Aaron Parks Interview: Allow the Record to Show Up
Photo by Anna Yatskevich
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Describing a record as a band's "loosest" yet is too often either a lazy euphemism for saying that it sounds incoherent or an effort to obscure the fact that it sounds the same, desperate to find a differentiator. Of course, you now know that I'm going to say that for jazz pianist Aaron Parks, the third record from his band Little Big is, for real, their loosest album. But in speaking to Parks last month over Zoom from his home in Lisbon, what I found was that there were material reasons for the album's sense of untethered security. For one, Parks and his quartet--guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard Jr., and, for the first time on a studio album, drummer Jongkuk Kim--decided that though they would release Little Big III (Blue Note) under Parks' name, it was everyone's band, each member's songs and visions equally welcome, fostering a proper creative environment. Moreover, before recording, the quartet was able to rehearse the songs all day and perform them for an audience at night for five days, seeing for themselves the songs take shape just as audience members did.
Little Big III is a free-sounding record not because it's ramshackle but in that the twists and turns it takes are cohesive, yet natural. It starts with the exploratory "Flyways", Kim's skittering, syncopating drums and Tuohey's spritely, hazy lead guitar line breaking up Parks' and Ginyard Jr.'s tandem lines; the band breaks from the pattern but always returns to the main theme, like a pet checking out a new person. From there, "Locked Down" goes from creaky to cosmic: Its lurching beat and warm guitars carry the song to an end where Kim's drum rolls sound like a black hole. But for every song layered with expressive themes, there are (in hindsight) necessary breathers, like the stark, emotive "Heart Stories", or the Western guitar-addled "Willamina". And many songs feature a push and pull within themselves, like "The Machines Say No", whose subdued guitar line is subsumed by mighty, hip-hop style drums. Little Big III is the type of album that bends time with its paradoxes. Just as you were getting into a groove, it surprises you around every corner, but when you look back, you realize there's nowhere else you'd rather be.
Parks spoke with me about the making of Little Big III, working with big-name producers with varying styles, storytelling, record sequencing, and Invisible Cinema, his only other record for Blue Note as bandleader. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: You've said Little Big III feels raw and honest. Did you feel like less of a bandleader and more of a band guider making this record?
Aaron Parks: A couple of things were very concrete. Greg and I clearly made a decision that it wasn't going to be just my band anymore. It would be my name, because we weren't going to change the metadata, how we built our audience. [But] it's a group thing. It's especially Greg and I. That's my co-pilot, right there. Knowing that very clearly and having that discussed, that [Little Big] was a band that I was in, started to change my approach where it didn't feel like this thing I was trying to lift off the ground. "We gotta get it right! Let's get to my ideal." We had already created a sound for ourselves with the first two records. Now, the band itself starts to tell us what to do.
Right before hitting the studio, we worked with ShapeShifter Plus, part of ShapeShifter Lab, a wonderful space in Brooklyn run by Matt Garrison, son of Jimmy Garrison. He and his business partner Fortuna [Sung] opened up the space to us to be able to do three days of all-day rehearsals and three nights of performances. We had a chance to really get under the hood and try things from different angles. In the "jazz" world, way too often, [you get] one or maybe two rehearsals, and if you're lucky, there's a gig before the record. But more often than not, you make the record, you tour the record. For us, we wanted to go into the laboratory a little bit first to start to get the chemistry going, play a few shows in front of a live audience with these new songs, just to sort of start being a little less self-conscious on them. Then, immediately go into the studio. Those five days at ShapeShifter Lab were essential to set us up to hit the studio and allow the record to show up.
SILY: The record that wants to be made will be made. It's like it's a living, breathing thing. Have you had that recording experience with any other records, where you get the opportunity to road test before recording?
AP: I've had the opportunity to do something on the road. It's funny, though, because it doesn't work in the same way as you would think. There's a trio record from [2017], Find The Way with Ben Street and Billy Hart on ECM. We had 6 dates with the band in the UK, three days to record in the South of France. For a variety of reasons, we were playing one way on the road and had built up our chemistry and figured out what we were doing, but the moment we hit the studio, Billy played completely differently because [label founder] Manfred Eicher was there in the room. He knows what Manfred likes out of the drums. It was very interesting. I actually really love that record, and it doesn't sound anything like what we were playing on that tour.
