Gregg Belisle- Chi

This interview with Gregg Belisle- Chi was conducted by email during July 2015.

Tony Reif: Tell us about your musical background and studies as a guitarist and composer – how you started out, what musicians, composers and genres/styles of music have inspired you, who you’ve worked with, any highlights and milestones, etc. And you’re currently completing your M.Music in performance (and composition?) under Cuong Vu and Ted Poor at the University of Washington – what’s that been like?

Gregg Belisle- Chi: Like most guitarists, I started out playing rock music. That was everything from Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, to Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, sort of the typical guitarist trajectory. I got pretty serious about guitar around junior high and devoured records and mix tapes from friends, whatever I could get my hands on. I would circle all the guitars and amplifiers I wanted in guitar magazines. There was also a pretty lively music scene in my hometown, Richland; a lot of young, talented bands playing music that sounded like Radiohead.

It wasn’t until high school that I discovered jazz. I picked up a Charlie Christian transcription book and saw all these chords and lines that I just couldn’t understand. That was sort of the turning point where I knew if this was something I was going to do seriously, I had to explore everything. So, while jazz has been primarily my musical “career” and exploration, it’s all rooted in other music as well.

I decided to study music in college and moved to Seattle in 2008 to attend Cornish College of the Arts. That was all thanks to Larry Coryell, who was from my hometown and recommended me to the department chair there. I studied with Jay Thomas, who’s an amazing saxophonist and trumpeter, really rooted in bebop and swing. I also studied with Jim Knapp, who’s one of my favorite living composers today. It was through Jim, and playing in his band, that I got to meet and play with Bill Frisell. Both those guys have been really inspiring and encouraging to me, I’m really indebted to them.

I started working on my Masters at the University of Washington last year, three days after I got married. Still haven’t gone on our honeymoon. But, that was thanks to Cuong Vu, who is another hero of mine. I think we met when I was playing with Andy Clausen (of the Westerlies) and he got me into the program with a teacher’s assistant job. So, getting to study with Cuong and Ted Poor, as well as taking composition classes and getting the opportunity to teach, has been just the most incredible experience. It’s been a load of work, but has been rewarding beyond words. Earlier this year for our annual jazz festival (The Improvised Music Project Festival), we brought in Chris Cheek and Steve Swallow, with whom I got to play…and that was amazing because I’d been listening to Swallow since high school with John Scofield. So…man, all really great.

TR: What led to the creation of this music for solo electric guitar (with vocals by your wife, Chelsea Crabtree, on three tunes)? Would you say that Bill Frisell (a friend and mentor) and Ben Monder (and the Monder/Bleckmann collaborations) have been conscious influences? What about classical composers (you’ve mentioned Bartok and Ligeti)? If so, how do you see this music as moving beyond them to make its own statement?

GB-C: I guess it was two years ago now that I just found myself with an abundance of time and energy to seriously sit down and start composing. I’d been writing tunes for smaller ensembles, but not taking it super seriously. It came to the point where I finally had some time to think about what I was wanting to say, artistically. Bill was really encouraging. I mean; his enthusiasm is so infectious that it makes you want to work really hard and gets you really excited about what you’re doing. So that was definitely an influence. At the time I was listening to a lot of Ligeti, Bartok, and other 20^th century classical composers, as well as trying to figure out Monder’s sound and his approach to harmony. So, all of those circumstances sort of coalesced into this project; I was just trying to make music that represented where I was at, musically and personally.

TR: What’s your history of music-making and musical collaboration with Chelsea, and her background as a musician? It seems her contribution to this project was essential to it in some ways…

GB-C: Chelsea and I have been making music together, in some capacity, since we started dating in 2009. In a way it’s always been a part of our relationship, which is exciting and challenging. We did a demo together as a quartet with bass and drums, just jazz standards, basically to get gigs around town. But we didn’t really pursue that, mostly because we got involved with other projects. She sang in a really great choir called the Esoterics, directed by Eric Banks, who was a professor of ours at Cornish. They perform contemporary choral work pretty exclusively, I think. I also played in her band, while that was happening. It’s sort of on hold right now, but she’s working on her own singer/songwriter music that sort of straddles pop and jazz. The two of us also lead music at our church, half or more of the Sundays during the month. I’m not sure how familiar you are with contemporary church music in general, but it can be absolutely wretched, just God-awful. Fortunately, we have the opportunity to, musically, do whatever we want so we bring in our own arrangements of hymns or original compositions, and just try to make the music as exploratory and interesting as possible, whether that’s using odd time signatures, improvising, or whatever.

