Peter Zummo: Downtown Bandleader

It is early evening in January, and rain taps into Soho’s black, neon-washed puddles. I have jet lag and I am late to meet Peter Zummo, legendary impresario of New York’s minimalist avant-garde, for a double espresso at Bar Italia. Peter is in London for only a few days. In that time, he has already appeared on Tropic of Love, the ultra-chic NTS monthly slot hosted by Portuguese selector Mafalda, and helped launch musician, composer, and “whale-noise enthusiast” Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi’s album Undertow at the Old Church in Stoke Newington.

Pushing eighty and still possessed of an irrepressibly lithe spirit, Peter moves through the city with buoyant attentiveness. He is as conversant with London’s underground as any Dalstonite, corresponding with younger musicians by email and late-night radio messages from his Staten Island kitchen. When I turn onto Frith Street he is standing directly in the road, dressed in an olive games blazer and trousers, playing trombone to the punters queuing outside Ronnie Scott’s. Nobody appears surprised. He looks completely at home, less visiting musician than someone who has simply stepped into another branch of the same ongoing scene.

Like many people, I first encountered Peter through his collaborations with Arthur Russell, the pop-experimental cellist whose avant-garde instincts carried the tenderness of a folk singer, particularly the pieces collected on the 1983 instrumental album Tower of Meaning, originally written for Robert Wilson’s staging of Medea. Peter tells me they would jam together in a sixth-floor walk-up on East 12th Street while Russell invited, as he puts it, “some really weird people” to join in. The door was effectively open; musicians, dancers, friends, and acquaintances drifted through. Music happened because people happened.

“Peter tells me they would jam together in a sixth-floor walk-up on East 12th Street while Arthur Russell invited, as he puts it, “some really weird people” to join in. The door was open; musicians, dancers, friends, and acquaintances drifted through.”

This was the mid-1980s, but by the time Peter had arrived in New York from Ohio a decade earlier, downtown Manhattan was already a kind of musical commons. It was full of weirdos, outcasts, artists, and down-and-outs, but the categories did not hold for long. Composers played in bands, minimalism brushed against disco, rehearsals became gigs, and a long conversation about tuning systems might continue into pre-drinks before an all-nighter at Max’s Kansas City. Peter fit seamlessly into this world and quietly tuned it, not as a frontman or provocateur, but as a bandleader, someone whose presence allowed things to cohere. He studied trombone with Roswell Rudd and Carmine Caruso, developing a technique that could be impeccably controlled or loose and conversational, depending on what the moment required.

“I worked closely with Boris Policeband in the original Big Apple Circus band,” Peter says in a gravelly, unmistakably Midwestern accent. “I’d visit his Varick Street loft, and we’d read Bach two-part inventions, he put me on the treble while he played the left-hand line on viola. Later he staged a piece in the entry of the old Kitchen on Broome Street, displaying police blotters from a closed precinct and hiring an off-duty officer to stand guard while he blasted screeching violin through outdoor horn speakers. Looking back, I realise I was more punk than I knew.”

Tonight he will play at Cedric Bardawil Gallery on Old Compton Street, co-badged with Tom Willis’s Soho Reading Series, and I have been asked to introduce him. It is hard to know what to expect.

As coffees become gin martinis at Bar Termini, I begin wondering what actually makes a scene cohere, not just talent but proximity: cheap rooms and long nights; musicians reading poetry chapbooks in the afternoon and hauling speakers down the street at midnight; venues porous enough to let amateurs and obsessives share a bill; a small audience willing to return before anything is good; arguments carried from lofts to bars and back again. It requires a certain economic looseness (now largely gone), but also a seriousness of attention (still possible): people showing up for one another’s half-formed ideas, lending equipment, introducing friends, starting series. By the second martini I suspect scenes are built less by charismatic leaders than from a collective agreement, briefly held, that something strange is worth attempting in public and someone else will be there to witness it.

