Tony Malaby
When New York saxophonist Tony Malaby was in Vancouver recently mixing his new Songlines record Appartitions (featuring Tom Rainey, Michael Sarin and Drew Gress; U.S. release date October 14/03) we sat down and talked about the music and music in general.
Tony Reif: Apparently this is the first band in which Tom Rainey and Michael Sarin have performed together and their amazing textural and rhythmic interplay is one of the things that makes the record special. It seems that two-drum groups are becoming more popular; how did this particular formation come together? Did you get the idea for the group first, or ideas for the music and then put a group together to develop it, or…?
TM: I had a really good run at an East Village club called the Internet Cafe which was on E 3rd St. it had two separate fires and it was eventually shut down, but a lot of times I played there two or three times a week, and that was the first place that I played with each one of these guys as sidemen, that’s where I first encountered Drew, Tom and Mike. My first experimentation with the two drummers was there. The club eventually gave me a steady Wednesday so whenever I was in town I could play there. The first time I did the two drummers Sarin was involved but Rainey wasn’t. I think I did two gigs with two drummers but I kind of abandoned it, then I did a solo tour where I played in Boston and Maine and at the Maine gig I invited up two drummers who had been students of mine at a summer jazz camp. This was spring 2002. It replanted the bug again, I like how it felt. It’s just the most comfortable couch, or like taking a warm bath, just being surrounded by that sound and falling into it. I got back to New York and just knew that Tom and Mike were the guys for this. Then I set up a couple of improv gigs with Drew and Tom and Mike and I heard it, I started to organize the whole idea of what I wanted to get to.
TR: The music’s soundworld is so consistent that the record feels almost like one continuously varied suite rather than individual compositions or improvs, yet there’s a lot to attend to in each piece, it never seems repetitive. I’m wondering how you yourself think about this music, and how it came to take its current shape. Did the musicians surprise you in what they came up with? How do you (and they) handle the relationship between composed material and improvisation? How important is intuition in your music with this group and how important is structure, concept etc.?
TM: Just from playing at the Internet Cafe in different combinations there was a lot of vocabulary that was developed and codified with each of these guys. I decided to try to create platforms for my favorite “zones” that we’d developed or would hit on. So for example, a multi-layered zone where the four of us are each playing in our own pulse or dimension in time, or a very transparent zone where it’s cymbals/mallets/brushes and I’m playing flute-like and Drew’s playing arco. And the question is how am I going to get this into a composition, how am I going to structure it? A lot of it for me was hiding the composition within these zones, and now it’s just second nature for us all in making all of this seamless. It’s a new aesthetic that’s been around for a while now, and I’ve been really fortunate in having the experience to fall into this approach by playing in bands led by Mark Helias, Tim Berne, Mark Dresser, Mike Formanek, Mat Maneri. Zones like the burning energy thing, the scratch-and-sniff transparency, or different orchestration possibilities cross-fading each other, for example Sarin and I emerge out of a duo between Tom and Drew or vice versa. A lot of those cross-fades happen on this record. And I hit on a lot of sonic vocabulary in the studio that day that I incorporate now on a regular basis in my playing.
A lot of people ask me who am I listening to, who inspires me at the moment, and it really is the people in this band. I know instinctively where they’re going to start and end, and most of the time I know they’re going to play off what’s been established compositionally, they’re going to be reverent to that. This comes from their experience of playing traditional jazz and understanding form, that’s why I feel so comfortable with them. There’s so much abstraction that happens, but we really trust each other so we can go out on a limb and take those risks, we’re going to support whoever goes out there.
Another thing that I developed sonically is trying to create the illusion that I’m not playing saxophone, that I’m playing marimba or other percussion-like instruments, so I’m trying to make the ensemble sound bigger than it really is. There are times when I’m playing with Rainey when I want to hit things that sound like I’m playing the toms, so I’ll do things with articulation, or blend with the bass, especially if Drew’s playing arco – so where’s that coming from? was that Tony, was that Drew? trying to disguise who’s playing what. You get that in the real soft zones on the record – the introduction to “Apparitions,” I don’t think you can tell that’s a soprano saxophone for a while, it almost sounds like some kind of wooden flute to me.
TR: Something else that interests me about the music is the fine balance between supposed opposites/complementaries: form and content, the abstract and the concrete, reserve and passion. Could you comment about any ideas and feelings that are involved for you in this work as a whole, or in specific tunes? Obviously many of the titles relate to your background as a Mexican-American…
TM: It’s basically just trying to cover all the possibilities of things I’ve experienced playing with Drew, Mike and Tom, just tapping into that. I didn’t want to make it all energy or all scratch-and-sniff. On “Talpa” and “Jersey Merge” there’s a structure that we’re blowing off of, chord changes – “Jersey Merge” is based on the harmonic structure of “Bye Bye Blackbird” – and I knew that I’d get a different type of music from the rest of the record if I incorporated a couple of tunes with form and structure. The way they mask that there is a form there is brilliant, it creates a seamlessness that never constricts me as an improviser.
