Slow Absorption: A Conversation with Ned Rothenberg on solo performance and ‘Looms & Legends’

In his Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein posits that the fourth dimension, time, can flow differently for different observers. While length, width, and height are readily observable, appreciation of the passage of time can differ from person to person and place to place. The malleability of this construct inherently results in not only different conceptions of time but also individualized relationships to it. Consider how, to a child, a year seems like an eternity, but to an older person, it flashes in the blink of an eye. And these perceptions inevitably shape socially acceptable attention spans, which in turn influence how listeners interact with and appreciate music. A few generations ago, it was commonplace to have a vinyl record play – both sides- for an hour with little else taking place. Today, music is most often relegated to delivery via small headphones that provide just one input in the sea of sounds surrounding us. In an age of soundbites and reels, the idea of setting aside the necessary attention to let an album slowly evolve over time seems foreign. Antiquated even. Because of this, it is very easy to suggest that Ned Rothenberg’s Looms & Legends (Pyroclastic, 2025) belongs to another time. But that perspective explores only a half-truth.

Generally, Looms & Legends slowly opens and gradually evolves. Those looking for a quick hit of sonic enjoyment are unlikely to find what they seek. Full appreciation of the work requires the listener to sit patiently and let the art unfurl at its own pace. If a listener has the fortitude to let the music breathe and move on its own, what they hear can transport them to a place of solace where the vibrant strokes of extended techniques – circular breathing, multiphonics, overtones, and rhythmic layering – craft a rich landscape. The effort of actively listening to the record is well-rewarded.

However, while Looms, writ large, is a powerful statement against the era’s insufficient appreciation of art, the music contained therein also reflects some of the best elements of the moment in which we live. Over the last three decades, the internet has made the world seem smaller than ever. Cross-cultural pollination has become a norm, not something viewed from afar with curious interest. In many ways, Rothenberg has been ahead of this trend with his deep dives into musical traditions from around the globe. One that particularly stands out on Looms is his incorporation of decades of study on the Japanese shakuhachi. This is especially true on the album’s bookending pieces. The opener “Dance Above” uses the flute to create a dizzyingly danceable groove, while the closing rendition of Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” is simply haunting, with the artist’s tones stuck in a delicate dance with silence. And, even staying within Western instruments, Rothenberg experiments boldly with the tools at his disposal. “Plun Jah,” for instance, is built around the novel idea of combining a clarinet and a trumpet mute to create sounds that are oddly equally familiar and foreign.

And, so, what one finds with Looms is neither a castigation nor a blind appreciation of our immediate creative culture. Instead, the album is both a rallying cry for improvement and a recognition of how fertile the soil is for new growth. That duality of perspective also reflects Rothenberg’s own place in music. For the last forty years, he has been at the forefront of expanding the language of free music – sometimes with collaborators like John Zorn, Mary Halvorson, and Evan Parker – but he also does so with an overt appreciation of the ideas that came before.

With Looms & Legends, masterfully weaves strands from a colorful past, full of now iconic voices and audiences who actually listened to, into new patterns from which future generations can build. We sat down with Rothenberg back in September of 2025 to discuss his solo work, overcoming short listener attention spans, the shakuhachi, and Hans Reichel’s daxophone. While this conversation has sat packed away for months, it is full of insight, and with an impending solo performance at the Big Ears Festival on March 26, 2026, it seemed like the perfect time to lift the curtain hiding the conversation from view.

PostGenre: What do you feel most sets Looms & Legends apart from your other solo work? 

Ned Rothenberg: Because I haven’t put out a solo album in thirteen years, the new one, and the process I went through for it, is so much more present in my mind. I can’t pretend that it’s not a refinement and honing of materials I’ve been working with for over forty-five years. However, things continue to change in terms of the motivational aspects of my work. I feel I’m crafting things in a more refined fashion now. 

