spawned		Chicago, 2001 with Jeff Parker at the recording of Dénouement The Truth Machine talk to me Caught me in a lie? Fine. Just tell my webmaster. It’s his fault. Contact him directly.
My mother is Barbo Rückert (nee Goldstein), from “Little Egypt” Illinois, where she was, among other things, a marching-band twirler of flaming batons and “Promising Young 4-H Scholar” for 1946. My father was Izzy Feigenbaum. He was born on a chicken farm a few miles outside of Galesburg. They sold primarily to the kosher markets on Chicago’s northwest side. Like his three older brothers, he worked the farm until his father, Abraham, moved the family to Gary, Indiana, where he took a job in the steel mills. When my father graduated high school, he moved to Chicago Heights, not that far from Gary but far enough, he said.
cultivated
I was born in Chicago on the 27th day of Elul in 5719 (sharing my birthday are Steve McCall, Freddie King, and Buddy Rich, who said I had a lot of gall sharing his birthday, since he played with Sinatra, Bird, and blah blah). I lived in Chicago Heights until I turned 14, when I ran away from home. For a while I panhandled and worked as a spotter for drug dealers in the Hyde Park neighborhood (where the AACM flowered) on the South Side. That’s when I first learned guitar, sitting in the wings of the Regal Theater and listening to blues musicians on Maxwell Street. That’s also where I earned pocket change stealing hubcaps from tourists’ cars and then selling them back as identical replacements. For a few quarters musicians like Hounddog Taylor and Scotty Honeywealth (of Scotty and the Ribtips) were willing to share a little of what they knew. Eventually I settled on the near north side (at the time a land of earnest folk singers and money-grubbing rock bands) before moving to Madison, Wisconsin a coon’s age ago. Now I spend most of my time in Cologne, Germany, which, among other things, is home to the James Choice Orchestra.
unemployed
For booking information please contact Horst at Manyaks agency.
blah blah blah blah
Getting me to stop talking is harder than getting me to start. A historian for an all-things-art-in-Chicago non-profit organization had no idea what he was getting into when he asked me to sit for an interview. The results are posted as part of the Chicago City Arts oral history project.
scholarly
I graduated from William Ray Elementary School, attended Kenwood High School for half a year and Central YMCA High School for another year. Eventually I was able to pass the GED test. Much later I received a diploma in “electronics technology” from the DeVry Institute of Technology, entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a music major before graduating with baccalaureates in economics and journalism and a Masters in mass communication research from the School of Journalism. In addition, in the past 30 years a number of fine musicians have attempted to teach me, often in vain. I’ve studied classical guitar with Sherry Conway, George Lindquist, Javier Calderon, and Wulfin Lieske and jazz guitar with Carl Michel and Roger Brotherhood.
name dropper
Although as a leader I perform with a number of line-ups, I call them all The Scott Fields Ensemble, partly in homage to the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think of the ensemble as consisting of everyone who has performed or recorded with the group at any time. Although not all members are present at any given performance or recording, they are there at least in spirit. There are, unfortunately, sometimes exceptions. Recently a musician had to be tossed from the virtual ensemble pool when he let it slip that he hates animals. The ensemble includes Carrie Biolo (vibraphone), Michael Bisio (contrabass), Geoff Brady (percussion), Kyle Bruckmann (oboe, English horn), Marilyn Crispell (piano), Matt Turner (cello), Vincent Davis (percussion), Stephen Dembski (conduction), Hamid Drake (percussion), Gerry Hemingway (percussion), Elizabeth Falconer (koto), Michael Formanek (contrabass), Sebastian Gramss (contrabass), Guillermo Gregorio (alto saxophone, clarinet), John Hollenbeck (percussion), François Houle (clarinet), Robbie Hunsinger (oboe, English horn), Derek James (trombone), Raymond Kaczynski (percussion), Greg Kelley (trumpet), Peggy Lee (cello), Thomas Lehn (electronics), João Lobo (percussion), Rob Mazurek (cornett), Myra Melford (piano), Larry Ochs (saxophone), Joseph Jarman (saxophone), John Padden (contrabass), Ed Pias (percussion), Jeff Parker (guitar), Donald Robinson (percussion), Scott Roller (cello), Damon Short (percussion), Ryan Smith (computer), Robert Stright (vibraphone), Hans Sturm (contrabass), Matthias Schubert (tenor saxophone), Dylan van der Schyff (percussion), Xu Fengxia (gu-zheng), and Michael Zerang (percussion).
