I recently read about a new John Cage biography in the New York Times Book Review. I ordered the book, Begin Again by Kenneth Silverman, and it just arrived.
Cage influenced people who don’t even know who he is. And then there are folks like Brian Eno and Ryuichi Sakamoto, both of whom owe huge debts to Cage’s thinking on music and sound. Music sampling, cannibalism, noise effects, and silence are all sonic and conceptual territories explored by the late composer.
I am fortunate to have met this brilliant and gentle man. It was during the Los Angeles Festival in 1987, and we held a radio event on Morning Becomes Eclectic—which I hosted then—with Cage. It was a chance operation involving three tall stacks of LP’s which I randomly pulled from different genres/sections of the large KCRW library—albums by Umm Kulthum, James Brown, Sun Ra, classics by Bach and others. All stacked up into 3 piles around 100 LPs high.
Cage threw the yarrow sticks in an I Ching chance operation. I would pull from the various stacks according to the results: #15 from first pile, #32 from the 2nd, #83 from the 3rd. Three turntable operators then played cuts from each—simultaneously. The result was a crazy mix and an entirely new composition. That was pure Cage.
I’m also fortunate that one of the turntable operators that day had kept a cassette of the session. I had lost my aircheck and despaired of ever hearing it again (there was no internet in 1987). I put the word out on social media, and amazingly, heard back from Larry Stein, now in Seattle. I can savor it again and it is even more interesting and provocative now, decades years later. I am grateful to have lived moments like this.