100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 19

Whereas John Lomax was interested in the music for its own sake, Alan began some time ago to look for the deeper meaning, or social significance, of folk songs. In his many trips around the world he built up a collection of recordings from every continent and virtually every major culture. Along with a co-worker he developed his findings into the new branch of anthropology known as cantometrics.

When the Voyager 2 s.p.a.cecraft left Earth last August for a journey beyond the solar system, it carried on its side a unique record player with a specially made disk for alien beings to hear and enjoy. The disk contained 27 musical selections, which have been named "Earth's Greatest Hits"; 13 of them were chosen by Alan Lomax.

The following interview was conducted in various rooms of Alan's office on a Friday evening in August, 1977. One room was filled with recording equipment, tapes and records; another with music books; a third with computer readouts; and a fourth with movie films. Lomax spoke rapidly and found it difficult to sit still. He is not a neat housekeeper, a sharp dresser or a master of the social graces. He is, however, a tireless worker who gives the impression of being totally absorbed in his work. A large, robust man, he will no doubt continue to be a major figure in the field of international folk music for years to come.

Question: What exactly is cantometrics?

Answer: It means, literally, singing as a measure of culture. With it, a song performance may be a.n.a.lyzed and related to a culture pattern. Each aspect of music stands for a different social style. By using cantometrics you get the story of mankind in musical terms. ... It's like the guy who says, "I don't know anything about music but I know what I like." It means that kind of music stands for his background and what he believes in.

Q: How did you develop this new science?

A: I started this project in 1961. ... We a.n.a.lyzed 4,000 songs on a computer. Out of that has come a map of world culture. There are 10 big groups or styles of music. Stone age people have style 1. ... We found there's a similarity of Patagonian music and Siberian, even though these people live near the opposite poles. ... Along with studying song, we have also studied dance and conversation in the same way, from film. I probably have the biggest collection of dance film in the world -- 200,000 feet. Maybe the New York Public Library has more, but that's specialized in fine art.

Q: What's the purpose of cantometrics? How can someone learn it?

A: I recently published a set of seven ca.s.sette tapes of folk songs from all 10 cultural levels around the world. In the booklet that comes with it, the songs are broken down and a.n.a.lyzed so that the student can learn the cantometrics system on his own. When you learn the system, you can understand any music, even if you don't know the language it's being sung in. By the time you've heard two or three tapes, you get used to the world standard of music. Cantometrics measures things like repet.i.tion, ornamentation, rhythm, melody, orchestral arrangement. ... It a.n.a.lyzes music in relation to social structure -- political organization, community solidarity, severity of s.e.xual sanctions. Cantometrics makes the world's music into a geography.

Q: How does American music differ from that of the world in general?

A: In our culture, for example, we didn't have much repet.i.tion until rock and roll came around. And that represents another influence. ... As you know, we of European background don't sing very well together.

Everybody starts singing at a different tempo, like seven cats in a bag. But if you take people who live and work together, it's like clouds rolling out of the sea. ... It turns out that the people with the most repet.i.tion in their songs have the most primitive cultures -- at least, in relation to their economic development. Everybody knows the same thing about everything. So being specific is boring, and repet.i.tion is what they like.

You don't impose your boring accuracy on everyone.

Q: What do you consider the real beginning of the folk music movement in America?

A: It all began in Texas in 1885 when my father heard "Whoopee Ti Yi Yo" on the Chisholm Trail. He was a country boy. He grew up in Texas, and the cowboys drifted past. He wrote the songs down just for the h.e.l.l of it. Then he got a grant from Harvard and found out how important it was. He was the first person in the country to use a recording device, in 1902.

Q: Did you know Woody Guthrie very well?

A: Know him? I made him famous. I had a coast-to-coast radio program when Woody first came to New York. I introduced him when he first sang on radio. He stayed at my house. ... They offered him a huge contract, but he just walked off and went to Oklahoma. He was a deeply pa.s.sionate person, and tremendously gifted. First of all he was the funniest man that ever talked. And Woody was so quick: talking to him was like playing jai alai. He got up in the morning and wrote 25 pages before breakfast just to warm up. And there was always a slightly strange thing about woody -- an itchy feeling that he had. It might have been beginning of the disease which later killed him.

Q: What's your connection with Pete Seeger?

A: Peter Seeger is my protege. I gave him his banjo. The banjo was a dead issue, and he came to me and asked what he should do with his life.

He was a Harvard hippie. ... We got to be colleagues. We worked on the whole revival of the American folk music. I taught him most of his early songs.

Q: Were you ever a performer yourself?

A: Yes, I've made a few records. But I was always more of a funnel. I regarded myself as a dredge, dredging up the rich subsoil of American folk and putting it back on the developing music scene. We set out to revive the American folk music in 1938, and by G.o.d we did it. By 1950 it was a national movement.

Q: What are some other things you've done?

A: I did the first oral history -- the Leadbelly book and the book on Jelly Roll Morton. The Leadbelly movie (1976) was taken from that oral history. For Jelly Roll Morton, I transcribed the tape and made it into a piece of literature. The story has been bought for a movie by the same people who made the Woody Guthrie movie, _Bound for Glory_.

Q: Have you done a lot of research outside the United States?

A: Yes, I spent 1950 to 1960 in Europe a.s.sembling all the best material that had been collected into 14 alb.u.ms, geographically arranged. Then I started thinking about what I heard on alb.u.ms -- not what musicians or literary people heard, but what I heard. Then I met some people at the National Inst.i.tute of Mental Health who were interested in the norms of healthy behavior. I indicated to them that I was that getting at the behavior styles of the people of the world. They gave me some dough and I got a staff together.

Q: How was the American folk music scene then?

A: I was very shocked when I came back to the United States in 1960.

