello as a classical instrument — he amplifies his instrument and uses stomp boxes such as distortion and delay pedals to create a rich, idiosyncratic sound.
Roberts has been a fixture on the downtown NYC avant-jazz scene since the 1980s, and has played with improv musicians such as Tim Berne, Joey Baron, Mark Feldman, and Bill Frisell, with whom Roberts has been playing since they met in 1975. Roberts has also been a staple on the Ithaca music circuit since he moved here in 1989, and he has collaborated with the best Ithaca has to offer, including Mary Lorson, Billy Cote, Richie Stearns, Ti-Ti Chickapea, and Eric Aceto.
Roberts has a record forthcoming on Munich-based contemporary jazz and improvised music label Winter & Winter, which was previously known as JMT Records, on which Roberts released many records in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1997, Roberts founded a label in Ithaca, Level Green Records, which releases jazz and avant-garde music.
These days, Roberts is known as one of the leading innovators on the cello. We took some time to chat with Roberts about his open-minded approach to performing, composition and collaboration.
Popcorn Youth: Growing up in Terra Haute, Indiana, how you would describe your exposure to jazz music?
Hank Roberts: Well, I grew up in a town where there was a university and a couple of small colleges, so it was a combination of a very rural community and also one where there was some importance for the arts. That, in addition to the fact that my mom was a music teacher and a musician herself, we always had a lot of music around the house. She was always playing records, and also very supportive. I had some good teachers, other mentors at the University.
Popcorn Youth: You first started out playing other instruments. How did you eventually end up playing the cello?
Hank Roberts: It was just by chance, in a way. (Laughs) I first wanted to be a drummer. That was inspired from seeing some concerts at the University, inspired by the drummers. Then I took piano lessons. We had a player piano, and we always had at least two pianos in the house, it seemed like. So I played those instruments and improvised and had fun.
Popcorn Youth: When your were improvising on those instruments, were you thinking mostly about a jazz tradition, or were you also thinking about other genres of music?
Hank Roberts: I was really into a lot of different kinds of music. Like I said, at first I wanted to be a drummer, but you couldn’t take drums at my school. You could only take a string instrument. (Laughs) And then I saw a cello, and it really appealed to me. I liked it because it was bigger, I think, and I was kind of a tall kid. (Laughs)
But at the same time, I was just a normal kid, in terms of listening to the radio all the time. Back then, the radio was much different, it wasn’t so formatted. People didn’t know how to control it yet, so on my AM station, you would hear James Brown then Frank Sinatra and then “Girl From Ipanema,” then Stan Getz playing with Joao Gilberto, you know? (Laughs) The radio was a lot more diverse back then. As a kid, I also liked The Beatles and other rock bands, and I wanted to be a rock guitar player. And I was really into the blues, because my older brother and sister turned me on to music, too. We became aware of the blues somewhere in the mid 60s as a focused art form, and that was when I really got into blues, and wanted to be a blues guitar player. And then I went to a jazz concert, and saw a trombone, so I started playing that when I was about 13.
I had three or four different ways I could go, and I sort of just assumed that I would do them all — and in a way, that is kind of what I have done, I just put more of it into the cello at this point. But back then, I played in a rock band, I played in a local jazz ensemble, I played in the orchestras that were around town.
Popcorn Youth: At what point did you start to think about your cello in a more experimental, idiosyncratic way?
Hank Roberts: At first, I really just heard acoustic instruments playing jazz. I was really into Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans and John Coltrane. When I was 15, I was totally absorbed in that, and the thought of the need to amplify wasn’t in my mind. But when I moved out to Boston and started to play with louder instruments, the cello just couldn’t keep up with the drums — you had to get a pick-up just to be heard. And then I saw people using distortion pedals and reverbs and things like that, so it was a natural thing for me to want to experience that on my instrument.
Popcorn Youth: You are playing with Bill Frisell now. How did you get involved with him and the downtown NYC jazz scene of the 80s?
Hank Roberts: Yes, I’m in a group with him right now, there’s a cello, violin, viola and guitar. That group also plays with bass and drums and two horn players. There are three different configurations that I work with Bill on that.
I met Bill back in 1975 in Boston and we became friends. I was just in school just for a very short period, for a summer session at Berklee College of Music, and then I lived in Boston and stayed around the scene and played with people.
Popcorn Youth: And then you both moved to NYC?
Hank Roberts: Yes, I moved to NY, and then moved back and forth between NYC and Indiana a couple of times, but there in the 80s for a pretty substantial bit of time. Bill was living [in NYC], so we started working together there, too. And we had been doing stuff before that, but then he put together a band and I played with his band for about five years.
