Fred Frith, you have 24 fingers and you’ve recorded over 400 albums. Are you a guitar hero ?
(silence, laughter) I don’t even know what that term means. I must be a guitar hero for someone. I admit that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that! There are two million guitarists who play better than me. It’s not difficult !
You’ve been playing the guitar for 60 years. Do you feel like you’ve done the rounds of this instrument?
No. I still have work to do. It’s never over because I work in several different contexts. My work always adapts to new contexts and to the people I play with.
You will play for the 15e time at the Victoriaville Current Music Festival (FIMAV). Is it difficult to stay “current” when making current music? Does the term condemn you to always be in the process of renewal?
Current, not current, I have no idea what that means in the end. As Quebec musician Jean Derome, whom I greatly admire, used to say: I don’t care if the music is new or not. What is important is that the music is alive. If they want to call it the Festival de musique vivant de Victoriaville, that suits me very well too.
What is live music for you?
Alive, that is to say that it is not dead! When people do imitations of what’s already been done, to me that’s not live music. In music schools where we learn jazz, you learn to play like people did 60 years ago. It’s not alive. You have to find your own voice.
You yourself taught at a music school in California. What have you tried to convey to your students?
That if you don’t make mistakes, you’re wasting a lot of time. You have to be able to make mistakes. You learn from your failures, not your successes. I encourage my students to learn from what’s not working so it works better next time. When I talk about mistakes, I’m not talking about guitar technique, I’m talking about ambitions. Don’t be afraid to try ambitious tricks to figure out what will and won’t work. If you don’t have big ambitions, your mistakes will be smaller.
You recently told a French journalist that in spirit you were a folk musician. What did you mean by that?
I don’t know in what context I said that. But in the 1960s, my first gigs were in folk clubs in Britain. It was a completely welcoming atmosphere. Anyone could take a guitar or a violin. It was in this atmosphere that I learned to play with people. I felt encouraged. Today I want to be as encouraging to the people who are listening. I like to do a concert where the door is open. Let people come in to see where we’re going.
That said, your music is not considered easy to access. Many people are still afraid of improvised music…
There are plenty of clichés about the difficulty of this music. But if you play in front of people who have no prejudices, they listen to what you offer. And if you come up with something that invites them, I think it’s absolutely possible to enjoy and travel with us. We don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t care!
For your show at Victo, what to expect?
This show is an improvised trio of rock guitar, bass, drums. There will also be Heike Liss doing live visuals and Susana Santos Silva on trumpet. We already toured together four years ago. Susana is a very gifted musician, she can do anything with her instrument. We also did some duo stuff. We have an album that just came out (Laying Demons to RestRogueArt tag).
You are 74 years old. You retired from teaching in 2018. When will you retire from music?
Never. I intend to play until the end! On the other hand, I am in a big operation of death cleaning Right now. I fix all the stuff I don’t want my kids to inherit after I die. When we do that, we leave less shit behind! That said, I have no intention of dying soon. I still need to improve…
Fred Frith Trio with Susana Santos Silva and Heike Liss. Canadian premiere. Friday, May 19 at Carré 150 (Salle F. Lemaire) at 10 p.m.