Author: Kevin Laskey

Saxophonist Kevin Sun deftly navigates jazz’s knife edge of tradition and novelty. While Sun’s compositions embrace rhythmic and harmonic abstractions, his playing is rooted in the deep study of saxophone elders from Lester Young to Stan Getz to Mark Turner. Sun’s newest project straddles that divide between new and old, a Charlie Parker exploration called <3 Bird (Endectomorph), released just in time for Parker’s 101st birthday. In “Greenlit,” below, Parker’s tune “Confirmation” is shot through a rhythmic prism, exaggerating the tune’s already-slippery twists and turns.

This Thursday, August 19, Sun returns to The Jazz Gallery stage to celebrate the release of <3 Bird, alongside the album’s full-band lineup: trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, guitarist Max Light, pianist Christian Li, bassist Walter Stinson, and drummer Matt Honor. We caught up with Sun to discuss the project’s origins and his experience listening to Parker’s complete recorded output.

The Jazz Gallery: I was going back and reading your Parker blog posts from the past year-plus. When you started writing these in late spring 2020, was this something you had always planned on doing for Parker’s centennial, or was this something you went toward in that early pandemic headspace?

Kevin Sun: It wasn’t really planned. I would say more that I gravitated toward it and found myself sucked in when I was really isolated for a while, like everyone else. In the back of my mind I knew that Charlie Parker was very important to me and I wanted to do something for the centennial, but, I didn’t have anything really in mind.

It just slowly grew, and it kept growing; the more I listened, I had more and more questions come up. Some of them I haven’t really found a satisfactory answer, and I’m not sure there is one. I have like three or four legal pads just filled with tons of notes: questions, listening notes, reading notes. It was something that gave me life and pretty much kept me going.

TJG: Since you already knew Parker’s playing well, what were some of the things that appeared differently in your listening this time? What were those questions?

KS: The biggest thing that occurred to me was to get my hands on everything that is known to exist, and there’s this amazing resource—a website made by Peter Losin that has a database and a search function, so that was super helpful for me in terms of organizing the discography as I was acquiring recordings. I tried to listen to everything, and it comes out to about 72 hours. Based on what I have, I’m missing a handful of dates—like three or four—but I pretty much have everything. From there, I extracted all of the solos; that’s close to about 24 hours, which is more manageable. If you want to listen to 3 hours a day, you can do it in a little over a week.

The first thing that struck me is consistency. Pretty much in every recording, except for one or two, he’s just him. It’s all there—the time, the feel, the phrasing. It’s so clear and distinct, and it never feels like he’s overly accommodating. He always presents himself and makes his own voice fit in the context of how the music’s happening. That just blew me away, because it’s pretty much his whole recorded career. It’s kind of shocking because there are so few musicians who are on that level of consistency. Other people I’ve studied a lot—like Joe Henderson or Coltrane—have good nights and less good nights. Parker just never had an off night from what I can tell recording-wise, and that’s pretty freakish.

TJG: That consistency brings up interesting questions about how Parker’s improviser-brain worked, especially compared to people like Henderson and Coltrane.

KS: I thought about that a lot. One of the questions that brought up for me is, what did he practice? How did he practice to reach such a level of consistency that was apparent from a young age? Pretty much from his early 20s, we have recordings where he’s playing with bands and playing bebop.

It seems to me that he must have been very clear to himself, very decisive in terms of choosing what melodic material he thought was the strongest, and wanting to use that again and again and again. That also means that he had to decide not to do all of this other stuff that he was aware of. Other people might play that way, but he decided not to play it because it doesn’t speak to him in a profound way like the material he devised.

That second element seems really hard to do for me. It’s not just discipline, but sacrifice, because you’re choosing to cut out other things that might be fun to flirt with. I feel like for young musicians today—myself included—a big part of the learning process is trying a lot of things, and some things stick and other things don’t. Bird somehow just accelerated the process, or he just knew within himself from an early age what he wanted to say.

