#kirkknuffke

Brian Drye is a trombonist, composer and the father of, what has become, a central part of the improvisatory community in Brooklyn: his rehearsal, teaching and performance space I-Beam. In recent months, Drye has given artists a three day, two set residency at I-Beam--a rare opportunity for musicians these days. 

Tonight through Saturday, Drye himself is in residence with his band Bizingas comprised of cornetist Kirk Knuffke, drummer Ches Smith and guitarist Jonathan Goldberger. And Drye has done something special with his three night run in giving his Bizingas cohorts each a set to play their own music, in a band of their choosing, after each Bizingas set. 

I caught up with Drye to talk about this residency and some tangentially related topics which you can read below.

(I-Beam Brooklyn is 168 7th St; Bizingas starts at 8:30)

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How was Bizingas formed? What was the impetus to gather these folks together?

This band has been together since 2004. It started as a trio of guitar bass and drums with Jonathan Goldberger and Take Toriyama. Take passed in 2007 and we had recorded a full length album a few weeks before. At some point in 2008 I started playing sessions with Ches Smith, Jonathan Goldberger and Kirk Knuffke and I knew that had to be the band. The chemistry was great and I had a sense that this would be a great group to try some of my Bizingas songs. At the time I was very interested in blending analog synth within the group and adding Kirk gave me even more freedom to do so.  We recorded out debut album which was released in 2010 and they were a whole new set of compositions written specifically for that date. 

How'd you come by such a name?

A friend of mine used to call and leave nonsense words on my answering machine (which dates that activity). One time he said Bizingas ( or atleast that's what I thought he said). I liked the way it looked and sounded and  that became the name.  As far as I know there is no official definition of it.

  Can you talk about the special guest subs who will be playing with you guys?--Shane Endsley and Tom Rainey.

Shane has been my friend and musical compatriot since I moved to NYC in 1997. We've played countless gigs together but this is the first time I've had Shane sub in my own band. It just so happens that one of the songs on the record is titled Shane.  It's an old song that Shane mentioned years ago that he liked. On the new record Kirk Knuffke and I play it as a duo, so I'm excited to have Shane guest for this one. Tom Rainey is one of my favorite drummers in NYC and I've been listening to him since I moved here.  I've recently gotten to know him a little more and had some chances to play with him some.  I'm really excited to have his as a guest with this band.  I have a history with Ches and the music now after so many years and had very little opportunity to sub it out.  I thought since this was a residency that it would be fun to hear the music from a different perspective.  

Every night of the residency, for the second set, you're giving your Bizingas bandmates a showcase with their own groups. What was the idea behind that? It should be exciting to see these guys in a different context immediately following a Bizingas set!

I just thought - it's hard enough to get these guys all together, let alone for 3 nights, I thought it would be fun to have them also present something since they are all amazing leaders and sidemen.  Ches is bringing his long standing duo Good for Cows and both Jonathan and Kirk are using the opportunity to bring a new project.

  Can you talk about how I-Beam has grown since you started it? It's really become a large part of the community.

Ibeam started as a teaching space and it has grown into a performance space.  The idea for a residency series has been brewing for a long time and it seemed like the perfect time to start to try it.  So far all the residencies have been really successful and it's a rare treat to offer musicians the opportunity to present their music for more than one night.  It's very rare for this community, and I think it can be an essential way for the music to take shape, develop and encourage the audience to participate in the process. We also have a membership of amazing musicians who also produce concerts and we occasionally rent the space for shows.  I worked my ass off to improve the space, the sound, the gear.  We just got a sponsorship from Maxwells Drum Shop and we should have a brand new drum set any day now.

  Any notable I-Beam stories?

Hmmm…It's hard to say - there have been so many amazing events there in the past 7 years.  I could not have imagined that this would have turned into such a great performance space.  I think one of my favorite moments was many years ago, Roswell Rudd performed with this Russian trio I guess he had met on his travels.  Roswell being one of my personal heroes I was pretty excited to have him in the space.  Back when I was first open, I used to teach a lot of lessons there, and he had come in while I was teaching where we used to have a waiting room.  I came back to greet one of my students and he was sitting there so nonchalantly I thought he was a student's grandfather.  He commented how much he loved the student's playing and I asked him who was his grandchild.  He looked at me puzzled and I suddenly realized who he was.  (I was pretty embarrassed but he seemed to get a good laugh out of it.)

