Houle / Hawkins / Eisenstadt
This interview with Alexander Hawkins, Harris Eisenstadt and François Houle was conducted during September 2018.
Tony Reif: My memory of the first gig you three played, at Ironworks during the 2014 Vancouver jazz fest, was that it was wild and mostly outside/free improv, and your second one two days later at Performance Works (a free Canada Day gig) was a little more self-contained, if that’s the right word, although still plenty intense and I believe mostly free. And then, when you came to make the record almost exactly two years later, without having performed together in the interim, this generally more contemplative and lyrical vibe surfaced. (Alex, I like your description “poised and spacious.”) It surely has something to do with the fact that all the pieces are composed – by the three of you plus Steve Lacy, Andrew Hill and Charles Ives – and did you come with all the pieces already selected, or just brought in some lead sheets and picked the tunes and worked up arrangements on the spot? Although it was a one-day session I don’t remember any rush to get enough music in the can, things just seemed to flow along. What do you attribute this level of comfort to – particularly as Alex and François, you hadn’t performed together apart from those two gigs?
François Houle: I think the answer lies in the fact that there’s a shared language and sensibility among us. I can pretty much go anywhere in the world and play with musicians for the first time and recognize certain common threads among us, be it world music, jazz, classical music, etc., there are always guiding lines that we gravitate towards. Having said that, I was actually thinking a lot ahead of our studio session about the quality of the music I wanted to create with Alex and Harris. In the little snapshots that I’d heard in their playing (from Harris and Alex’s Convergence Quartet, their individual recordings, as well as the two times the three of us performed live) I had a feeling there was enormous potential for more poetic and refined elements in our musicmaking. Within an energetic space we knew we could generate lots of efficient ideas together, but it’s the potential for a quieter, more introspective approach that intrigued me. So, except for s new piece, “Run Riot,” most of the material I brought to the session was fairly melody-centric stuff. During the session I could feel a quiet energy settling. Perhaps there was a bit of a post-festival, post-tour “let’s relax and have a nice hang” feeling in the air which led us to play with a slightly different perspective.
Alexander Hawkins: As far as I recall, we actually played all the material we then had at both gigs in 2014. I suppose it was mostly relatively ‘outside,’ but I think the compositions we brought were all very open, so we were able to play very freely but remain within the composition (so much to say that I don’t think at any stage we would have thought of ourselves as ‘free improvising’ – but I could be remembering this incorrectly).
Yes, I think that amazing energy of the Jazzfest audience at Ironworks certainly took things in a certain direction that night. I seem to recall Performance Works being very intense too, but yes, on that larger stage, with less intimacy (only in the sense of proximity to the audience – they were incredibly warm, reception-wise) I think we probably shaped the performance a certain way to communicate in that different setting.
Come the session, I think we were also able to pace things a different way because we could rely on detail being captured in hi-fi, in a way which can’t of course always happen in the live setting. My memory is that we each came armed with a few tunes, and just suggested things as we went according to the feel in the room. In fact, we didn’t even have a lead-sheet for the Andrew Hill tune “Dusk” – it was a half-remembered thing, which we scribbled out ourselves.
As to the level of comfort…hmmm, good question. I suppose although it’s true François and I hadn’t performed in the interim, it’s equally true that Harris and F, and H and I, do have quite a lot of history together, so two sides of the triangle were secure (and Harris and I had just come off the back of a tour, so were already ‘dialled in’). One other thing could be that although we were playing compositions, we’re all equally comfortable playing in free improvising contexts, where it’s of course much more usual to play in more ‘ad hoc’ settings – so we’re all accustomed to adjusting quickly to situations.
Harris Eisenstadt: Alex is quite right to point out that the studio has a lot to do with how the recording sounds. The Ironworks and Performance Works audiences were different from each other, of course, but both pretty electric, as I remember. I remember the morning of the recording as a typically overcast day in Vancouver, and the morning session unfolded slowly, patiently, with coffee and with some discussion about material. There was a general unhurried-ness to the recording that felt very different than those concerts. As to the comfort we felt during the session, since Alex and I had just finished a long trio tour we were indeed locked in. François and I had found a similar lock on a long tour with his quintet a few years before. And as to Alex and François finding an easy comfort level, I can only attribute that to their respective personalities and musicalities. We all trusted each other to find the music together.
TR: This is maybe a related question: all three of you are very familiar with the Western classical tradition (François, classical and contemporary art music have almost always made up a considerable part of your performing life) and obviously this record is some kind of freeish chamber jazz – like many other releases on Songlines. Could each of you say something about how you see that interface between jazz and classical music in your own practice as composer-performers, and in relation to this record?