TJG: How did this thinking about Parker’s consistency impact the way you’ve practiced recently, and how you devised the music for the album?

KS: Well, my understanding about the consistency came way after I wrote the music for the record! The writing was pretty whimsical. I would just sketch out ideas and things that occurred to me, whatever came to mind on a given day. During that three-month period where I was pretty much alone and wasn’t seeing anyone, I just sketched ideas with the thought that I would be able to try this music out with my friends at some point, whether that was a year or something. A lot of them were just fun mental exercises, trying to take my attention away from the world for just a little bit.

One thing I’ll say is that I didn’t intend to really record this music as an album—I just wrote music as it came. Like the “Dewey Square” thing (“Du Yi’s Choir”), I actually started thinking about that a little bit before the lockdown happened. I knew I was into that intro from the original recording, which has this weird cross-rhythm happening. I messed around with speeding it up and slowing down. There’s the piano versus the bass and drums—what if one starts way faster and slows down, and the other starts slower and speeds up until they cross? It’s kind of nerdy stuff that could be interesting, but I don’t know if it’ll actually sound good until we play it.

TJG: That’s making me think of the Conlon Nancarrow player piano pieces—there’s one in particular that has two voices speeding up and slowing down in that way. And that’s making me think about how Nancarrow and Parker aren’t that far apart in age, and what would have happened if they had met in a different timeline.

KS: Interesting—I didn’t know that. I always thought Nancarrow was much older.

Thinking about collaboration more generally, it’s funny that a lot of the ideas for pieces on the album came from song introductions, and I get the feeling that Bird didn’t come up with them. The thing from “Dewey Square” seems more like something Max Roach would have come up with. If you listen to the various takes, the first take doesn’t have an intro—they just hit the melody. In the second, there’s an intro, but Max Roach is just playing time under the piano figure,  then it’s the third take where Roach comes up with that really interesting cross-rhythm thing that makes it more mysterious.

I think it says something about Charlie Parker as a composer and bandleader: He has a very strong sense of the material he’s going to present in terms of the core of the melody, but leaves space for the people he’s collaborating with to bring something new. In “Scrapple from the Apple,” Roy Haynes comes up with something brilliant for the intro, a counterpoint to that upbeat figure.

TJG: To me, this relates to the kind of restraint you were talking about earlier—Parker knowing what his music was and what it wasn’t, and that quality allowing for other kinds of music to fit in the space around Parker’s lines, whether that’s the rhythmic games of Roach or Haynes, or the big orchestral sound in Bird with Strings.

KS: One thing I feel is that the negative space for collaborators to jump into is only as effective as how clear we define the positive spaces. In Parker’s case, the aesthetic of his lines is so clear. That makes it so that other people are freer to be themselves and contribute their personal feeling. I think that’s the clearest in the way drummers play with him, like Roach or Haynes or Art Blakey. On the best live recordings, there can be so much counterpoint happening, way more than I think typically happens in the hard bop bands of the ‘50s. Parker’s drawing the line so clearly in the sand, so you know where you can to complement it. Maybe a better word to use is “conviction,” and how that conviction is expressed through musical choices.

TJG: One element of your Parker project more generally was listening through all the solos to find every musical reference he played. Since I’m really interested in what musical reference can do, I’d love to hear you speak about what you think the purpose of those references are in Parker’s playing, especially juxtaposed with the consistent melodic style we’ve talked about.

KS: I bumped into Miles Okazaki randomly a few weeks ago in the Village. We were talking about the references, and Miles brought up a really good point. One of the main purposes is to play something that the audience members can connect to and recognize, so they feel a part of the musical experience. That definitely sounds like the case on certain recordings where you hear people respond loudly when Parker plays something really obvious. He knows how to connect to people dancing in a ballroom, and playing something people will recognize does that.

TJG: Basically what a DJ does to keep the vibe going.