TR: Two of the songs with words have lyrics written by you. Have you done much music-and-lyrics songwriting before this? Also, what was it in particular about Wendell Berry’s poem “Sabbaths X (1998)” that led you to turn it into music?

GB-C: I have written a lot of songs, but sort of just recreationally and never with any intention of releasing them in any way. But more and more I’m attracted to the idea of incorporating songwriting into a jazz/improvising ensemble. I think jazz sort of missed the mark by just taking the Great American Songbook and using the chord progressions as vehicles to improvise over; everything is about the instrumental solo and the virtuosity of the players, but that sort of leaves out the listeners who might want to hear a great story or who appreciate great poetry, anyone who’s attracted to words, which seems like a majority of listeners today.

As for the Berry poem, which is written as a letter to his wife, I was just so moved by it that I thought it would make for a nice piece of music that Chelsea and I could perform together. It’s been some time since I’ve read it, so I’d have to go back and reread it to see if I can remember what it was that initially drew me in, but it was probably his imagery and his word choice. He’s so clear and descriptive without sounding blunt and he never enters into that realm of sappy sentimentality, even though it’s one of the most beautiful love letters I’ve ever read.

TR: What role do these songs play in the overall concept of Tenebrae? More generally, in what ways is literature important for you as a musician?

GB-C: For this music I drew a lot of inspiration from writers: when it came to composing, I divided up all the elements similarly to how you might a piece of fiction, in terms of form, phrase, structure, characters, development, motifs. All these things sort of relate to one another, in musical and literary terms. I should mention that a lot of this music was also influenced by literature: “Fear and Trembling” comes from a philosophical work by Soren Kierkegaard; “Tragedian” was a character in some piece of fiction that I can’t recall.

I would love to keep setting texts to music; it’s a great challenge to try and get inside a piece of writing and explain it musically. But I think I’m more interested in songwriting, as far as the whole ‘words and music’ thing goes. I just don’t think there’s a lot of jazz/improvising musicians who take that very seriously, probably to the detriment of the music.

TR: This music is all through-composed, meaning the improvisation is a matter of the realization of these scores – such as maybe the details of articulation, phrasing, effects and so on. (Do you use any effects apart from delay?). Is this a preferred way of working?

GB-C: I don’t really have a “preferred” way of working, but it was definitely intentional to keep it all through-composed, mostly because I really wanted to work on composition in a formal way. It stems from my frustration with purely improvised music scenes, not purely improvised music, but the mentality that “I can get up there, play whatever I want, and it’s cool.” First off, that’s not cool. Secondly, jazz has been so dedicated to improvisation that composition, which I don’t always see as the same thing, though some would argue that it is, has sort of gone on the back burner. I think that’s really unfortunate, especially if you see how classical/chamber music has evolved and how jazz has evolved. I think jazz, in spite of how young it is as an artform, is still pretty conservative.

Concerning effects: my guitar/effects/amplification setup changes a lot, but I will generally use a volume pedal for swells and dynamics, distortion when it is appropriate, minor delay to add a little dimension to the sound, and reverb. All of this runs stereo into two tube amplifiers which I have eq’d a little differently. This gives me a lot more options in post-production to dial in the sound that I have in my head.

TR: How do you see this music in relation (if any) to the various histories of guitar music, especially solo guitar – “alt-folk” (John Fahey, Nick Drake) and post-rock (Six Orders of Admittance), 20th century classical (Leo Brouwer) and ethnic-influenced musics (Dusan Bogdanovic), etc.?

GB-C: There’s really no denying that this is, as you put it, “guitar” music. But that can also mean a lot of different things. “Guitar” music to some means Van Halen and Steve Vai, which is great, but also pretty far removed from what this record is about. As far as the solo thing goes, I guess it does relate to players like Fahey and Nick Drake, both musicians that I love. Brouwer, sure, though I’m just now becoming familiar with his music. I’m not sure of the other two musicians, but I’m interested in checking them out.

