James Carney (II)
This interview with James Carney was conducted by email during May-June 2009.
Tony Reif: Your first record with the Group, Green-Wood, got a lot of great press, and I’m just curious whether anything that the critics wrote about it actually made you look at it in a new light, or had some effect on how you compose for or lead the band. More generally, how do you think this record is different from the first? Have your ideas about being a jazz composer/musician evolved much in the meantime?
James Carney: Well, anytime someone writes positive things about your work it feels good, no matter what other musicians might say. But I believe that even if the album didn’t receive that praise I’d still be happy with the compositions, the playing, and the recording. I suppose the press was a confirmation that what I’m hearing and believing in is something that resonates with at least a few others as well.
The biggest difference between Green-Wood and Ways & Means is that everything was conceived from a cinematic perspective this time, and written sequentially as an album, although I did end up changing the order of two movements after the premiere, which made it feel more natural and film-like to me. Ways & Means is also different in that I purposely left certain sections of the album open so that we could compose in the moment. There are three free improvisations and additionally, within the framework of most of the other composed pieces, there is a huge amount of open terrain. But that doesn’t mean the forms aren’t there; they are, but they’re perhaps a little less obvious than they are on Green-Wood. The other difference is that I feel I improved my orchestration for this group by having more familiarity with the player’s personalities, and I was also more careful about my use of the registers and frequencies of the keyboards so that the blend was more balanced and contrapuntal in nature. When you’ve got four horns – two brass and two reeds – they eat up a lot of frequencies in the mix, especially with wide intervallic voicings, so I think I learned to use the palette of piano, Fender Rhodes, and synth in more complementary ways from a sonic and compositional perspective.
As far as being an improviser and composer, I’ve come to realize that as time goes by the differences between approaches, styles, and eras of music are almost meaningless to me, and in fact I see more of a continuum between everything than I ever did before.
TR: In the liner notes you mention that Green-Wood included two pieces from a score you were commissioned to write and perform for a festival screening of a 1925 Hollywood movie called His People. Of course, you spent years in L.A. composing and recording film scores for Imax films, you’re totally familiar with the process. You go on to say: “Ways & Means was conceived and executed as a virtual film score – not reliant on any specific images to tell its tale. The overall story emanates from the compositions, but the plotlines develop through the interpretations and direction of the players….Since we didn’t have to worry about hitting action frames…this commission insured that my film music could hold onto its own natural sense of cadence, and that we could freely play, improvise and, ultimately, tell a cinematic story from the perspective of the musician.” A lot of music, including jazz, that is expansive or atmospheric or seems like it could contain a program or evoke visual images in the listener’s mind is routinely called cinematic. I’m wondering how literally we should take your statement. When you were writing the music, did you have some narrative arc in mind, a definite program, a progression of colors and emotions? And did you have the title already? What are the ways and means, and what about the references to native Americans in two of the song titles? How do the three free improvs fit into the concept? And did you discuss any of this with the musicians?
JC: No, I didn’t discuss any of this with the musicians, because I have found that, generally speaking, the less a bandleader says, the better. But I did write from the title, and I really did think about a 70-minute dramatic narrative film when I wrote every piece in the album, and how those individual compositions would intertwine, because there is a different sort of approach with film scoring, in that the music should always complement and enhance the onscreen action and emotion. Yes, lots of music can sound cinematic and atmospheric, but this was a conscious effort to write cues that could be used in a drama. I wanted to create music that could function as the complete score for an edited sequence of images – music that would have themes, sound effects, atmosphere, shock value, drones, periods of time with no established tempo, and dynamic range surprises that are usually a component of scores. And I continually visualized the end result during the process – that we would provide a complete wall-to-wall 70-minute soundtrack that a film director could cut images and sequences to without changing anything. I didn’t think of a specific story, but I did ponder and focus on abstracted collages of scenes from many films I admired in the past, so that was my general guide. But in traditional film scoring, it’s rare to have the music be jazz-based, or improvisational in nature, and usually when it is, it’s a single or specific type of jazz like bebop or ragtime, big band or cool. And, almost always, the music becomes sliced and diced, because most directors will usually place utmost importance on the length of the visual sequences, not the length or cadence of the music, even if it makes the music sound unnaturally altered.
When I scored projects in the past they never featured group improvisation, and they never used all the sonic tools I now have at my disposal. It’s not just blending synths and acoustic instruments in a jazz context – it’s the ability of my band members to coax very unique and sometimes completely unpredictable sounds from their instruments because of their musicianship and their open aesthetic. And most importantly, it’s the blend of all of those sounds, intervals, chords, and their related partials that I wanted to exploit, coming from both the composed passages and the open sections. You can’t plan it, and you really can’t orchestrate it, either.