KS: But for me, there’s another thing, too. I was using this website Chasin’ the Bird, which is a crowd-sourced catalog of quotes. They had over 150, and I added a few others that I recognized. My theory right now is that based on the breadth, volume, and frequency of quotes you can recognize and identify on his recordings, he had a remarkable gift for recalling melody and then playing it back. I don’t think he had perfect pitch as far as I know, but he just had great ears for that kind of thing. I think the implication is that if you don’t have to think as hard about melody, or if melody is more accessible to you, maybe you can focus more of your conscious, creative exertion on other aspects, like rhythm and phrasing. For me, it makes sense because you’re not thinking so much about what the melodic part is, but how to phrase the melody, how it’s going to come out in the moment. If that’s the case, I think it explains a lot about his style and why it’s so powerful.

TJG: This is getting back to that question of an improviser’s cognitive activity. When there are so many notes flying by, it’s clear that the player isn’t thinking about every single note, it’s these larger chunks that coalesce as an object. It’s something I teach a lot in aural skills classes—being able to recognize larger patterns, so when you’re soloing, it’s thinking about beginnings and endings of chunks and where they’re placed in time. And for Parker, those chunks are the melodic phrases that we associate with him that he practiced so much, and the musical quotations.

KS: Yeah—something about his language can be very discretized, like in terms of his sequences of pitches. But what’s challenging and interesting is how from solo to solo, there are big changes in how they’re phrased, and where the emphasis is, and the pauses and which notes are held out. It’s a higher-level organization on top of the discretized pitch material.

TJG: In some way, I feel it’s analogous to a total serialist approach to composition, where there are different levels of organization of different musical parameters and the ways that they conflict and coincide create musical shapes. Parker’s organizing different parameters with a different method, but that kind of layered system feels very modernist.

So one last question: when you actually got this material in front of the band, how did the performances line up with what you were imagining back in spring 2020?

KS: I mean, I was pretty blown away. They’re all amazing musicians. For the purposes of the album, I split up the group, featuring certain people on certain tracks. But most of them have played or read through most of the music at some point. The Gallery show will be interesting because we’re not going to play the album as written, but do sextet arrangements for everything. I think that’s a bit more suitable for a live setting—both more organized and more chaotic, I think.

When we first started playing, it felt like some of the music was really hard. That usually happens, and it takes a while to acclimate to new music like this. But by the end of the recording session, I was thinking, “Man, I’m sure Charlie Parker would sound amazing if he played on any of these songs.” Even with all the odd meter things, I don’t think he’d have any issue hearing it, knowing what we know about how flexible and solid his sense of time was, and how flexible he can be with phrasing. I don’t know, I would hope that he would be into it in some way.

Saxophonist Kevin Sun celebrates the release of <3 Bird (Endectomorph) at The Jazz Gallery on Thursday, August 19, 2021. Mr. Sun will be joined by Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Max Light on guitar, Christian Li on piano, Walter Stinson on bass, and Matt Honor on drums. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 P.M. E.D.T. $15 general admission (FREE for members), $25 reserved table seating ($10 for members), $20 livestream access (FREE for members) for each set. Purchase tickets here.

 

When Cuban drummer Dafnis Prieto moved to New York full time in 1999, he made an immediate splash. Seemingly overnight, Prieto began playing the likes of Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman, and Brian Lynch, showcasing his ability to execute the knotty counterpoint of a full Cuban percussion section with a single drum kit. Since then, Prieto has released seven acclaimed albums as a leader, taught at NYU and the University of Miami, and received a MacArthur fellowship. Prieto has also developed a close relationship with The Jazz Gallery, performing on the “Jazz Cubano” series, writing commissioned works, and most recently, celebrating the release of his Grammy-winning big band album.

This evening, June 12, Prieto will guest on The Jazz Gallery’s online “Words and Music” series. Before joining the conversation, check out the following interview with Prieto where he remembers his earliest days in New York and his musical growth at the Gallery.

The Jazz Gallery: When you first moved to New York full-time, how did you go about meeting other people to play with? You started playing with Henry Threadgill and Brian Lynch seemingly overnight.