You and I were discussing Artificial Intelligence previously, and I’m going for an intimate music that is absolutely nothing that could be even imagined by AI. In an age where things are so genericized and taken down to their least interesting common elements, I’m trying to stand my ground with my own language. Regardless of whether people like or don’t like that language, it is ultimately irrelevant. Some people might call my work a bag of tricks. Others might call it a poetic sonic language, which is what I’m trying to do. 

I received one review for Looms & Legends where the writer said I overdubbed my parts. He was very complimentary towards the record, but obviously has no familiarity with my language. I wrote a note to thank him for his coverage, but to also clarify that there was no overdubbing. What you hear on the record is a polyphonic language done on woodwind instruments through a certain language of extended technique. 

PG: How much of the lack of appreciation of your language, from those who indeed fail to appreciate it fully, comes from people generally having shortened attention spans? In the notes to the album, you mention TikTok culture, and that would certainly seem to play into it all. 

NR: Shortened attention spans didn’t start with the internet. I think there have long been legitimate artists who play with listeners’ attention spans. My close friend, Mr. John Zorn, has worked for a long time in this area by changing things up incredibly quickly and moving the listener from one place to another. I think his work speaks to the age because it operates on that short time span. But mine doesn’t. I’ve always been a process guy. I’ve always focused on working something out where the ideal is a combination of inevitability and unpredictability. It absolutely doesn’t work if you shut your mind off after ten seconds. 

My work is heavily influenced by a lot of music from around the world, as you can probably tell. I also teach a world music class at the New School. I give some sociological and anthropological background to the music, but it’s really about what’s going on musically. And it is amazing the things that so many students – college-age people who want to be professional musicians – don’t know. It’s great that I can turn them onto things like Gamelon music, Japanese gagaku, or whatever. But I did have a wild experience where I played some dance music from Laos that was performed by a single person on a vertical mouth organ. I asked the students if they had heard it before, and five of them shot their hands up. But when I asked where it was from, no one knew. It turned out the song had gone viral on a thirty-second video on TikTok that many people had heard. But while the students heard it, none had taken the time to even find out what it was they had heard. I’ve had similar experiences with people I teach privately, where I play them something, and they’ll tell me they think it is incredible, but when I tell them to go find something else the person did, they don’t bother. Instead, they move on to something else.  I don’t want to make this interview all about short attention spans, but yes, you’re absolutely right. 

And it’s a profound weakness of my music in terms of its promotability in the current age. If you listen to twenty seconds of my music, you might get a little feeling of what it is about. But I think my music rewards close listening. I think that is true for a lot of my favorite music. Just skimming the surface of any kind of art is difficult. But it is especially so for music since it is an art form that the perceiver experiences over a period of time. One can look at a painting and be really knocked out by it within five or ten seconds. Maybe they’ll keep looking at it to further the experience, but they do get to see it all at once. By contrast, music needs to be absorbed over a longer period of time. That is a problem for all music, but it’s particularly one for music where the player has an individual language that isn’t something that the listener expects. 

PG: You did an interview for Roulette a while ago, where you talked about how you got into timbral shifts from music from Chad and the work you had to go into back when you were younger to learn about and obtain records to continue your research. You had to dig for things. With the internet, so much information is easily and readily available online. Do you feel the failure to dig into things more is tied to the ease with which information has become available? 

NR: Absolutely. The relationship of a listener to an album drastically changed because of the internet and streaming services. Access to an album via streaming is immediate, and it also becomes so much easier to move on to something else. When I was first getting into jazz, I didn’t always get into what I listened to, but I often kept it on. I grew up in Boston and didn’t always get into stores that had a large inventory. I ended up ordering a lot of records from the record store. You would wait for maybe a week before a record could show up. If I finally got, say, a new Charles Mingus record after having to wait a week for it, there was no question that I was going to listen to the whole thing. Both sides. And,  if I liked it – and in the case of Mingus, I always liked it – I would then listen to that record for probably three or four weeks and study it. I would go through it and pick up my horn and play with it. You’d also read the liner notes and see who the other musicians were on the album. All of that was a very common experience for musicians of my generation, and it is largely gone now. 

