John Butcher is interested in particular people and their personalities. He prefers not to work in a generic situation, where there's an agreement in advance to play a certain kind of thing, and the music cannot swerve in a sudden fresh direction.
As he told me a few years back: "What got me so interested in the type of improvising I ended up really spending time on was, at least at a personal level, there was a feeling you could start from scratch. Now you might well be mistaken, and rediscovering endless wheels, but it felt like there was a chance… Whatever things you do pull together from various places into that, relate more to your own personal take on – I’m not just talking about music, but how you want to live as a musician in the world, what aspects of things outside of music you’re hoping will find their way into your activity."