What's some music you've been listening to lately?

I've been listening to Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite and Brahms Piano Concerto #1.  My two year old daughter keeps pulling out scores and records that I haven't listened to in years and those are some of the ones she keeps pulling off the shelf.  I'm also obsessed with this Gerry Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer record and Jelly Roll Morton.  

What's your ideal sandwich?

by Samuel Weinberg

To conclude our week-long feature on Ideal Bread it seems only fitting to return to the leader, Josh Sinton, albeit in a much, much more abridged form than when we first spoke to him on Tuesday. Below are his answers our Ideal Questionnaire. And  you all should really check out this tremendous record Beating the Teens, the fruit of Sinton's labors.

What's your ideal summer day in New York?

rainy day in middle of August. city's emptier, air's cooler and smells are better.

What's your ideal song at this very moment?

The one I keep trying to write down correctly. Still trying.

What's your ideal cup of coffee?

Pour-over at Cafe Grumpy or Blue Bottle

What's your Ideal Bread?

(photo by Peter Gannushkin)

Our week of Ideal Bread continues, with the band's drummer Tomas Fujiwara. Check out his answers to our Ideal Questionnaire, below. 

What's your ideal summer day in New York?

Basketball in the park. Barbecue in the back yard. Ice cold shitty beer.

What's your ideal song at this very moment?

Kendrick Lamar "Backseat Freestyle"

What's your ideal cup of coffee?

Whatever someone that knows more about coffee than me recommends. I do like Blue Bottle.

What's your Ideal Bread?

(photo by Peter Gannushkin; Downtown Music Gallery)

To continue on with the week of Ideal Bread, we have one of its longest standing members, cornetist Kirk Knuffke answering our Ideal Questionnaire. Knuffke-- whose immaculately organic and flowing lines are unmistakable and a delightful foil to Josh Sinton's baritone saxophone-- plays an integral role for this new record, Beating the Teens. 

Check him out, below!

What's your ideal summer day in New York?

I want to practice everyday so thats in there even on a nice summer day, but after that going to park.  There was a day last summer when my wife Madeleine and I just laid in the grass in prospect park, that would do it. And some sushi!

What's your ideal song at this very moment?

"Bright Moments" by Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the album Kirkatron (no relation, well maybe....)

What's your ideal cup of coffee?

Todd Sickafoose took me to Cole coffee in Oakland, that was the best coffee purchased in the states.  Sant Eustachio in Rome was the best overseas, otherwise my Bialetti coffee maker with Lavazza crema e gusto or qualita oro, does it for me.  I do dig the coffee.

What's your Ideal Bread?

(photo by Peter Gannushkin)

For the better part of the last decade, baritone saxophonist and bass clarinetist Josh Sinton has led the Steve Lacy repertory band Ideal Bread. Ideal Bread's first two records had at their core the simple concept of transcribing Steve Lacy tunes and playing them, roughly, as Lacy did. Yet on their newest record, Beating the Teens (Cuneiform), Sinton was decidedly more ambitious and set out to re-arrange and re-conceptualize an entire three-CD boxed-set of Lacy's, Scratching the Seventies. Beating the Teens is an amazing record, one which explores many facets of the members playing and one which evidences a deep improvisational rapport between Sinton and his Ideal Bread cohorts--drummer Tomas Fujiwara, cornetist Kirk Knuffke and the newest member of the group, bassist Adam Hopkins.

I spoke to Sinton about the history of this group, what went into the making of this record, why he made it in the first place, and we even spoke of the consequences this has on questions of authorship and authenticity. Sinton is an incredibly erudite and well-spoken guy, and this talk is well worth your time!

And here's a remarkably catchy tune from Beating the Teens:

So maybe you could talk a little bit about your history, as a listener, with the Steve Lacy box set Scratching the Seventies and what the impetus was to aggregate and rearrange those tunes for this record. What about it, in the arc of Steve Lacy’s career, was compelling to you?

