AEM059 Jerome Ellis

Pic­ture your­self in a gar­den. There are some bushes, some trees, and clus­ters of flow­ers scat­tered about. Sev­eral defined paths wind through this gar­den, but there’s plenty of space to forge ahead through the rough. You can enter the gar­den at any place, but from the entrance it’s impos­si­ble to see out the other side. The gar­den is sea­sonal, and its cre­ations grow, evolve, and die over time. No, this isn’t one of those “Who killed Sean in the gar­den?” puz­zles; this is an intro­duc­tion to the mind of Jerome Ellis.

When Ellis sits down at the piano, or his sam­plers, or his sax­o­phone, he enters this gar­den. The cre­ation that then emerges is a musi­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of his tra­jec­tory through the gar­den. Each entity that he encoun­ters trig­gers a motif, com­plete with sug­ges­tions as to tempo, dynamic, and har­monic move­ment. The path he takes gov­erns the tran­si­tions and inter­ac­tions between these motifs. Some­times we hear a clean break, some­times a slow blend of ideas and an even­tual dis­til­la­tion to a sin­gle dom­i­nant fig­ure. As he vis­its and revis­its cer­tain of the garden’s res­i­dents, we see them grow, blos­som, and wither as Ellis’s con­cept of them changes. Some are peren­nial favorites, and oth­ers sprout but once, only to return to dust shortly there­after. This isn’t some quaint metaphor that I’ve con­structed. This is how Jerome Ellis actu­ally makes music. He con­ceives of it spa­tially, and while the gar­den is but one space that he tends to inhabit, it’s impor­tant to under­stand this process if we’re to pre­serve a hope of unrav­el­ing his unique genius.

Ellis once thought he would grow up to be a great jazz sax­o­phon­ist, and while he’s still got some time before he’s con­sid­ered fully “grown,” it looks like he’s headed down a much dif­fer­ent path. This is the story of how he got set on that path, and where he’s going now that he’s on it, as spread across a series of dig­i­tal 7-inch reviews to come in 2010. Those of us who have been trained on a sin­gle instru­ment (par­tic­u­larly in the idioms of clas­si­cal music or jazz) and chose at one point or another to embark upon an odyssey with a sec­ond or third instru­ment, some­times feel like we’re cheat­ing on a loved one. Why exper­i­ment with com­po­si­tions on piano when I could be engag­ing in reg­i­mented prac­tice on the sax­o­phone? And so it was with Jerome Ellis. Piano was an allur­ing temp­ta­tion, but he kept it rel­e­gated to sec­ond chair, play­ing only late at night when the sound of his tenor would have woken the house­hold. But these pre­cious hours would prove instru­men­tal to Ellis’s musi­cal and intel­lec­tual development.

When he reached col­lege, Ellis began hav­ing sec­ond thoughts about jazz as a voca­tion. He wanted to escape the pit­falls of bebop that so often leave an indeli­ble mark on nascent jazzmen. The brass and bravado of New York jam ses­sions failed to excite Ellis. Hav­ing achieved remark­able tech­ni­cal pro­fi­ciency at an astound­ingly young age, he wasn’t moved by solos strung together from bits of Char­lie Parker solos, and more impor­tantly, he didn’t feel like this is how he was des­tined to move other peo­ple. He began a series of musi­cal exper­i­ments with drum­mer James Monaco, fea­tur­ing Ellis on key­boards. He sud­denly felt as though he were mak­ing music of sub­stance, music with the poten­tial to move peo­ple on a vis­ceral, and not just intel­lec­tual level. James’s back­ground was in pop and rock music, a world to which Ellis had sig­nif­i­cant expo­sure, but that had never been his focus of study. He began to draw upon his own dis­parate influ­ences (gospel, blues, clas­si­cal) and to dis­cover new ones–music from Java, Bali, and Zim­babwe. Ellis remem­bers think­ing, “I didn’t know this was pos­si­ble, I didn’t know sounds could do this, I need this, I need to lis­ten to this, I need to make this part of my life.” And so it became.

Amidst these stir­ring shifts in musi­cal direc­tion, Ellis began per­form­ing with the Trudy Sil­ver Group at the 5C on the Lower East Side of Man­hat­tan. Sil­ver men­tored Ellis, encour­ag­ing him to syn­the­size his expe­ri­ences both in and out­side the jazz idiom and to inte­grate his pre­vi­ous train­ing rather than to aban­don it. The result was an intensely per­sonal man­i­fes­ta­tion of what could loosely be called free jazz, and Ellis began using this semi-regular gig as a venue for test­ing his new direc­tion, tak­ing ten­ta­tive walks through the gar­den of his muse. It didn’t take long before he began shar­ing the group lead with Sil­ver, and not long after that it seemed as though each per­for­mance belonged just as much to Ellis’s musi­cal vision as Silver’s. I was lucky enough to attend sev­eral of these ses­sions, and as I sat on the sub­way head­ing back uptown, with the sounds of the evening echo­ing through my head, on each occa­sion I knew I had just wit­nessed some­thing truly special.