I would say that the reason it turned out to be solo guitar was because 1) it’s the instrument I know best and 2) that seemed like a good place to start when it came to studying composition: to know the instrument you’re writing for. I know its limitations, especially my limitations, and I know how it can be manipulated to create music that might not be familiar to audiences. I guess that idea attracts me.

TR: Would you say you had an expressive purpose in mind when you composed these pieces? The Westerlies’ Andy Clausen (in whose bands you’ve been performing for several years) described the music as “strikingly beautiful and mysterious”, and I would go farther and say that much of can be quite unsettling, almost uncanny or mind-expanding – a deep, interior kind of music. Was this something you were thinking about as you composed and recorded it? Have you received other feedback about it that is very different from these characterizations?

GB-C: I feel like I can’t play music without expressing something, at least a part of who I am or where I’m coming from. I’m always trying to convey “beauty” in my compositions, but, simultaneously, I was also paying a lot of attention to harmonic dissonance and investigating how that feels, what kind of emotions it delivers. And you’re right, it is unsettling. I think if the music was just harmonically and melodically dissonant, it wouldn’t be as Andy described it, “strikingly beautiful”, which is a very nice thing to say. But I was very conscious about composing clear melodies and trying to make functional sense out of otherwise harmonically dissonant chord progressions.

I did hear a very sweet story from a concert we did – a friend of mine told me that, while we were playing “Sabbaths”, a couple in front of him turned to each other, longingly, got closer to each other and embraced. Could’ve been for a lot of reasons, maybe their date was really happening!

TR: Why did you name this suite of music “Tenebrae”?

GB-C: In the early stages of composing I was paying a lot of attention to the

smallest details: notes, phrase construction, the “architecture” of the pieces. But I wasn’t paying any attention to shading or color, or light and shadow. Once I started thinking about those things, in terms of harmony and tone, the pieces really started to transform. So “tenebrae”, Latin for “shadow”, seemed like the appropriate title.

TR: What was the recording process like? Did you do multiple takes and minimal editing? Were the vocals overdubbed?

GB-C: Recording was done in two days, everything was live. The first day we did guitar and vocals, the second day was all the solo stuff. We did have multiple takes and maybe did some editing, but I tried to keep it all live as much as possible. We recorded to analog tape, because I prefer that sound on guitars and also I knew that it would make me commit to takes, rather than having the option to do overdub after overdub. It was my first time working with Trevor Spencer and I’m pretty happy with the sound of everything. Mastering engineer Chris Vita was also really easy to work with and I’m very thankful to him. I mean, if I’d had a larger budget I might have done things slightly differently. But, thankfully, I’m still very happy with the result, which is sort of atypical for me. I tend to record or write things and then want to move on to the next thing as quickly as possible.

 TR: You have various other projects happening or in the works, including a duo with pianist Brian Kinsella, a trio with trumpet and bass, and a larger group involving reeds, trumpets, viola and drums. Is there any overlap with the feeling of Tenebrae, or do they go in very different directions?

 GB-C: All those projects are all over the place. A majority of the work I’ve done as a musician has been as a sideman, which has been great because I love playing in all these different contexts and styles. So all those projects that you mentioned are influenced from so many other places and musicians that it’s hard, at least for me, to recognize any overlap between them and Tenebrae. But having a totally unique voice as a guitarist and composer is the goal, and I guess that means consistency. Every day I’m trying to zero in on what that means for me.

TR: Where would you like to be in five years in terms of your music?

GB-C: I’d like to have a larger book of music, not only for this solo and duo thing, but other projects as well. I definitely don’t want to be playing my music exclusively. I love collaborating, I’ve probably learned most from playing the music of other people. Of course, I have plenty to learn as a composer and I will always pursue that thing, but I get really excited playing music that I’m unfamiliar with, that’s totally alien to me until I get to the rehearsal or the bandstand and am forced to deal with it. There’s a sort of freshness that those opportunities provide that can’t be replicated when you have an idea of how the music is going to sound beforehand, whether it’s a general/vague idea or a very specific, intentional one.