I actually grew up on the West Coast, a little town south of San Francisco called Pacifica. It's like a little beach town. It's funny, I just got back from spending two weeks there, so it's fresh in my mind. It was one of those little places that was kind of a cool place to live, but there wasn't a whole lot going on so you had to find things on your own. I played in rock 'n' roll bands and stuff when I was in early high school, grammar school. But there was a lot of music around, a lot of different stuff, and I just kind of luckily had heard some things I liked -- jazz music, improvisational music -- from during my early high school times, and just got interested in that, and started pursuing it. I guess I got interested in jazz music when I was somewhere around 14, 15. There was a great library in the town there. Whoever bought the records for the library had really eclectic tastes, so you'd end up listening to anything from Ornette's Science Fiction to Coltrane's Om to Bitches Brew, Kind of Blue, a really wide range of music. So I just started checking it out. And a bunch of circumstances led me to actually start working gigs in San Francisco in the city when I was pretty young. I was like maybe 16, started working these gigs, and sort of put it all together pretty early. So things didn't really happen in a really drawn-out, sequential kind of linear way; they sort of happened on top of each other.

And you were just absorbing everything you could in that context.

Pretty much, yeah. As that was happening, these opportunities were presenting themselves. And I started doing it.

When was it that you realized you were committing yourself to a career, a life in music?

I went to a state university out there for a year in East Bay, and during that year I knew pretty much that I wanted to be playing. I was already playing, I was already doing it, and at that point the thought of staying in school for four years with people that I felt -- at lest at the time, being sort of arrogant or whatever -- that everyone including the teachers were playing at it a little bit but not really doing it. And I was sort of getting the opportunity to at least be around what I considered the real stuff that was happening. There it was like the Keystone Corner and these different places in San Francisco and kind of getting to hang out with the musicians or play with them or whatever. It was right around that time, when I was 17, where I said 'I think I'd better just be doing this. This is what I'm going to do, so I should just be in it.' And it just started to happen.

Were there people who were mentors to you at that time?

There were several. On different levels. In terms of sort of a mentor in just playing jazz music, there's this guy who still plays around the Bay Area a lot called Bishop Norman Williams. He's an alto saxophonist that came from Kansas City, and he's been a real mainstay in the San Francisco scene since the '60s probably. He's one of the first guys I started working with. The thing about the Bishop -- with him it was all about the spirit of music, just playing, and it was not about talking. In fact, we'd say, 'the Bishop is a man of few words.' He would just call tunes, you couldn't understand what he was saying half the time; he'd just mumble out the name of some standard you never heard of and count it off and you just kind of had to go. So I learned a lot learning those kinds of tunes, jazz standards, on the bandstand. Just kind of having to deal and listen to it, and eventually go back and find a record, tighten it up, and hopefully have it more together the next time. For a lot of people he's been a kind of mentor out there and an important figure; but for me personally, because he took me under his wing and in his band when I was about 16, and I did two records with him early on. So definitely the Bishop. I had a few teachers. There was a bass player who used to play a lot -- he played with Roy Haynes' band, and played with Stanley Turrentine's band back in the '70s -- named Toru Nakamura, who I met through some people that I knew out there. He kind of mentored me through certain things, just about being a bass player. He'd lived in New York, he'd sort of done the sideman thing in New York and all that, and kind of gave me a lot of ideas and sort of helped guide me through certain things in the straight-ahead scene and all that. So he helped me in that realm. I mean, there were a lot of other people, but these are the people who really took an interest and spent some time. There were other people I was playing with in the meantime out there. Eddie Henderson was very giving in terms of giving me opportunities to play and get exposed out there, doing some pretty high-level gigs. Baikida Carrol was there then, and I used to be in a very fun band with Baikida called Savage Lust that used to play in the Bay Area. I was younger; I left there when I was 20, so this was all between like 17 and 19. Art Landy was another one, a great pianist who lives out in Boulder now. Who must be one of the most brilliant improvisers that I've ever met, and truly eccentric musician, and I think he was one of the guys who was honest with me about what I needed to do. And then probably the last one of that group would be Dave Liebman, who was living out there, and I was in a couple of bands with in '76, '77. And Dave was also great in terms of guidance, and giving his opinion on things whether it was solicited or not. It was always stuff that, even when it hurt, it could help. So those were kind of my mentors in the early time. Then when I came to New York, Ron McClure and I got to be pretty friendly. Bass players. Red Mitchell, George Mraz, guys who spent a little bit of time just hanging.