I have to say that this whole record started as a concept piece; it wasn’t based on any kind of emotional resonance with Scratching the Seventies. I knew of that boxed set, and when I saw that it had become available in iTunes, I purchased a copy of it. I originally found out about those records in 2002 or 2003, and it was just with a bunch of Lacy stuff that I had found and it wasn’t anything that I listened to a lot, so I didn’t have warm or cold feelings about it. It was one of those things where someone asks you about a book and you say, “Yeah, that’s a fairly good book." But I had this concept that if I was going to work on another Ideal Bread record...well, I’m one of those guys that, if I do something, I have to have a good reason to do it. And sometimes the reason can seem very silly, but that’s alright, as long as it compels me to do it. So I got this idea in my head that we should do something else, and if in parts of our consciousness, or in jazz culture, we are thought of as a cover band--and we are, regardless of what I say, we are thought of as a cover band--I started to wonder about what cover bands do, not just in jazz. And although I’m not a big fan of them, that band Phish, when they were together, used to do these annual Halloween shows where they would have their fans vote on a record that they should cover--so one year it was Remain in Light, one year it was Led Zeppelin IV, another Dark Side of the Moon, things like that. So at the Halloween show, you’d hear Phish cover the entire record. And I think that in rock, there’s very much this idea where you could not only cover a song, but an entire album. That hasn’t been done as much in jazz. But I just thought that it’d be funny and perverse if I just took that to a logical extreme. I thought to myself, “If Ideal Bread is a cover band, then we should cover an entire record. But wait, a minute! Let’s not cover a record, let’s cover a boxed set!”. Already, rational minds are saying, “Okay, you don’t have to cover an entire record, and there’s no law obligating you to cover a boxed set. And by the way, you do realize that Steve Lacy--as wonderful as he is--is a little on the obscure side”. But I was immediately hooked on that tension between rationality and this logical extreme, so I thought that we should do this. And added to this irrationality is that some of the original material is un-coverable! The first bunch of those tunes are from his first solo record called Lapis which is a series of multi-tracked pieces. Particularly on the tracks in which he was becoming increasingly experimental, as on this song “Cryptosphere," I felt could never cover it properly because it such sui generis piece. Also there are a few tracks on that boxed set that I think are perfect, and that there’s no way or reason to do them again because they were done perfectly the first time: “Dreams” is one of them; “Cryptosphere” is another; “The Wire” is another. These are tunes, for me, which ask, “Why would anyone do this again?”. It’s a little like covering “Free Bird” or “Stairway to Heaven," but less popular. But dealing with the question of how the band was going to cover a solo saxophone record was interesting. Then there’s another "uncoverable" record from the set called Roba, which is just a free-form improvisation. It was literally one of those things where you play one side of the record and you hear the first half of the blowing session and the other on the second side. And the fidelity on this is pretty bad. It literally sounds like they just kind of put a cassette tape recorder on the ground and just let it record. In the boxed set, it just ended up as two twenty-minute-long pieces. So it’s the kind of thing in which the very nature of the piece is such that you can’t cover it. It partakes of that aesthetic of free-form improvisation that many Europeans pioneered, like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Tony Oxley people like that; these people whose aesthetic was that once something had happened, it would never happen again, and it had never happened before. “Roba” is one of those pieces. Secondly, I don’t particularly like that piece that much. It’s like “Revolution #9” on The White Album--the long track that you sort of say “ehh…okay” to. I mean, I’m sure some people like "Roba," but it's one of those pieces where I wish I had been there to hear it live. But I had set myself this goal, and so it was like playing a game. I was like, “Okay, I said we were going to cover the whole boxed-set, so we have to do that impossible-to-cover stuff too”.

So you used voices on “Roba”, right? You guys kept saying the name of the tune.

Yeah. Well the recording of “Roba” is different from the live version. In concert “Roba” became a tactic that we would use. What I wrote for “Roba” is more of a game: during the course of a concert, if at any point I say “Roba tactics apply” that means that any member of the band can yell out “Roba”. And when someone yells “Roba”, you have to stop what you’re doing and immediately do something else. You just have to change what you’re doing, fundamentally. And that will go on until someone gets tired of it and somebody else yells “Roba” at which point you snap back to what you were doing before.

So this happens in the middle of tunes?