And so, we here at Ampeater are hon­ored to present Jerome Ellis’s first dig­i­tal 7-inch, enti­tled “Hym­nal” / “Unti­tled 1″. In 2008 I spoke with Ellis at length regard­ing this piece, and gained some keen insight on how it came to be. It’s not so much a song or a piece or a com­po­si­tion; the best term I can devise to describe it is a “ves­sel.” There are cer­tain fixed ele­ments, but every per­for­mance sees these ele­ments recon­fig­ured to address Ellis’s increas­ingly com­plex musi­cal per­spec­tive. “Hym­nal” is always per­formed in three sec­tions, the first uptempo and rhyth­mic, the sec­ond slow and ambi­ent, and the third ush­er­ing a return to the first while echo­ing the cen­tral themes of the piece at large. It’s the same cycli­cal struc­ture that gives clo­sure to the clas­si­cal sonata form, appro­pri­ated here by an orches­tra of sam­ples, brought together under Ellis’s mas­ter­ful direc­tion. But “Hym­nal” was and will always be per­formed live in a sin­gle take–there are no over­dubs in this record­ing, and that makes impro­vi­sa­tion an essen­tial com­po­nent in its cre­ation. The sax­o­phone is recorded live atop pre­pared sam­ples, and while Ellis would seem to be the sole archi­tect of this mar­velous and com­plex con­struc­tion, the sam­ples that he trig­gers are also active par­tic­i­pants in the piece, tug­ging it in all direc­tions. Ellis is thus ren­dered both musi­cian and con­duc­tor, posi­tioned at an invis­i­ble podium to pro­vide req­ui­site guid­ance to a dozen or so sam­ples that under­stand but a hand­ful of basic instruc­tions. The depar­ture in this piece for Ellis is its remark­able acces­si­bil­ity. Very early on in its con­cep­tion he imposed strict lim­i­ta­tions: first, it would have the afore­men­tioned three move­ment struc­ture; sec­ond, all the sam­ples used in the piece would be sacred, and not lim­ited to West­ern reli­gion or music; third, the melodic con­tours would be sim­ple, singable, lik­able. Your aver­age lis­tener typ­i­cally assumes that artists like Ellis and pieces (OK, ves­sels) like “Hym­nal” are typ­i­cally thought to exist for some sort of nonex­is­tent hyper-cerebral music the­o­rist as the sonic equiv­a­lent of Finnegans Wake or some sim­i­larly impen­e­tra­ble artis­tic cre­ation. “Hym­nal” is the anti­dote to this assump­tion. While its com­plex­i­ties are numer­ous, they’re not expressed as dis­so­nance. This means that lis­ten­ers are able to relax into the piece and fully grasp its genius with­out being assailed by tone clus­ters. When I lis­ten to “Hym­nal” I hear equal parts Mozart, Javanese game­lan, African thumb piano, Ray Charles, and Panda Bear; I hear some­thing com­pletely unique, some­thing that I couldn’t have even fath­omed to exist before actu­ally hear­ing it. But most of all, I hear some­thing that moves me, deeply.

B-side, “Unti­tled 1″ (I know it’s ridicu­lous to call these “sides” on a 7-inch. Even “dig­i­tal” 7-inches can’t be 30 min­utes long, but to hell with it) rep­re­sents Ellis’s depar­ture into piano music as a seri­ous vehi­cle for cre­ative expres­sion. This par­tic­u­lar path through Ellis’s gar­den is the one labeled “to Brian Eno’s house.” With noth­ing but a piano, Ellis reminds me how I felt, what I thought, and what I thought music could be, in the moment I first heard Music for Air­ports. It’s as though Ellis took a snap­shot of time, space, thought, and emo­tion and upon hold­ing this snap­shot up to the light saw tiny holes scat­tered through­out the pic­ture and then decided to fill them in with sound. One hears this piece and thinks, “It’s exactly what’s miss­ing from ______.” The key is then to fill in that blank, and to recre­ate as a lis­tener the sit­u­a­tion that spawned the cre­ation, in all its minute com­plex­i­ties. If one suc­cess­fully reunites the two in what­ever men­tal space is reserved for idle thoughts while lis­ten­ing to music, some­thing just clicks and the world ceases to exist as some­thing dis­tinct from the sounds flow­ing into your ears. Ever tried lis­ten­ing to Music for Air­ports in an actual air­port? Go try it, you’ll know what I mean.

As I men­tioned ear­lier, this is but an intro­duc­tion to Jerome Ellis–we’ll be fea­tur­ing his music on sev­eral 7-inches in the months to come, and while it’s tempt­ing to squeeze all my thoughts on his music into a sin­gle review, I’ll cut it short here in an attempt to cre­ate some dra­matic sus­pense. Can you feel it? Good. In the mean­time, if “Hym­nal” sent you on as much of a jour­ney as I hope it did (if it didn’t, keep lis­ten­ing until it does), you can read the attached inter­view with Ellis, con­ducted imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the piece’s first ever pub­lic per­for­mance at WKCR 89.9 FM in New York.

Ben Heller

Email Jerome Ellis
Visit Jerome Ellis on MySpace

Read the Ampeater exclu­sive inter­view after the jump!

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]

Inter­view:

BH: So we’re here to dis­cuss your lat­est piece Hym­nal, just per­formed live in the stu­dio today, Octo­ber 20th, 2008, for the very first time. I thought we’d just get down some pre­lim­i­nary thoughts as to your expe­ri­ence with the piece, your his­tory with it, how it came to be, your expe­ri­ence in New York and else­where as a musi­cian that led to this most recent evo­lu­tion, and how you con­ceive of it as a whole in terms of the gen­eral progress of your artis­tic devel­op­ment. I know that’s a lot to lay on you, but, for starters, what is it? Describe it to peo­ple in your own terms.

