Rusefest ’91 Gives Progressive Artists a Place to Jazz It Up

SAN DIEGO —  He calls himself Zopilote, an Indian name meaning buzzard or scavenger, and friends say he takes pride in his ability to survive on very little. Only a survivor would commute between a family in Tijuana and a full-time job in San Diego, then give up sweat and long nights to keep cutting-edge jazz alive in a city where the audiences for it are, more often than not, very small.

Zopilote--known as Manuel Mancillas to his fellow employees at San Diego Youth and Community Services, where he is a social worker--co-founded the Ruse Collective in a small Gaslamp Quarter storefront in 1988. Since moving to the Marquis Public Theater last year, Zopilote and the Ruse have continued to deliver top-notch cutting-edge jazz by both national and local performers.

The Rusefest is one of Zopilote’s pet projects, a twice-a-year celebration of alternative jazz and theater that began in 1989. Operating with shoestring funding, including a grant from the city of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture, the Ruse manages to produce inspiring performances.

Last weekend, San Diego pianist Joe Garrison premiered an original extended jazz composition. This weekend, Rusefest ’91 continues Friday night with Mexican sax and flute player Arturo Cipriano and Saturday night with a solo performance by Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia.

In laid-back, artistically conservative San Diego, jazz’s fringe isn’t always a hit. Audiences for recent Ruse shows at the Marquis have ranged from an apathetic 25 to an impressive 90, though never near the space’s capacity of 103.

Even so, Zopilote remains committed to his mission.

“I’m not burned out by any means,” he said. “It gets frustrating sometimes when you know you have a good show and you don’t get the kind of support you would hope for from San Diego, but I’m sort of used to that.”

Musicians are appreciative of the Ruse and of Zopilote’s efforts.

“It’s the only outlet for creative music in San Diego, the only place music can be played as an art form, where the music is not being performed to support a restaurant or bar,” said multi-instrumentalist Turiya, who has performed several original works at the Ruse since its inception. “I have never met any creative jazz musician that does not feel insulted by that, but they just kind of resign themselves to the victim role. For me, in a very conservative, repressive environment that we live in, especially in the post-Persian Gulf era, the Ruse is like the only breath of fresh air.”

Golia, who plays just about every known woodwind instrument, is one example of the quality of talent the Ruse attracts--he’s a prodigious composer whose original pieces blend the free-form improvisation of the riskiest jazz with the complex structures of contemporary classical music. In other words, Golia believes in improvisation, but he also believes it can be something more than the undisciplined honking and screaming that also falls under the avant-garde jazz banner.

When he’s not scoring the occasional movie (including “Blood and Concrete,” due in July) or dance presentation, Golia spends his days practicing and running his independent music label, Nine Winds, which now has a catalogue of 43 titles ranging from straight-ahead jazz to more than a dozen of his own recordings.

Golia, 45, has an unconventional background for a jazz musician. He once believed his calling was painting, but in the early 1970s, began exploring other media.

“I was looking for something more immediate,” he said, recalling a time around 1969 and 1970 when his neighbors in a New York apartment building included jazz musicians Dave Liebman, Chick Corea and Dave Holland. “By that time I was really into drawing and sketching, and I was trying to make laser beams do what I could do with a pen, but the technical side wasn’t there, and monetarily it was killing me. I blew up about three of these lasers, and I never got it the way I wanted it.

“I ended up creating environments, and I wanted something to happen in them, and one thing led to another, and sound was more immediate, and I thought that might be a way for me to go.”

A girlfriend bought him his first sax in 1970, and by reading books and watching other musicians, including his neighbors, Golia taught himself to play. He also taught himself to read and write music in order to compose the complex works he had in mind.

His development as a musician kicked into a high gear when he went to Los Angeles in 1973 to take care of family business and ended up staying. His first album was a 1977 session with reedman John Carter.

Although some critics have denied the existence of substantial cultural history on the West Coast, Golia finds himself continually mining a deep vein.

“The more I’m out here, researching the history of the place, I get to see what the lineage is,” he said. “The more I play with someone like (trumpeter) Bobby Bradford, who talks about the history, or Red Callender, I get to hear this music from the past and see how much was composed.

“I find that people here have played incredibly complex music with incredible ease, and I just don’t see that in a lot of other groups. Shorty Rogers, Gerry Mulligan, that’s the lineage we inherit. Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Dolphy all came from here, and they all wrote incredibly complex music, and they all played the heck out of it. The music’s roots are here, because you don’t just make that up and start playing, it has to come from where you live.”

Obviously, Golia’s jazz roots run deep, but contemporary classical music has exerted just as strong an influence on his music, especially the way he uses complex compositions to control the directions of improvisations.

“Most of the classical music of the 20th Century seems to be so close to being improvised that there’s a common bond there,” explained Golia, who has recorded with a range of jazz and classical players including John Rapson, Wayne Peet, Michael Vlatkovich and Tim Berne.

“Plus we use the same kinds of extended techniques (as classical players do) on the horn--quarter tones, multiphonics, over blowing, altered fingerings--once you get into that realm, you’re on common ground. I notice some of the music from the 1960s, like Christian Wolf and other classical composers, is mostly direction music, where they give diagram information but not notes. It’s control-led improvisation, as opposed to free-form.”

Golia has composed music for a variety of instrumental contexts. His two most recent releases show the incredible range of his writing and playing abilities. One is a duo project with Del Mar bassist and UC San Diego professor Bert Turetzky titled “Intersections;” the other, with his 19-piece ensemble, is named “Pilgrimage to Obscurity.”

As Golia remembers it, he hasn’t played a San Diego club since the late 1970s. He usually performs with groups, but for this Saturday’s atypical solo performance, expected to last an hour or more, he’ll bring a clarinet or two, a sax and several ethnic instruments. He plans to play three or four extended original compositions, including “The Cave,” which he wrote in 1978, and “Nuba,” on which he alternates between piccolo and bass saxophone.

Although Golia has become a mainstay of the progressive jazz scene on the West Coast, he still doesn’t consider himself a permanent fixture.

“I haven’t decided (to stay) yet,” he said. “I’m just here. I play with a lot of very good people. I don’t think that some of the opportunities to play with the caliber of people I play with would come as easily back east. I’m still learning. I guess I’ll move back east when I stop learning.”