I love the challenge of writing a long-form composition, orchestrating it, and then handing off the reins of control to everyone in the group so that we have the chance to go somewhere completely unplanned. That rarely, if ever, happens with music in a dramatic film. And that’s also partly the premise behind the title: that I finally had my own personal ways and means – a unique opportunity, really – to create powerful sonic material by mixing these great improvisers with analog synthesis and traditional keyboards in music that had a film-like character. I also wanted to explore more playing inside the piano, which I did, and it’s the blends that we achieved, and the organic modulations of tempo and texture that I’m particularly excited about.
About the song titles, Onondaga is the name of the upstate New York county that I was born and raised in – the rough translation of “Onondaga” is “People of the Hills.” I wrote the music from the title, and I was thinking about deep winter, snow and the bitter cold I grew up in. “Pow Wow” just struck me as a suitable title, but I guess I didn’t think consciously about the significance of the combined titles, or any direct connection to Native Americans.
TR: Several people have remarked on the analog synth (or synths?) that you like to use, and it’s back on pieces like “Onondaga” and “Legal Action.” Could you say something about how you use it to color the music, and more broadly how you use the range of instruments in the group to create colors and textures as well as harmonic interest? While you’re composing a piece do you specify certain instruments for the harmonies, or does that come later? Do you hear harmony and tone color as linked expressive variables?
JC: Green-Wood marked the first time I had ever used a synthesizer on any of my albums, although I used them frequently back in the scoring days. I only own and use one synthesizer, an Alesis Andromeda, which I discovered shortly before moving to New York, and I was able to purchase one a year after that at dealer cost. It’s a current instrument, and features digital storage of patches, but it only uses older analog technology throughout the audio chain, so it offers the sonic character of classic synths from the 70s and 80s. It is also excitingly unpredictable because the oscillators are analog and are therefore subject to drift, as are lots of its other parameters. For me it’s the most human and dynamic synthesizer I’ve ever used, and it inspires me to write. On Ways & Means I use the Andromeda a lot, and the tunes I play that feature it were written on it, motivated from the sounds themselves. It just feels like a keyboard instrument that responds to me the same way a good piano or a good Fender Rhodes does.
A synthesizer also offers a nice timbral change for a pianist because, unlike the piano, we can sustain notes, bend pitch, and modulate the sound continuously the way a horn or string player can, and it’s the perfect instrument for use with film music. It’s great for drones and ambience, and establishing moods. Plus I’ve found that it works well with acoustic instruments, and when it’s combined with them the partials that are created in the blend are especially interesting. The mix of acoustic and electronic creates bundles of sounds that are almost synergistic in nature and often very surprising.
As far as arranging, I do think about the orchestration as part of the compositional process, so it is usually in development from an early stage, and often I’m interlacing the parts at the same time I’m writing the melody. There are several tunes – like “Squatters” and “Gargoyles” – where the orchestration for all voices was done at the same time, with each of the four horn voices completely dependent on the others. That means you are often going back and forth and modifying them all as work progresses so that all parts have equal importance and “weight” in the arrangement. On this project I also tried to use the instruments in ways I might not have in the past, for example writing trombone parts above the other horns, or having the trombone play bass parts while assigning the contrabass arco lines to a higher register than usual.
TR: It’s hard to tour a 7-piece band, yet the richness of the music depends on having more than a trio or quartet to play it. What do you feel though is the essence of your music, and can it be realized by practically any formation?
JC: Whenever I compose, I strive to write music that I think will sound complete if I play it as a solo piano arrangement. I remember reading advice once from a successful songwriter; he said that if the tune can’t stand on its own with just voice and acoustic guitar then it’s probably not much of a tune, and I’d say that I pretty much agree. I also think that benchmark translates to just about any other genre, because a composition is a composition, and to a certain extent it is only going to be effective if it sounds good no matter what circumstance it is played in. In my case, I often lift the arrangements for the horns from the exact same chord voicings and voice-leading that I’ve set up on the piano during the writing process, and many times I can cover the parts or at least some of them if I’m playing solo or trio.
So my ultimate goal is for the music to be modular; that it can successfully adapt to various formats: solo, duo, trio, or more. Sometimes I modify the arrangements so that when we play gigs as a quartet or quintet those two horn parts may be slightly different to compensate for the lack of all four horns together, and other times I just have the players play the same parts they were playing for the larger group, because I can usually fill in what the other horns are playing on the arrangement.