“Music is my way of being in the world.” The words of “Blue” Gene Tyranny, spoken in Just For The Record, David Bernabo’s recently completed documentary film on the life and work of the pianist and composer. “Blue” Gene Tyranny, who left this world, peacefully in his sleep, earlier this month, was born Joe Gantic in San Antonio, Texas on the first day of 1945. He grew up being Robert Nathan Sheff, that name taken from his adoptive parents. Starting early, Sheff studied the piano formally and in depth, yet he also displayed virtually from the outset natural flair and versatility, which never deserted him. It was that rare combination of apparent ease and evident brilliance, whether sight-reading or improvising, that led Kyle Gann, writing for The Village Voice, to cast analytical moderation to the wind and declare, “God plays piano though this man.”

Before he had entered his teens, Sheff took composition classes with Frank Hughes at San Antonio’s Trinity University. Hughes sent the 11 year old home after his first lesson carrying recordings of music by Charles Ives and Harry Partch. That moment of illumination proved crucial and enduring. A few years later, at Jefferson High School, another enlightened teacher called Raymond Moses introduced Sheff to Philip Krumm, a former student who was no less passionately enthusiastic about Ives and his experimental legacy. By the start of the 1960s Krumm had entered into correspondence with John Cage, and members of the emergent Fluxus group. Sheff teamed up with him to present, at a local art institute, concerts of iconoclastic compositions by Cage, La Monte Young, Philip Corner, Yoko Ono and Richard Maxfield, along with some of their own work.

In 1962, Sheff enrolled at New York’s Juilliard School, but soon opted to follow Krumm to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where they got to know Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley and other artists involved with The ONCE Group. While still a teenager, Sheff took a leading role in organising events on the fringe of the legendary ONCE Festivals , promoting innovative and radical approaches to music. He featured as a pianist, playing songs by Ives; and Sheff’s own youthful compositions such as Ballad, Meditation Nine and Diotima were programmed alongside pieces by luminaries of the avant garde such as Cage, Ashley, Nam June Paik, James Tenney, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Earle Brown.

Seated in the audience at some of these events was Jim Osterberg, also a teenager, en route to becoming Iggy Pop. He admired Sheff in that context, but also heard him playing keyboards, from 1965, with The Prime Movers, a blues saturated Ann Arbor rock group. Osterberg joined that outfit as drummer, and later he invited his friend to tour with The Stooges. On stage with Iggy, at the start of the 70s, Sheff took on the identity of “Blue” Gene Tyranny, an experimentalist under cover, wearing bright red light-emitting diodes in his hair while pounding out the riff to “Raw Power”.

In 1969 Robert Ashley moved to Oakland, California to work at Mills College. Sheff was invited to join him and for the next decade, starting in 1971, he gave lectures at Mills on studio recording techniques, harmony and counterpoint, and jazz improvisation. In 1976, Ashley invited him to assume the character of Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player, in Perfect Lives, an opera he was working on for the UK television station Channel 4. Sheff was also asked to compose harmonic sequences over which he would then improvise, while Ashley enacted the role of narrator. Private Parts (The Record) (Lovely Music, 1977) was in effect a trial run, yet its combination of rhapsodic music and enigmatic words remains spellbinding. The rich strangeness of Perfect Lives, as finally realised in 1980, stems largely from the dynamic chemistry between Sheff’s vigorous and eloquent keyboard playing and Ashley’s singular mode of storytelling.

Their creative partnership produced further memorable results. Ashley described “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s input into the later opera Atalanta (Acts Of God) as “consistently spectacular”. There have been other notable collaborations, for theatre and dance productions as well as with musicians ranging from Laurie Anderson or Peter Gordon’s Love Of Life Orchestra to entirely improvised performances with violinist Leroy Jenkins. Sheff has also published numerous illuminating articles on trends and specific instances of contemporary music. These varied activities have perhaps distracted attention from a catalogue of recordings that testify to the breadth and depth of Sheff’s own compositional achievement.

Mimi Johnson’s Lovely Music label, based in New York, provided a home for the irresistible avant pop of Out Of The Blue (1978), and The Intermediary (1982), where an electronic network shadows and enters into dialogue with the pianist’s spontaneous invention. Country Boy Country Dog ( 1994), a realisation of a procedural score entitled How To Discover Music In The Sounds Of Your Daily Life, uses rhythms derived from electronically processed environmental sounds. Free Delivery (1990), a selection of keyboard pieces, includes Sunrise Or Sunset In Texas, a sublime sequence from a movie soundtrack. Take Your Time (2003), a further selection, concludes with the ethereal Spirit, conceived for computer-edited harmonics and piano. In more recent years Unseen Worlds, another adventurous label based in New York, has brought to light more of Sheff’s inquisitive, compelling and frequently very beautiful music.

In 2009, at the Quaker Meeting-house in Lower Manhattan, “Blue” Gene Tyranny performed a version of George Fox Searches, a newly composed piece which sets out to draw a parallel between that Quaker visionary’s soul searching and the inner workings of musical improvisation. In 2011, at The Kitchen, also in Manhattan, Sheff played keyboard in a restaging of That Morning Thing, a piece Robert Ashley had originally presented with The ONCE Group in 1968. For the last decade of his life, however, Sheff was completely blind, and public performances grew infrequent; still more so when restricted mobility posed an additional problem. Yet he continued to compose until the end of his days. The Forecaster Hopes, a completed piece from that concluding phase, will feature in a box set soon to be issued by Unseen Worlds, devoted entirely to previously unreleased music by “Blue” Gene and his friends.

In 2016 Sheff collaborated with poet Mary Griffin on Recollections: Songs From Aphasia, a multi-media oratorio which draws inspiration from people who have been deprived of their ability to speak, due to a stroke or some other traumatic brain injury. At the time of his death, he was working on a composition that addresses Charles Bonnet syndrome, where people who have lost their eyesight experience complex hallucinations. Sheff knew this curious phenomenon first-hand, and found it fascinating. The Forecaster Hopes explores our imagining of the future, not just in terms of projected concepts but also of events taking place in the brain’s basal ganglia, neurological processes that gives rise to intuitions and also inform our feelings about music. Throughout his life Sheff approached music as a means to investigate perception and memory, and to expand our understanding of what human consciousness may involve. Making music, he confides in Bernabo’s film, is “a way of deeply informing myself that there’s another world”.

Read Julian Cowley's original interview with “Blue” Gene Tyranny in The Wire 238.