Dafnis Prieto: I got to New York in 1999. I already knew a few musicians there, like Brian and Henry and Steve Coleman. I had met them all over the previous five years or so on different occasions. I met Brian at Stanford University during a previous trip to the states for a residency. I met Steve when he came to Cuba in 1996. And I met Henry the previous time I had come through New York on a tour—Henry came to see the band. It was a band that I was part of in Cuba called Columna B and the members were Yosvany Terry, Roberto Carcassés on piano, and Descemer Bueno on bass. So in any case, when I arrived, because I already knew these musicians, I just called them up. Henry had expressed interest in working with me previously, as well as Steve, so I was looking forward to that.

I started playing around with other musicians, too. I think something that was really helpful was that I liked going from one genre to another, even in a matter of hours. Like I could have a more avant-garde gig, or a more straight ahead-jazz gig, and then four hours later had a gig that was completely Latin. I learned how to swim in different waters, and that helped balance my exposure, as well just make a living.

At the same time, in the early 2000s, there were a lot of other musicians coming to New York for the first time. I mean, there are always musicians coming to New York, but at that time, but I feel there was a particularly big wave at that time. One of those musicians was Yosvany Terry, who happened to be a good friend of mine. We had played together in Cuba a lot, and we kept doing that in New York. Yosvany started doing the “Jazz Cubano” series at The Jazz Gallery in 2000 and I played with him there. That was how I first got introduced to The Jazz Gallery and Dale Fitzgerald and Rio.

After that, I started presenting my own projects at the Gallery, too. One of the projects had Luis Perdomo on piano, Hans Glawischnig on bass, Ravi Coltrane on tenor saxophone, and Henry Threadgill on alto.

TJG: I want to hear that recording!

DP: Yeah! That was a really fun performance. And the relationship with The Jazz Gallery just grew from there. I basically debuted every project I came up with there. It really felt like a laboratory for the musicians, allowing us to experiment and bring things to life for people to experience in the audience. We were really blessed to have a place like The Jazz Gallery that was so open to different kinds of music. I think a lot about the quality with which the Gallery treated musicians. It really felt like a pleasant community, and I think that’s reflected in the quality of the music presented.

TJG: So the Gallery was clearly an important spot for you from the beginning, but you also mentioned that you would play a huge range of gigs. Were there other venues that you played a lot, or met future collaborators?

DP: One of the other big places for me was the old Zinc Bar on Houston Street. I used to play there almost every week, and sometimes two or three times a week! The music presented there was at a very high level. I met so many musicians who would come and hang out because it was one of the places that would stay open until 2 or 3 A.M. People would finish their gigs at 11 or 12 and then come over to hang at Zinc Bar.

TJG: Smalls wasn’t too far from there and stayed open late. Did you hang there as well?

DP: I never did that much at Smalls. I probably played there a couple of times. I mean, I played lots of different places. But in terms of places I would go to almost every week, either to play or check other people out, it was Zinc Bar and The Jazz Gallery.

TJG: I’d like to move on to your work as a composer. Had you written a lot of music before coming to New York?

DP: I had written some tunes in Cuba, and I played a few of them with Columna B. But I wasn’t fully into writing music. I was more into playing drums. When I got to New York, the city really invited me, or challenged me, or inspired me because of the amount of different music happening. I started feeling a sense that I needed to create my own music. I needed to express myself not just in my own drumming, but in composition. I don’t think I would have developed the music that I make now without the New York experience. It helped me believe that I could write music of my own, have great musicians play it, and have it be personal and different.

I was developing that voice through the drums, but I wanted to go farther than that. When I visualize what I wanted to do, I see it as creating my own water to swim in. It became a necessity for me, and it grew more important. New York was the perfect scenario for this growth because I had met all of these great musicians who were willing to play my music.

TJG: When you started writing, were there particular musicians whom you saw as models? Like, Steve and Henry are very powerful conceptualists in terms of how they devise music for their ensembles. Were they models?