The musical scene at Was.h.i.+ngton Square made me sick. They said, "Alan, those people you talked to are all dead." I kind of withdrew from the whole business. ... Later I set up a concert in Carnegie Hall and brought in the first bluegra.s.s group and the first gospel group to perform in New York. People stormed the stage. There were fistfights and everything.

Well, that was the whole end of people saying New York was the center of the folk scene.

Q: What do you think of Bob Dylan?

A: Dylan came along in the footsteps of Ramblin' Jack Elliott. He lived with Woody for a while, and picked him as his model. He absorbed the whole southwestern style from Woody. And the country for the first time fell for a national American vocal style. Then Dylan left the scene and went middle cla.s.s after three years. He turned his back on folk music, turned his back on people. I think he did a big disservice to the country when he did that. ... The whole thing has been to make urban mobile people have a folk music of their own. It's not a bad idea. Terribly boring though.

Q: Do all your projects lead to one goal?

A: I make my living as a very hardworking scientist. I do that because it was important finally to take this huge world that was coming out of loudspeakers, and get down to the meat of it so that it can be used for the betterment of our future ... so that we can keep all the treasures of the past and use them. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing it in a scientific way so that I can absolutely refute the idea of those who say that Oklahoma doesn't matter, or that the Pygmies might as well be exterminated. Each of these people, we have found, has something for the human future, and for the human destiny.

EASTSIDER PETER MAAS Author of _Serpico_ and _Made in America_

1-12-80

On the surface, his life could hardly be calmer. Peter Maas gets up every morning to have breakfast with his 12-year-old son, then heads for his midtown office, where he spends about five hours at the typewriter. He rarely goes out in the evening, and his idea of fun is a weekend of fis.h.i.+ng, a set of tennis or a game of backgammon. "I don't have to live in New York," he says. "When I'm working on a book, I might as well be living in the wilds of Maine."

But in his mind, Peter Maas leads the life of James Bond and Al Capone rolled into one. "I know an awful lot of people on both sides of the law,"

says the author of two nonfiction block-busters about crime, _The Valachi Papers_ and _Serpico_. _The Valachi Papers_, the real-life saga of three generations of a Mafia chieftain's family, was published in 1969 following two years of court battles and rejections from 26 publishers who felt that books on the Mafia had no commercial potential. It sold three million copies in 14 languages and paved the way for an entire industry of Mafia books and movies.

_Serpico_ (1973) revealed the rampant corruption in the New York City Police Department through the eyes of officer Frank Serpico. Then came _King of the Gypsies_ (1975), Maas' third expose of the underbelly of American society which, like the others, was made into a successful movie.

Now the 50-year-old author has written his first novel, _Made in America_. Published in September by Viking, it is a raw, violent, grimly humorous story of an ex-football star for the New York Giants who gets mixed up with organized crime while borrowing money for a shady investment scheme. King Kong Karpstein, the terrifying loan shark who dominates the book, is based on several people whom Maas had known personally, and the novel's head Mafia character has much in common with Frank Costello, the "prime minister of the underworld," who granted Maas 11 interviews shortly before his death in 1975. The scenes of _Made In America_ -- p.o.r.n parlors, criminal hideaways, the FBI offices -- are all described with the same intense realism as the characters. The movie rights have been sold for $450,000.

"The reason I wrote it," explains Maas, sitting restlessly at his 11-room Eastside apartment on a recent afternoon, "was that I didn't want to wake up 10 years from now wondering what would have happened if I had written a novel. ... I also think a writer has to challenge himself constantly. I don't think he should play a pat hand."

As he talks on in his breezy New York accent, fidgeting with a gold matchbox on the antique table beside him, Maas seems barely able to restrain himself from getting up and pacing the room. Quite striking in appearance, he is a tall, stocky man with a Brillo-pad thatch of silvery hair and eyebrows like cotton batting. A native Manhattanite, he was one of the country's top investigative reporters for many years before writing his first book, _The Rescuer_, in 1967.

The reason for the t.i.tle _Made In America_, says Maas is that "the events in the novel could only happen in America. ... One of the themes is that n.o.body in the book, including the football player and the federal prosecutor, thinks that he's doing anything wrong. So that's a very profound kind of corruption."

Like his previous books, _Made in America_ took two years to write.

"The biggest difference that I found," he points out, "was that in nonfiction, all the discoveries and surprises are in the research, and in fiction, they're all in the writing. When I write nonfiction, about two thirds of the time is spent in research. I didn't do any research for this.

It was much harder. And it was the only time I had to rewrite the whole book."

Although Maas claims that his own life has never been in imminent danger, he was touched by deep personal tragedy in 1975 when his wife, a highly talented writer/producer named Audrey Gellen, was killed in an automobile accident. Their only child, John Michael, is a skilled pianist.

Puffing on an imported little cigar, Maas speaks with pride of some of his most important stories in the past. An article he wrote in 1960 led to the release of Edgar Labat, a black convict in Louisiana who had been on death row for 11 years. An article about columnist Igor Ca.s.sini in 1963 resulted in Ca.s.sini's arrest and conviction as a secret agent for Dominican strongman Trujillo. The biggest story Maas never wrote was a book about the shah of Iran; several years ago he turned down an offer of $1 million for the project in order to concentrate on his novel.

"I've always had trouble writing about women," he confesses when asked about future books. "So the main character of my next work will be a woman. It was going to be another novel, but now I've run across what I think is a fantastic nonfiction project, which I'm mostly interested in because the subject matter is a woman. So I think I'll do that first and the novel afterward. At least I know what my next two will be, and that's comforting."

died 8-23-01. born 6-27-29. Auth or of _Serpico_ and _The Terrible Hours_.

WESTSIDER LEONARD MALTIN Film historian and critic

9-2-78