Prototype Issue
Lassoing Drew Lesso
By Capella Parish
(page 1 of 1)When I finally sat down with Drew Lesso he had just finished a composition that took longer than expected. Like most artistic geniuses, his mannerisms were fascinating and as he spoke his hands moved in perpetual fluid motion of loose fidgeting.
Often, as he conversed, a lighter would be held in the crook of his left palm while he rolled the filter tip of a cigarette back and forth between his thumb and forefinger into a perfect square. When he did light his cigarette, it would often go out after being lit, in part due to Lesso’s oral neglect and because that is what most expensive boxed tobacco is wont to do.
As my tape recorder burned into the fifth hour and the pages of my notebook became filled, I realized that the more I listened to the reclusive Lesso, the more I came to appreciate the delicate tension on the wishbone of his life. On one side was a loosely controlled melancholic man and on the other, a German trained composer and genius. I had lived in my neighborhood for quite sometime and sightings of Drew Lesso were about as rare as viewings of Greta Garbo.
Drew Lesso is 6’ 2” of gazelle-like lankiness with a face full of curious eccentricity accented with a Salvador Dali-thin mustache, his silver hair is neatly tucked thick behind his ears and is framed by a jaw chiseled out of ice. When Lesso was in my presence, I felt that he truly listened, but did not judge nor categorize my findings. With the relaxed air that only the educated elite have, Lesso doesn’t seem to struggle for much in life except when confronted by his fears of loneliness which lies thinly veiled under his fashionable glasses. As he tells his story, his massive hands move through the air gracefully in suspended animation.
“My God he has hands like Frankenstein, What are we going to do with these hands?” Frau Schmidt Neuhaus screeched when she was presented with the young Lesso, her new American pupil. She promptly declared him her worst student. She ordered him to hold soft balls in his hands in order to perfectly align all of the joints in his hand, removed the balls, then turned them over onto the piano keyboard and told him to begin playing. Beyond the arduous requisite studies in Germany, Lesso did finger exercises for three years for the stern Frau. Thanks to Frau, he now has speed and motion in his playing which is what he always wanted, along with much brighter memories.
Like most geniuses, the signs in his childhood were everywhere and pointed towards a great burgeoning promise. At five years old, Lesso was secretly tuning the radio dials through big band stations at 2 am while his Swing era parents listened through the walls in amusement. When he was a teenager, Lesso helped his father teach piano students. At 17, Lesso began composing his own music of piano sonatas and pop songs. He formed his first group Federal Reserve under a five year contract and under the guidance of a slimy NYC agent tethered to a Penthouse model. Needless to say, although Drew and his band played cocktail lounges and country clubs, they sadly never saw a penny from their music contract.
At 19 he had a non-drug-induced mind altering dream. He experienced a light in infinite space and felt he could see in all directions at once. He saw two points of light and heard a sound, a perfect fifth, and as the two lights moved towards him and through him, the pitch rose and fell like the Doppler effect. This led Lesso to start asking questions about light, movement, color and sound and the relationships between them. He discovered Hans Kayser’s Handbook of Harmonics in the library and coveted the archaic out-of-print German text for three years.
When Lesso showed the head of the music department at West Virgina State University some of his geometric drawings based on triangles, assigned tones and notation based on these triangles, a letter of introduction was promptly drawn out, and Lesso was soon on a plane to meet the great composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Although Lesso couldn’t speak a word of German at that point, he jumped the pond to Europe and took the train to Cologne to meet Stockhausen. Stockhausen stamped Lesso with his approval, and Lesso was plugged in like a wire in the wall. He was allowed to do his counterpoint studies in Munich and immerse himself in the German language. Lesso was quickly brought up to speed and excelled in his new environment.
While Lesso fidgets with his unlit cigarette, the memories start pouring out. Names and events come flying out of history and as I tapped into the esoteric vibe of harmonic strings of philosophy, mathematics and music, I marinated in the sulfur oxides of his red wine and snacked on a few butterscotches that were laid out in a crystal candy dish for guests.
