What was the last gig you played before it all shut down?<\/strong><\/p>\nStrangely enough, the last real gigs I played were in French Guiana with this wonderful French band, Papanosh, and Napolean Maddox, who played in my Sotto Voce band. We have a project together to explore the English word \u201chome\u201d all over the world, but particularly in French-speaking countries.\u00a0 We\u2019ve done workshops with immigrants and immigrant children in France and in hospitals where people are losing different mental capacities. We work with\u00a0these communities to explore ideas of belonging and various identity questions that are at the root of so much bullshit nowadays.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the French government paid for\u00a0our\u00a0trip to French Guiana to do\u00a0the\u00a0“home” workshops and concerts\u00a0in this beautiful and strange place that voted to continue being part of France but clearly has a very different population mix than continental France. French Guiana has a majority population of former slaves, Amazonian Indians and a smaller number continental French natives.\u00a0\u00a0The country has\u00a0a fairly small number of people (less than a half million) all of whom explore these questions of national and ethnic identity daily.<\/p>\n
So, in the last few weeks of January, I was with Papansoh and Napoleon in residence in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana and did two really lovely concerts there based on workshops in one area of the country.<\/p>\n
Then I was home for a few weeks teaching at NYU, writing and getting ready to go on tour to France in late March and a good deal of April and May.\u00a0 But first I was to fly to UCLA to be a guest in Arturo O\u2019Farrill\u2019s \u201cCross Cultural Conceptions in Jazz.\u201d and a little gig he set up there in L.A.\u00a0\u00a0That was, like, March 9, and on the way to the airport I got cold feet and just called Arturo and said I didn\u2019t feel comfortable going.\u00a0 I felt ridiculous cancelling like that, but I was so conflicted and it was all so weird.\u00a0The car service driver told me on the way how his wife had to go into the hospital with symptoms and I just freaked.<\/p>\n
What was the last gig you heard before it all shut down?<\/strong><\/p>\nI don\u2019t go out that much when I\u2019m home, so most of the gigs I hear are when I\u2019m on tour. So the last live gig I went to was a Papanosh gig they did in French Guiana.\u00a0 They were playing music from a terrific new CD they\u2019d made, and Napoleon and I were in the audience.<\/p>\n
You’ve found ways to share your music\u2014from your porch and front yard, during this shelter-at-home period. How has that worked, how did it feel? <\/strong><\/p>\nI was recently asked by the Europe Jazz Network to be on a panel of musicians from different countries, to discuss our personal experiences during this pandemic, and there were several fundamental difference between my experience and the other panel members.\u00a0 Firstly, and most obviously, they were European musicians who get more support at all times by their respective governments as do other workers and citizens in general in Europe, so there were issues around that.\u00a0 But also, the other two musicians, one from Norway and one from Portugal, were young and far more comfortable finding ways to share their music online.<\/p>\n
For me, there is just no way to replace the experience of playing with and in front of people.\u00a0 It\u2019s just essential to the experience of meaning-making with sound. I\u2019m lucky enough to own a house in Flatbush (I grew up this neighborhood, which the realtors now call\u00a0 Ditmas Park). My family lives on the 2nd<\/sup>and 3rd<\/sup>floors, and our friend\u2019s family lives on the first floor.\u00a0 So the very first day of this lockdown, I decided to go out to my second-floor deck and play one song exactly at 5pm, and asked my downstairs neighbor, Lloyd Miller, who is a very good musician and a bass player, to join me from below.<\/p>\nI looked at this idea as a way to provide something lovely on our block and the blocks around us, that all of us could count on.\u00a0 I thought it should be at an exact moment each day in a very uncertain time.\u00a0It\u2019s turned out that other neighborhood musicians have come by to join in.\u00a0 I don\u2019t play any of my own music on these \u201cporch concert\u201d songs.\u00a0 I just play songs that people know that and seem to me to speak to the moment, and that I feel comfortable playing \u2014\u201cAmazing Grace,\u201d all the Bill Withers\u2019 songs, \u201cThis Little Light of Mine,\u201d \u00a060\u2019s R&B stuff we all know and an occasional jazz tune that seems right, like one time we played Strayhorn\u2019s \u201cDaydream.\u201d\u00a0 Mostly they are forms of R&B.\u00a0 A video of one of these porch concerts was shown on WNYC\u2019s \u201cGreene Space,\u201d and we are raising money through that for Flatbush Development Corporation, a community organization that provides all kinds of programs for the many struggling people of our neighborhood.<\/p>\n
Anyway, that\u2019s been a lovely experience but it hardly replaces playing a real gig with your own music that come from the investigations into sound and composition that you do in your basement.<\/p>\n
So this experience of sheltering at home changed the way you experience your music and your writing? <\/strong><\/p>\nLike I said, I was supposed to be on tour in France and in Europe generally during most of this period and nothing can replace the true interaction between audience and performer. \u00a0That dialogue is just the essential stuff of being a musician\/improviser.\u00a0 But playing by myself during this period I\u2019ve found myself editing solo improvisations into little compositions.\u00a0 Even when I play something like \u201cLush Life\u201d\u2014 to get more deeply into the composition.\u00a0 Not having that dialogue with others either keeps me depressed on the coach or gets me playing by myself into protools where I\u2019m thinking more compositionally. The most messed up thing is not having the interplay with other musicians; that just clearly sucks and there\u2019s no replacing it for me.<\/p>\n