It always does help to have that basis of trust and communication and feeling like things are flowing already. You're not starting from zero, even if you do take it in a different direction, ultimately. This record, for me, all the way through, it felt really special to be making it. As we were making it, in addition to how we prepared for it, we went to the studio itself and hunkered down as a band there, in Dreamland Recording studios up near Woodstock. [Blue Note president] Don Was was also there. [His] presence was valuable in so many ways and shows you the power of attunement and attention and how that transcends and bypasses the need for words some of the time. Don's just fully checked in being present as he was listening. He did something as a producer that I hadn't seen before, which was to set up a headphone station for himself in the big room with the band while we were tracking. He wasn't behind the glass listening and taking notes. He was in the room with us, vibrating. Having someone with good, warm, encouraging vibes and who is listening, and you're playing for them and each other, it gave a different focus. It was very special for us all to be in our own little world we were making there in the studio. It made for a really memorable experience.
SILY: Like Manfred Eicher, he's a big name, the president of the label, but it sounds like something completely different. It was almost like he was a part of the band rather than the boss.
AP: To be clear, I like them both. I really loved working with Manfred as well. I went into the experience working with Manfred with full surrender, willing to be manhandled. "Make your record with me." In that regard, I decided for that record to be a sideman in my own band, to let Manfred make the record he thought we should make. Working with Don, there's such a transparency there, and sometimes, when needed, the occasional incisive, "Hey, let's get things back on track." A handful of small words here, encouragement there, making sure we don't get bogged down in the micro and lose sight of the macro. Having the ability to be in a place where we were all completely free from the outside world. We made our own little bubble for the four days we were there and lived in the world of the record. Whenever that's possible, especially for music like this that is as much about world-building as it is about anything else, I feel it's essential, holing up.
SILY: Are there any concrete ways holing up affected the mood of individual songs?
AP: In some ways, it feels a lot more of a piece, somehow, than the previous [Little Big records]. I still have a lot of love for those records, but as a listener, they can feel a little more herky-jerky, like I'm being pulled around in a bunch of different worlds. This one, we build a mood and sustain it. As we were recording the record, it became apparent we already had the sound. Most of the records I made in the past, you get something as good as you can in the studio, and you know you'll have to reimagine it later on. "We'll fix it in post." We really got the record sounding very close to how it sounds on the final album as we were tracking. Staying in that space as we were listening to the playback, being able to go right back to the control room if you wanted to [do so] in the middle of the night. The entire record, I was wearing slippers, because I was treating it like I was in the bedroom. We did a big round of shopping for everyone so we would all have breakfast together in the morning. Having conversations with Don over coffee and matcha about Big Thief or Thomas Morgan or whatever came to our minds. It felt less like going to work and more like the whole day was the process. It was all creation, all part of it.
Photo by Anna Yatskevich
SILY: I take it you had most of the songs written and just added in improvisational elements during the recording.
AP: Exactly. By the time we hit the studio, we knew what we were doing, but there were a lot of things we hadn't decided upon at the beginning of the rehearsal week. A lot of my pieces, even in the studio, we went back and forth with compositional ideas, details of phrasing, or slight things in the form that only revealed themselves when we found it in the moment. I really love how the improvisation works on this record. On the earlier Little Big records, sometimes, it had a feeling of something I was trying to build or achieve, these songs of mine I was trying to bring out into the world. "Here's what I'm hearing, let's try to make it as close as we can to the ideal of it." There was a certain element of striving inside of [those records] that when it came to the improvisation, it could still be really cool, but there was something that felt at times like it was playing safe. We were so much focused on being able to build this thing that I wasn't allowing enough of the chaos energy to enter into it, for my own sake. Now that it feels much more alive, now that it feels like it's not mine, it feels a bit more thorny and dangerous when it needs and wants to be, and we're not getting in the way of that anymore. We're not forcing it to be exciting if it doesn't want to. It has less of a feeling of striving in any way. The songs are whatever they are.
SILY: There are moments where Greg's guitars are really scraggly, more so than usual, or there's a starkness to Jongkuk's drums. It doesn't really sound like you're trying to make a grand statement in the moment, you're just letting it be.
AP: On a tune like "Locked Down": That's a way I never would have allowed myself to play in the past, more angular, blurry, almost drunk-sounding. It's funny because this is the first Little Big record I was totally straight edge leading up to it and the recording. It was an interesting experience for me, because the previous two Little Big records were done on pretty heroic doses of mushrooms. This was definitely a cleaner vibe that actually sounded a little more intoxicated, in its own way.
SILY: This is your second Blue Note record as a band leader after Invisible Cinema, which is one of my favorite contemporary jazz records. Does this album have any sort of connection to that record?