Popcorn Youth: Are there many well-known cello improvisers? What was it like when you first started out?
Hank Roberts: Well, when I first started I had no idea. I had such an open mind, that I thought there would be lots. I assumed that when I went out to Boston, but there was just myself and maybe one other person at Berklee. Now there are 125 students who are string players at Berklee. It wasn’t happening then so much, but now, there are just more and more.
Back then, everyone had it in their minds that if you’re going to play the cello, you’re going to play classical music. But people have really broken through those boundaries and successful careers. There are a lot of different cellists doing a lot of interesting things, from old-timey Cajun jazz players to people who play really abstract improvisational music to rock. It’s getting more popular because it’s fun. If you’re going to be a cellist, and you focus your energy on that and you go for an audition with a string orchestra and 75 people show up for one slot, what are you going to do? (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: So it’s almost by necessity that people are branching out.
Hank Roberts: I think so, but also because that’s what their spirit wants, too. I think that in the 1800s and early 1900s, classical musicians were supposed to do the bidding of the composer, which is not a bad thing. It’s okay for some people, but there is a limited amount of freedom for your own expression. There are things like phrasing, intonation, volume, dynamics — all of that kind of stuff you can do to change when you play a piece that is written.
Popcorn Youth: What is it like balancing a jazz tradition with a classical tradition? What is the dynamic between experimentation and traditional idioms?
Hank Roberts: Well, I’ve had no boundaries in my head for so long, I don’t see it [that way]. I mean, I understand these categories, like when people say that “straight-ahead” jazz is bebop and 60s jazz and all that. But chord changes, rhythm, melodies, and phrasing are all really important, and you can do the same thing with other situations
I’ve been in a number of different string groups where, basically, we were all improvisers. It was pretty much like, [a person] can choose to play the music that’s written, or he just can choose to play in the scales. I think that those boundaries are being erased more and more all the time. There were times in classical music, back in Renaissance times, when people were taught to play continual: the cellist would get the chord changes from the piece, and he had to know how to create his own bass line in the moment. And so it’s not totally a new thing.
It would be hard around here to make much money from playing really abstract improvisational music; on the other hand, you can go to Europe and make a pretty good living playing free improvised music, if you’re really dedicated to it.
Popcorn Youth: Why is that?
Hank Roberts: There’s a bigger appreciation, I think —more of a history for the appreciation of the arts in Europe. And here we’re more into money and guns, I don’t know. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: How have you seen the downtown jazz scene in NYC change over the decades?
Hank Roberts: It’s funny because it’s probably changed more than I know. But we were fortunate then. If you had asked me about the Knitting Factory or the downtown scene, the Knitting Factory was really the home back for musicians that I knew back in those days. I think that it goes through ebbs and flows of being more conservative. When I was there in the 80s and early 90s, it felt really vibrant to me, but a lot of it circulated around a couple of venues people could go and play, so the venues became really important home bases for people to gather and try out new ideas. So when I see that happening now, it seems healthy.
Popcorn Youth: You moved to Ithaca in 1989. What was the transition like, moving from NYC to Ithaca?
Hank Roberts: It was a transition that I wanted to make on a pretty broad spectrum.My wife and I had two children at that point, and we wanted to live in a community where we felt we could easily integrate into the community and be a part of it. We lived right outside of the city in New Jersey, but we felt really disconnected from the neighbors and our friends because we were separated by great distances. And I had a challenging traveling situation to get over the bridge and into New York. I had to be in cars for hours every day — I just remember sitting in a car all the time! (Laughs) We lived nine miles outside of the city, and I was in a car for three hours of the day. We wanted our kids to have a backyard to run in, and the homeschooling community was going pretty strong here at that point, and we were pretty involved in that.
And I wanted a change — I was on the road all the time, and I was longing to have a space where I could think about what I really wanted to do, rather than all of these projects that came at me that I had to take to survive. But I did enjoy and learned a tremendous amount from them, too.
Hank Roberts: What is your approach to collaboration these days?
Roberts: Well, I’m wiser about getting involved in things that maybe aren’t “right” for me, you know? I think it’s different in every situation. It’s always different in terms of where I am at the time, or if I’m busy with a lot of things. For example, right now I wouldn’t take on a lot of outside projects because there are things I need to prepare for that are going to take up a lot of my time.
In the past, I would have taken everything and then just worked like crazy and have it take up all of my time. (Laughs) It was out of balance. Now, I have to face what I really want to do, and work with people that I really feel attracted to work with. I’m definitely more selective now in terms of looking for people that have the chemistry that works with my chemistry and trying to be clear about what the collaboration will mean for everyone. It’s always collaboration no matter what you’re doing, or else you’re on an island.