Yeah, we’ve been using it in concerts, and it’s actually a lot of fun. It keeps us on our toes; it keeps the material interesting; it keeps the audience wondering what the hell is going on; and it’s a nice little theatrical bit. It fulfilled my requirements because I wrote a piece and anyone can identify it because we’re yelling “Roba”! And it’s repeatable. That wasn’t going to work on the record. So the piece that ended up on the record came from an idea that I had. Do you know the game Exquisite Corpse? It’s a surrealist game. The idea is really simple: you take a piece of paper and fold it in threes or fours, and then you hand the piece of paper to somebody who draws a head at the top third of it, then you turn it over so that only the middle third is visible and they draw a body without knowing what the head looks like and then you fold the bottom third of it and another person draws the legs. You open it up, and there’s your exquisite corpse. This is an old, old, trick--it’s been done in the visual arts, it’s been done in literature, but it has not been done as much in music. But that’s essentially what we did on the record; “Roba” is an exquisite corpse. What we did was, at the end of each day, I would have someone go into the recording booth and they would improvise, announcing their improvisation by saying “Roba," and they would start improvising. They were supposed to improvise for exactly a minute and at the end of the minute, they’d say “Roba” again and they would stop. Then I would have another person go in there and do the same thing, and I would have the engineer rewind the first improvisation to its half-way point. The person would put on the headphones, the playback would start, and that second person would immediately have to say “Roba” and start playing half-way through that first improvisation, and then they would play for a minute. So at a certain point, the first improvisation would stop and the second one would be left. And that person would play for a minute, say “Roba” again and stop. So we did that for each of the four days that we were in the studio. And what you’re hearing is pure-- there was no cutting and pasting. There was a little post production in the way of equalization, but that track is literally that document. So sometimes people didn’t say “Roba” loud enough or didn't play for a full minute, but essentially when you hear “Roba” that’s either someone announcing the beginning or ending of their playing. But it created this sort of crazy pastiche. When I listened to it, the first few times, I was making sure that it lined up the way I wanted it to structurally. I ultimately concluded that it’s exactly what I wanted it to be, which is this somewhat crazy quilt with some tension holding it together, but that tension is hard to identify and it's compounded by these weird yelps of “Roba” in-between.

Basically "Roba" came together for me as one long game or exercise just like the whole record did.. My focus for the group has changed. When the group first came together, it was just a vehicle for playing Steve Lacy tunes. I was really curious about the music, I didn’t understand it, I didn’t sound good playing it and I used Steve Lacy’s method that he had devised with Monk, Ellington or Herbie Nichols or really anything--he knew Mingus tunes, Charlie Parker tunes--and so rather than talk about that music, Steve would just play it, over and over and over again and would quietly let it sit in his brain and do it that way. So that’s how Ideal Bread as a group started, it was just a vehicle to do that. And it just so happened that I was in the right time and place and it felt like the universe opened itself up to the group and really liked what we were doing. I was pleased about that, but I was kind of surprised since we were just playing these Lacy tunes, pretty much the exact way he played them.

They were just exact transcriptions on the first two records, right?