What's especially interesting to me about this is that it's a pretty conventional story -- a young and dedicated musician just working and getting together with older people who've been around. Sometimes I talk to people in the so-called Downtown Scene who don't think about the extent to which this really is still coming straight out of a tradition, the same tradition that guys like Jackie McLean and Red Norvo were a part of. Sure. And I think looking at the stuff you've been involved with in particular, those differences become a moot point. I think the first album I heard you on was something by Bob Mintzer. So the lines that people draw between Screwgun-type stuff and the stuff that's more straight-ahead, those distinctions don't mean anything.

Right. Well, I think that so much of that is kind of artificial. I was maybe more conscious of some of those divisions and the things that made those things different before. Now, it seems to me like they all feed each other, and there's a lot of great cross-pollination between all these different musics, and some people don't want to acknowledge that in any way. A lot of other people are just dishonest about it, because there was this big thing about the downtown scene and all that, this whole postmodern thing, and you get a lot of people who say 'Oh, it can't be jazz, because this is this new thing,' and a lot of people almost pretend that they haven't been influenced by these things. It's kind of a defensive action sometimes. Sometimes it's genuine. I know people that are generally just not, have no connection to jazz music. That's fine. But if you do, you do. I can't deny what my background is, and I'm very proud of that. I had a lot of opportunities to play with people that very few people of my generation, regardless of what music they're into, have got to do. On the other hand, I can say that a whole lot of those guys I played with I disagree with on a lot of fundamentals about music. So what led me to do a lot of the stuff that I'm doing, was because I did not share that same set of philosophies -- about what a rhythm section player should be, or what jazz was.

That's a good segue into another question. Let's talk about your perception of the bass as a rhythm section instrument.

In some ways, I don't think my view is necessarily that radical. I think that the bass, because of the range and the sound and what has been done with it, it makes sense that it sort of fulfills this bass function, and connects the rhythm and the harmony, or the rhythm and the melodic material, and gives it sort of an anchor for the music. I think for me a lot of that is that it gives the music a really strong sense of rhythmic foundation, and something to bounce off of, and at the same time give strength and buoyancy to. I like to think about how the bass has that great combination of being this very deeply-rooted strong anchor, but being able to deal with it in a very buoyant and flexible way. And in terms of being a rhythm instrument, that's it. You can help establish the groove, you can play with that; you can totally give yourself up to that aspect of playing the bass. I mostly choose not to do that. I guess I have these little contradictions in terms of how I like to approach the music, because I like to feel like I'm able to do that at any time -- to break things down to maybe their most basic time-rhythm elements, and be able to really simplify. Or have that be very deeply rooted in me and play something totally different. Play against what I'm feeling and sometimes comment on what I'm feeling musically, or really deliberately shake down the foundation of what I think needs to be there. A lot of times I'll sit and figure out what really is the right thing to play, and then play anything but that. Because music to me sometimes, there's a part of me where it's a game, it's fun. What can I do to disguise these most basic elements? Sometimes that's just playing around a groove, or using pitch material that's just outside of the zone where I want it to land, where it maintains just enough tension where eventually if I just feel the right moment where it feels right with what everyone else is playing, to just kind of go 'BOOM!' and find that spot where you just want to land. Everything else before that can just be this incredible foreplay before that moment can happen. I like that. Sometimes it's very much more emotional process, sometimes it's a more intellectual process where I'm thinking about things that I'm doing. But I'm always trying to really keep the time and what I think should be happening harmonically, melodically -- I'm trying to keep that sort of inside of me, just going all the time. And I like to choose the spots where I just want to sort of connect with it, with what I'm playing.

