April 9, 2003

By Will York

TALKING TO KEN Nordine one-on-one is slightly surreal. This is a man whose career stretches back half a century and whose legacy is embedded in countless TV ads, radio shows, and recordings. As a recording artist, he is still largely a cult figure, but his high-profile fans have included Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits, the Grateful Dead, and – I can't believing I'm saying this guy's name, but it's relevant information – Fatboy Slim, all of whom have collaborated with or, in the latter case, remixed the man.

Even if they don't know Nordine by name, most people know his voice, one of the world's coolest and most blessed. It's a relaxed yet authoritative baritone that is practically a part of the nation's subconscious by this point. And at age 81, he still has it. Not only that – he continues to speak with the same sharp wit and uninhibited, free-flying imagination that defined efforts such as Colors, his ninth album and an oddball classic, first released in 1966.

True colors

On that album he free-associates – to borrow a term from Sigmund Freud, one of Nordine's favorite thinkers – on the characteristics of 34 colors, coming up with personifications such as "amber believes in being neutral" and "burgundy is fat." He also uses the occasion to spout other, more tangential pearls of wisdom, at one point wryly bemoaning the state of poetry: "Puce is a victim of loose thinking / Thinks poetry pays / No one these days pays the least attention to things poetic / Ain't got no time to waste on rhyme."

That line could be a commentary on Colors itself. The whole project got started when the Bay Area-based Fuller Paint Co. commissioned 10 pieces as radio spots, but when Nordine reworked them and added more for an album to be released on the Philips label, it was "what they call a 'stiff,' " he says, speaking on the phone from his home in Chicago. "They didn't know what bin to put me in." The album was reissued in 1995 by local label Asphodel and has remained in print since then.

For someone who pretty much invented his own minigenre, word jazz, the "What bin does this belong in?" dilemma is understandable. In the late '80s the influential Incredibly Strange Music books, published by the Bay Area's RE/Search, made a noble effort to situate him in a new context, including him alongside fellow hard-to-classify figures such as Esquivel and Perrey and Kingsley. Unfortunately, much of this stuff is still viewed, with condescending irony, as mere kitsch. Nordine confesses, "I never considered myself strange, although strange things have happened to me. I always thought myself incredibly ... simple."

Flowetry in motion

His April 13 appearance as part of the SFJAZZ spring series places him in a different context, although not a new or foreign one. After all, he has always been a big Charlie Parker fan, he once MCed a radio show, Jazz in the Round, which featured guests such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and his records have involved jazz musicians and improvisation or, as he clarifies, "improvising with a little help from forethought."

"The best ad-libs," he explains, "are things that either you've done – you know, just telling stories for people – or that you've written out, slightly, and you use it as a sketch for where you want to go." Even the monologues on Colors, which were written out ahead of time, flow with a stream-of-consciousness quality that is the hallmark of a good bebop solo. Maybe more important, though, Nordine has an innate feeling of how to make it all come together without stepping on the musicians' toes and vice versa. You don't feel like you're listening to some grandstanding, self-important blowhard when Nordine speaks – he's more like an old friend.

"A lot of people think that you just talk and then they play music," he says, accounting for why so many jazz-and-spoken word recordings are – politely put – unlistenable and irritating beyond belief. "The trick of what I do, really, is to listen very carefully to what the players are playing, and have them listen very carefully to what I'm doing.

"What I do is somewhere between singing and intoning with the beat, so that if you're in the pocket, you get the feeling that you're where you should be musically. And I make sure to leave enough space for the players."

Incredibly strange visuals

The players at Nordine's show will include keyboardist Laurence Hobgood, percussionist and Pat Metheny veteran Paul Wertico, bassist-trumpeter Eric Hochberg, and guitarist John McLean. While Nordine admits, "I never know what I'm gonna do before we do it, really," his show will likely include material from his 2001 Asphodel release and his first studio full-length since 1993, Transparent Mask, plus some old favorites from his catalog and something new he's been working on that he's described as "image jazz."

"I've been working with vector math, with a computer," he says, "and I've done some things that are going to be projected with a VGA – abstruse, abstract backgrounds. It's morphing backgrounds, with no cuts – it's trying to do something with images that's noncompetitive, or nonintrusive, to the meaning of the words." This is something he mentioned in his Incredibly Strange Music interview more than a decade ago but has just recently found the technology to pull off. Which, for an 81-year-old, is pretty inspiring – not to harp on the age issue or anything.

He explains, "Well, listen, my theory is that if you have something you haven't finished – that you're not gonna finish right away but you have to apply yourself to – it's a good way to keep death at the right distance! 'I can't die now! I've got too much to do!' "