DP: Of course! That was part of the inspiration when I came to New York. It was really inspiring to be around and work with these unbelievable musicians who have such a distinctive vocabulary and concept behind the music. I wanted to do that too.

When I say something inspired me, I’m not saying that I wanted to imitate it. They all do distinctive kinds of music, and their perspectives inspired me, but when I work music out within myself, it comes out in a different way.

And beyond Steve and Henry, I got to check out many other wonderful composers too. I got to play with Andrew Hill, who was one of a kind. That was very special. And then I was playing with Eddie Palmieri and Michel Camilo. They’re all so distinctive from each other, but I was able to enjoy and understand and appreciate where they were coming from, musically-speaking.

TJG: In some ways, it seems like the inspiration is how to distill different sounds into a personal voice, rather than superficially imitating what was around you.

DP: Yeah. I never really wanted to do things like someone else. Listening to their music for long periods of time, I appreciate it and it inspires me, but it doesn’t mean I want to sound like them. Music, for me, isn’t one formula. There are different kinds of musicians, there are different kinds of human beings. Some people need to be told what to do. Others go out and find it and get it. I always felt much more related to the latter. In my life, I never had people give me stuff for nothing. So I always see myself with that responsibility to find my own way.

TJG: How much do you remember about how the first Jazz Gallery commission came about?

DP: I remember two or three different commissions through The Jazz Gallery. I remember preparing a statement about what I wanted to pursue on that specific project. And then with The Jazz Gallery, we submitted that proposal to funders. I think one of the first ones was for my project the Absolute Quintet. That was a project that involved string players, and we eventually did an album. I really like to address specific musical ideas in each project. I want to get as much as I can from the sound and the individual musicians. We’re talking about stuff twenty years ago, so I can’t remember all the specifics!

I forget if this was a commission or not, but I remember being part of a collaborative project where there were a series of duos. One day, I played music with Vijay Iyer, and then the next day I played with James Hurt. I also played duo with Kwaku Obeng, the percussionist from Ghana, I believe. That project was all about being open and conscious of who was in front of you. There were so many different settings for making music, so that was very exciting.

TJG: I was able to find a review of one of the 2002 commission concerts of yours that featured Avishai Cohen, Peter Apfelbaum, Jason Lindner, and Hans Glawischnig in the band, plus Claudia Acuña guesting on a couple of numbers. It mentioned a few tune titles and I was struck by how those tunes have showed up on different albums of yours recorded at different times. Can you talk about the process of reimagining compositions of yours over time?

DP: There are pieces that have that quality, that regenerate in a way. Others are more specific in how they should sound. That evolution has to do with your imagination and really taking advantage of the full possibilities that you have. You might be in a situation where you’re asked to bring something in to a band, and it might be a different configuration than what you originally had, and so you think about which one is more appropriate for this setting. It’s a great exercise for a musician.

I’ve been doing that for a long time, and I really did that with my big band record. I took some older songs of mine and rearranged them. It became about exploring different sounds and different expressions from the same source. I’ve always been open to that. As much as I like to be a composer, in terms of conceiving something for a specific situation, I also have to give value to the performer who brings the music alive. If I write something for piano and I don’t have a good pianist to play it, I might bring that part to the saxophone. It’s just a great adventure.

Opening up to have the same material played by different configurations is a learning process. I’ve always been drawn to that—the experience of learning from my peers, learning from the feedback that I get when we play. It’s not only the verbal feedback, whether criticism or not, but the feedback from the performer interpretation. That will trigger something new and different in me. It’s kind of a chain reaction.

TJG: I’m interested in artists who have a more evolutionary approach to their music versus those who may be more conceptual. I think of John Coltrane as an evolutionary artist—so many of his albums are for quartet, and his music evolves gradually from record to record. And I think of Miles Davis as a more conceptual artist who can have really rapid departures in sound and instrumentation from album to album.