Lesso calls his music art music because it doesn’t follow the traditional rules of music, but it does follow traditional themes. Lesso finds himself creating more art, much of it 3D, which fits into his modern music. His downtown LA Arts District loft is littered with these mysterious objects d’art, piles of four-sided stones, shells, and combines representing the inherent musical structure of things in nature that he pulls into his compositions.
Surprisingly, it’s been over 35 years since Lesso has performed written music. For his last piano recital he performed Beethoven’s “Das Lebe Wohl” which loosely translated means “See You Later”. The night before the piano recital, Lesso was working on his own composition of geometric music rather than fretting over the stressful recital.
As he struggled with a 4’5 foot piece of millimeter paper overlaid with clear plastic and thousands of punched out dots revealing the harmonic nature underneath, he placed his work up and fastened it with sewing pins onto the wall for better study; and not with pushpins, but inadequate sewing pins. The pins pierced his thumbs and a trip to the emergency room revealed that glass balls were embedded in his thumb tips and needed to be removed. The surgeon prepped Lesso’s digits with an anesthetic and with hesitation put the scalpel down and declared he could not be responsible for mutilating Lesso’s hands. A doctor’s note was written and Lesso didn’t have to do his recital. He never had to play a written piece of someone else’s music again.
His studies were ripe with the influence of other great composers such as John Cage and Mauricio Kagel who showed him the fascinating study of marking every word in the dictionary that has to do with sound, and of course Karlheinz Stockhausen who through his alternating brilliance and madness taught Lesso the value of centering. Whatever the work was that Lesso worked on he would make a diagram that fit onto one page for the singular work. This was called a skizze. Lesso would organize all of his thoughts onto one page schematically before the actual music was ever written.
"I had lived in my neighborhood for quite sometime and sightings of Drew Lesso were about as rare as viewings of Greta Garbo."
Friends of Lesso have not been so fortunate. Claude Vivier was a former student of Stockhausen and gained much notoriety as a brilliant composer who wrote very fluidly but stepped into the seductive darkness of the occult. Vivier wrote a libretto opera about a fellow whose lover left him and flew to Paris where he met a drug addict on the street and pleaded with the man to kill him.
The unrequited lover begged for his murder at the hands of the miscreant and after offering a sum of $500 was knifed to death. Perhaps because Vivier was always conjoining with the darker spirits, he ended up living the libretto he wrote. When his longtime lover broke up with him, Vivier got on a plane to Paris and after offering a street hoodlum money, was promptly stabbed to death. There was a price to pay for being involved with that society and Drew’s interests were not with the dark side, but through proportions and philosophy and their relation to his music.
Upon his return to the US, Lesso was held up at immigration. On the desk he was shown a big fat file from the FBI with his name on it. He had been observed for many years but never seriously investigated. Lesso was a nice country boy from the Midwest, was declared a model citizen and allowed re-entry.
After 10 years managing a successful multi-million dollar fashion business and other ventures in LA, Lesso now spends his time occasionally working as a overqualified piano tuner, on the daunting task of the 40 retrospective of his work, and preparing to teach at a university. He hopes to teach a class on harmonics open to all disciplines, since he is a Pythagorean harmonics specialist and sees its value in all areas of life.
Lesso has lived a very different life compared to other American composers. He decided against being involved with marketing his work, as it would take time away from his art and instead, has placed the last 40 years of his work online at www.drewlesso.com, where his music and collaborations can be listened in its entirety for free.
Now that he is finally able to take his time, Lesso has relaxed into his work. As his mother stressed, it’s better for others to talk about you than for you to talk about yourself. Some artists are really good at beating the drum and saying, ‘Hi, look at me.’ Lesso likes his private world. If he does decide to venture out, he can be spotted at the usual Arts District haunts, such as Boyd Street Restaurant to check out an art opening or E3rd Steakhouse to enjoy a filet mignon. He walks with his favorite companion, a Dachywawa named Max, if you’re on the lookout.
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