Yeah. And really there was very little difference from the original tunes. Some people might argue with me about that, but I would point out that there were some tunes that Steve recorded multiple times throughout his career, and he would change them with slight rhythmic alterations. So they might be familiar with a different version of the song that what I used as source material. We just did straight up covers in a way, although perhaps the word "covers" denigrates it a little bit. But I just wanted to do it pretty much the way that Steve laid it out, which meant doing a lot of head-solo-head structures. But with this record, by the time it came along, I was more interested in doing something else because I began to think that Kirk, Tomas and I have a history together--Reuben was out of the band by this point, so I didn’t even have a regular bass player--but I knew I wanted to play with Kirk and Tomas again because we had developed a sound and we really enjoyed each other’s company, both on and off the bandstand. So I knew that I wanted to do something again. But we had spent years just playing the Lacy tunes straight and exactly the way they were recorded. And that was fun, and that was fine, but I just saw that that phase was over for now. Why should we keep making records like that? It just seemed pointless to me to keep making those records and approaching the music in that way. So I had this issue of how do I keep this group going--a group that is actually kind of quintet, with the fifth member being a composer who is dead...because it’s these four guys playing the music of Steve Lacy. So in a way, it’s a quintet. And I view that as being essential to this group; that it needs that; that’s what provides the glue for the whole thing is the meeting of these four living musicians with this one musician’s compositional stuff. I was trying to figure out how to get the group back together, and to do it in a way that’s fun and interesting and would make sense to me. That’s when I started thinking that we needed a vehicle to express ourselves, because we had developed an actual band sound, which took years and had been a dream come true for me, it was what I wanted for the longest time. But I needed something that would serve the band, rather than the band serving the music. So that’s how I came up with these conceptual games; saying “Yeah, let’s do a boxed-set” and by the perverse nature of that game, I was going to have to write a whole big book of tunes. So I thought, “We’re going to do this whole boxed-set, and since some of the material is un-coverable, we’re going to have to do some arranging and work of putting it together”. But then I decided to take it a step further and since I was no longer interested in playing Steve’s music as he had played it, I thought that I should be more of myself in arranging this material and so I came up with a couple of rules for myself in terms of how I would arrange the material. As I worked this way, I did have thought that if Zombie Steve Lacy showed up and asked me, “What are you doing to my music? That’s not what I wrote!”, that I would respond, “Yeah sorry, but this is how we’re going to do it." I had to let go of this need to be the obedient student, or the good student about it, because I feel like I had done that and I had proved it, if it needed any proving. I had certainly proved it to myself. That being said, some of the tunes on Beating the Teens sound not-too-different from the original: “The Wane” sounds pretty similar; “The Wire” kind of different, but not too different; “The Owl” is actually pretty similar. But other tunes sound nothing like the original: so “Crops”, “Scraps”, and “Roba” sound nothing like Steve’s versions. So everything sits on this continuum of divergence from the original, where some things are pretty close, and other things are fundamentally, drastically changed from what they were. And that was really intentional on my part, because I was trying to find a way for us to have fun! Early on, one of Steve’s lessons--and he’s written about this and said this--was that the most important question for him was, “Is this alive or is this dead?”. So if this is dead, and feels dead, it isn’t worth one’s time. One should invest one’s self and feed one’s self with things that are living and that sustain one’s self and give one life. So playing Steve’s music the exact way that he had written it, and the exact way that he had played it, wasn’t going to be alive enough for me, there wasn’t enough life in that approach anymore. That’s how this album came about, and it’s definitely more conceptual than the previous two.

You asked an interesting question in the video that accompanied the Kickstarter campaign, and you didn’t really provide an answer, but you ask something about why spend two years re-arranging these pieces, as opposed to composing your own material, which you’re certainly capable of doing, but rather really taking on this whole boxed-set and really changing it and making it your own. So what went into the decision to do this instead of taking the rapport that you were talking about with Kirk and Tomas and channeling it to Josh Sinton pieces, rather than making Steve Lacy your own?

Right, the question could be asked: why should I go through all of this trouble when I could write all original material? Well there’s kind of a three-pronged answer to this: one, I gave part of the answer when I said that this band, Ideal Bread, consists of this sort of weird quintet--it has to be us with the music of Steve Lacy, and that’s simply what the band is. The rock band Lynrd Skynrd continued doing the same music, even after their original lead singer died. The lead singer who replaced him was his brother, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch, but it was a stretch. So they didn’t totally revamp themselves, but rather said, ‘Nope, we’re still Lynrd Skynrd and we do the exact same tunes, but with a different guy’. AC/DC is the same thing as well: Bon Scott died, they got another singer and kept doing the same tunes, or tunes in that mold or style. So part of this answer is that part of the nature of this band is dealing with Steve Lacy material. It’s a great gift and also an obstacle, a difficulty, a problem to deal with. What happens when I as the leader, or anyone else in the band, feels stifled or restricted by doing Steve Lacy material? How do you deal with that? That tension, to me, is fascinating. And my favorite art is born of tensions, sometimes irreconcilable tensions actually, which I think makes me a bit of an outlier in today’s society. I mean I’m perfectly happy not understanding or not grasping something that I’ve experienced or observed. I’m really okay with that. I’d rather there be a tension which gives something life...I’d rather walk away from something in which I have unresolved questions, than witness something where everything gets tied up and resolved. So there’s that part of it.