DP: I’m interested in the evolutionary nature of music, but I also like doing really different things as well. Like, there are some songs that are written specifically for the Absolute Quintet that I would never imagine doing in a different situation. I’m not someone who sees this idea in black and white. I see so many choices when it comes to music. Sometimes, there are musical things that I don’t want to do, but I have to do because of logistics, or I have to because it will pay off in the long run. I like both approaches. Both of them are valuable. I have to deal with the situations in my life.

TJG: I think Henry and Steve have that mixed approach as well. They can have really different instrumentations from album to album, but have also been honing their respective compositional systems for long periods of time.

DP: Yeah. For example, I have a different perspective about that. I’m a big fan of Salvador Dalí. He said this thing in an interview, and it’s a really surreal statement, but also so real. They asked him, “What makes you Salvador Dalí?” And he said, “I like to repeat myself.” At first, that sounds like the opposite of creativity. I think what he means is that if you’re thinking that you’re doing something new, you’re just adding something to what you already are. It’s just a continuation. It deals with your perception of that moment versus the full perception of your body of work.

I’ll say this: it’s very hard to get rid of yourself. I have to love myself in order to express something about who I am. In a way, I’m thinking in the long run. Each record works as a continuation, or adds a very specific sound. But to me, it all adds to a body of work. And the end, you can look back and say, “I did a lot of different projects with different sounds and different musicians. I got to share this with lots of different people, and this is who I am.”

You mentioned earlier Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and how Coltrane really evolved gradually from Blue Train to the later periods. But I can see the same thing in Miles Davis! From Kind of Blue to the Tutu record, that’s an evolution right there from one to another. It’s a different kind of evolution, but he’s just a different human being. Different human beings have different strategies, different formulas. And they react differently to reality, too. All of this is so personal. It’s like life itself. It’s unique and personal, but also general at the same time. It’s the concept that there are two sides to the story.

As both a leader and sideman, pianist Jason Lindner has stitched vast threads of connection within the New York jazz world and beyond. His omnipresence at the Winter Jazz Festival, for instance, inspired WBGO’s Simon Rentner to coin “The Jason Lindner Award” for the busiest musician at the festival.

As someone who has moved fluidly through the scenes at venues like Smalls, NuBlu, and The Jazz Gallery, we at Jazz Speaks thought it would be great to sit down with Lindner and talk about how the jazz community has moved and changed over the years.

The Jazz Gallery: Smalls was such an important place for you and a lot of your peers when you were getting started in the 1990s. Why do you think Smalls ended up being a real lodestar for your musical community at the time?

Jason Lindner: First, it was their booking model. Musicians were in charge of finding other musicians to play. Musicians tend to know more about the scene because they’re on the scene. It might take someone who’s a booker or a club owner a little longer to understand what’s happening.

In New York at the time, for the premier jazz clubs like the Vanguard and the Blue Note, you had to be of a certain career stature to play there. It was how their model worked—they sold tickets, had cover charges, and attracted a certain clientele. Smalls didn’t have that type of model—it’s why that first Smalls compilation album was called Jazz Underground. These weren’t artists who were names in the recording industry yet. So you had all of these underground jazz musicians that were known in the community but not beyond that. Through Smalls, they had a chance to have worldwide recognition.

Number two, the model of Smalls was very accessible. They had no liquor license, so there was no age limit. They didn’t have to adhere to a lot of the same rules and regulations that regular bars had to. Smalls helped so many young people in New York, especially students, by being so accessible and so affordable. It was pretty multi-generational. It was striking how accessible Smalls was when other jazz clubs weren’t. A student wouldn’t go to the Blue Note unless they were a superfan of somebody and wanted to save up $25-85 for a ticket.

But maybe the biggest reason was the jam sessions. They had open-ended jam sessions seven nights a week and the club wouldn’t close until the last person left. That’s why they called it Bohemian, stuff like that. All the musicians who came to New York to a play a show would all end up at Smalls by the end of the night. That’s how a lot of people met and made relationships and new groups.