JE: Um, well it’s funny call­ing it a piece, cause it’s not writ­ten down or any­thing and it’s really loose. I can play it 40 min­utes long, 20 min­utes long, half an hour. There’s a lot of sec­tions, but they’re of var­i­ous lengths, so the piece…I call it a piece because I can’t call it any­thing else. It’s not a song or an extended song or some­thing, but I don’t con­ceive of it as a con­cert piece of music that you sit down and just hear for as long as it hap­pens. It’s more about fill­ing the room than about being a set length. But it does have 3 move­ments, so there is a clas­sic struc­ture to it with the first and third being rhyth­mic and dancey and the sec­ond being ambi­ent and slower. That’s the way I usu­ally think about it. But the jazz back­ground is in it in dif­fer­ent ways. There’s noth­ing really jazzy about it but the loose­ness and the struc­ture of it comes from that, in that I have melodies that I can throw around and play at var­i­ous times and I can play off of those how­ever I want to. As opposed to a jazz group where you’ll have every­body inter­act­ing with each other, I’m inter­act­ing with the sam­ples and the loops. Not like a one man band, but like a band com­prised of singers from the late 1500s and singers from South Amer­i­can in this big jum­bled pot.

BH: Do you feel like you’re impro­vis­ing when you’re per­form­ing the piece?

JE: When I’m mov­ing through it, no. Each sec­tion is planned out, but within the sec­tions I’m impro­vis­ing. As a whole it’s very struc­tured, which is dif­fer­ent from what I’ve done in the past, espe­cially on saxophone.

BH: So you con­ceive of your­self pri­mar­ily as a sax­o­phon­ist. What has it been like to branch out from sax­o­phone to other instru­ments, to then mov­ing past other instru­ments and just focus­ing on the nature of the sound itself? Are you think­ing of your­self less and less and less as a sax­o­phon­ist, or are you think­ing of your­self as a tenor sax player on vacation.

JE: Less of a sax­o­phon­ist, def­i­nitely going in that direc­tion. When I started play­ing with my friend James Monaco, my dear­est friend in the world, last sum­mer, it was him on drums and me on sax­o­phone for a lit­tle bit. We tried some­thing like that and it didn’t work out. I’ve always been toy­ing around with key­boards and pianos, so I had brought my key­board over to his house and started to play a lit­tle bit. That fit. So I began imme­di­ately to think of things in terms away from sax­o­phone. When I was play­ing sax­o­phone a lot and I wanted to be a jazz sax­o­phon­ist, that was the path I wanted to go on and I would lis­ten to lots and lots of sax­o­phon­ists. It would hin­der my piano play­ing. When I would play piano I would feel bad that I wasn’t prac­tic­ing sax­o­phone, so it would usu­ally hap­pen late at night or some­thing. I kinda sti­fled that a lit­tle bit, but when I started play­ing with James I opened up a lot more and real­ized that I could branch out. It’s been like that since I came to col­lege; less of a sax­o­phone player, more of a com­poser, I guess you could say–it’s a weird word for me. Just, explor­ing. Explor­ing lots of dif­fer­ent things, because I real­ized that there are cer­tain peo­ple whose voice rests solely inside the sax­o­phone, and that’s all they need to do. Just as there are peo­ple who sing and play piano, and that’s all that they do. But I real­ized that’s not what I need. I feel much more of an affin­ity to the piano, actu­ally, which is strange since I’ve never had any train­ing on it. So there’s a lots of things that I used to try to sti­fle that now I’m welcoming.

BH: So as you added these instru­ments, it seems like it took you fur­ther and fur­ther away from jazz. Now this might be a lit­tle bit of a dif­fi­cult ques­tion so feel free to blow me off if you need to, but do you feel like jazz is anachro­nis­tic? Did it feel in some ways old fash­ioned, like you were play­ing in an idiom that wasn’t really going any­where, like you were play­ing things past, and that play­ing Coltrane was some­how not mov­ing forward.

JE: Yeah, I think I had that feel­ing. It was an uncom­fort­able feel­ing, but I think there’s value in people…I don’t think jazz is dead or will die or that peo­ple who focus on jazz are some­how not mov­ing for­ward. That has crossed my mind, and I think a lot of peo­ple feel that way, but I don’t feel that way. I played in an ensem­ble in the fall, and I didn’t feel that I was really say­ing what I wanted to say. I real­ized that jazz was a dialect, the same way that rock is a dialect and folk is a dialect, and I real­ized that I wasn’t really speak­ing in that dialect. I would bring a lot of these lit­tle things into my impro­vi­sa­tion that wouldn’t fit into this straight-ahead bop tra­di­tion and I would get scolded for it. I began to real­ize that maybe that’s not how I should play, that maybe it’s not the truest way for me. So I don’t think jazz is dead and I don’t think peo­ple who play it are fol­low­ing a dead dialect. It’s pos­si­ble to be really stale in jazz with lots of hard bop, but it’s also pos­si­ble to keep it fresh and vital.

BH: Is the bridge between Hym­nal and the more tra­di­tional bop that you were play­ing your work with the Trudy Sil­ver group? Do you see that mov­ing in con­junc­tion with the more pro­gres­sive direc­tion that you’re tak­ing, or is that your remain­ing anchor to the jazz tra­di­tion? Because you are doing com­po­si­tion in that, and you’ve men­tioned that you’re tak­ing more and more of a lead role in terms of the cre­ative direc­tion of that group, has that facil­i­tated in this, has it served as a step­ping stone to where you are now? Are you still feel­ing very much part of that or have you now moved beyond it?

