Waxwing II
This interview with Jon Bentley, Peggy Lee and Tony Wilson was conducted by email during January 2021.
Tony Reif: If I’m not mistaken the group has been together for 15 years – but with some years where there were few or maybe no performances? So that’s fairly long-lived even for a jazz group, and I’m wondering if you could take a look back and talk about the things that have kept you together. And also how the group roles/dynamics have changed over that time, if they have.
Jon Bentley: For me Waxwing is a group that over time essentially found itself naturally, meaning the more gigs and recordings we did over the years the more the role of each band member became defined, and the unique identity/sound of the band itself really came into focus as a result. That is a wonderful (and rare) moment when making music in a group format, and it becomes quite compelling to pursue more of that experience, so I think that’s probably what has kept us together all these years.
Peggy Lee: Yes, I’d agree that the sound of the band has evolved slowly and organically. It has always been a leaderless group in terms of the musical direction and so we’ve found our sound through working collectively on each other’s compositions and through improvising.
Tony Wilson: Yes, the band has been together 15 years and as stated there have been years with very little activity. I also agree the music has evolved organically. This is truly a co-op band. I don’t remember ever discussing a musical direction, we just bring in the charts or parts and during rehearsal we might discuss ideas about the forms and improv possibilities.
TR: I noticed when comparing the tunes here to the 14 on your previous CD, A Bowl of Sixty Taxidermists, is that there are more improvs (7 compared to 2) and all but two of those are under 2 minutes, in fact 4 of them are around 1 minute or less. As for the composed tunes, Tony has 7, Jon and Peggy 2 each, whereas on Bowl it was 3, 7 and 1 respectively. So I’m curious how you all decided what pieces to include here, whether they were all composed for Waxwing, and what the rehearsal process was like. For example, your tune Peggy “Crossing Paths” is one of the more complex structurally – did you present it to the group in more or less its final form, or was it worked up collectively?
PL: Yes, “Crossing Paths” does have a pretty set structure. The form is a head in followed by Jon soloing on the form and then Tony playing an open solo with Jon and I using material from the head as background voices and ending with a double-time rendition of the head. As I recall I brought it in to rehearsal with the idea of the overall form but we workshopped it as we do to fine tune the details.
JB: For this recording we wanted to incorporate very short improvisations into the overall song structure of the album by using them as interesting sonic “intermissions” or transitions. They contain different and unusual sound sources that add colour to the overall album picture and refresh the ear for the more standard composed trio type songs. In terms of selecting the composed material generally we have used the same process over the years. We record more composed songs than we will need to create an album and then decide after the recording which ones had a strong take and also which combination of songs work the best together as a group. So that means we always have extra composed songs that were recorded but don’t make the end album.
TW: “On This Day” and “Highway of Tears” were composed with lyrics sung by Patsy Klein before I presented them to Waxwing. “A Day’s Life” was a leftover from my project of the same name. The other tunes were written for the band.
TR: In terms of the production, was there more overdubbing this time on some of the arrangements, to create a denser complexity on those tracks? – always making sure that the spontaneous qualities of live performance shine through. Some tunes morph through several sections of composed material/solos/group improvs, and one of the nicest things about this record I think is the way things develop in sometimes surprising ways – everything feels organic, yet there’s an elegance to the way the often disparate sections transition. Did the arrangements change much in the studio from take to take? And as for the overdubs, Tony’s and Peggy’s at least would presumably have been done during those two days recording at Demitone. But Jon, you did the mixing at your home studio – did you do much additional overdubbing on the composed pieces? And could you talk a bit about the “background” instruments you used such as the tank drum (which is similar to the hang?) and your sampling and programming, and also how Miranda Clingwall used the Roland Space Echo on the three improvs she participated in?
JB: There is more production on this recording than the previous ones but hopefully it is hidden well. I started prerecording some ideas on a tank drum back in 2017 which I then brought into the studio where we improvised over top of those pre-recorded tracks. I then took those improvisations and essentially constructed hybrid improv/composed-sounding songs using Ableton Live and Serato Sample production software, which are not common to use in a trio chamber jazz setting. Many of the short pieces on the album are actually manipulated improvisations to help give them a slightly more composed feel but retaining the spontaneity and interest of the original improvisation. I wanted to have a large modern production element to this recording but ideally keeping it somewhat underlying and not overproduced. The arrangements on some songs changed dramatically from how we initially recorded them and on some they stayed true to the original. It was a long process of developing new, interesting sections through overdubbing new instruments/samples or altering the original recorded sounds at my studio. There was also a fair amount of manipulating Tony’s recorded guitar sounds and loops through various production methods. As well, I have built a large personal recorded sample library over the years that is unique to me and there is a fair amount of those samples hidden throughout the recording.
