From "Warne Marsh/Susan Chen" - Liner notes by Warne Marsh:
"Some people 'play Jazz'. Personally, I let jazz play me. I abandon myself to influences whose love of music and generosity of spirit--Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano and a few others--lead me through my career. I don't share with so many of my peers any need to impose technical prowess or vast stores of information, or social (or political) sentiments on music. I've felt caught in a welter of attitudes and I've been missing the clean pure spirit of the musicians who drew me into jazz in the first place. There's a force in music which unites people and draws them into the musical experience, a total willingness to be in time and in harmony with another mortal; and how simple it really is; and it amuses me to watch people struggle to maintain their precious personal identity and in so doing lose the very quality that draws the listener to jazz in the first place, that feeling of a shared experience. There is such a thing as a universal sense of time --the musical sense. The imitative mind has to assume someone else's sense of time, and in so doing avoids that primary musical responsibility of discovering its own way through melody and structure. Through the same inner need that seems unique in every musician who creates his or her own identity, my fellow musician in these duets has divined that unique sense of time that allow for sharing and that we call musical."
"Susan's musical career finds her exploring toy pianos at four, studying piano with the pianist of the St Louis Symphony at seven and performing with the symphony's local appearances at ten. She survived eight more years of classical music before dropping out of Oberlin Conservatory and her previous career to begin listening to jazz. She studied with Alan Broadbent, myself and Lennie Tristano with what she likes to describe as varying degrees of success. She claims she learned more in four months with Lennie than everything she had learned in her previous education. At one of her first lessons, he summed it all up for her with the idea 'You don't need brains for improvising music, you need your ears and feeling.' Lennie died four months later and she' been training herself ever since. She says her major inspiration was listening to me during her years in Los Angeles. Since false modesty is no virtue, I accept the compliment and point out that she was being given the same inspiration I had been given by Lester Young."
Warne Marsh-1986