JE: No, I do cer­tainly feel part of it. I don’t think I’ll move on for quite a while. I’ve learned a lot play­ing with Trudy, because when I’m doing free jazz I can bring in these lit­tle things that I do that aren’t in this bop tra­di­tion. I can do these sax­o­phone river lines all up and down the instru­ment and all on a five note pat­tern. I hardly ever swing when I’m play­ing in that group, and she doesn’t either. When you have free jazz in that domain there’s a lot more room to ven­ture out into other places, and yeah, I have been try­ing out many dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tional ideas there, both on piano and on sax­o­phone, which has been really good, because she’s very open to all that. It’s helped me with Hym­nal, espe­cially when you begin to man­age all these dif­fer­ent ele­ments. When we played in that 5-piece with bass and tuba and drums, it would often fall to me to man­age every­thing that was going on. So when I men­tion that I have this band of sam­ples, I’ve learned a lot from play­ing with her about the way you con­trol them. I guess it’s both, it’s a step­ping stone but I’m also very much in it. I don’t see it as just a thing I’ll leap off of and then leave.

BH: For folks who aren’t quite as famil­iar with the logis­tics of work­ing with sam­ples, my under­stand­ing of it is that in a sense you have com­plete con­trol over them, but in another sense you’re very much work­ing with them and con­stantly strug­gling against them to get them to do what you want. The rela­tion­ship between work­ing with sam­ples as a band and actu­ally work­ing with real band mem­bers is a closer con­nec­tion than you might assume.

JE: Yeah, it’s really strange. James and I learned a lot about sam­pling from Dilla, the late Dilla, who is just so good at the art of sam­pling. We’ve torn apart the album “Donuts” and there’s lots of dif­fer­ent things like, well it’s just him, he doesn’t have any peo­ple on the record rap­ping or any­thing, so he treats sam­ples as humans, he’ll inter­act with them, he’ll leave space where you hear the per­son breath­ing. It’s a lot of fine work on a sam­ple to get it right, because on a hard­ware sam­pler it’s impor­tant to get it to where when you press a pad and it sounds just the way you want it, so there’s a lot of chop­ping up a sam­ple, get­ting it to stop and start in the right spots, vol­ume issues, bal­ance issues, so it’s like being the leader of a group, han­dling the way peo­ple are play­ing with each other. You might have one per­son play qui­eter, or have one per­son ful­fill a set role. There’s 10 sam­ples in Hym­nal, so for exam­ple there’s three in the 1st move­ment. There’s the bot­tom loop, with the singers [sings] so you have that, and their role is to be the rhyth­mic ground on top of which every­thing else will build, so they have a very set role. Then there are the two other ones. There’s one of a men’s cho­rus singing and one of just a lady, and those will come in and out. Their role is more sur­face level, and you have dif­fer­ent roles. In the 2nd move­ment there’s a sam­ple from a spir­i­tual, the way the man ends the song and then the clap­ping after­wards. So that’s more of an ambi­ent side thing, and then you have this organ sam­ple from the 1600s. That’s a loop that goes over and over again and that’s also rhyth­mic in its way. You have to assign dif­fer­ent roles to var­i­ous sam­ples as you would in a jazz group. Where the bass may in one part be a walk­ing base­line, and in another part may be freer.

BH: As some­one who was work­ing with a sin­gle instru­ment, a sax­o­phone, how did you build your arse­nal, how did you select what instru­ments were absolutely nec­es­sary to cre­at­ing the sound that you have, and what sound do you think you’ve achieved with the sam­ples and instru­ments that you’ve picked?

