Walter Thompson Relates Music to
Colors, Figures and Shapes

Music and painting go hand in hand for composer Walter Thompson. As the son of Abstract Expressionist painter Ron Thompson, Walter spent his summers in Woodstock, where he met painter Phillip Guston and associated with musicians Karl Berger, Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell at the Creative Music Studio.

"I've always looked at painting and composition very similarly. If I look at a painting, it's just full of all kinds of colors, figures and shapes. That relates to composition. If I have a piece of manuscript that I'm doing some orchestra writing on, it shows a lot of notes, motion, shape. That's how I relate it to painting--there are so many shapes on the paper that deal with how you're harmonizing, what type of shapes the music's taking, how many clusters you have. It's all very visual," says Thompson.

The music he writes for the Walter Thompson Orchestra shows the influence of Charles Ives in the layers of sound and in the shapes of its collage patterns. His band swings in an Ellington sort of way too, but with the contrastive juxtaposition of African polyrhythms and European atonality that he found in the work of Chicago's Association or the Advancement of Creative Musicians. To that mix, Thompson adds a conducting language of over 100 signals that give shape, color and form to his group's improvisations.

Increasingly, the Walter Thompson Orchestra is focusing on these conducted improvisations, as will be the case for their April 1 appearance at Greenwich House. Later, they'll perform at La MaMa Galleria on May 10 and are scheduled to reconstruct Fletcher Henderson's music during this summer's What Is Jazz? Festival at the Knitting Factory.

Since moving to New York in 1981, Thompson has maintained a varied bag of activities, including work with theater groups and with choreographers. In theater, he's worked with En Garde Arts on site-specific works, scored Brecht plays and "Danton's Death" with Irondale Theater Ensemble and is currently composing for Anne Bogarde and Brian Jucha's Via Theater's sci-fi musical, featuring the Doug Elkins Dance Company and his orchestra. In dance, he's worked with the Avila/Weeks duo, in dance theater with Annie B. Parsons Big Dance Company and with Gus Solomons Dance. His latest collaboration with Solomons will premiere at Merce Cunningham Dance Studio from May 25-28.

Born May 31, 1952 in West Palm Beach, Florida, Thompson got an important lesson for any composer--training on a variety of instruments. At age 5, he started on piano. Two years later, he turned to guitar and later to drums. By age 14, he was playing various woodwinds and alto sax. His dad had a habit of listening to anything from Charlie Parker and Charles Ives to Patsy Cline and Jimi Hendrix while he painted, so the young Thompson became exposed to a wide range of music. His Cajun mother played zydeco piano and by age 12 her son was gigging at Bar Mitzvahs. In his early teens, he took classes in music and painting in Louisiana before attending the Arts Students League in Woodstock, New York.

After music classes at Berklee School of Music in the early '70s, Thompson returned to Woodstock to teach at Karl Berger's Creative Music Studio. Up to that time, he'd listened primarily to Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Charles Ives, Wallingford Riegger and Henry Cowell's music, but in Woodstock, he took interest in AACM musician Leo Smith and composer Frederic Rzewski.

"Initially, I was trying to go back to my roots," says Thompson, "writing things that were fully notated coming out of an Ivesian field, where things were very layered, with different time signatures going on and very collage-like. That was one side. Then there was stuff coming out of Ellington in terms of colors. We could definitely swing really hard, but we'd cross over into contemporary Classical music. About ten years ago, I started using a conducting language that's really a sign language. It uses different shapes and gestures. Now there's more focus on conducted improvisations.".