“Some people leave the room screaming at us, that’s a given,” says Charlie Ebersbaker of his experience with Hawthorne Improvisation Collective groups, “That always happens.” Continues cohort Mike Switzer, “It’s not the kind of music that lends itself to casual listening. You’re going to get out of it what you put into it. It won’t be soothing to your ear if you’re sitting there having a conversation at the bar and having your drink.” HIC is the name that they’ve given to the loose collective of musicians that play under various monikers: Avijit, The Democratic Art, Bartiromo, Last Bastions, The Defenestration Unit, and probably more to come. The name of the group usually corresponds more to the instrumentation, rather than the personnel, which will often overlap between groups. Some of these groups have standard rock instrumentation, while others rely more on horns or electronics. What they all have in common is that the music has little structure. Things grate and squeak, as each musician finds what he deems is the appropriate reaction to what he is hearing. It’s obvious fun for those involved and—sometimes--even audiences. But often enough, they can clear your local bar. But that’s not to say that everybody hates the music, as Switzer relates, “Some people come up to us afterwards and say, ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before. I loved it; it was fantastic.’” The HIC began in 1995 with the idea of playing improvised music. Several of the core members who lived in a house on Hawthorne Street in the Montrose area were inspired by watching regular Sunday performances by improv groups Charalambides and the Dave Dove Paul Duo at Harvey’s Club Deluxe, which was located in the same storied warehouse district space that was once (and is currently) called The Axiom. It was a relaxed atmosphere where friends could gather to sink into well-worn sofas and watch as the groups played. New Zealand native Paul Winstanley of the Dave Dove Paul Duo was particularly instrumental in making these shows happen. “Paul is one of the reasons that I got into free improvisation or improvised music,” says Switzer, “And before I heard Dave Dove playing trombone, I was really jealous of all the skronks and squeaks that saxophone players could make. I realized that there were a lot more things that the trombone could do than I’d really given thought to.” Switzer also realized that these sorts of performances could happen more often with a larger pool of participants, so he and the other Hawthorne Street residents set up regular sessions in their living room. “Originally the idea was to encourage improvisation in Houston—to get a lot of different improvisers together to kind of support each other. The thought behind it was to model ourselves after the (Chicago based) AACM—the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,” says Switzer. “Something where we actually make some kind of community occur,” continues Ebersbaker. So once a week a group would get together to play at the Hawthorne house, since they found that bar owners shy away from the kind of music they were after. “There aren’t a whole lot clubs that are incredibly receptive to us,” says Ebersbaker. Consequently, if you wanted to hear what was going on, you had to be there. But obviously that’s not easy for everybody, so early on Switzer and Ebersbaker began recording these sessions, in hopes of expanding their audience. “There used to be a time that we recorded an album every Sunday. When we would practice. That would be an album, “ says Ebersbaker, “Everything we played was recorded.” Switzer goes on, “Every one of those became an Avijit cassette that was available at Sound Exchange that the members of Charalambides would buy.” Okay, so their audience was a little slow to develop. When the group eventually moved out of the Hawthorne house, Switzer continued having sessions in his new house, inviting anybody who was interested to play. And, of course, they continued to record these sessions. “We have a whole lot of random recordings of different groups of people that all sound totally different from one another. You never knew who was going to be in it,” says Ebersbaker. Listening to these recordings was never a predictable experience as instruments came and went, sometimes competing with tape hiss to be heard. The recordings have a lo-fi quality that you might expect from a home recording. “We get a four-track tape recorder a few mics and we’re ready to go,” says Switzer, “For our purposes it’s certainly not worth the extra money we would spend going into the studio, since any recording of this music is only going to represent it so far.” In other words, you should really be listening to the music in person. In an effort to make the music available the way it is supposed to be heard, Chicago transplant David Maddox, organized a regular improv session every other Tuesday at the place that has been so good to improvisers for so many years: Sound Exchange. The idea was for people to come watch or--preferably--play. Says Sound Exchange’s Kurt Brennan, “Lots of musicians participated. It was especially fascinating to witness the degree of ‘listening’ that went on amongst them.” They called these sessions Houston Improved Sound Deployment, a name they invented to fit the acronym H.I.S.D. And people came--not just to watch, but also to play. This is the sort of thing that HIC had needed for a long time. “People just come out of the woodwork. That was the best thing about it,” says Ebersbaker. But for all of HIC’s energy, they found it hard to maintain a high level of interest in regular performances--as Switzer points out, “Some nights would be duets between drummer Vaughan Boone and keyboard player Robert Pearson for two hours. That’s why it’s not really happening as regularly anymore.” Overwhelming success or not, the H.I.S.D shows planted the seeds of a community. As Switzer says, “The sessions were a good place to find new people to play with.” New people mean new ways to communicate, which is important because Switzer would like to extend the idea of improvisation past music, “We improvise all the time. Everything you do is an improvisation. Very little in life do we do by rote--at least that we do by choice, so it’s just a very natural way to play. What if everybody did things like this? When you’re playing in a group--group improvisation--it’s a lot about being very sensitive and listening and adding to the greater whole and not necessarily putting forth your own personality or your own agenda. What you come up with out of group improvisation is something that nobody in the group would have come up with by themselves, even if they could have. It’s something that’s arrived at through negotiations with each other and the space you’re playing in.” Ebersbaker continues, “I often don’t feel quite so connected integrally when I’m listening to somebody improvise as I do when I’m actually doing it.” And everybody can do it. “Even if you can only make one sound, if you choose the right moment to make it….,” Switzer trails off and Ebersbaker picks up (like they’ve been at this communication thing for years), “You don’t have to study for twelve years before you can really be versed in it or anything like that. I have a lot of respect for people who have done that and I love that kind of music, but it’s exclusionary. If you haven’t gone to music school and you have a day job then you’re not allowed to get up and play the saxophone that you have from high school.” “But,” warns Switzer, “it’s not like this music doesn’t require some kind of preparation, you just don’t have to play scales eight hours a day. With what we’re playing, there can be mistakes. You can do something and you know it was the wrong choice after you do it, but how the other players respond to that can be just as interesting as how they might respond to the right choice.” But how can this sort of music—fraught with mistakes and recoveries, unlike anything that could conventionally be considered commercially viable—succeed? The answer is simply that The Hawthorne Collective has no plans to be the next big thing. This is Houston, after all. Says Switzer, “We know we can do whatever we want to do here because we don’t have to gear ourselves for being the next Seattle or Nashville. There’s a real freeing aspect to that.” Concludes Ebersbaker, “There’s no sense of preparing for imminent greatness; you can just do whatever you want.” They just want to play music and they want you to come along for the ride in whatever capacity you can. You can watch them play live or you can play with them. Or you can just pick up one of their CDs at Sound Exchange. What do you have to lose?