JE: Well the thing that’s inter­est­ing about sam­pling, is that once you have a sam­pler the entire world of sound is sud­denly avail­able to you. It’s awe­some and also crazy, how much you can grab and tweak. So it comes pretty nec­es­sary early on to limit things, to put bound­aries all over the place. There are sev­eral bound­aries in this. One was that all the sam­ples would be sacred music. A focus in Hym­nal is sacred music, and how peo­ple from all over the place get into this state of wor­ship or praise or even just los­ing it. In the 1st move­ment, the loop that goes over the whole thing, that lays the foun­da­tion is from South Amer­ica. It’s praise music for their gods, and the same thing with the loop in the 3rd move­ment. The two other ones in the 1st move­ment are from Java. There’s one of a men’s cho­rus from Java and the other of a lady and that’s also sacred music. If you hear the word Hym­nal you auto­mat­i­cally think of some­thing rooted in a reli­gion from the West, because the Hym­nal I have that my Mom gave me is staunchly hymns from the Bap­tist line, so I was inter­ested in using not just that reli­gion but going fur­ther. So in the sec­ond move­ment you get these sam­ples from the Renais­sance and then one from a mod­ern hymn being sung. In the third move­ment we return to the ones from South Amer­ica and we have these dif­fer­ent pieces of sacred music from all over the world. It’s help­ful to have these lim­its, because if I wanted to sam­ple some­thing and it wasn’t sacred then I would just be like no, I can’t use that. So it begins to focus the piece. It’s the same way if you have a band made up of sim­i­larly minded peo­ple, then you’ll have a cer­tain sound. I think maybe that was also what I was going for, putting my sax­o­phone and pit­ting it with and against peo­ple (a lot of the sam­ples are of voices), pit­ting them against each other but all kinda directed towards the same place. The sax­o­phone is used in a dif­fer­ent way; there are two dif­fer­ent ways that it’s used, both very far away from how it’s usu­ally used in jazz. One is for chords and for drones that I have through­out. Actu­ally, I have a lit­tle name for them, I call them clouds. The process is just loop­ing the sax­o­phone, but I fade or ease into the notes so it sounds like one long drone. That’s one role of the loops that I use with micro­phones. So you can get a sax­o­phone chord, some sound dreamy, some sound bru­tal, some throb­bing, but that pres­ence of many dif­fer­ent sax­o­phones in lay­ers runs through­out. Then there’s also the process of the sax­o­phone as a rhyth­mic instru­ment, which maybe ful­fills the role of a bass, as in the first and third move­ments when you have these pound­ing sax­o­phone notes through­out and then you have these chords stacked on top there. I actu­ally real­ized after I began the piece that I was lis­ten­ing to a lot of R&B from the 60s and 50s–Ray Charles, The Car­di­nals, Joe Turner, and I lis­tened a lot to the way the saxophone’s used in R&B. It’s very dif­fer­ent. You take a sax­o­phone player from a 1960 R&B group and then you take one in a jazz group and they’re so far apart. The sax­o­phone player in the R&B group acts just as another voice, the lines he plays are sim­ple, they’re singable, bluesy, but you don’t really get a R&B sax­o­phon­ist play­ing quickly, his parts are more shouts. So I began to be inter­ested in how the sax­o­phone was work­ing in that con­text. All the sax­o­phone melodies in the piece are closer to that than they are to a line from bop.

BH: In that sense, as soon as you started play­ing, it imme­di­ately reminded me of some­thing that Don Cherry or Albert Ayler would do, tak­ing melodies from chil­drens songs and turn­ing them into very freeform jazz, and Don Cherry tak­ing influ­ences from the ori­ent, those were very sim­ple melodic fig­ures that they turned into these great epic opuses, and that seems to be what you’re doing here. Is it also a com­ment that you seemed to have moved beyond tech­nique? As we’re talk­ing about you mov­ing beyond jazz, really at the core of bebop, (and it’s not really an arguable point) that part of bebop is the dis­play of vir­tu­os­ity. Are you try­ing to show, instead of vir­tu­os­ity, a sense of spir­i­tu­al­ity? You were talk­ing about using only sacred sam­ples, well in a sense if you’re using all sacred sam­ples and your­self as one of those sam­ples, repeated and dubbed, is this your Love Supreme? Is this a dis­play of your own spir­i­tu­al­ity, draw­ing back from the pompous­ness and the show of bebop vir­tu­os­ity and just sim­pli­fy­ing everything.

JE: That’s exactly right. Espe­cially last year when I would go to jazz clubs and jam, I would get really frus­trated and tired of sax­o­phone play­ers. There would be a line of six of ‘em and they would all go up and just play really quickly and really loudly. It can be very mov­ing if you’re very good at that, but I’ve since changed my goals. I’ve done that, I’ve moved peo­ple by tech­nique. Sax­o­phone play­ers don’t like to admit this, but it’s really easy to play quickly and loudly. It’s the nature of the instru­ment. I wanted to shift the focus away from mov­ing peo­ple from say­ing “Wow he’s really good at sax­o­phone” to a dif­fer­ent kind of appre­ci­a­tion. I’ve done that, I get really bored really eas­ily. I got this sam­pler nine months ago, and it’s already cen­tral to what I’m doing. I work really slowly and I move quickly in a sense and I drop things really eas­ily, which is some­times a bad habit. I began to get frus­trated with sim­ply hav­ing peo­ple be like “Wow, you’re really good at sax­o­phone” or “Wow you play really quickly” so yeah, I wanted to pare down the tech­nique. It’s not a hard sax­o­phone part to play. The melody’s all quar­ter notes and half notes, and I think that’s impor­tant. I think there’s kinda a thing with pop melodies in there, and how pop music’s focus isn’t on tech­nique. The value lies some­where else. When a per­son can sing some­thing, that’s valu­able, and you don’t really hear peo­ple singing bebop lines. I mean, some peo­ple. Not many. I think that’s what I was going for as well. And that was part of the R&B thing, like I can sing the Fat­head New­man solos from Ray Charles songs because it’s just as if he’s another voice in the band. Part of it came out of the fact that I sim­ply don’t have the tech­nique that I used to. I don’t really want to. I don’t prac­tice sax­o­phone as much as I did, I write more and I write with dif­fer­ent sounds more. So I don’t really have that tech­nique any­more, and I’m fine with that. My focus has moved on from there. That’s not say­ing that tech­nique isn’t impor­tant, obvi­ously. I’ll never be a sax­o­phone guy, and I don’t want to. I used to, but that changed.

BH: Why did that change, and when?