“Since my early days in the city, I made the connection between composition of ensemble and composition for ensemble,” Peter says. “An ensemble is a social unit. That’s true in classical groups, but even clearer in rock, jazz, and vernacular music: each musician contributes individually toward a shared aim.”

“By the second martini I suspect scenes are built less by charismatic leaders than from a collective agreement, briefly held, that something strange is worth attempting in public and someone else will be there to witness it.”

Tonight Peter is a bandleader for an ensemble of one. At Cedric Bardawil he plays his first solo concert in decades. Rather than a formal introduction, I have written a brief prose-poem in the spirit of his methods, and he will accompany it on trombone. His own lyrics are collages of overheard subway talk and stray radio chatter, and when we arrive the gallery is already dense with conversation: twentysomething Soho Reading Series regulars, bearded veterans, and NTS devotees. Tom Willis parts the crowd and I begin.

I close by borrowing lines from “Prepare for Docking,” on Peter’s album Deep Drive 2 +, set on the Staten Island Ferry, a patient account of metropolitan transit that also hints at submerged channels and an otherworldliness beneath the harbour.

“It’s not a recital,” Peter once said. “It’s a movie.”

As I read, he answers with low, searching trombone tones, distant as an animal call echoing through a subway tunnel. My words pass in borrowed voices:

“It’s because the voucher represents a discount.”[Text Wrapping Break]“How do you like your new refrigerator?”[Text Wrapping Break]“It doesn’t happen often, but it happens enough.”

On the ferry a similar sentence is pressed into metal and paint – a warning not to fall overboard. Half-spoken, half-sung, it carries the cadence of an announcement: a human voice imitating a system. The message is practical, but it also becomes philosophical. We tell ourselves the encounters that change us are rare, and yet they happen enough. I suggest to the crowd that this is one way that Peter makes the seemingly random encounter make sense and hold meaning while the roguish bandleader enters, performing a one-note piece with octave displacements whereby he moves his instrument in a sweeping and searching movement, parting the audience on either side like a municipal leaf-blower, a minesweeper, or Moses.

The trombone swells. My voice disappears. The performance takes over.

“An ensemble is a social unit.That’strue in classical groups, but even clearer in rock, jazz, and vernacular music: each musician contributes individually toward a shared aim.”

For the second set Peter plays Awkward Position, a process-based piece inspired by the challenging American artist Vito Acconci, whose performances placed audiences inside situations rather than in front of objects. The instruction is simple: repeat a three-note sequence of slide positions – 5th, 7th, 3rd – while playing D-flat, E, and F. It is deliberately awkward, a choreography of repetition pursued almost to exhaustion, with only partial concern for the notes produced. The music becomes endurance as much as sound, a physical demonstration of attention. The piece ends without a flourish. Applause arrives almost cautiously, as if the audience is checking whether the situation has concluded.

Later that evening we walk a few streets over to the Groucho Club, where Peter is scheduled to play again, this time as a quartet featuring Stefano Ancora on drums, Leon Brichard on bass guitar, and a reunion with Hansen-Knarhoi on cello and voice. The room is smaller than the gallery and darker, a warm-lit half-library, half-bar. No real stage separates anything. People are mid-sentence when the instruments come out. People talk, order more drinks, move chairs. There is no announcement, no moment of beginning. The musicians simply take their places and start. Sometimes Peter plays only a few notes, sometimes none at all for long stretches, holding the trombone loosely at his side while the others continue. What he provides is not leadership in the theatrical sense but orientation, the sense that the music knows where it is, even when it does not know where it is going.

Walking back onto Dean Street, I realise what distinguishes him. The bandleader here is not the loudest person or the most visible. He is the one who alters the behaviour of a room. Downtown was never only a location in 1970s Manhattan; it was a temporary alignment of attention. At the Groucho, for a couple of hours or more, it forms again, and Peter, almost discreetly, conducts it.