Dueling cohorts
Pianist Art Lande and guitarist Khabu Doug Young
Improvisational duos, especially those that pair harmonically able instruments such as guitar and piano, require musicians who are especially familiar and empathetic with one another, who know when to lead and when to follow as well as how to support and complement. They need to get along, right? That’s not the thinking of pianist Art Lande and guitarist Khabu Doug Young, who’ll appear together at the Gig Performance Space on Saturday, Oct. 15. “I always say music is too easy,” Lande told Pasatiempo in a phone call from his home in Boulder, Colorado. “And it’s too easy to do what you’re good at. Khabu and I know how to play defense — we challenge each other, purposefully play something that makes it hard on the other.”
“That’s the reason we play,” said Young, also from Boulder, “so we can get in each other’s way. That’s the joy of it. It takes someone like Art, who is so creative that he can interrupt my thought process. I love that. Otherwise, I know what I’m hearing, and I’ll just play what I hear. “Sometimes getting in each other’s way is taken to extremes. “One gig,” Lande recalled, “I was yelling at him, holding him by the arms and yelling into his ear. He just kept playing.”
When Lande and Young go one-on-one at the Gig, their concert will be another in a history of collaborations that began in the 1990s. Lande, a major figure in jazz and improvisational music since his first recordings for the European ECM label in the 1970s, met Young as a student at Naropa University in Boulder. “It’s the thing that drew me there,” Young said of the liberal arts college known for its Eastern, contemplative approach to learning. “I knew Art was teaching there, and I was familiar with his style and interested in his approach to improvisation.” Young made the move from his home in Houston to Colorado in 1988. “I remember him coming in for a lesson,” said Lande, “something about harmonizing in a way to create a counterpoint, something that’s not easy to do. He came back a week later and had it mastered. I thought, ‘This isn’t a student. This is a cohort.’ ” Young responded, “I consider Art my mentor.”
Among musicians, Lande’s reputation rests equally on his prowess as an educator and a performer. Even as he was defining the early sound of Manfred Eicher’s ECM with his band Rubisa Patrol and recordings with saxophonist Jan Garbarek and bassist Gary Peacock, he was giving private instruction and teaching at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco and later