I think that's the reason why -- regardless of whether you're engaging with that moment or holding back from it, whether you're playing a lot of notes or distilling things to their simplest forms -- there's always a sense of rigor. That's the sense I get. Now I'd like to quote something from a blindfold test that Jazz Times did with Tim a couple months ago. They played him something from Marty Ehrlich's Lucky Life disc (Enja). He says: 'On a piece like this, with Formanek, the possibilities are just endless. I've played with so many good bass players but Formanek is just frightening. Formanek, you can just give him the simplest rhythmic idea and he just turns it into something symphonic. He's amazing. Rhythmically, harmonically, he can just make a piece like this sound like an orchestra piece, and in a trio that's pretty essential.' Any rejoinders? Any way to enlarge on that?

Well, how can you enlarge on that? [laughs] I mean, that's just like, you know, in a way that's like everything I possibly could ever want anybody to say about what I do. What can I say -- I mean, that's like grossly exaggerated, barely has any element of truth to it...

But I think it does relate to what we just talked about. The line where he says 'give him the simplest rhythmic idea...'

Right. Yeah. But granted this is coming from a person, we share a lot of these musical views. I could say the exact same thing about what he does. And that's something that I feel like I share with like a handful of people that I play with. Improvisers that have a really broad palette to choose from, who can go very technical and specific to very gray area stuff that's non-describable, non-transcribeable. And so for me that's a description of probably who I consider in my inner circle of musician friends that I'm very close with. Marc Ducret, Tony Malaby, Jim Black, there's a group of people I feel really close and connected with like that. I could say similar things about anybody.

I feel like that sense of collective identity really moves from one project to another. I hear the ghost of Jim Black on Ornery People, for instance.

Uh-huh. Yup.

And when I caught your group Northern Exposure at the Knit, Jim was in that band. And when I hear the two of you playing together, it's literally impossible for me to imagine anyone else doing the music you're doing. Northern Exposure seems to me to be about that identity. I hear that even in Am I Bothering You? I don't want to say it's lessons learned from these experiences, but it's something that must have grown or developed.

Yeah, and you have to look at it from both perspectives. How we've influenced the situations we've been a part of, and how those situations influence us. And say for myself, in a band like Bloodcount, what I feel by Tim sort of throwing Jim and I in this thing together, it sort of forced us to come up with this approach, a way of playing that just kind of happened. It was things that I'm sure we both had in us to do, that may never have quite developed the same way had it not been that situation with those people. With someone writing a certain kind of music, and also an infinite amount of patience to let us work through a lot of stuff, basically without talking about anything. That's something that Jim and I have never talked about, it just happened from doing a million gigs. Both of us walked away from that experience maybe changed in a certain way. It affected my solo playing, no question. And on Ornery, there is always a kind of spirit of Jim there in a certain way, because that's somebody that I feel most connected with rhythmically. It's not necessarily that I'm hearing Jim, but I'm hearing the same kind of rhythmic ideal that we've heard together. It has more to do with connecting with those same points rhythmically that we sort of connect to together. When we're playing together, we're just totally zoned in on each other. We're just playing the way we hear rhythm, together. And finding ways of making it sound musical and together as much as we can. And it's always spontaneous because it's almost never worked out.

There's a different but obviously related chemistry that happens between you and Tim, and I guess that Ornery is the best place to look for that, because there's no one else. There's an interplay there that doesn't really recall any other bass-and-horn duo combinations. What tools do you bring to the table that allow something like that to happen?

