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Fine |  (Not) Another image-mongering ploy: Milo Fines Photo By Diana Watters |
Milo Fine doesn't know when to shut up. "It doesn't take much to get me going," admits the compulsively self-aware, avant-garde musician and self-confessed "cheap interview." Just as the cure for the abuse of free speech is more free speech, the king of the clarification calls back numerous times to add nuance to his already measured and qualified statements. But when Fine is on a roll, this 47-year-old multi-instrumentalist's discursive improvisation can be as fascinating as any musical excursion he has committed to disc.
"Frankly, the avant-garde is just another genre," he warns me during our hourlong conversation. "It's prone to the same dilettantes and bandwagon hoppers you find anywhere else. I certainly don't promote myself as a carte blanche champion of the avant-garde." He pauses. "God, I hope I don't promote myself at all."
Fine is one of a handful of Twin Cities musicians whose local anonymity belies his international reputation. He has performed and collaborated across the nation and in France, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, and Austria. Born in Minneapolis and raised in Bloomington, he started playing out on drums during the counterculture's late-Sixties zenith, christening his jazzy power trio (with guitarist Scott Munsell and bassist Steve Dokken) Blue Freedom after holding a name-the-band contest in a local junior high school. Playing what he terms "overtly rock-based inflections" of contemporary classical music, Fine drew on John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and Captain Beefheart before lunging headlong into free jazz. As the band changed names--first to Blue Freedom's New Art Transformation, then to the Milo Fine Free Jazz Ensemble--the bandleader sought to purify his improvisational technique until, as he puts it, "not only did any obvious link to rock fall by the wayside, but [so did] any semblance of formal structure."
Today Fine remains an aesthetic absolutist who, upon seeing unfamiliar faces in the audience, will indulge fears of being reduced to a novelty act for avant-garde tourists. As a result, he seems to have deliberately estranged himself from the mainstream. "Pop music by its very nature feeds on the deeper streams of creativity," he explains, "And by its very nature, which is parasitical, it doesn't do those streams justice." But, as Fine suggests, the avant-garde is equally suspect. Having knitted the highbrow in its own image, institutional art is subject to the same pitfalls as any commerce. For Fine, postmodernism is pop writ large, favoring pastiche over depth. And so he instead occupies a prematurely discarded modernist space that he seeks to insulate from both commercial and political influences.
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