eMusic Q&A: Henry Kaiser

Plenty of guitarists perform in dives, but Henry Kaiser is the only one I know who doubles as a professional research diver most recently exploring the waters underneath Antarctica ice.

Born in 1952, Kaiser has been erasing the boundaries of improvised music with his unique combination of humor and discipline for more than three decades. His cornucopia of eMusic titles include scrupulously "outside" solo albums like Aloha, It's a Wonderful Life and Domo Arigato Derek Sensei (the latter a tribute to his musical mentor, Derek Bailey); exciting group efforts, like the remarkably faithful Grateful Dead tribute project, Eternity Blue; and daring cross-cultural collaborations with musicians from Asia (Buddhist Stories), Scandinavia (The Sweet Sunny North), Russia (Popular Science, with keyboardist Sergei Kuriokhin) and Madagascar (A World Out of Time).

As if that weren't enough, the Berkeley-based overachiever has lately been producing movies with director Werner Herzog. But we'll leave that interview to Netflix.

You were sort of a late bloomer when it came to guitar, right?

I started playing guitar when I was 20 years old. I wanted to play the kind of music I enjoyed listening to, and that's what I've been doing ever since. I wanted to learn to play everything from Derek Bailey-style free improvisation and Captain Beefheart's composed experimental rock to my favorite blues guys and San Francisco psychedelic guitar.

I also wanted to collaborate with people from other cultures. In fact, the first day I got a guitar, I tried to play along with Sonny Sharrock, which was easy. And then I tried to play Sonny Sharrock style to a track from a 1964 album from Madagascar. Almost twenty years later, I went to Madagascar and ended up recording the same song, "Izahay Sy I Malala," with the same person I'd first heard perform it, the valhila player Sylvestre Randafison. Only I didn't even realize it until I got back from Madagascar.

What kind of a guitarist are you, anyway?

I'm an experimental guitarist. Everything I've ever done has been in the spirit of a science experiment, or a fourth-grade science-fair project, where you try something crazy and see what happens. I try to do things I don't think anybody has done before, just to see what will happen. Not so much to get an answer, but to lead to new questions.

You're one prolific guitarist, too. I counted some 31 albums with your name on them eMusic's site.

I put up all the stuff I control. I also assembled a couple of new albums just for eMusic: Nostalgia for Infinity and Blue Water Ascent are solo guitar records that use looping technology. It's very psychedelic, druggy music.

Tell me about A World Out of Time, the three volumes you recorded in Madagascar with guitarist David Lindley.

When Lindley and I went to Madagascar in 1991, we wanted to follow a different model for collaborating with people from other cultures. We'd seen Paul Simon and David Byrne do horrifying things, where they'd either rip people off and not pay them, or they'd water down the music until it became unrecognizable as roots music. We wanted to collaborate respectfully, in a fun way, and make sure the local musicians got all the money. Which they did. Our collaborators have made more than a hundred thousand bucks, many times the average Malagasy income. We gave them all the money and we introduced the incredible music of Madagascar to the rest of the world. We did a good job.


To read more of Richard Gehr's interview with Henry Kaiser, including Kaiser's picks from the eMusic catalogue, click here.