It’s funny, I’ve talked about this with Zorn regarding how he struggles to get attention for the other musicians who play his music. He can scream on stage a million times that the person playing with him is Brian Marsella or Sylvie Corvoisier or whoever, and too many people won’t recognize the other musicians. They only focus on the big name of Zorn because so much of music is an enterprise. 

People just don’t give art, especially what I call temporal art –  art consumed over time and which asks for your time – the same chances they once did. I’ve been guilty of that, too, with new music. But back when, I also bought records that I didn’t like so much, but still listened to all the way through. Part of that was to fully make sure I didn’t like what I heard. Sometimes it took time to absorb it all. 

For example, one of the most influential records for me was Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure (Blue Note, 1964). At the time, I was just starting to play the alto saxophone, and my sister’s friend told me I needed to check out Eric Dolphy. He gave me a copy of the record, and I listened to it, but it seemed way too weird for me. So, I put it on the bookshelf. I bought other records, and Point of Departure got to the back of the pile. Until one day, I decided to check it out again. Now it is one of my absolute favorites. It’s an unbelievable record. Being willing to create a relationship with the art that you’re checking out in that way, to fully absorb it, is something absolutely necessary and in short supply these days, especially for people who want to become practitioners of an art form.

PG: I had a similar experience – as a millennial who grew up mostly with CDs and, later, slow dial-up internet – with Ornette Coleman’s music. My saxophone teacher gave me a copy of The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic, 1959), and it made no sense at first. But after the fifteenth time or something, it clicked. It’s now, to me, one of the best records ever. And I’m not sure I would have found that today, where it has almost become too easy to skip from track to track and album to album. 

NR: Exactly, because why would you ever listen to something fifteen times if you didn’t like it immediately? And I don’t think that’s as much a reflection – good or bad – on young people as it is the way that information is accessed. You kept listening to the Ornette record because you had it and it was just sitting there. I would say that I have had some really committed students who do keep listening to something. But it is incredibly important to keep listening even if you don’t get something at first. Usually, what you are hearing is something personal you just do not connect with yet. Or it is something intriguing and unexpected. Something you hear is not the way you expected a particular instrument to sound. Or the piece was not composed the way you expected. Something was working rhythmically that may have been confusing. Some music appreciation is tied to problem-solving. I’ve always been intrigued by music that makes me want to figure it out. 

I think that with my music, many people need a little time to figure out their relationship with it. I’m not a big fan of talking a lot about the technique involved in my work, even though there is a lot of technique involved, especially extended technique. If woodwind players want to talk about what I’m doing, I’ve done clinics where I will explain it. But I’m trying to make art that is evocative. And, sometimes, people are just used to particular sounds and relationships. All music is abstract to a certain degree, especially instrumental music, but I would claim that there are levels of abstraction. My music is ultimately very sensory but very abstract. 

PG: Is that what you enjoy most about playing solo, that you can dig deeper into what you specifically are doing compared to communicating with somebody else? 

NR: Well, it’s not like I enjoy only playing solo.  I’ve certainly played music with other people that I hope communicates at a level as fundamental as my solo work. The thing that’s specific about my solo work is that the language, the sonic palette I’m using, does not read very well when you play with other people.  For instance, a drummer may hide subtle multiphonics on a clarinet. A high sound that would certainly cut through other instruments, but the lower partials of the clarinet are very wide, and something that sounds very interesting and rich in a solo setting becomes much more one-dimensional as soon as other instruments are added. That is one thing – that the music wouldn’t read very well in other contexts – that is common across a lot of my solo work. I have occasionally played with certain kinds of players, sometimes with electronics and other instruments, where it’s very specifically trying to be transparent and let all the sounds speak. But with solo music, I can lay out the whole landscape as I see it. 