One more thing—because it was so musician-friendly, Mitch Borden actually financially supported a number of older, down-and-out musicians. These were freelancers, master musicians in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, who had played for a long time, but weren’t part of the larger employment system, so they didn’t have health benefits and what not. These were people that my peers looked up to, but they weren’t able to make ends meet financially, or get help with health or addiction issues. Smalls was really a home for a lot of those musicians. There was an ecosystem of support between older and younger musicians.

There’s never been another place like that in New York in my lifetime. And they’re not like that anymore because they’re a legally-operating bar. It might be more comparable to the World Stage in Los Angeles where Terrace Martin, Thundercat, and the LA jazz community came up. Billy Higgins was the founder of that place. That really has an ecosystem of youth and elders. There was also a place called the University of the Streets in New York where I used to play a lot, and they had jam sessions and concerts. That was more of a community center. It wasn’t really run like a club.

TJG: It’s interesting hearing about Smalls compared to somewhere like the old Knitting Factory, which also had a strong community, but a very different model. A lot of the performers associated with the Knitting Factory had eclectic tastes and styles, which I definitely associate with you and many of your peers. Was there a lot of crossover between the Smalls and Knitting Factory scenes when you were coming up?

JL: If the original Knitting Factory was still around now, I feel that would be a choice place of mine because of the experimental and eclectic spirit. I really like that music, but back in the ‘90s, it wasn’t really a scene that I fell into. The people I was playing with at the time were bebop-centric. I had studied with Barry Harris and a lot of my friends were in that same circle. Smalls became a pretty bop-centric place. I feel the taste of Mitch Borden had a lot to do with that, as well as the people he associated with, like Frank Hewitt and Tommy Turrentine—they were straight-up bebop.

I actually dislike using names for genres, because they oversimplify and generalize cultural movements, downplaying the innovative individuals involved — terms and phrases historically created largely by outliers to those movements.

But anyway, for explanation sake, Smalls was more in that vein.

There were a few players—definitely the minority—like myself, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Omer Avital, Myron Walden and others—who weren’t restricting themselves to that style of music, who’s style was more genre-fluid. That grew as the years went on, especially after the release of Jazz Underground: Live at Smalls. But Smalls and the Knitting Factory were really different scenes back then. There was little crossover, I think.

TJG: How did The Jazz Gallery first get on your radar?

JL: Rio’s ex-husband Stafford Hunter was a trombonist in my big band, so that’s how I met Rio. A short time after I met Rio—this is in 2001—Smalls was going through financial difficulty and heading toward a temporary closure. Since Smalls was where my big band had been playing every week, Rio had the idea of the band continuing our performances but at The Jazz Gallery, which we did.

Roy Hargrove was also a part of the Smalls community. He would definitely hang at Smalls a lot and play in the jam sessions, as would the musicians associated with Roy. At the same time, Roy was collaborating with Cuban musicians and experimenting with that and with hip hop, so I think he helped facilitate more of that crossover mentality. A lot of musicians that I associate with the Gallery I met at Smalls, like James Hurt, Sherman Irby, Dana Murray. And, of course, the whole clique from Texas, like Robert Glasper. I heard a lot of people for the first time at Smalls. That was pre-Jazz Gallery. Sherman played with Roy too.

TJG: Beyond the big band residency, were you performing with other projects at the Gallery in those early years?

JL: I think the first thing was this piano duo series that the Gallery did. I performed duet with James Hurt at one piano. It was heavily improvised, but anchored within our own compositional ideas. Ben Ratliff actually wrote a cool review for the New York Times back when that publication used to review local cultural events.

TJG:  Then in 2002, you were part of the Gallery’s first commission series. Can you talk about working on that project?

JL: That was for an insane group of some of my favorite musicians—Jeff Ballard, Larry Grenadier, Miguel Zenon, and Mark Turner. It also featured Todd Low, who played the Chinese snake violin—the erhu—and taught me some traditional songs for that instrument which I arranged for the band and that was so cool!