Something I do in composing and in performances is use a lot of imagery or visualization, and I think at the time of making Apparitions I was dealing a lot with my heritage, so a lot of imagery of adobe, weavings, chilis, cilantro, spices, the ancient pyramids of Mexico…these were on my mind at the time. And there’s a primitiveness in the music…the piece “Tula” at times sounds like I’m blowing into a conch shell, and the way Mike and Tom play feels and reminds me of a primitive ceremony of some sort. Something I’ve always carried with me from the southwest, moving to New York, is a sense of space. It’s very easy for me to create density and energy but I’m working on spacing that out, pacing myself, and thinking of “arcs” differently, I don’t want things to always start soft, crescendo to a peak, and come down at the end.
TR: The melodic and harmonic aspects of the music are another thing I’m wondering about. From your point of view what affinities does this music have with other avant-jazz and with more inside jazz? How is your music part of the “downtown” scene as it exists today? – to me it feels different from much of that music. And what are some of the things you continue to work on to develop a unique voice?
TM: I think the important thing is the players on this record were constantly going between both worlds, the avant and more inside jazz. I really believe it’s not about this school or that school with us any more, it’s just about good music-making, good jazz. One of the things that I work on is trying to stay open and not create a corral around myself. For me there’s not a big difference playing with Fred Hersch [his quintet and Walt Whitman project] or Mark Helias’s band. I’m stimulated and engaged and challenged by both musics. A big part of my music is that I’m not anti-jazz; I feel some of the downtown guys are really avoiding sounding “Smithsonian” or cliched, but I’m just not afraid of that anymore. I don’t even associate myself with that scene, and I think that the strong improvisers within both of those scenes see beyond that and don’t get caught up in drawing lines or creating sub-divisions of the New York scene. To get caught up in that kind of politics doesn’t seem worth doing.
Musicians in my generation more and more are able to improvise on form, harmony, changes, difficult forms and changes, and not rely on the bebop vernacular or cliche lines to get you through these structures. So I’m not afraid of mixing in compositions that are tunes, I know that we’ll interpret them a different way every time. Often I don’t have to set harmonic parameters, I know it’s going to be fine, and we’re free to go wherever the music takes it, including back inside.
TR: What are your plans for the band, and where does the music go from here?
TM: I look at this recording as the first layer of a great painting that will evolve over a long period and we’re going to add stuff to the top of it and delete things. I’ve experimented with adding another color by performing this music with Ben Monder and I love the results. I’m envisioning the five of us sounding like one instrument, like a big pipe organ. It’s more and more getting into a collective space, not about soloists. I don’t think this is anything new but it’s an exciting place for me to be.
I think graphically, how things are placed on top of each other: colors, really trying to tap into the earth tones, then reds and purples, also pasting things up against each other and ripping things off and having them emerge later. In my teaching I try to get my students to think this way, not solely think melodically and harmonically. It’s a kind of non-linear approach to improvisation and composition. Back to visualization: it’s just taking a piece like “Apparitions” and laying in my hammock in the back yard and visualizing the whole composition, the events that will take place.
A big part of the aesthetic is that the composition is hidden, and the improv is equally hidden, it’s trying to create a music where you don’t know where the solo begins, or getting away from the solo thing. Tom, Mike and Drew are masters at creating this effect, because they can absorb the material very quickly and are then able to abstract it and deconstruct it, they create another layer over the written material, even as they perform it. The musicians constantly surprise me: as a leader one of the big lessons I’ve learned is not to give any direction during the first pass of a piece in rehearsal. Nine out of ten times what these guys will come up with is better than what I envisioned might happen. They’re incredible improvisers. Apparitions is all about what are we hearing here, is this improvised or composed, is that Mike or is that Tom, did Drew play that or did I play that? It took a while to evolve and it happened very organically. We’ve played in so many groups together – Tom was in half the bands I was working with.
Plus I really want there to be a song there, in the improvisation and in the tunes – even if it’s something very abstract intervalically, I want to be able to interpret it as a singer. I think this comes from growing up with show tunes and playing standards. Coming to NY the first people I found work with were the downtown guys, the first people I went to Europe with, the touring aspect of making a living was with these people, and just now I’m starting to get the straightahead work.