I have great admiration for something like  Anthony Braxton’s For Alto (Delmark, 1971). It’s amazing that he sustains the level he does playing basically single note lines on the saxophone. On Looms and Legends, I do have some pieces that are in the same mode. But a lot of what I’m doing on the album has much more than one thing going on at a time. You need to listen closely to hear it, and it doesn’t read in an ensemble context most of the time. 

PG: Since you mentioned Braxton, one of your first professional gigs was working with him. It sounds like you do not see his solo work as informing yours much. 

NR: Well, in terms of his influence on me, he is more direct. Having played with him, listened to his music, and absorbed his music, I have been influenced by his personality and his bravery more than an actual sound or musical ideas. Musically, what we do solo is quite distinct. The much more obvious person who had made me aware of possibility is Evan Parker.

PG: With whom you have also worked. 

NR: Yeah, Evan and I have done four or five duo records together. There are aspects of the language that we share because we are working with these instruments that have physical properties. But it is funny because one of the things we have to be very careful of is that when we play together, it can be too much. Two saxophones can sometimes sound like twenty saxophones. And if you do that too often, it becomes only a trick. Density and transparency are very important elements in our musical approaches. It’s a very important duality that you need to be able to work with. But Evan’s approach is certainly more directly influential on the materials that I use than, say, Braxton’s. 

PG: To ask you about a specific track on Looms & Legends, the album is almost entirely original pieces, but you also include a striking version of [Thelonious Monk’s] “Round Midnight.” Why did you choose to cover a standard on an album of otherwise entirely original material?

NR: For the version on the record, I am playing the shakhuachi, an instrument I’ve played for somewhere between thirty-five and forty years now. The song happens to sit incredibly idiomatically well on the shakhuachi, even though it is an instrument that doesn’t play all twelve pitches of the piano with equal strength. The shakuhachi has a character where the sound changes. One of the very interesting things about woodwind instruments is their non-linear aspects. The saxophone and the clarinet are designed to have the same timbre and sound as close as possible in those regards, from the bottom to the top. Classical players of those instruments work incredibly hard to maintain this unity of tone. By contrast, jazz players often have very interesting non-linear aspects where their low registers sound a certain way. People like Ben Webster have developed very personal ways of sounding on these instruments that were designed to sound linear. 

The shakuhachi, by its innate design, was never a linear instrument. It’s an instrument where some notes are soft and closed, and others are open and strong. There’s a breath with some notes. There are many kinds of subtleties. Some people do try to play straight-ahead jazz on the shakuhachi. There’s even a fellow, Zach Zinger, who’s played Michael Brecker solos on it, which is very difficult technically and admirable as a technical exercise. But it is also very strange because to do so, you need to work against all the natural characteristics of the instrument. 

PG: Traditional Japanese musicians tend to become very focused on the different schools of shakuhachi playing, and presumably, those incorporate those natural characteristics. 

NR: Right. I studied with two of the five greatest shakuhachi players of the twentieth century: Gorō Yamaguchi, who was the living national treasure in the Kinko School, and Katsuya Yokoyama, who is a more independent player, but he’s very famous as the person for whom Tōru Takemitsu wrote the “November Steps.” Though I studied with two preeminent players, the music that I play does not belong to a particular school. 

PG: How did you start on the instrument?

NR: First, I didn’t even play the shakuhachi in public for seven years. My first public performance on it was not a live performance. It was my part on  John Zorn’s The Big Gundown (Nonesuch/Icon, 1986). Zorn had heard me play privately, and he told me that he wanted me to play on it. I told him that I don’t really play in public, but he insisted, so I did. While I had studied Japanese traditional music extensively, I developed my own style on shakuhachi, and there is an album on Zorn’s label called Ryu Nashi/No School – New Music for Shakuhachi (Tzadik, 2010). The title of the album reflects how my music on the instrument does not belong to any particular school. I’m a huge fan of traditional music, but I feel that the rigid lines between the schools are largely a negative force. Instead, I believe that in music, across the board. 