I think it has to do, almost more than anything, with what tools we're both bringing to the table. In order for a lot of those kinds of things to work, things have to be balanced in a certain way. From playing with Tim for so long, I know how deeply connected with the bass Tim is. I mean, you listen to any of Tim's music, almost anything he's ever written -- things are generated from the bass line, there's generated from the groove, he plays the baritone, he plays the bass lines. He's got such an interesting approach to that. So I feel there's always this willingness to -- not necessarily to change roles, but to focus on these bass lines, and different ways of using tension, using held notes against moving lines. Sometimes to me it feels as much like playing with two bass players. It's that kind of freedom, freedom to move around. We both tend to play a lot, we're both pretty active players, and we both tend to use a pretty wide register of our instruments. So there's a lot of this thing of setting up lines and patterns where I'm definitely playing in the bass zone, but as part of my line I can interject things that are registerally close or harmonically close to what Tim's playing. Sort of keep pivoting off those two areas. That's one type of way that we play together a lot. It's really nothing that's been decided or talked about or any or that, but it's just an approach to playing that feels like, you know, we're playing off a central set of some kind. There are times in the beginning of an improvisation where these different lines get set in motion early on, and that becomes sort of the material or fodder for the improv, and it gets to be like this game -- how to keep this groove-bassline-melody thing happening. Sort of like not dropping the ball, you know? And that's the way it feels a lot. I've never really verbalized it, but it feels like that a lot. Almost like there's a constant kind of handing the baton back and forth, like relaying things around. One of the ways that I've been able to deal with that is that in the last several years I've really worked at just expanding my way of playing where I feel like I'm playing the whole instrument all the time. Thinking of the bass almost like it's a piano, as well as percussion. So that gets into some kind of contortionist kinds of stuff sometimes where I feel like I get myself out on these limbs. I'm not quite sure how I get there or how I get back, but I really enjoy that. It's a thing that has stemmed from the kind of music that we've attempted to play together; that's one of the solutions.

It's like inventing a new vocabulary, another set of techniques. And that's what striking about seeing you with Jim, because he's doing a comparable thing.

Oh, no question.

And it changes all the time. So I think that's really interesting -- the idea that technique is assembled, and can be extended and expanding. The thing about Jim, too, is that I have never met another musician (and definitely not another drummer) who could have maintained so much groove and deeply rooted rhythm, where you feel like you've got to move, but where he doesn't need to always define it. He's so comfortable moving in and out of even and odd bar structures and all that. We can always be implying, I can come up with some sort of weird pattern and he's so on it right away that it feels like you never have that feeling of someone's being afraid because the time is turned around. You never have that, it always feels so natural. He can deal with it naturally but he can also deal with it mathematically and technically, make those micro-adjustments to keep things feeling good. It's amazing.

There was a tune you did with Northern Exposure called 'Bovine Intervention,' with a section in 10 and a section in 7. The fluidity of transitions in a tune like that is striking.

That particular piece was pretty much written for Jim for that band. You write these things and you know that it's not going to sound like deliberately it's in 10 or deliberately it's in 7. He's just going to come up with some kind of a groove or part. And it changes. I've heard several different versions of that already, and they're all equally interesting. And the way he moves from one to another is pretty scary. Just think: on that 10 thing, which is written in 5/4 but has more of a 10/8 thing, he kind of does that closed hi-hat, almost double-time thing in there. I never could have thought of that. I knew what the basic groove was going to be, but it's such a surprise sometimes when you actually start playing.

Now, given everything that's happening with that band, and with all of your other current projects -- if you were to hear a track like 'Yahoo Justice' from Wide Open Spaces (Enja), would it sound sort of foreign to you? Or is that stuff still very much a part of your present tense?

I'd say it's a little foreign at this point. It was music from a certain time, and I was sort of putting together a lot of different elements. At that time I was still thinking more in terms of styles and keeping things in certain zones. Where now there's a lot more grooves butted right up against each other, just different ways of structuring things. It's still me in a certain way when I go back there, but I think I've really changed a lot in terms of how I look at music, and also in terms of what I want to put out there that will be interesting for these other musicians to play. That's what I'm thinking a lot of times too, is how I can come up with something that's going to maybe get those juices flowing a little differently than they might.

I noticed on your web site that you teach lessons, and two things caught my attention. The first was that you'll work with musicians who play instruments other than the bass. And also that you're very interested in teaching composition. How do you work on composition, as an instructor?

