Dana Jessen studied Classical Bassoon at Louisiana State University and New England Conservatory before pursuing a Fulbright and then a second master’s degree in Amsterdam to study free improvisation. She co-founded San Francisco-based reed quintet Splinter Reeds and has spearheaded numerous commissions, premiering dozens of solo, chamber, and electroacoustic works. She has collaborated with composers and improvisers across the globe including Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Ensemble Dal Niente. She’s released three solo albums: Set, Winter Chapel, and Carve. She spent the past weekend at the Ucross Foundation residency in Wyoming, developing repertoire for her most recent album, a series of solo pieces she wrote featuring bassoon, live processing, voice, field recordings, and found objects. The album will tentatively be released later this year.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What first drew you to free improvisation, and how has your relationship with it changed over time?
Like most bassoonists, I went through conservatory classical training. At a certain point, I got really excited about contemporary music. I happened to be at the New England Conservatory, and they have a really fantastic program called Contemporary Improvisation, where people from different divisions and majors come together and play improvised music. It was pretty wide-ranging: including non-Western music, free jazz, and open improvisation.
I saw Dave Holland in concert at NEC, and a lot of it was free improvisation. There was just something about the players that felt very evocative. They put all their emotions into their music in this way that felt palpable and that I hadn’t, at that time, experienced from classical music. Later I did, but this felt seriously like, “If I’m going to be making music, I want to put my whole life experiences into it.”
I started taking classes at NEC and discovering this whole practice exists. I later went to continue my studies in Amsterdam. I worked with a ton of mentors and started really understanding what improvisation is and implementing it more as an identity, rather than as something secondary.
As improvisation became part of your identity, how has it affected your life outside music?
I really feel deeply that improvisation, especially among many of the musical art forms, is deeply rooted in community. We can think philosophically about how improvisation, especially this type of free improvisation, breaks down hierarchical structures. It invites people of all voices to have a say, regardless of background, experience level, or talent. When I started taking improvisation more seriously as a practice, I had the classical music mentality of: “I want to sound good; I want to do something that’s compelling.” I still think that now, but I feel like my approach to it has opened up. I focus on what this practice is and how it’s connected to community. Improvisation doesn’t exist without community. It breaks down a lot of those systemic structures that we see in society and in other forms of music. It puts everyone on the same playing field. It really resonates with me.
In tandem with these ideas of anti-hierarchy, I know free improvisation has a strong history of activism, and I’m curious how you think about those political associations in the current day. Is it still making those efforts?
I don’t think I can necessarily represent all of what music is doing. I will say the starting point of a lot of the stuff I teach at Oberlin is rooted in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was started in 1965, a very fraught political moment in our country’s history.
The AACM is an organization that specifically exists to support Black experimental artists and musicians, but even disregarding the organization’s politics, it has created the framework for the entire improv scene that we see now. Everyone in the scene now has some kind of connection to the AACM — either influenced by them, or had them as mentors, or are members themselves — because the organization still exists. One of the many reasons that it was founded was to respond to what was going on in the world at the time. Regardless of how terrible or how wonderful the world is, all of our experiences go through our practice of improvisation.
Going back to this idea of community, I do think that in the darkest moments of the world, when it feels so hard to get out of bed and to listen to the news and to face everything that’s going on, in those darkest moments, it feels like these communities of art are what get us through the day. There have been moments in the last 10 years when I looked to my improv community as my family because it’s been a space I know I’m going to feel safe. I can express myself. I don’t know if that’s activism. Probably not, but I do think having all these communities is a pretty powerful way for people to be connected and be supported in moments when the world is hard to bear.
How do you develop curriculum for a practice that’s so open and personal?
There are a lot of methodologies and pedagogy in idiom-based music. What I’m doing is not connected to one type of aesthetic idiom, and it is extremely new in academia. I’m extremely grateful to Oberlin that I get to do these things.
There are not a lot of faculty members at institutions across the country who are teaching this type of music. It is exciting to develop new curricula, and I have been exploring various methodologies and pedagogy in this area. I think a lot of it boils down to how I can create a curriculum of programming that allows students to individually develop a personal musical language that can then be used in improvisation settings.
I also think about how we can create larger group settings for students of so many diverse musical backgrounds, life backgrounds, and skill levels, where they are co-creating pieces and negotiating what kind of aesthetic they’re looking for. I like to view this as creating good citizens of the world because in improvisation, you’re always listening. You’re always providing a platform for everyone to share their own voice, you’re engaging in dialogue with other people, and you’re creating and exploring.
The other aspect of the curriculum that I find really important for improvisation is knowing the history. There isn’t a local scene in Oberlin of professional improvisers. You can go to Cleveland and see a little bit of it, but I value getting it in their ears, making sure that they’re exposed to some history and have done some listenings to familiarize themselves with what’s possible and what the aesthetic could be — what does it mean to express yourself musically and put all of your expressions through your instrument or voice?
