MORRIS, LAWRENCE DOUGLAS “BUTCH” (10 February 1947–29 January 2013), African American composer, conductor, and cornetist who invented and trademarked a new way of organizing group musical performance, called “conduction,” in which the conductor leads the ensemble on a guided improvisation via a sui generis vocabulary of gestures.
Born in Long Beach, California, Morris played the trumpet until he was fourteen, when he switched to the cornet. Beginning in 1966 he served in the military as a medic in Germany, Japan, and Vietnam. Returning from service, Morris studied music at Grove Street College in Oakland, California, and later taught and played in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He settled down in New York City in the early 1980s, playing in groups with his friend the saxophonist David Murray; between them they developed a style they called “avant-gutbucket.” Eventually Morris formed a group called Orchestra SLANG as a vehicle for his conductions. The first performance employing the technique took place at the Kitchen in New York in 1985 and was titled Current Trends in Racism in Modern America (A Work in Progress).
A conduction is not a free improvisation; it is, rather, a loose structure, spontaneously determined by the conductor, within which the musicians have free rein. At the beginning of a conduction Morris would establish the tempo and then allow the musicians to develop a theme. He would then continue leading the ensemble using various gestures and symbols understood by the performers (those unfamiliar with Morris’ gestural vocabulary would generally have to undergo a five-day crash-course series of rehearsals). Eventually conduction performances grew to include not only musicians but occasionally dancers, visual artists, and poets as well. Over the years Morris taught and performed conduction at workshops all over the world, briefly settling at a position at Bilgi University in Istanbul from 1998 to 2001. To make money he wrote music for films, TV shows, and windup music boxes.
Morris professed indifference as to which genre of music others would ascribe to him, though he understood himself as essentially a jazz musician and conduction as “derived from jazz but not beholden to it.” The 2012 documentary Black February: Music Is an Open Door by Vipal Monga chronicles a series of concerts Morris put on in February 2005 to celebrate conduction’s twentieth birthday. He died in 2013 in New York City at the age of sixty-five.