The disagreements between the schools of shakuhachi are similar to how Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians often fight over how to play the clave when, ultimately, it’s all coming from Africa, and it’s all beautiful. You can have different ways of approaching the instrument without getting into a fight about it. But one of the sad things of our age is that you always have conflicts between brothers and sisters.  The Serbs and the Croats. The Palestinians and the Jews are ultimately both Semites. We’re all the same people. And in music, you have the same thing. In Japan, the acrimony between the schools is the same nonsense, and it is something that I always try to fight against. 

PG: Do you ever encounter much resistance from people who strongly adhere to a certain school? 

NR: No. Actually, I have found support in trying to move beyond the schools. Ryu Nashi, for instance, received very positive, strong responses from people in Japan who realized I had gone very deep and approached the instrument with a real understanding of its capabilities. I think it’s very obvious when people are gleaning just the frosting off the cake. Certainly, there are issues with people who just use traditional music as a flavor or something. Just as jazz has smooth jazz, “world music” has smooth world music, music that has a little bit of an African or Asian flavor. But people who go deep into the music of those cultures know the difference. 

PG: Which goes back to how Looms & Legends‘ version of “Round Midnight” is more than simply the original tune with essentially a Japanese traditional aesthetic added to it. 

NR: Right. I had previously played a version of “Round Midnight” with the great pianist Satoh Masahiko on a record we did in Japan called Decisive Action (BAK, 2004). It was a very abstract version where I played the tune like it was a honkyoku. A honkyoku is the traditional Japanese solo music for the shakuhachi, which is based in Zen and meditation. I was playing the piece so slowly that it took ten minutes to play through it once, and Satoh improvised against it. 

This time, I thought I would try doing it in a way that is more compressed, where you can actually recognize the piece, but with that same feeling of meditation. Loom & Legend’s version is about five minutes or so, and I just played through with a little bit of ornamentation. I simply play through the melody one time. I’ve played the whole canon of honkyoku shakuhachi music. And, of course. I’ve played many jazz standards in my time.  And I noticed a confluence of the tonality and the shape of “Round Midnight” that fits the characteristics of the instrument very well. 

PG: Playing a cover also brings familiarity for audiences.

NR: It does. There are a few different ways and reasons people do a cover. In many cases, you do one so your audience can hear your language in an environment familiar to them. In this case, adding “Round Midnight” to the album is very much a coda to the record.

One of the frustrations for all kinds of musicians is how the shape of an album is largely ignored today. From when I started making records in the early 80s until the early 00s, artists labored over the order of the tracks on the album. Some musicians still do, but it’s rare. The album order was another kind of statement that once existed but is now mostly gone. On this record, I spent a lot of time on the order of the pieces. I hope some people will listen from beginning to end because I think that’s another part of the instrumental journey you’re taking the listener on. Many times, we don’t have the opportunity to do that because people just listen in shuffle mode or listen to one piece at a time. I make a plea on the part of all creating musicians to try to listen to somebody’s new record from beginning to end because they took some time to think about it. 

PG: We discussed how you learned shakuhachi and other instruments, but have you ever considered inventing your own instrument? You had worked with Hans Reichel, an underdiscussed artist, who had done his own creation via the daxophone.  

NR: No, I haven’t considered making my own instrument. Hans was a rare person. Besides being a great musician, he was a genius of workmanship. I had toured with Hans in Japan and stayed with him and his then partner for a while in Tokyo in the 80s. I’ve also worked very closely with his most worthy successor, the guitar player and saxophonist, Kazuhisa Uchihashi. He’s amazing. He was very close friends with Hans. I’m very averse to saying anybody’s the best at anything. You’re never going to get me into an argument like whether Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane is better on the tenor sax. But I will make the statement that the best daxophone player in the world is Kazuhisa Uchihashi. He also has Hans’s pieces of wood that make up the daxophone, since the instrument is effectively pieces of wood in a clamp. With it, he has covered things like James Brown and does a version of “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s incredible. 

