When he was in kindergarten, the late avant-garde pianist “Blue” Gene Tyranny brought his favorite records to show-and-tell. He made tape recordings of sounds in his backyard, sang in his Lutheran church’s choir, and even attended additional Baptist services to accompany them on piano. At 11, he took composition classes at Trinity University, where his teacher sent him off with Charles Ives and Harry Partch LPs after their first lesson. For one of his early assignments, he unintentionally composed a 12-tone piece. He soon befriended composer Philip Krumm, and the two put on events where Tyranny performed music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Anton Webern, as well as theater pieces from Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and La Monte Young. He was 14 at the time.
Despite his stage name, Tyranny was a kind, funny, and self-effacing person who uplifted others whenever possible. In David Bernabo’s 2020 documentary, Just for the Record: Conversations With and About "Blue" Gene Tyranny, sound engineer Philip Perkins notes that, when playing in live ensemble settings, every musician except Tyranny was generally given a solo: “He’s supporting everyone else… that’s who he is.” Those who knew Tyranny considered him one of the greatest pianists alive. And while such praise didn’t lead to sizable fame, archival releases from the label Unseen Worlds—most notably the reissue of avant-pop masterpiece Out of the Blue and the live album Trust in Rock—have helped bring his music to a larger audience. Degrees of Freedom Found, his first posthumous release through the label, is even more momentous: a six-disc anthology featuring 380 minutes of music recorded between 1963 and 2019, complete with extensive liner notes from Tyranny himself.
Tyranny’s closest brush with fame arrived in the early ’70s when he went on tour with the Stooges as their pianist (he and Iggy Pop first played together in the ’60s blues-rock band the Prime Movers). On stage, Tyranny would appear in tattered clothing, with light-emitting diodes in his hair, his sweat occasionally leading to electric shocks. While he wouldn’t continue down this punk path, his resolute spirit remained. During an early-1980s live performance of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, an opera where Tyranny plays the role of “Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player,” shards of a broken mirror cut up his hands and left his piano splattered with blood.
Such dedication to the craft comes alive on Degrees of Freedom Found. Tyranny’s secret to conjuring deep emotions lies in the tension between structure and spontaneity. While this balancing act isn’t as obvious in his pop works, the solo piano and piano-centric pieces on this collection make his methodology clear. As he navigates the opening piece “A Letter From Home,” taking crooked and diagonal paths along the way, Tyranny maintains a stately, lovely demeanor: an apt reflection of the stream-of-consciousness reminiscing that appears on Out of the Blue’s extended take on the track. Whether at small or grand scales, his compositions were fully-realized.
Revisiting and reworking compositions was a common practice for Tyranny throughout his career. “Tango for Two,” for example, was originally composed in 1984 as a solo piano piece for the International Tango Collection. On the version here, Tyranny is credited with piano along with an “electronic orchestra,” resulting in a barrage of synthesized instrumentation with technicolor flashes and unpredictable evolution. “The 36 Chords from the Driver’s Son,” another mesmerizing highlight, has seamless modulations and a quizzical structure—there’s power in the gentlest keystrokes and grace in the most rambunctious clanging. The music from “36 Chords” draws from “The Driver’s Son,” a sprawling journey whose 80-minute 1999 performance acts as the box set’s centerpiece. With four other performers providing vocals, synthesizer, and percussion, it is a full-fledged epic, well-deserving of Tyranny’s description of it as an “audio storyboard.”
Tyranny loved avant-garde music for its potential to extend “beyond the particular circumstances of both your life and the whole history of music.” As he explained in Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music, “To try as much as possible to circumvent Puritanism in the United States and elsewhere is the task.” His political intent is most prominently showcased on “Harvey Milk (Portrait),” a track from 1979 that features a speech from the openly gay San Francisco politician, soundtracked by Tyranny’s sparse electronic blips. The second half is voiceless—a stark depiction of Milk’s assassination the previous year. This simple change creates an uneasy atmosphere: a meditation on lost hope.
Music provided opportunities for Tyranny to open himself up to unfamiliar terrain, which was the primary goal of his collaborative work. One of the most striking examples appears in “On the Road to Blountstown (A True Story),” a song that was largely improvised when Tyranny and musician Leroy Jenkins had 10 minutes left during a 2001 set and no material left to play. In the introduction, Jenkins shares a story about being stopped by a sheriff and taken to jail. Next, Jenkins vocalizes atop his viola and Tyranny’s piano, both musicians in perfect dialogue. As Tyranny’s piano dances alongside the shrieking strings, he runs through multiple emotions to flesh out the story’s drama.
He could also find inspiration in more lighthearted fare. “How to Swing a Dog,” from 1984, is a boisterous improvisation that features playwright Roger Babb talking at lightning speed from the perspective of a dog; it’s one of the liveliest tracks on Degrees of Freedom Found, and it emanates classic early-’80s art-school humor. On 2019’s “The Forecaster Hopes,” the newest composition, a 1960s electronic analysis of natural, quotidian sounds becomes the source material for generating “quasi-random rhythms” for his string arrangement. The song is at once steady and erratic, defined by a hopeful aura: a musical embodiment of someone moving through life itself. As the final track on Degrees of Freedom Found, it serves as a capstone to this exhaustive overview of Tyranny’s career. It’s the sort of music that leaves you in awe: a reminder that music always did the same for him.
Buy: Rough Trade
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