Peggy Lee

This interview with Peggy Lee was conducted by email during February 2018.

Tony Reif: Echo Painting came together in 2016 and its premiere was at that year’s Vancouver jazz festival. Could you talk about the genesis of the band in discussions between you and Rainbow Robert, the Canadian programmer of that year’s festival? You write on your website that “our intent was to create a new large ensemble including some of the most active and interesting improvisers on the Vancouver scene today”, combining veterans with younger players. Did you have the instrumentation in mind from the start, or was it mainly about various performers you like and their styles and musical personalities – or both at once? And what about the band name, what if anything does it signify?

Peggy Lee: Yes, Rainbow had invited me to create something new for the 2016 jazz festival and we both agreed that it would be great to bring together some of my longstanding band members with some of the younger players that I had recently begun to collaborate with. I wasn’t thinking about specific instruments really, just the players that I was excited about working with. The name to me simply speaks of our efforts to make sense of our world through artistic practice…And of course there are echoes of much of the music that has been meaningful to me over the years.

TR: So once the band members were selected, what was the process of writing, workshopping and rehearsing the music like? Everyone I think is given at least one solo where they can shine, but what about the compositions themselves? Were there some guiding principles, did you have an overall form in mind, or was it a more intuitive process of combining voices (pedal steel!) in various ways in the different pieces to bring out certain harmonic and textural qualities in the music? And how do the solos/duos and the arrangements work together here – did the players have much input into their roles in the arrangements? Were you writing more for these performers and their styles (like Ellington famously did) or more for the instrumentation? And how does your own voice as an improvising cellist fit into things in this band as compared with your other ones?

PL: I would say it was mostly intuitive. I knew that I wanted to write a suite and so “Incantation” was a good launching point and I went from there. I definitely was thinking of these particular players as I worked and wanted everyone to be featured and so I worked out a loose plan designating areas for solos etc. But specific arrangements came together once we started playing and the direction that the solos took was completely up to the musicians.

TR: Apart from the co-led trio Waxwing, the two other bands you lead, The Peggy Lee Band and Film in Music, have 8 performers; Echo Painting has 10. There are a few overlaps of personnel between bands – Jon and Brad for example are both also members of the Peggy Lee Band (and of course Dylan holds the drum chair in all 3). I would guess this has something to do with Brad and Jon’s sound and stylistic reach. They are both very lyrical players who can also be assertive, they cover the range from post-bop to free although hewing more to the inside than the outside, and the way their sounds blend with each other and with the trombone in both bands creates a beautiful sonic glow that I think of as a hallmark of your writing. I guess my question is, what draws you to these large small ensembles or small large ensembles, and what do you see as the commonalities and differences between these three ensembles in terms of the statements you’re making through them?

PL: Well, I don’t think that when I started this project I was necessarily thinking about starting another large band as a long term endeavour. This was originally a special one-off project for the jazz festival which has ended up having a life beyond…It certainly has a lot in common with the sound of the Peggy Lee Band with the horns, but adding violin and pedal steel creates another dimension. The Film in Music band feels quite different from both of these in that it was inspired by a particular show (Deadwood) and was meant to feature free improvisation in a more prominent way.

Oh and I should mention another co-led trio that I work with called Handmade Blade…This brings me back to your question about the role of my voice as an improvising cellist in these bands. In the larger groups I’ve been most interested in exploring ideas as a composer featuring improvisers, whereas in the trios, performing pieces by the other composers as well as my own, I’m working to develop as an improviser.

TR: You trained as a classical cellist and are still fairly active in classical music. Music is music and genre labels can be limiting, but I’m interested in how you see the overlap between these two worlds whose ethos is so distinctively different (jazz = improvisation, solos, certain typical combinations of instruments, types of inflection etc., classical = composition, interpretation within specified limits, more standardized sound production, etc.). And also whether that overlap and difference is something that you’re interested in exploring in your jazz ensembles. Would it be too much of a stretch to call Echo Painting or Film in Music jazz chamber ensembles (if not “chamber jazz”, a term which has its own codified set of expectations)?

PL: Yes, I still work with the opera orchestra and the new music ensemble Standing Wave and I feel that all this music is related to the music I make with improvisers. If the music moves me, whether it’s a great melody by Puccini or Ennio Morricone or a cool texture notated by Nicole Lizée or a Brad Turner solo, it’s all music and I don’t care what you call it.

TR: Why did you decide to include a cover song, The Band’s “The Unfaithful Servant”, sung by Robin Holcomb?

PL: That’s just a song that I’ve loved for a long time and always thought it would be a great vehicle for soloing of the right kind. We started by doing it as an instrumental but when it was time to record, I thought it would sound great with Robin and luckily she was game.

TR: Do you plan to write some new music for the band, and if so, are there any new directions you’d like to take it?

PL: I haven’t planned much farther ahead than the release!