AP: They're deeply connected. This band, Little Big, is taking some of those ideas I was looking after with Invisible Cinema and seeing whether I could boil [them] down a little bit more, in terms of feeling less stylistically grafted onto one another. Not jazz guys using rock ideas, but, "Can we have the improvisation and composition and mood and storytelling all start from the same center?" I still stand by [Invisible Cinema]. My playing on it sounds so youthful, scampering, in a way that sometimes, I'm like, "Oh boy, young man, chill out." [But it's faithful to the] idea of [allowing] so-called genres to really fuse with each other. That's one of the things I've been after with this band, allowing it to reduce to what is most essential. I've found that in some ways, the harmonic world of these songs has gotten much simpler and starker. How can I make the music that I'm playing sound to feel more like the music I most like to listen to?
SILY: And doing so in a way where parts of the process are out of your control.
AP: Exactly. It makes sense for this one to be coming back to Blue Note after all these years, the spiritual successor to the things I was after with Invisible Cinema years ago. It's looking at the same questions and finding different answers.
SILY: How do you approach storytelling with your music? Are there stories behind the songs, and what do you mean by "stories?"
AP: It's a funny thing, because I use that word a lot, and [the songs are] not necessarily concretely grounded. It's not a specific, actual story. They're not biographical--not most of them, anyways. There's another record that will come out next year [whose songs are based off] people, images, and dedications--not so much stories.
It's such a good question, and it's one I'm not sure I know how to answer, except for a feeling of narrative and folktale. I find myself drawn to myth and things that have been reduced into something that becomes totemic, in one way or another, and has a storytelling aspect that in some ways, is a specific story, and in other ways, is archetypical. I find myself drawn towards and often writing music that requires a sense of storytelling logic. What are the principles of the world of the song? How does gravity work in this environment? How do these different characters of the different leitmotifs relate to each other? Where might they culminate in surprising ways? As a composer, how can you withhold a part of the composition and have it emerge later on? A song like "Heart Stories" comes to mind. It's a lullaby. The first half of the song has a pathos.
SILY: There's a melancholy to it.
AP: That's the right word. There's a melancholy to it, especially the first half of it, that's a bit working with primary colors. It's simultaneously a lullaby and highly structured. It's mostly in various shades of blue at the beginning, you might say. Halfway through that song, the bottom falls out. It takes this narrative turn of leaving the question unanswered that it proposed, cutting you off in the middle, and putting you in a realm of more kaleidoscopic, more shifting emotions, more possibility. For me, it feels a little like you went from a sepia-toned thing to technicolor in the course of that song. That's a little bit on the simple side, but that's the kind of thing that comes to mind. It creates a feeling, that possibility of an emotional response in that moment--not an emotional response, hopefully, in a manipulative way, as that's not the goal either--allowing that story to unfold. That's as best as I can say it.
Photo by Anna Yatskevich
SILY: What went into the sequencing of the record? Was the process at all different from previous records?
AP: The process was just as obsessive and trying to create story with a sequence, as well, and simultaneously doing math because of vinyl. I was working on different sequences for a long time. This is the first Little Big record I don't wish we had done the sequence differently. The previous two records, I have strong feelings that I screwed up the sequence of it. I feel pretty strongly that this sequence is right. "Flyways" is the only way that the record can start. We tried a version that started with "Delusions", and it felt like a beatdown. To be perfectly frank, if I had a do-over, I wouldn't have picked "Delusions" as the lead single. Instead, it would be something even less representative of the record as a whole but very colorful and at the heart of the record, [like] "Little Beginnings".
[Though] "Flyways" for me works at the very beginning, there was something about it that felt a little bit too in common with the [opening song of the] second Little Big record, ["Attention, Earthlings"]. It felt a little bit like we were retreading familiar ground. The tunes are similar and different. They are both odd meter songs with tonal centers separated by a minor third. That's a lot. From there on, though, once [you] get into the heart of the record, each song as it comes along, you didn't see it coming but also feel that it was inevitable.
SILY: That's a common quality among my favorite records. Once I listen to it through all the way once, anything else wouldn't fit.
AP: Exactly. It was a puzzle putting this thing together and making it fit. The record is 42 minutes long, and we got it to 21 minutes each side, single vinyl. I was really happy we got it as short as we did, especially because the first two records were a bit on the bloated side. Single vinyl felt like the distillation. [David]'s tune "Little Beginnings" [is] right in the center of the record, I had asked him to write something for the band, and he wrote it right before we went into rehearsals. I can't imagine the record without it. It really does an important thing harmonically that adds a wider palate than the rest of the record has and showcases the chemistry of the band in real time, in a really special way.
Sequence is really interesting, and I'm glad you asked about it. It's something I put almost too much thought into. When the time is right, I will probably remix Little Big II and put it out again, because we did it in a hurry just before the pandemic. I'd like to put it out again with some bonus material, a different mix, and a different sequence. We didn't quite nail it.