PG: The album, Singing Daxophone (Innocent, 2021), is very interesting. 

NR: For someone who hasn’t heard it before, it will absolutely blow their mind. I was working with him on a show in Lyon, France, when he was doing that record. So, I heard some of that stuff from very early on. As amazing as Hans was on the daxophone, Kazu is the first one to actually use it well in both very non-commercial and commercial contexts. He has a huge range. I’ve played with Kazu in a band with Sanko Namshilak, and we also played together with Samm Bennett as a trio called R.U.B. Because Kazu lives in Berlin, Sam is in Tokyo, and I live in New York, it’s not a group that gets together too much. But there’s a record on my label called R.U.B. (Animul, 2003), which is fantastic as well. 

But to get back to Hans, he not only created this new instrument, the daxophone, but he also designed his own guitars, including nylon string guitars that he fretted all the way to the end. Hans actually made most of his money designing beautiful fonts, so he was also very visual. These guitars he made weren’t just funky and weird; they were finished like art pieces. In terms of performance, he was also freely improvising while tapping on guitars before Stanley Jordan did. The guitars have multiple fingerboards: one on each side of the bridge. Unfortunately, you can’t see them anymore because Adobe orphaned Flash, but Hans also made the most incredible Flash websites to document all his work. 

But, yes, I played with Hans. Actually, I have a tape of a trio with myself, him, and Fred Frith that I would love to release someday. You’re right, not enough people talk about Hans. But there are a myriad of incredible musicians who most people don’t know anymore. When somebody my age teaches young people about them and drops a name, students often look blankly at you. Even people like Jimmy Giuffre or Lee Konitz. It’s a kick in the stomach when I see younger musicians who have never heard of them. But we do our best. That’s why you’re writing about music. Hopefully, we can keep all the great work that all these people have done alive. 

PG: Which may go back to what we were discussing earlier about short attention spans.

NR: One of the things that drives me nuts is that people will tell me, “Oh, I really liked your new record. What else can I hear like that?” Well, have you checked out the other fifteen records I’ve done? Nothing comes out of thin air. I did a solo concert at the Noguchi Museum a few years ago and, after it, young people came up to me. The first thing out of their mouth was, “Why have we never heard of you?” I told them that answering that question might get to a long and painful explanation, but if they enjoyed the concert, they should take it from here. If they had a good experience, there’s a whole body of work that they can go check out. 

That also goes to one of the things that drives me nuts when I get questionnaires from magazines and labels where they want to know things like an artist’s ten best records of the year. Maybe I’m throwing this at you as a journalist, but if you want to have musicians blow people’s minds about the music they listen to, don’t ask them about their ten new records of the year. Ask them for the ten records that they love that they know ninety-nine percent of the people who read your publication have never heard of. It might be a bunch of 78s from 1920 or something. I still find music all the time that has been around for fifty years that I’ve never heard of, and which totally knocks me for a loop. That’s one of the magical things about music. The whole thing of only paying attention to what came out in the last year is beyond absurd. That is not to say you should ignore what came out in the last year. Obviously, it is important to cover things. But music is so much more than only new recordings. Hans Reichel’s music is absolutely as contemporary as anything being done today. There is nothing old about it, and people should check out both his creations and his music. The obsession with things that are current is a natural human inclination, but, especially in terms of art, so much is left overlooked that really needs to be discussed. 

‘Looms & Legends’ is out now on Pyroclastic Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. Ned Rothenberg will be performing solo at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee on Friday March 27, 2026 at 2:30 PM at the First Presbyterian Chapel. More can be found on the festival’s website. More information on Ned Rothenberg is available on his website.