TJG: That’s quite a lineup!

JL: Yeah. And then later I brought in other projects including a duo with drummer Dan Weiss, where Miriam Crowe, a visual design and lighting artist, created a really cool mini-installation of rose-colored hanging ornaments lit in a really cool way.

TJG: One thing that’s interesting to me is that you didn’t document these projects on record, like you have with Now vs. Now. What do think the reason is for that?

JL: I feel the early 2000s predated the idea that you have to document every single thing you do. I know the Gallery documented all of those performances for their own catalog

TJG: It’s all on MiniDisc!

JL: [Laughs]. At the time, I would have loved to record those projects, but I think it was too much. It wouldn’t have been financially possible, and we didn’t have great recording equipment of our own at that time. Now, it’s kind of a no brainer—you have a show, so you record it, video it, make content. If it’s a good show, it could even be a record. Back then, people weren’t really thinking like that. In improvised music and jazz, I feel people were more appreciative of being in the moment and accepting that that moment as being a future memory and a feeling, as opposed to a document you can revisit. If you know you can’t revisit something, you’ll be sure to pay attention more, to really experience it with your entire being.

I’ve always done a lot of experimentation, but in terms of pooling resources to actually release an album, I always put extra pressure on myself to make sure that shit is really good and feel confident about what I’m presenting. I think that’s a big reason why there was such a big gap between my big band records and Now vs. Now. For ten years before Now vs. Now, I was experimenting with different groups, mixing styles, getting my feet wet with electronics and with extended song form, playing at Nublu and other spots. I recorded gigs for myself, but I never thought, “Yeah, this is ready to be a record.”

We also relied on record labels back then and we don’t need to anymore. If we all could have released shit on Bandcamp in 2002, we all would have been doing it. That didn’t exist back then.

I mean, there must have been artists in the early millennium who were thinking like that. Marc Ribot comes to mind, since he’s so radically independent. A great example is Sun Ra, who was a relentlessly prolific DIY recording artist before anyone even did that. But I didn’t grow up in a DIY culture, unfortunately. I kind of wish I did. I had to learn that a little later.

TJG: I think Sun Ra and Marc Ribot are good examples, because I associate that DIY ethos with a lot of the downtown improvisers and artist collectives like the AACM. 

JL: You’re right. I feel like in the downtown jazz scene, there’s a lot of crossover into other experimental, DIY scenes, and those experimental scenes are purely for art’s sake, and there’s not necessarily any expectation or want or need to be more than that. I would say that experimental artists in this country are basically forced to do everything themselves because they don’t receive any type of support. But it fills a cultural gap and is absolutely needed.

TJG: I want to end by talking a bit about yourself as a kind of “elder statesman” of The Jazz Gallery. Back in 2015, you worked with pianist James Francies as part of the Gallery’s Mentoring Series. What made you want to be involved in the series and how did you choose James?

JL: When Rio asked me about getting involved in the series, I had recently been up at a place in Harlem and heard James at a jam session. I was totally blown away. I had just met him that night and talked for a bit, so I didn’t really know him. I thought of him immediately regarding the series.

It was a little weird for me at first. If I’m a mentor, there’s this stipulation that I’m the teacher and I’m inviting someone to learn from me. I wasn’t really comfortable with that. But when I saw James play, I saw someone who was inspiring me, so I flipped the whole idea. James then happens to be a very humble and dedicated musician and a very nice human being. I think it worked out in a really cool way because he got to learn some stuff about my songs and my approach just from the experience of playing in Now Vs Now. And he truly inspired all of us as well!

Since then, I’ve seen him get more into electronic instruments and he does it in a very different way than I do it, which is awesome. He found the kinds of instruments that fit into the music he wants to make—he became a multi-keyboardist. It seems like there was a bit of influence there. I just think it’s awesome that he’s gotten so many opportunities, and I’m not surprised, because he’s freakishly good.