JE: James had a big influ­ence in this. When I started lis­ten­ing more widely, I started lis­ten­ing to a lot of music from Java and Bali and Africa, Zim­babwe and a lot more pop music. I real­ized a lot of it was closer to how I wanted to move peo­ple. I think peo­ple get tired of hav­ing to appre­ci­ate some­thing for its tech­nique or showi­ness. I think a lot of peo­ple do dig that, which is why a lot of peo­ple still like bebop. Peo­ple like solos, see­ing a guy who can solo really well on gui­tar, but when I lis­ten to peo­ple like Deer­hunter, nobody ever solos. They move me through dif­fer­ent means. It’s like find­ing a dif­fer­ent way to impress peo­ple, and impress in the sense not of to “wow” them, but impress in the sense of to make a mark on them. So they’ll move me through the way they layer things and not through the way they solo. I think that’s valu­able and often can be harder to do. I think I like to take on chal­lenges a lot and maybe because I get bored. So I made that a chal­lenge for myself, how would I approach mak­ing some­thing mean­ing­ful and not make the focus the sax­o­phone and the way I’m play­ing saxophone.

BH: I men­tioned briefly the issue of spir­i­tu­al­ity as involved in the piece. What does this per­son­ally mean to you, hav­ing moved past tech­nique, and try­ing to reach audi­ences with a pop sen­si­bil­ity, you were talk­ing around the issue of really hit­ting at this inte­rior of a per­son, try­ing to touch them on a level that’s not rely­ing on some sort of intel­lec­tual pro­cess­ing and really hit­ting at some emo­tional core. Yes, it has some­thing to do with being able to hum a tune, and yes it has some­thing to do with the over­all sim­plic­ity and catch­i­ness of the music–it has beat, it has rhythm, it’s not overly complex–but do you think that using spir­i­tual sam­ples and hav­ing a sense of spir­i­tu­al­ity your­self, that this is the pri­mary mes­sage you’re try­ing to con­vey and maybe the pri­mary way in which you’re try­ing to impact your audi­ence directly?

JE: I think that all music’s pur­pose is to take one higher, and depend­ing on the per­son and the music is very vari­able, and I think that we all like to leave for a while. Why it’s weird to think of Hym­nal as a com­po­si­tion is that I get really frus­trated with a lot of mod­ern clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion that only con­nects with the mind. It’s almost like some­one telling you “sit there and take this”. It’s sup­posed to be good for you even though your mind won’t grasp it, or maybe it’s only your mind that grasps it. You can come away with a great feel­ing, or you can come away feel­ing empty. I didn’t want that, I wanted to hit on var­i­ous lev­els. The inte­rior is impor­tant, the spir­i­tual aspect about going higher to some­place. Music can take you away to many places, but the spe­cific direc­tion of up is what I want. Loops have an inter­est­ing part in that, because there’s always this ele­ment of trance in the way Hym­nal is built, because trance is another way that peo­ple around the world go higher. That’s where I wanted to take off from. I lis­ten to tons of music from Java and Bali and the Javanese espe­cially, there’s such a sense of cir­cu­lar­ity. I played with that in Hymnal–the way it ends is very sim­i­lar to the way it begins. And of course loops are lit­tle cir­cles in and of them­selves. The whole way it moves within a set place but find­ing rest inside of that, the sec­ond move­ment hits at that the most. The sec­ond move­ment is the loos­est. Every time I play it it’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent, and I wanted that, I wanted to react to the var­i­ous things I’m play­ing. So you have these two sax­o­phone notes going in and out of each other. You have this man singing in the back­ground this same note, going over and over again, and you start to get into this place. When you see peo­ple in a church ser­vice and they’re taken back by the spirit, all they’ll do is sway and hum. I love see­ing that and I love being there. You can only focus on so much in a piece of music, both as the per­for­mance and as the audi­ence.  There’s like 4 chords in the entire thing, there’s not an empha­sis on har­mony at all, there’s not an empha­sis on har­monic move­ment. The first move­ment even­tu­ally has two chords and for most of it it’s just one with drone. The sec­ond move­ment has maybe one. The third move­ment has two as well. When you take the focus away from the har­mony, away from the tech­nique, you start to be able to focus on other things like the melody and the way you get swept up. It’s very much about the room, very much about things ring­ing and swirling about. I think that in hav­ing this so open, because I need a lot of space when I’m mak­ing things hap­pen in the air, when you have some­thing that doesn’t have a cer­tain genre with it, you can’t say oh that’s jazz or, because it’s kind of elec­tronic but not really, when you have this open feel to it you can start to focus on what you’re say­ing about the spirit. But I didn’t want it to be heavy-handed, which is why rhythm is there. I could just make the whole thing the sec­ond move­ment for half an hour, and that would be fine with some­one maybe, but the rhythm and the dance helps to raise that up and lighten it a lit­tle bit. It’s really about the lis­tener. I think that’s another thing I was frus­trated with about clas­si­cal music and often with jazz, peo­ple seem to for­get the lis­tener. The per­form­ers and the com­posers will treat the lis­tener like some­one who has to sit there and take it. Going back to pop music, pop music can’t sur­vive with­out the lis­tener, the audi­ence, and what the per­son wants. So I began to care a lot about what the per­son wants, and of course not every­one gets really excited about drones or loops, but I think hav­ing things like clear melodies makes it more wel­com­ing to peo­ple. That’s what I think about gospel. You don’t go to church for a con­cert (well, some peo­ple will), but gospel music from the begin­ning wasn’t about the con­cert or the musi­cal object. It’s all about peo­ple, singing. It’s not about the stage or the per­son on the stage high above the audi­ence. I wanted it to be wel­com­ing to peo­ple, for peo­ple to feel free to sway and not have it be this cold thing. It’s called Hym­nal, but I pur­posely didn’t put any hymns in it. I wanted to approach the way gospel music affects peo­ple through means that aren’t hymns or songs.