The tank drum is an amazing instrument created from a recycled propane tank, mine by a local maker on the Sunshine Coast, BC. Each tank drum has a different scale or set of notes permanently cut into the metal tank. There are two tank drum tracks on this recording: “Montbretia Gates” utilizes a traditional finger attack as the sound generator and “Invisible Something” uses timpani mallets.
Miranda Clingwall plays her acoustic flute into the classic Roland Space Echo tape delay on “Peace for Animeek,” a song dedicated to a childhood friend who tragically took her own life after the sudden onset of a mental illness. There are over sixty tracks on that song, so it was a challenge to have something so dense and diverse sonically not stand out musically from the more traditional-sounding trio songs. The whole piece was created in Ableton Live and is based off a great guitar loop from Tony that over time gradually slows down and eventually settles at a new tempo.
PL: As far as I can remember, there are no cello overdubs on the record. As to the production, I was blown away by the transformation of the music from our two-day session to where it landed. Huge kudos to Jon for his vision and magic and to Miranda for her contributions.
TR: Tony, where did you run into the Baul instrument the ektara, what tracks is it played on and how would we recognize its sound?
TW: I found the ektara in Chinatown, it’s got a drum on the bottom with one string going thru it to a tuning peg on top. It’s on a couple of improvs, one where I play the drum with a chopstick hitting the string and another with a chopstick on the string.
TR: I think there’s only one piece here that’s really uptempo, and much of the music has a reflective quality – tender, heartfelt, nostalgic, gentle, sad, sombre, floating, ambiguous, spooky are some words that came to mind as I listened through to the record, although of course the moods and feelings that music evokes are going to vary a lot between listeners. Still, was there any discussion about an overall musical statement that you wanted to make this time? Or Jon, do you think one might have emerged during the time you spent doing the post-production (and did you also sequence the record)? How did the fact that you produced Flicker Down (as you did Bowl) significantly shape its final form?
JB: There wasn’t really a group discussion about an overall musical statement in advance, we all wrote music and brought recording ideas to the main studio dates based on our previous experiences playing together. But I do think a cohesive vision slowly emerged post recording and a lot of that was simply a result of a long process working intimately with the tracks. After shaping the songs over many hours certain tracks seemed to naturally gravitate towards each other and then gradually start to work together in larger groups. Perhaps it’s similar to assembling a complex jigsaw puzzle except in this case you can reshape each puzzle piece to work better with the one beside it, and with extra songs you don’t even end up using all of the puzzle pieces.
TR: Some of the other titles must also have personal associations – most obviously I guess “Highway of Tears,” which should mean something to all British Columbians but might not to people outside our province, and also maybe the title track “Flicker Down” – Tony, care to comment?
TW: Tony: “Highway of Tears is about the murder of indigenous women. The lyrics are a brother talking about his sister who was murdered, and the chorus goes: “Highway of tears / took my sister away / there’s no memorial / will bring her back today.”
Jon: “Flicker Down” was actually a title of mine that we really liked for Tony’s composition. It is a dark story: Miranda Clingwall and I were standing on a quiet road enjoying watching a Northern Flicker eat some ants with its brilliant feather patterns lit up in the sun. A large pickup truck suddenly came aggressively around the corner. The driver saw the flicker, swerved over intentionally and ran it over, killing it in a cloud of feathers. It was an awful moment but we gave the flicker a respectful burial and carried around a feather or two in our pockets for years. I often ponder the incident and its obvious unavoidable implications about the ongoing conflict between humans and nature.
TR: This record straddles the inside and outside of jazz improvising, as you three often do in the jazz you make outside the group, but there are also echoes of other musics percolating though this music without drawing attention to themselves, because they’re so well integrated, and surely that’s the result of decades playing classical and contemporary new music (Peggy), or combining jazz with folk/songwriter projects (Tony), or Jon (I’m guessing) your study of the saxophone’s classical side and maybe an interest in ambient music? – and all of you are keenly aware of sound and how to make your instruments speak in different “accents.” Is there a question here? Maybe just this: music is its own universe that words can never really define, but if there were one or two words that might suggest to you the spirit of this group, what would they be?
Jon: I enjoy many different types of music and I particularly love modern music production. Because I spend so many hours listening to currently produced music it is natural that those influences would appear on this recording. As a saxophone player I like to play and listen to different forms of jazz and other styles of music as well so hopefully those spices are tasteable. I believe a key part to the sound of Waxwing is the diverse sets of influences the three of us bring to the group because together they create an interesting larger picture.
I think “beauty” would be at the core of how I approach Waxwing. That doesn’t mean everything needs to sound aesthetically pleasing all the time because there can still be beauty in even the most savage musical moments, similar to all of our lives outside of music as well.
Peggy: It’s true that we each bring our own musical and personal stories to this music. But I feel that we are each at a point where these influences are by now integrated into our sounds so that, as you say, it doesn’t draw attention or feel awkward.
I’ll use “awake” and “attentive” as words to apply to the spirit of the music!
TW: “Inclusive” would be the word I would choose.