As to writing, I was working on a long book\/dialogue\/poem before this all happened.\u00a0I haven\u2019t spoken about this much yet but suffice it to say it was very much involved with memory and these are times where memory recedes and the moment is right in front of your face.\u00a0So I\u2019ve been excited that my second book of poetry, which has all my work for the last 10 years, was supposed to come out on Madhat press in September\u2014but given these times, it\u2019s been pushed back to January and even that is not certain given the tours being closed etc. But anyway, I found myself going back to writing short \u201cplague poems,\u201d specifically about the moment.<\/p>\n
You had planned an album release for \u201cHeart,\u201d from Endangered Quartet. What should have been happening? What is happening instead? How has that worked out and affected you, emotionally and in practical terms?<\/strong><\/p>\nMy very close friends, Curtis Fowlkes, Tim Kiah and Jesse Mills and I put together a collective band called Endangered Quartet that composes and arranges a kind of chamber music.\u00a0 It\u2019s been a beautiful experience of finding our voice in these last two years or so.\u00a0Curt and I started the Jazz Passengers together, of course, and both Curt and Tim played with me in Sotto Voce. Then I\u2019d met Jesse through Tim, when he subbed on a Sotto Voce gig about 10 years ago.\u00a0 Jesse is a wonderful classical violinist. I grew up with a mother who was a classical pianist, and I\u2019ve always had a particular affinity to the pianists and violinists who are classically trained \u2013 particularly if they really like jazz and improvisational music.\u00a0 Jesse is certainly that, and Tim has become a terrific orchestral composer, so it\u2019s been a blast for me to write for this group and to experiment in playing in these through-composed pieces that involve improvisation but are more intentional in terms of orchestration and group sound.\u00a0 The Passengers were invited to play in a few chamber-music festivals years ago, and I do think that I\u2019ve always gravitated toward creating meaning through group sound and involving lyrics into that mix, and this new band furthers all that for me.<\/p>\n
So finally we finished the CD that was released on New Focus Recordings\u2019 Panoramic imprint on May 22nd<\/sup>.\u00a0 The concert was supposed to be at Joe\u2019s Pub, which really is the perfect place for this subtle combination of sounds that includes vocals.<\/p>\nOf course the concert has been cancelled, and we\u2019ve scrambled to find some kind of way to make an event about the release. So we settled on making a kind of film out of a Zoom discussion and a listening party featuring tracks from th CD.\u00a0 To help get at least a little buzz on the thing I asked my friend Elvis Costello, who\u2019d already heard the CD and really dug it, to help out. He\u2019s great guy and generous, so he gave a lovely guest introduction.\u00a0 Anyway, the whole thing was weird but we\u2019ve done what we could and who knows what now\u2026\u00a0I really looked forward to getting the band booked, and of course that\u2019s the only way to make any money from something like this but, still, it\u2019ll be nice to know that people are hearing this music that, oddly enough, does really seem to speak to the vulnerability of this moment.<\/p>\n
The lyrics that begin the title track to the new album \u2014 the ones Elvis quoted in that Zoom discussion\u2014are stirring. Do they take on new meaning for you right now?<\/strong><\/p>\nYeah for sure.\u00a0 Even before this pandemic we\u2019ve been in the throes of some pretty serious dystopic shit in this country, with a totally immoral and amoral nut and his cronies running the show.\u00a0 As a public-school music teacher for years and an old lefty who was at Columbia in the early 70s, I\u2019ve always been yelling about the levels of inequality in this country but that shit has been so on steroids these last few years that yelling seems wildly redundant.<\/p>\n
Tim is a wonderful musician who wrote the song \u201cEndangered Heart.\u201d He said that the song was about endangered animals, and he asked me to write some lyrics to the beginning of the tune. My sense was that, as musicians and as a poet, our responsibility is the uncertain science of the heart.\u00a0 Scientists have given us more than ample doomsday evidence of the science of environmental destruction, historians and sociologists have given us more than ample evidence of the institutional destruction of the structural deficiencies in our collective response to these problems, but, as artists, it feels like we\u2019ve got to find someplace in the cracks to talk about the heart. I kind of ran with lyrics about us birds and our bird hearts. The lyric that Tim wanted me to keep was the one about us needing to, \u201cSee the world through the eyes of a child.\u201d\u00a0 I don\u2019t totally believe that, but I certainly understand the deep emotion behind that, so I put that lyric into a context I could believe in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you see saxophonist Roy Nathanson on the Q train, head down and pen out, he\u2019s writing a poem. (His second book is due for publication soon). He hasn\u2019t been riding the subway lately, and we know why. Had you heard Nathanson\u2014head up, saxophone pointed skyward\u2014at Joe\u2019s Pub, in Manhattan, last week, toying with Bach … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “COVID CONVERSATIONS, Volume 3: Roy Nathanson”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6984"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6984"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7007,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6984\/revisions\/7007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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If you see saxophonist Roy Nathanson on the Q train, head down and pen out, he\u2019s writing a poem. (His second book is due for publication soon).<\/p>\n