Popcorn Youth: Have the people you’ve played with over the years been influential in your own playing?
Hank Roberts: People used to ask me who my influences were, and I would name the great famous jazz players, classical players, R&B players. That’s what I’ve learned from, and that’s how we learn, by taking from others. But I realized at a certain point that the people I play with probably influence me more than anyone. In NYC, it opened me up to a whole world of music that all of my friends were approaching in different ways. People were as creative as possible.
Popcorn Youth: What do you think is unique about the Ithaca music community?
Hank Roberts: Well, it’s what I always dreamed I would want to find and want to be involved with. I’m glad that my dream actually had some reality connected to it. (Laughs) It’s kind of the place that my wife and I were looking for, and it’s also the community that I was looking for musically. I like the fact that it’s a small town and still there’s lots of culture going on. It’s small enough that we effect each other and we’re not lost in the sea of things. We can have an effect on the community and walk down the street and know the neighbors, and walk to work.
Popcorn Youth: When you first moved here, was there a process of seeking out musicians around town that you wanted to play with?
Hank Roberts: Yes, I found that happening. I made a decision 13 years ago that I was going to stop traveling. I was traveling back and forth between here and New York for a while, and I kept an apartment in Hoboken for a while. That was really hectic and I didn’t know what I would find here in terms of musicians although I had heard of it and seen some stuff around. But then, naturally, I just planted myself down here and said that I wasn’t going to travel for a while. And I had a pretty strong feeling to want to play music so naturally I sought people out and people sought me out. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: do you find yourself going back to the city frequently?
Hank Roberts: I’m traveling a lot more now these days, and I made a decision to do that. I’m in good place with my family to do that, I’m not going crazy about it or trying too hard; when things come, I kind of go with it. I go to NYC if I have work there, so lately I found myself going down there more, which has been nice, especially connecting with some friends that I haven’t had much commerce with in the last 10 years or so. It’s been great.
Popcorn Youth: How would you define the success that you’ve found in Ithaca?
Hank Roberts: (Pauses) Emotional satisfaction would be the first thing that comes to mind. I have a great circle of friends, people dedicated to music and the arts. Now, when you think about Grass Roots [Festival] and things that happen around here, the fan base is great, too.
In a way, it’s like how it was in NYC, but there aren’t quite as many jazz musicians around here, so I’m doing very diverse stuff here. I enjoy working with Billy Cote and Mary Lorson, whenever that comes up, and I work with Richie Stearns and Eric Aceto and Ti Ti Chickapea, and I do my solo stuff, and from time to time I put together bands and write music for the group and put on concerts.
I really get to do quite a broad range of things right here in Ithaca and it takes me 10 minutes to get to the concert or rehearsal. (Laughs) And I feel like I have a really nice group of students right now. I’m more into teaching than I ever have been. So that’s been really fulfilling.
Popcorn Youth: Obviously music technology has changed quite a bit since you were a student at Berklee. How have digital software, recording environments, or even things like fancier effects pedals effected your work?
Hank Roberts: I think that’s probably one of the significant changes that’s happened in our culture. The whole computer software thing, even in the last five years, gosh, it’s just skyrocketed. I think that’s had a big influence on us. I must admit there are times I get involved pretty deeply in the computer side of it. And the reason I say, “I must admit,” (laughs) is because I am enamored with it to a certain degree, and then I realize that the roots of all this is people getting together and playing music and sharing ideas and having conversation.
But it is just amazing what computer technology in the digital age has done for graphic design and for the information that’s out there that we can have access to. So I think that in itself is just incredible and actually a wonderful think.
Popcorn Youth: What is your live set up like these days?
Hank Roberts: Well, I have an amplifier, and probably bring my big cabinet down for the show at [Castaways] (laughs) because it’s got a really good sound. And a distortion pedal and a delay pedal, that’s basically what I use electronically, just old style stomp boxes, nothing too fancy.
Popcorn Youth: Is there a younger generation of cellists that participate in a similar tradition?
Hank Roberts: Oh, yes. There’s a couple of different cello groups out there these days. These young folks, they just want to have fun. (Laughs) It’s going to be an explosion. It’s fun and more lucrative, financially.
Popcorn Youth: So what else you have planned for 2007?
Hank Roberts: Well, I’ve reconnected with the label [JMT] that I used to work with in Germany. I did eight CDs with them back in those New York days. I had been doing some touring in Europe, so I got reconnected with those folks. They’re now called Winter & Winter. So I’m just really pleased about that because I haven’t worked with Stefan since the early 90s, and we’ve been in contact. Now that I’m traveling more it makes more sense for him to want to do something with me, can sell a few more records that way. (Laughs)