Harold Budd: My expectation is exactly what happened: It was total chaos, total confusion. No one knew anything, including me. I didn’t have a clue.
Yaa Gyasi: I’m hunkered down in Brooklyn and trying to make sense of what the next few months will look like.
Budd: It wasn’t an alien thought. That was the start of a change.
Gyasi: One thing I knew going into Iowa—because I was an English major with a creative writing emphasis and had done a lot of workshops before—is that you learn pretty quickly that not everyone is for you.
Budd: I was happy to get the hell out of there. This was even before Tristano, but it was because of that that I moved over to discovering the most revolutionary left-wing part of jazz, which was extremely cerebral, unemotional, very cold.
•••
Gyasi: That’s always a pleasure for me.
Budd: There was some of that. It wasn’t enough.
Gyasi: Right. Which sounds simple, but it’s not, right?
Budd: Absolutely, yes. Ridiculous.
Gyasi: It was a different muscle.
•••
Budd: I was learning a world that I didn’t even imagine existed.
Gyasi: At all. Even once allowed that permission, I was always second-guessing myself as to whether or not I was representing it well.
Budd: At the end, he said, “Would you please write a piece for my horn?”
Gyasi: That’s a good question. [Laughs] There are two ways to answer that question.
Budd: It’s not true. I never paid a dime.