gear nerd
Until recently I played a Gibson signature guitar that was made in the Gibson Custom Shop. It’s called the “SF-336” because it is a variation on the ES-336 model. It has the same body and straight-pull headstock as the ES-336. But the Scott Fields Signature model has a spruce top instead of maple. The fingerboard is unbound, inlay-free ebony instead of bound rosewood. There are nickel markers on the fingerboard’s side. The ES-336 is a semi-hollow, but the SF-336 is completely hollow, although the top is thicker in the center to support the pickups and bridge. The pickups are P94s, which are single-coils that sound more-or-less like old P90s, rather than the ES-336’s humbuckers. The SF-336 came in a finish they call “vintage sunburst,” as though there are more recent suns available to burst. Recently, however, I stumbled across a small builder in Maine, C.P. Thornton. These guitars work better for me than anything else I have tried. The model I play, the Jazz Elite, has a spruce top and maple sides, back, and neck. It is semi-hollow, but Chuck has a clever way of attaching the center block (which is actually an extension of the neck) to the back and top in just a few places, so that the instrument resonates much like a hollow-body thinline. The guitar is a single-cutaway, but the neck joint is tapered so that playing in the top positions is just as easy as on a double-cutaway. The craftsmanship is extraordinary. The guitar speaks quickly, has a woody tone, and has the best separation between notes of any electric I have played. After I bought my first guitar Chuck asked if I would like to endorse his instruments. How could I say no. He’s now making me a backup to replace the one the airlines will lose or destroy. Chuck made a few changes for me from the standard Jazz Elite, sort of a virtual signature model I guess. He got rid of the dots on the fingerboard, put a narrow spaced nut on a wide neck (I tend to yank E strings off the edges of fingerboards), installed Lindy Fralin P-92 pickups (they are a pseudo-single coil, real toney but not so hummy), and wired the pickup selector so that includes an off switch and an out-of-phase position. As for my classical guitars, I have two that Robert Ruck built for me. On early CDs I used a spruce-topped guitar he completed for me in 1984. On my recent recordings and tours I’ve used a cedar-topped, cutaway guitar he completed for me in 1999. Currently I am on the waiting list to get on his 10-year-long waiting list. If my name ever moves from the waiting waiting list to the waiting list, I plan to order a cutaway spruce-top guitar.
industrious
As always, I’m currently juggling a variety of projects. December 2007 I recorded a suite and an extended single-movement piece for Stephan Rath (theorbe) and myself (classical guitar) that we premiered in May for the Cologne Musiktriennale. Currently I am writing music for a January 2008 recording of my quartet for the German label Neos. In February Clean Feed will release a CD of my Freetet, a blowing trio that includes João Lobo on drums and Sebastian Gramss on bass. We plan to record a second set of material summer 2008. Clean Feed will also release a CD of acoustic duets with I recorded with Elliott Sharp last summer in New York. He wrote half the stuff, I wrote half, and the other half we made up as we went along. Two other recently-released suites were funded by the Panaesthetic Institute. One is settings of some of Samuel Beckett’s short plays for electric guitar, cello (Scott Roller), tenor saxophone (Matthias Schubert), and drum set (John Hollenbeck). The first set of these Beckett settings was just released by Clean Feed Records. I hope to record the next set in summer of 2008. The other Panaesthetic project is music for electric guitar, tenor saxophone (Matthias Schubert), Gu-Zehang (Xu Fengxia), and analog electronics (Thomas Lehn). We recorded these five pieces in July 2005 and they just appeared on Rogue Art Records. Other current projects include a trio for shakuhachi, nylon-string guitar, and contrabass, duets for nylon-string guitar and contrabass, a solo recording of 171 very short pieces using the drawings of Thomas Hornung as graphic scores (these were recorded in summer of 2006), and a modular piece for the James Choice Orchestra to premier spring 2008 in Cologne. Projects in the not-too-distant past include music for the videos of Douglas Rosenburg, a commission for Li Chiao-Ping Dance that was a “reimagination” of J.S. Bach’s third cello suite BWV 1009, and the trio suite christanglefox (482 Music). Working backward, the previous large project, released on the Italian Rossbin label, was an extended suite—which was funded by the Dane County Cultural Commission and Madison CitiARTs—for a quintet that includes percussionist Carrie Biolo, double reedist Kyle Bruckmann, single reedist Guillermo Gregorio, trumpet player Greg Kelley, and myself. In early 2000 I wrote a piece for contrabass and percussion that was a commission from the Wisconsin Alliance of Composers. It premiered April 7, 2000 in Madison. Another past commission was as part of a research grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board. The result was a large, modular composition 96 Gestures. Another older commission was the prototype and first score for The Truth Machine,a device that allows large ensembles to react to a single scrolling graphic score. This piece is for the Milwaukee Improvisers Orchestra. A few years earlier the dance troupe Kanopy hired me to write music for a children’s performance and at the same time choreographer Li Chiao-Ping had commissioned me as well. And way overdue is a solo percussion piece I'm writing for Yoshiko Kanda. Some of my compositions are posted in PDF form at The New Music Jukebox, which the American Music Center operates.
