"The quiet happiness of making this music"
Milo Fine is a Minneapolis-born and bred improvised music/ free jazz musician who performs regularly but infrequently in the Twin Cities. Improvised music is, according to Milo's definition, "composition in real time." He also teaches music at the West Bank School of Music and does other kinds of work to make ends meet, while maintaining a simple, low-cost way of life. His web site lists his released recordings and offers the chance to purchase them, as well as a listing of concert dates, background information, and a section on aesthetics. These pages attempt to communicate some of Milo's musical background, and his complex set of philosophies regarding art generally and music specifically.

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The Milo Fine Free Jazz Ensemble
Today Milo Fine’s Free Jazz Ensemble has two regular members: Milo and his guitarist Steve Gnitka. The two have played together since late 1975: “We’re an old married couple,” laughed Milo. There is a group of other local musicians who collaborate with Milo and Steve at their regular gig at the West Bank School of Music, which happens the first Friday of every other month. (See Milo’s web site for details.) These guest artists include Davu Seru on percussion and soprano sax, Patrick Crossland on trombone, John O’Brien on trumpet and flugelhorn, Nathan Smith on acoustic bass and guitar, and bass clarinet, Andrew Lafkas on acoustic bass, Scott Newell on tenor sax and voice, and Jason Shapiro on synthesizer and piano.

Milo has a strong distaste for aspects of the local arts scene: “This is an incredibly provincial area, the fact that the cliques are so finely knit they might as well be a smooth, hard surface, I don’t think is that much different from other places.” He grants that in New York he could probably work more, but he thinks the honeymoon would end soon enough: “If I can piss off the arts bureaucrats here, why bother going to New York?” Milo says that free jazz and improvised music today is run the same way as a major corporation, "you have people who decide who's flavor of the month ... magazines filled with the same hype phrases ... I'm trying to avoid the cult of personality, image-mongering, hype, and all the attendant nonsense ..." When he started playing in 1969, free jazz was an amorphous scene, the promoters and the current system were not in place, and people were idealistic, thinking the music could have an impact on the world.

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Milo doesn’t get out to see much live music locally, but he says if he lived in London, for instance, he’d be going out to hear music all the time because there's a consistent presentation of vital, creative music there.

Milo tends to plan gigs by the year; he’d rather go through a couple of days of coordinating people’s schedules, stick the dates up on the web site, and be done with it. He’s “incredibly grateful” to have the West Bank School of Music as his home base; “It’s a no-fuss, no-muss deal.” Even when he was more busy publicly, Milo did all his own bookings and he even started his own label; he saw the risks of giving control to business interests and has been practicing self-determination since 1970.

Milo’s label
It might seem counter-intuitive to make recordings of improvised music that’s never the same twice, but Milo says he started his label in 1972 just to document what he was doing. He cited English guitarist Derek Bailey in saying that documenting improvised music is a way of perhaps facilitating work, if people want to check out what groups are up to. Milo wanted the label to operate outside the realm of business; the last recording he sold out of was in 2000: it took 25 years to sell 550 copies. Milo says this is appropriate, given the way he’s trying to conduct his life. He’s not interested in appealing to the masses; he likes it that people have to make an effort to get his recordings, and he likes to buy recordings the same way, through hands-on distribution.

The audience
Milo thinks that anyone who's in touch with how their mind functions can get something out of his music. Audience applause often determines the end of a piece. He likes playing in a small room; it de-mystifies the effort people make with the process of improvisation. For him, being an audience for improvised music is like watching someone do research, or anything where they're concentrating on something they really chose to do. In a really practical way, he sees music's function in society as giving something for the mind to chew on. He has been adversely affected by an audience, when he sensed a hostility from the audience, but more often he's enjoying the "breathing together" feeling of surprise shared with the audience.

The performing space itself can contribute to the music. Milo has an LP where a piece ends with the sound of a bus pulling away outside; on another piece from a CD, his drum stick fell off the trap case and Milo told the recording engineer to leave it in: "That can become a highlight of a night, when you weren't doing a damn thing and (sounds simply occur)."

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Collaborating
Milo thinks formal organizations are a disease that automatically end up being antithetical to what they started out doing. He likes informal organizations of people having dialogue and developing healthy collaborative relationships; that's how he balances the individual and the collective. He says that in playing music, you have a certain trust in people, not that they're going to do what you want them to, but that they're going to do something in the moment that speaks to where they are and where the group is. If you listen to some of the ensemble's music, you might zero in on what someone is doing; in jazz this would be called a solo, but with Milo's ensemble, someone else in the audience might be zeroing in on what someone else is doing; who's doing the "solo," depends on the perception of each audience member.

Milo says that most of the people he works with are coming from a certain perspective, everyone with an interest in modern music, but he'd like to think that a really sensitive polka player, traditional classical, or bebop musician could play with the ensemble. (Although he doesn't think many musicians from other fields would be attracted to what his group does.) Milo likes to get together and work with other musicians in private, to see how things develop over time. He says his personality has a strong controlling element, so his music collaborations are a healthy way to abdicate control. Milo has done music for dance and theater productions in the past, and is open to such inter-disciplinary projects, but they don't present themselves often due to his eschewing of the arts scene and its overt networking.

Milo's process
It may seem counter-intuitive to rehearse for improvised music, but Milo does a fair amount of practicing, a couple of hours daily. He jokingly says that the practicing is to develop muscle memory, so if he has a stroke or something, they can just prop him up in front of a piano and he'll still be able to play. It's partly physical upkeep, such as limb and digit flexibility. His practicing tends to be denser than things he'll do in performance. A fair amount of his rehearsing is endurance playing, trying to expand his musical vocabulary and keeping on top of the music in terms of freshness. He's quick to point out that freshness for its own sake would not be a goal of his, he wouldn't want to try too hard for that, it would be like looking for enlightenment. "To keep the atoms and molecules bouncing off each other in undiscovered patterns, the key is not thinking about something too much or not enough."

Usually when a gig is coming up, Milo has a thought of what he's going to be playing. The clarinet and piano are steady, and what changes from performance to performance is the percussion, which varies between drums, m-drums II, or the marimba, the latter two using low-tech electronics such as ring modulators, a fuzz tone, and a trigger device. One day he practices the piano and whatever the main percussion instrument is, then the next day he practices horns, then the next percussion instrument. In concert, during performance, he has no idea what instrument he'll go to first; he'll stand, and wait, and sit, and wait, he'll go to an instrument and just do one thing on it and then go away from it. Milo says that thinking orchestrally gets you out of the ego-driven jazz solo mentality. Milo talks about the music as being a meeting ground where he doesn't have total control over the instruments. He tries to avoid having favorite instruments for creating certain sounds; he is attempting to get away from a hardwired perception of sounds.

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