BH: Are you telling a story, do you see a plot, do you see a greater struc­ture? Are you try­ing to con­vey some­thing in an arch across the entire piece? Are you tak­ing peo­ple from point A and drop­ping them off at point B, or are you doing that in a smaller form, within each movement?

JE: Well there are two dif­fer­ent strands here that I’m play­ing with, The first is the clas­si­cal struc­ture, because the clas­si­cal struc­ture of fast slow fast mir­rors the clas­si­cal struc­ture of 1–5-1, and the whole con­cept of home-away-home. And that’s how clas­si­cal music has told its sto­ries for a long time. The sense of being home, being in a place, going some­where and com­ing back, is the most basic story of a jour­ney. Because a jour­ney really isn’t a jour­ney until you some­how arrive back home or in a state that is sta­ble. So you have this strand going in there, but then what I was talk­ing about with this music from Java. It’s inter­est­ing hear­ing this music with my ears, because they’re West­ern, and they’re used to this. I don’t know how peo­ple in Java hear, maybe they hear sto­ries in their music, but I don’t hear sto­ries in Javanese music. I hear big cir­cles. I hear just one state of rest. A key thing of clas­si­cal struc­ture is the notion of ten­sion and being resolved. There’s not a whole lot of ten­sion in Hym­nal. The sax­o­phone clouds are pretty con­so­nant, but some­times I’ll insert half steps above or below to give them a dif­fer­ent sound. But the sec­ond move­ment was pretty over­all serene. Some peo­ple may hear the clap­ping noises as some ten­sion there, but what I was play­ing with was try­ing to rec­on­cile this cir­cu­lar feel­ing which I don’t feel has much of a story, and I’m fine with that. I really value the notion of rest in music. From what I’ve noticed in learn­ing so much about clas­si­cal music is that a key dif­fer­ence between Ger­man and French clas­si­cal music is that Ger­man clas­si­cal music is much more linear–Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn. But French clas­si­cal music–Ravel, Faure–is much more cir­cu­lar much more sur­round­ing. When you lis­ten to Mozart you hear sec­tion then cadence then a new sec­tion then cadence. It moves very log­i­cally, which is why so many stud­ies say that Mozart can help your brain, because it’s a logic that you’re fol­low­ing. Whereas in French music it’s more sta­tic in a sense, but so many new things can hap­pen when some­thing is sta­tic, like modal jazz is a par­al­lel. When you have a song like So What that only uses two modes, you can go places you can’t go when you have chords every other beat. So story telling in modal jazz is a lot dif­fer­ent than sto­ry­telling in bebop. As far as Hym­nal hav­ing an over­all story, I don’t really think it does. I think the melodies that we’ve heard through­out cul­mi­nate in the third move­ment, so in a sense it’s a jour­ney to that point. But I didn’t really con­ceive it in a lin­ear fash­ion like that and not even within the move­ments. Espe­cially the sec­ond move­ment, I wanted it like a bath where things wash over you. You’re not nec­es­sar­ily say­ing, “here’s the third sec­tion of the sec­ond move­ment,” but rather “here’s where the story rests.” I really value rest in music and peace, because I don’t have enough of it out­side the music. I often see music as a refuge. I love find­ing nap records, things I’ll put on only to sur­round me and help me sleep. It’s kinda the ambi­ent con­cep­tion, how Brian Eno sees music. Peo­ple will often devalue ambi­ent music, they’ll say it has no direc­tion. But I think there’s a lot of value in that.

BH: When some­one learns how to read, it becomes very dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble to unread. You look at a sign, you under­stand imme­di­ately what it says. When some­one has a cer­tain level of musi­cal train­ing either as a per­former or as a lis­tener, it becomes very dif­fi­cult to not grap­ple with music on the level in which you were trained. If some­one has per­fect pitch, it’s dif­fi­cult to not hear a C, if some­one has rel­a­tive pitch it’s dif­fi­cult to turn that off. Is part of what you’re doing with this idea of a sonic wash, try­ing to take peo­ple who have an innate sense of musi­cal struc­ture and a set of expec­ta­tion for it, and try­ing to teach us how to unread, or unlis­ten, to allow the music to flow over us in a way that isn’t pos­si­ble in a lot of musi­cal settings.

JE: That’s absolutely right. When I stum­bled upon this music from Java, this is for me what I’m most obsessed with. I lis­ten to it every day. I didn’t know how to inter­pret it. The music is put together in a dif­fer­ent way than it is in the West, it’s viewed a dif­fer­ent way than it is in the West. I became inter­ested in tak­ing these sounds and the way these things would react with me and try­ing to mimic those, but not try­ing to sound like I was mak­ing music in that tra­di­tion. That’s futile, I didn’t grow up with a Javanese back­ground. When peo­ple are exposed to things like that, it’s really valu­able, because some peo­ple need it. The first sax­o­phone player I ever fell in love with was Dex­ter Gor­don. At that time I needed Dex­ter Gor­don, and every­thing that he did, that room fill­ing tone, his simplicity…some peo­ple need cer­tain things at cer­tain points. When I found this music from Java, I real­ized that it was what I needed. It’s inter­est­ing when you find out that you need some­thing, post find­ing it. I think that some peo­ple like lots of music and then they stum­ble on some­thing and think “I didn’t know this was pos­si­ble, I didn’t know sounds could do this, I need this, I need to lis­ten to this, I need to make this part of my life.” That’s hap­pened to me with music from Java and then thumb piano music from Zim­babwe. The same thing, absolutely mag­i­cal and like noth­ing else made in the West. It is in a sense a process of unlearn­ing because you have to get used to this thing you’ve never heard, but it can be healthy. Expos­ing peo­ple to that is another goal of mine.

