WALLY SHOUP

Caterwaul of Sound

By David Keenan

   Thanks to a run of high profile releases on the Leo label and hook-ups witth heavy hitters like Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and drummer Chris Corsano, Seattle saxophonist Wally Shoup is rapidly becoming one of the more visible representatives of a leftfield, self-supporting network of free improvising musicians who operate outside of the orbit of major American jazz centres like New York and Chicago.   Alongside players like New England’s Paul Flaherty, Alabama’s Davey Williams and La Donna Smith, and Colorado’s Jack Wright, Shoup has been tearing at the margins for several decades now, self-releasing a slew of beautiful cassette documents that interrogate the liminal space between jazz, improvisation and freeform blurt.

   “There are always mavericks in any city” Shoup maintains, “people who’re drawn to the deeper end of the pool musically and they tend to find one another.   I’ve always found kindred spirits. I moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1981 and Davey Williams and La Donna Smith were important people to me, their commitment to free playing and their view of it as a poetic, surrealist experience was and still is inspiring and motivating.  Plus, the way they incorporated their Southern roots into the ‘non-idiomatic’ language was influential since I strongly feel playing abstract music should reveal who you are, not be something you learn and then hide behind.”

    Shoup’s sound is highly vocal, a mix of gutbucket blues, wrenching atonal squall and pure hallelujah that’s informed by a childhood spent absorbing the styles of wild secular singers like Little Willie John, James Brown, Wilson Pickett and Bobby Bland. “I grew up in the South during the 50’s and 60’s and was attracted to black music from a very young age, mostly through black radio stations.  I was drawn to the fervor of the singer’s voices, the screamers & shouters, they really got to me. I listened mostly to rock ‘n roll, r ‘n  b,&  soul until the late 60’s when I got exposed to free jazz and psychedelia.  The good stuff had that same quality of fervor and naked emotionality that the 50’s black singers had. Pharoah Sander’s Karma, John Coltrane’s Meditations, and Alber Ayler’s Spritual Unity knocked me out.  I listened to everything I could, everything that had that element of spunk and weirdness – Cecil Taylor, electric Miles, Beefheart, Hampton Grease Band, Stooges, Art Ensemble, Braxton, ESP discs….read about it too,  the radical politics, the intentions behind it, the reasons it sounded ‘weird’, the challenge to consumerism, etc., and I had my own personal revolution as a result of the music. I  began to see and hear things in a broader, more radical way.”

      Shoup first picked up the saxophone in 1970, primarily as a way of “letting off steam”.  But given his background – white, Southern, working class – he struggled with concerns over his own authenticity.  Exposure to the alternative improvisatory tactics posited by Derek Bailey and Evan Parker’s Music Improvisation Company signposted a way out of this particular cultural impasse. “I heard it as an extension of free jazz and abstraction, in general”, he relates. “It was less pulse-oriented, and that led to even weirder shapes, phrases, and textures.  It was a music exclusively for the imagination, with no historical reference points.  This co-mingling of free jazz and British free improvisation led to me discovering a music within me that was both personal and necessary.”  In 1981, Shoup released his debut LP, Scree-Run Waltz, a wild face-off with percussionist Ross Rabin in the style of early Paul Lytton/Evan Parker duos.  Over the next 13 years he went on to release nine cassettes that documented everything from a collection of alto sax solos and a trio  with Davey Williams and La Donna Smith to a concrete assemblage of found sound and overdubbed sax.

     But it wasn’t until the release of Project W on CD by Apraxia in 1994, showcasing the trio of Shoup, cellist Brent Arnold and drummer Ed Pias, that the saxophonist fully broke cover.  Thurston Moore was one of the few who were listening and early on the two made contact, cutting the ferocious Hurricane Floyd issued by Sublingual in 2000 in the company of percussionist Toshi Makihara.  The duo hooked up again in 2003 for the Live at Tonic quartet set that also featured Paul Flaherty on saxophone and Chris Corsano on drums. “I learned that Thurston had bought a copy of Scree-Run Waltz way back when and was aware of my subsequent cassette work”, Shoup reveals.  “Thurston, much to his credit, keeps up with lessor known musicians, poets and writers, if he feels they’re doing authentic work.  In 1998, he invited my group Project W  then featuring Brent Arnold on cello and Jeph Jerman on drums  to open for Sonic Youth, and it was terrific. We just played like we normally did and their audience dug it.  Since then, we’ve done some playing and recording together, and, invariably, it’s been an enriching experience.  I’ve played with a lot electric guitar players, ‘played’ one myself more or less, with drills, files  and have learned to make my sax work with whatever they’re up to.” 

     Shoup’s most routinely charged group is his current trio, featuring bassist Reuben Radding and drummer Bob Rees.  The trio's latest release, Blue Purge, is their most expressively energetic to date, with the set programmed in order to build towards a central point of overwhelming physicality. “Improvising, to me, is about staying in the moment, staying focused on the thing you’re creating collectively with others”, Shoup insists.  “Fast, high-energy playing makes it easier to stay there – you don’t have time to think – but any playing that remains intense and focused, not distracted or meandering, is worth pursuing.  I think improvising helps you discover your ‘spontaneous self’, the one that actually likes surprises and takes delight in free falling, free association, and caterwauling.  The longer this self stays in control, the better.  It’s just more open and creative than the analytical self. Of course, it has to learn its limits and not be destructive or domineering. So, I don’t look at improvising so much as catharsis, but as a means to access this spontaneous self and give it free reign. Although, in the end, that might well amount to the same thing.”