intermittent
From the time I purchased my first guitar at age 12 until I was in my early twenties, I practiced and studied relentlessly. My early influences were, in general, the lamest possible pop, a retelling of which earned me a spot as The Onion’s featured pathetic geek in their now defunct Pathetic Geek Stories cartoon stip. At my first professional performances I was still too young to legally enter the bars in which my blues bands appeared. Then, when I was 19, after a couple of years playing in various rock groups, I became increasingly influenced by the AACM performances I had been attending for the previous several years. I then began performing in a loud, free-jazz trio, which lasted until shortly before the premature death of one of its founding members, trumpeter and organist Stan White, in 1973. Take acid every day for a couple of years and see what it gets you. For a long period after that I was institutionalize and although at first I continued to practice, it was impossible to perform musically. In 1989 I started composing and playing again.
anal
I’ve been pretty well obsessed with structures for improvisation for some time. And although I don’t like to make a big deal about it, when pressed I’ll come up with some catch-phrase or another for the style of music. I used to refer to it as “post-free” jazz, because I thought that the genre didn’t exist and thus prevented me from being lumped into one camp or another. Not long after I was disappointed to be included in an article about post-free jazz, so I switched to “neo-revisionist improvisation” hoping it would be even less meaningful. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meaningless enough and reviewers started mentioning it. I then tried “transparent music.” and taunted reviewers to “make something of that.” One did. Now my term of choice is “exploratory music.” Whatever the stuff is called, over the last decade or so I have concentrated on providing a method through which chamber ensembles can develop extended improvisations. Two such pieces are the 1996 composition and Cadence Jazz Records CD 48 Motivesand the 1998 composition and CRI CD 96 Gestures,which allow musicians great freedom to create compositions that can vary radically from performance to performance. In concert, a conductor uses the American Manual Alphabet as well as traditional conducting gestures to select from melodic fragments (not all are played in any one performance, and they can be repeated and combined), instrumentation, dynamics, tempi, and other musical attributes. As musicians switch between motives, the basic materials for their improvisations—primarily 48 non-linear scales upon which the motives and gestures are built, but also the underlying feels—change. These motives are built on a tonal system that Stephen Dembski developed for his own classical compositions. In Dembski’s “circles,” the interaction of two 12-pitch tone rows is used to construct closely related non-tonal scales. For the past six years, I have relied on this harmonic system—simplified and notated for improvisers—almost exclusively. That said, however, the system comes into play primarily in the large ensembles. As the size of the ensemble decreases, the amount that I depend on the system decreases as well. By the time you get down to trios, duos, and when I play solo, you can hardly hear it at all.
latecomer
For more self-promotion and blather, and a few minutes of sound, see my myspace page.
compulsive
A person for whom routines and acquisitions of incomplete sets of anything are invariably enslaving shouldn’t collect as a hobby. Nonetheless ever since since my mom purchased my first amplifier for me (a Fender Bandmaster with two 12-inch speakers in a cabinet that could hold eight) I have hoarded pilot-light jewels. It has been said that my holdings are among, if not the, foremost collection to be found anywhere.