Mostly at this point, it's been one element of working with students; either someone who's been studying the bass, or in one case a drum student that I'd had. Where along with everything else, we'd spend a certain amount of time just working on compositional things. In those cases it's been more like coaching a little bit. Being another set of ears. What I think I've probably mostly done is taken something that was a good basic idea that starts but maybe runs into a wall, and come in with a fresh set of ears, and said 'How about this?' Try to get people to look at their music, once they've gotten it on paper, to look at it with a sort of orchestrator-arranger head. I haven't had any opportunity to work with too many people where it's been from the nuts and bolts of composing, and that's something that I'd like to do more of. I'm mostly self-taught as a composer. I have studied some, and I try to add new things to my arsenal. I don't consider myself a really schooled composer, so it would be pretentious to really say I want to be a composition teacher. But the zone where I'd probably be most effective is to first of all help people get their ideas on paper, and then get people to get in the habit of keeping notebooks and then referring to it. I'm always interested in how, if you have something like a notebook covering a six-month period of time, how much similarity or common material there'll be between the different sections. Dealing with non-bass-players, I take what I'd consider a little bit more of coaching role. I've had several drum students, and that's always been interesting. I've played with really good drummers for so long that it's an interesting perspective to work with a drummer and be able to say 'there something about your touch here, it just seems like if you were able to lighten up on this thing, or lay back on the bass drum a little bit it'd let this breathe a little more.' You can actually deal with subtleties that are not technical from a drum standpoint, but from someone that you'd actually be playing with, like a bass player, where it would make all the difference.

As a composer yourself, what sorts of processes do you use? Would you say that you often start with ideas on the bass, or does it happen a different way?

It doesn't happen that way that often. It does maybe less than half the time. I think usually it has more to do with hearing something, like some kind of groove or a melody line or something; it tends to go a little more from that standpoint. I probably write more melody lines first more often, or a bass line that I didn't write at the bass. One of the reasons I write away from the bass is that I don't want to just write things that I can play. I want to write things that are maybe going to be interesting. So that's why you end up with these crazy wide-interval leaps and awkward fingerings and all this kind of stuff -- because I try to do that away from the instrument. I know it's going to be weird when I'm writing it, but it's different from letting the fingers do the walking and doing the more obvious route. It's a combination, and I'm by no means set in that process. Whatever gets it going is what gets it going. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting something started and one thing follows the other. I lose that conscious thing at a certain point; it just starts moving along. You get some melody going, and then you go find some bass stuff, and that'll open up another door. Sometimes by the time you've written a melody, you start writing a bass line. So you get to a certain point where the bass line gets so interesting that you kind of throw the other stuff away. Then you work on the bass line until it runs its course, but some melodic idea stems from that. That's part of the process that I really enjoy; if you're open to it, things keep revealing themselves to you. You have to be responsive to that process, I think.

I think there's that sense of discovery especially on the solo bass disc. It's quite unclear where the compositional element begins and ends. And also the things you've been dealing with: the bass as a keyboard instrument, as a percussion instrument, extended techniques, and unusual stuff. That's all incorporated in a self-consciously musical sense, and could easily -- I'm not sure, I haven't seen the music -- but at certain points, it seems like it's definitely incorporated into the composition. And you wonder 'How is this notated? Is this notated?' And 'How did it develop?'

That recording was a great learning experience for that for me. I was always afraid, in a lot of situations where you're playing with other people, to be too sketchy. When you have people playing with you, you're responsible to sort of be more specific. Whereas myself, I know where my musical aesthetic is. I know that I'm going to deal with sort of really simple material or really sketchy material in the way that I'm at least feeling strongly about at that moment. So I could keep certain things really really sketchy. Several of the pieces on there are almost completely written. Two or three are completely improvised. And then there's all kinds of different proportions. It's probably got the widest range of different approaches in terms of how much is written and how much is not written.

And what's so great about the format is that because there's only instrumental voice, and because it's all coming from your head, the listener really has no indication as to that range and when one thing is improvised, when it's composed. The sonic range is clear, but the formal range is something that can only be imagined. Whereas if you were doing the same sort of project with other musicians, you could infer what's improvised. But because it's solo bass, it's quite indeterminate.

You just don't know sometimes what's the best way to go. I tend to be very intuitive about that; I don't really second-guess it too much. It felt good, it felt natural to me, so I just kind of went with it that way. Luckily Tim was around to help kind of keep it moving along, help get it focused too, because any kind of solo recording you can have your moments of doubt. It's a whole lot of you. And most of us don't think we're all that great anyway, so you think: 'For better or for worse, it's going to be a whole lot of me here.' So trying to find at least the best versions of that that you can do.

for sound and video clips, and much, much more, check out Michael's site www.amibotheringyou.com

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