The second part of it is that this is a question for the listener to deal with. You know, in the promotional materials for this record, Beating the Teens is called a “21st Century document” and I do think that this is a 21st century issue. Young artists today have this deep, deep sonic archive available now, of all sorts of music--it baffles me when people say that there’s no good music being made today. That’s just absurd and stupid. The hard thing today is to really stop and listen closely enough, and with enough attention, to realize that you either like or don’t like something, or understand or don’t understand. If I were a young person now, I would never leave my bedroom. I would simply sit there, with the internet plugged in and just listen to record after record and watch movie after movie. Basically, one doesn’t have to live one’s own life anymore, one can simply passively absorb elements and artifacts of other people’s lives. And this is a dilemma! It’s a wonderful thing, but it’s a dilemma, it’s a tension. What does one do with this tension that all this art is on the one hand, really gratifying, edifying, and fascinating, but on the other, at a certain point you’ve got to live? You have to make a decision, and I think everyone does this whether or not they realize it, of saying, “Okay, am I going to make something right now or just absorb something? If I’m going to absorb, what stuff is it going to be? How am I going to parcel out the time? If I’m going to make stuff, what stuff am I going to make?”. I think that this is a uniquely early 21st Century dilemma, so I made this record with a point of articulating that dilemma. Personally, what do I, Josh Sinton, do with all of these records available now? Do I just leave them there? Do I assume that they’re there? What am I to make of this? And I think that this is a question for people to work out when they hear it.

Right now I’m reading this author Roberto Bolaño.

Oh yeah! 2666? He’s great.

Yeah, I’m reading that, and I just finished The Savage Detectives. But he has this great book about Nazis...

Nazi Literature in the Americas?

Right, where he imagines a whole alternate reality in which he lists off all of these books written by Nazi authors. And likewise in some of the footnotes to Infinite Jest, where David Foster Wallace gets into the filmography of one of characters.

James Incandenza.

Right. And I think that this is an old question in literature, and literary criticism, which poses the question, what are we to make of this? This author has just listed an imagined list of works, so what are we to focus on? Are we to focus on the imaginary work? Are we to focus on the author who created this imaginary work? You know, this whole issue of authorship. And there’s this whole big thing in the literary arts of who wrote what, and ghost names or pen names.

It goes all the way back to Don Quixote.

Exactly, exactly. When I finally read it, I was amazed by how weird that novel is. It’s an amazingly weird novel and I think a lot of modernist literature really partakes of that.

It’s like 400 years before its time.

Right, and the Arabian Nights as well. It’s this whole thing of, ‘Let me tell you a story, but it’s a story that someone else told me’. And as that story gets under way, there’s a character in it who begins to tell his own story. Sooner or later, you’re down the worm hole, and at a certain point you’ve got to shake yourself in order to realize that the level of complexity with those stories within stories is actually a literary device; it’s an artificial thing so that this story can be told. But I just thought this whole issue would be interesting and pertinent to raise in sonic form. I like that tension of “Sinton said that Lacy wrote this material, yet when I listen to Lacy’s version of ‘Crops’ it sounds nothing like what Sinton wrote. So wait a minute: What did he write? Who’s the writer here?” And this is an old jazz tradition. One could easily make the argument that even though Hoagy Carmichael’s name is on “Stardust," it's actually Louis Armstrong’s song, because he’s the one who made it famous. Same thing with all of these songs that Louis Armstrong popularized. It’s this indelible stamp that a performer puts on something, which immediately make's one ask "Who’s the author of this piece?" This whole issue is being reawakened in Duke Ellington’s work now, where you have people saying, “Duke Ellington didn’t write this material, he just stole it” and you have other people saying, “Of course he wrote it, because Cootie Williams never got around to writing down ‘Concerto for Cootie’. My answer is that they both wrote it, because when we say the name Duke Ellington, we’re referring to a constellation of musicians and relationships. It’s the same thing when we say John Coltrane, particularly the John Coltrane Quartet, you’re talking about a constellation of people, it’s not just one person, and both Coltrane and Ellington were both very aware of this. So I think the same thing holds true here, too; that when someone says Steve Lacy or Josh Sinton, it’s not as simple as just this one person.