BH: Do you have a sense of where you need to go from here, or are you liv­ing in the moment, everything’s per­fect, this is the fur­thest point of your men­tal musi­cal devel­op­ment and you’re just gonna see where it goes from here, or do you already have an idea of things that need to change, things that need to grow, things that need to expand, are you going to move more towards drone or more towards use of key­boards in this whole project? Where do you see your­self going and are you already think­ing ahead?

JE: I’m always think­ing ahead. It’s very exhaust­ing doing that, I get really tired think­ing about it. That’s another rea­son why I can’t really call it a piece. It’s never gonna be fin­ished and it’s never gonna be sta­tic. In a month, Hymnal’s gonna be dif­fer­ent. It’s more of a ves­sel to pour things into. It’s not like it’s sealed up or set aside. Which is why I’ll never be able to be a com­poser and pub­lish things. I can never put peri­ods on things and say “OK, that’s the way Hym­nal is.” Although the struc­ture will remain, when I learn things I put them into it. A piano piece I wrote last Octo­ber is now much dif­fer­ent. I think even­tu­ally I’ll find the state I need to be in and live in that for a long time. This is not it. It’s a good step and it’s a hard step that I’ve taken, but I’m def­i­nitely think­ing ahead. I have to do a com­po­si­tion for a class I’m in, and I have to write this down for cham­ber ensem­ble, which will be the first time I’ve writ­ten any­thing down. I have tons of lit­tle sheets of paper that I’ve tried to write piano pieces down. I get to mea­sure 6 and just stop. What if I want to play mea­sure 4 three times? This is another step.

JE: Some­thing I was think­ing about a lot dur­ing the sum­mer­time, when I wasn’t doing free jazz, when I was impro­vis­ing with James–We were work­ing with spe­cific songs, com­pos­ing and struc­tur­ing, and I real­ized that with jazz and not just free jazz there’s what I call a ceil­ing. It depends on the play­ers, it depends on the inter­ac­tion, it depends on how peo­ple know each other, but there’s kinda a ceil­ing and it’s very hard to go past it. You can get really intense and really emo­tional and you can take peo­ple places, but even­tu­ally it has to hit the ceil­ing because…composition has many ben­e­fits. When some­thing is com­posed like a novel or a short story is, the way these more con­crete forms move peo­ple, you can do in a com­po­si­tion but you can’t nec­es­sary do in jazz. Motifs that come back in and out, and struc­ture itself, these can be mov­ing. I was inter­ested in com­pos­ing this and hav­ing a lot of struc­ture to where I could extend the ceil­ing. When you’re impro­vis­ing with peo­ple there’s only so much you can say because a lot of it’s not pre­de­ter­mined, which applies more to free jazz. When you play stan­dards you have a com­mon ground, so when you play Misty there’s the entire his­tory of how that entire song has been per­formed and depend­ing on how much you know about it you can take part in all that’s hap­pened before you, so the ceil­ing goes away there. But with free jazz you can go to really great places but there are some places you can’t go to because of the lack of com­po­si­tional struc­ture. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble to struc­ture free jazz, as Brax­ton will show you.…There are so many details that I’ve never had to deal with, with the elec­tron­ics now, there’s so much weight on me when I play with this setup because there’s so much that could go wrong, but there’s so much more that could hap­pen. The more you have going on the more you’re capa­ble of doing and the more you’re prone to fail. Fail’s not really applic­a­ble in music. The more it can fall off. But when every­thing works together in con­junc­tion it hits. It’s not like hit­ting your mind, it’s not like you grasp­ing this, it hits you, emo­tion­ally, phys­i­cally, and that’s what the rhythm is for, that’s what the dreami­ness is for. When all that works in con­junc­tion it hits. It’s hard to make it hit, but that’s what makes it all the more excit­ing, when some­thing is achieved that’s really hard. I never got ner­vous when I was play­ing jazz, because there’s such a focus in the moment that there’s not much pre-moment work. You’ll have a setlist, you’ll rehearse things, but it really is all about the inter­ac­tion. With this it’s both, there’s so much pre-work and then you have to do it, and that’s really tax­ing. It’s inter­est­ing, because com­posers when they write for ensem­bles, I’m sure they feel ner­vous in the audi­ence lis­ten­ing, but they can’t really do any­thing, and even if they’re con­duct­ing their com­po­si­tions there’s only so much they can do. But when you are the only one who this depends on and the peo­ple, the sam­ples, the sam­ples ARE peo­ple, but the peo­ple aren’t gonna do any­thing. You have to press a but­ton and have them come to life. When it’s all on you, you’re the only one who can make it hit. Of course there’s the impor­tance of peo­ple in the room, peo­ple tak­ing part, but it’s just that that weight makes it harder to hit and makes it more excit­ing when it hap­pens. It’s a weird composer-performer role that I’m explor­ing, and happy with.