FH: Well, for me it is a big question, with many challenges as to how we hear and make music. My musical experience straddling different esthetic streams, I have recently gravitated to a rather idiosyncratic and holistic view of the music world. My ideals are to try and understand and experience a clarinet-centric musical universe. The clarinet is omnipresent in so many cultures and stylistic arenas. This feeds me with a bottomless well of ideas. On this record the fact that we can navigate and find common threads in such contrasting materials as Lacy, Ives and Hill indicates a hyperawareness of the inner fabric of these luminaries’ compositional styles. It all comes together as a clear symbiotic discourse in this trio.
AH: For me, I genuinely don’t think about idiom when I play. However, I do practise a lot of classical music – for me, it’s a great way of keeping my chops in shape, but of course there’s the added appeal that there’s never any risk that any of the learned patterns will surface as ‘licks’ in an improvisation.
One thought: I do feel that classical musicians can be more sensitive to dynamic variations when they play than certain jazz musicians; and I think that as a trio, we do use a lot of dynamic shading. This is possibly one more concrete example of the influence of classical music here. I think classical music could encourage improvisers to think more structurally than just moment-to-moment, but of course this impulse could equally come from elsewhere…at any rate, I do feel that we’re thinking structurally throughout the album!
HE: I actually feel further away from the Western classical tradition these days than ever before. I’ve been so deeply immersed in batá study that I’ve barely been listening to or practicing anything else. But for many years (and presumably it will happen again) the Western traditions have profoundly informed my approach to composition and performance. I’ve been fascinated with the myriad approaches to organizing musical materials from the most monophonic to the most densely polyphonic. The wide dynamic range prized by concert music instrumentalists also continues to inform my approach to playing the drums.
TR: And another related question: the title of the record, “You Have Options,” is such a perfect summation of how improvisation, the requirement to always try to make things fresh and new in performance, enriches so much music-making, especially jazz but also classical music and of course many ‘world music’ traditions. But another theme that, François, you develop in your liner note, is the value, perhaps on some deep level even the necessity, of friendship if this kind of endeavour is to bear the tastiest fruit. Revisiting this session in its final form, does anyone notice any particular instances or moments where, to you, the collective music-making seems buoyed up by such musicianly fellow-feeling and creative delight?
FH: In “Run Riot,” for instance, there’s a real ecstatic musical moment where everything comes into focus rhythmically, harmonically, and energetically, somewhere in the middle of the piece. It lasts about 10 seconds. It’s moments like this (to my ears) that make the whole endeavor of improvisation worthwhile.
HE: I’m not sure I can point to an individual moment, but I remember a general “creative delight” both in the ease with which we seemed to be playing together, and also in the choice of composed materials. We were having fun, and that comes across.
AH: Well…I wouldn’t discount that creative tension can be an interesting thing, but I really feel that it’s romanticised, and that it’s actually almost always more productive to make music with people you get on with! I don’t think I can find specific moments in the music which are buoyed up as such…the truth of it is that I love to play so much that it’s always a joy (clichéd as that might sound): although for the sake of throwing an example out there of a nice thing that happens: around the 3:00 mark in “You Have Options” I start playing a syncopated discord figure in the right hand, and check out how Harris’ snare drum jumps right on it…Harris then introduces a figure on the toms at 3:40 which seems then to prod the piano right hand in turn to jump into a melodic idea. Meanwhile, François is just working away on this beautiful two-clarinet figure, sailing above all this.
But an interesting flip side to the joy of music making together is the way people who get on and are having fun can still capture a sort of melancholy. “The Pitts” is a nice example…it’s an almost impossibly sad tune in some ways! (But what I love about the performance is the total lack of sentimentality – like Monk. We play it a little bit like Michelangeli plays Chopin.)
TR: I know you’re all very interested in finally getting this trio on the road – any thoughts on how things might develop in the process of playing more together, and other repertoire or approaches you’d like to explore?
AH: No idea how it will develop – but the experience of the concerts being so different from one another, and then in turn the recording, is a real positive for me: it could well sound completely different again, but yet I’m sure it will be identifiably itself in some way, just as this recording sounds totally different in many way to those 2014 gigs, and yet definitely captures an essence of what we were about on those days.
HE: We will see what unfolds as far as more playing. It is increasingly difficult these days to find enough work for projects to develop, especially when a trio’s members live thousands of miles apart. And yet, when one considers projects in a more glacial sense, a group’s trajectory can happen over several years and still feel like there is some momentum. 2014, then 2016. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to play some more in 2019. One other thing about (semi-)glacial group development: it means that ostensibly the music will come out as different the next time as it did on the recording as it did during our first concerts together.
FH: Where there’s a will, there’s a way, regardless of geography. I’d like to think that there is lots of room and willingness on this planet to listen to this kind of musicmaking.