And the third reason I did this was to put philosophy into action. A long time ago, I came up with this concept for what I call “flexible containers” which are what I think a piece of music is--kind of like a glass jar, but a glass jar that you could easily melt and shape into whatever you want, or is rather shaped by whatever contents you put into it. You know, you could make something that looks like a glass jar, where the jar is the piece of music and what you’re putting into it is yourself. Then all of a sudden it looks like a door-stop, and everybody thinks it looks like a door-stop. So with that in mind, I realized that the container doesn’t really matter; it doesn’t matter what I started with, as long as I can shape it to what I want it to be. And the less like it's original form it is, the greater the tension; this is a thing I can use in making art and I just need to be aware of that. The further away the source material is from my rendition, the greater the tension. That can be either a good or a bad thing. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a thing. The closer my rendition is to the source material, the tension decreases. It all just depends on what I’m using it for. I just need to be aware of it. With that idea in mind, it doesn’t matter if it’s my name on the composition, or Steve Lacy’s name on the composition or if it’s Lady Gaga’s name on the composition. I mean it matters economically and legally, but artistically and aesthetically it doesn’t at all. I was made aware of this concept by artists like Anthony Braxton, but also guys like Ran Blake. When Ran Blake plays a tune, it doesn’t matter who wrote it because it sounds like a Ran Blake tune. He’s really foundational to my thinking about this stuff. So I realized that for Beating the Teens, we can call them Steve Lacy tunes, but that tells you nothing about the sound of the record. I was pushing this philosophical concept to a sort of logical limit--if I believe in this, then I should be able to listen to someone else’s music, and devote myself to it with some perseverance, and come up with something that I believe in. The problem with putting philosophy into practice is that people are not going to be so interested in that. I am aware that there are people who are going to be coming to the record wanting to hear a Steve Lacy album and they’re not going to hear one and they’re going to be perplexed and disappointed. And then there are going to be other people who would just like to hear a record, without any consideration of any of these conceptual underpinnings. And I get all that, but this is just what I needed and why I needed to do it, in a way.

So maybe we can talk a bit about Hopkins, the newest member of the band. He’s been in the group for a bit, but this is his first record with you guys. How did you come to know him? Maybe you can talk a bit about his series Out of Your Head?

Sure! So we met him in 2010. In 2010 we went to Baltimore to play a show at An Die Musik. Reuben couldn’t make the gig, but he recommended that I call Adam. So we did, then had a quick rehearsal before the hit, did the show and it went well. He was a really sweet guy. And then I didn’t really end up hearing anything from him afterwards. Adam moved to New York in early 2012 and he started doing the Out of Your Head series in Brooklyn. And 2012 was when I started working on this record. I started writing in January and then started rehearsing in July or August of 2012. Initially, I had gone to this guy Richard Giddens to play bass for us. And I had tried to get Richard to work with us in 2010 or 11, but he was really busy with his day-job--he was a member of Stomp at that time.

Tomas was in that as well, right?

Right, because the way I found Richard was that I went to Tomas and asked him who he liked playing with. I like a rhythm section that is happy to play together. And he recommended Richard, which was great because I had wanted to play with him ever since we had done a gig together that had been really fun, but he was never regularly available. But he was available in 2012 and we started rehearsing with him. In July I had started this regiment of twice-a-month rehearsals and once-a-month shows, so that I could start road-testing the new material. I put myself on a schedule based on the numerics of the project. So if we have 26 pieces, and have 2 rehearsals a month and a show a month, then I should be able to roll stuff out at such-and-such a rate, and be able to have it all done by the beginning of 2013, or so. Anyways, we started working with Richard and it was going well, but literally on New Years Day of 2013, Richard called me up and he had broken his hand. And we had a string of 4 shows in New England in the middle of January. It was really tough. I felt terrible for Richard, but he totally understood if I needed to find another bass player for the tour. So I asked Adam if he would sub for Richard, and he did. And he was everything we asked for: he was up for all the technical demands we asked for, which were extensive in some cases, but at the same time he was in the right place, emotionally. He understood that he was subbing for somebody, he understood that he was not our regular guy at the time, and he was totally down for that. So we went on this tour, and it went really well, Adam sounded amazing, and got stronger and stronger with the music, etc. But it turned into this sort of unfortunate thing for me and for Richard because Richard wasn’t able to play until April or May, and the whole time that that was going on I was still cranking out new arrangements and I was still booking shows and rehearsing the music. So basically what happened was that Adam stepped in for about four or five months, and then I just had to talk to Richard. Adam, without anyone meaning for this to happen, grew into the bass chair for this band, replacing Richard. So that’s how Adam came in and it’s been great. It’s worked out really perfectly. And what Adam built in Baltimore with Out of Your Head is amazing and I feel lucky because I know, probably over the next year or so, that when more and more people hear Adam play and meet him and see what an affable, and personable guy he is, that it’s going to be harder and harder to work with him. He does everything that one wants from a great musician and he plays bass which everyone needs! It’s only a matter of time until he’s unavailable.

So what’s some recorded music you’ve been listening to lately?

Lately I’ve had this dream of narrowing down this mountain of CDs which sit on top of my record player, and I’ve made almost no headway.