Wayne Horvitz (V)

This interview with Wayne Horvitz was conducted by email during August 2018.

Tony Reif: As you explain in the liner note, this project came about through an offer from Brett Allen, the owner and chief engineer at SnowGhost Studio, of most of a week of free studio time in 2015 in exchange for a private concert promoting the studio. You’d recorded there years before with your cover band Varmint. Tell us a bit about Brett and the studio. What styles of music does Brett generally record? Apart from its dedicated audiophile approach was there anything about the room, the equipment (including monitors), the Steinway grand, and Brett’s approach to recording that stands out from the dozens of other studios you’ve recorded in and produced projects at?

Wayne Horvitz: Brett does a lot of stuff. When you run a studio you do all sorts of music. And being in Montana he does a lot of commercial work, pop bands, and so forth. But he has a keen interest in experimental music. I know he has worked for example with Zeena Parkins and Matmos. In fact the first time I saw Matmos Brett invited me to see them in San Francisco. So he has always been involved in interesting music.

In addition Brett has a beautiful Steinway B, the room is climate controlled and the piano very well maintained. He also has some quirky keyboards I used a bit, and he is meticulous about micing and clean signal flow, and so on. Also the vibe is great, Whitefish is a quiet town in a beautiful place, and it’s easy to focus and leave the outside world behind.

TR: This is your first piano/keys+electronics-bass-drums trio, and you haven’t played much in a trio context, not since the 80s and your trio with Butch Morris and Bobby Previte. Why did you decide to bring Geoff Harper and Eric Eagle with you when, as you write, you “had no specific project in mind…and wanted to keep it that way” and “we didn’t set out to make a record, we just set out to enjoy the process.” You’ve worked with them for years in other contexts, including the Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble on Songlines. How did they react to the idea (and reality) of a recording residency where the three of you could take your time and potentially pursue any number of directions in a pretty open-ended way? Was there a collective freeing up of the imagination compared to most other recording sessions?

WH: Yeah it was one of those moments when you have a good musical feeling that leads to realizing these are people you want to get to know better, and dig a little deeper. We had played all sorts of gigs over the years, and Eric had played a lot of my music. I think everyone was excited to go in without a lot of plans, and even though they were my tunes, we really collaborated on the process. It’s a nice thing to not be beholden to a fixed outcome for a project. I wasn’t even sure it was something that would ever see the light of day, but when I heard the rough mixes I knew I had something.

As for trios – I like trio formats – but mostly I have had trios that were collectives. The piano trio, in the jazz sense of that term, is daunting, there is such a history, and even as a leader I always approach things as a composer and a collaborator, and the traditional piano trio puts one in the position of “principal soloist,” which isn’t the part of music I am most excited about. But it’s never too late I suppose.

TR: What equipment/apps did you use for the live processing of the piano, and had you done much with them in public before this project? What are some of the types of sounds that you ended up liking and using? The processing is pretty subtle at times, almost “ambient” – was that the effect you had in mind when you write that you “wanted to find an organic marriage between the idea of a piano trio, and some ideas I’d been exploring with amplified and processed piano?”

WH: I just used old school pedals. Sometimes when I do live shows I use a MAX MSP patch, less stuff to carry around, but I like the immediacy of pedals with knobs, stuff I have been using for years. 8 second delay, a tremolo pedal I love, a memory man, just garden variety stomp boxes.

TR: I assume you had quite a lot of material to go through. You write: “We sat on the roughs for about a year. Eric and I started doing some further mixes, and for a while we didn’t know what we had.” How and why did your ideas and feelings about the music change during that time, as it became what it was going to be with “a few overdubs, a bit of editing, and a lot of mixing?”

WH: Well we used almost everything we recorded…and since there weren’t a lot of overdubs it wasn’t that complicated.  But since the electronics were involved etc. it did leave a lot of options for how to mix. For example: do we keep the drums “natural” or try to do something interesting with them in the mix. But mostly I liked the roughs from the beginning – and it just all took a while because everyone is busy and we all had other projects.

TR: The trio premiered in June at the Vancouver jazz festival, where Peggy Lee joined you for the second set, and you’ll be touring it from October to December with Peggy or another guest performer, different ones in different places. Although the trio is already a very distinctive and sensitive group on its own, I saw how adding a guest, especially someone you’ve performed with quite a lot over the years, can bring out other possibilities in those pieces and in the way the musicians interact. Do you have any thoughts about where you might want to take SnowGhost in the future? How are you thinking about individual and group improvisation these days as an element of realizing your compositions in performance?

WH: The truth is Peggy is amazing, and I love the collective of a quartet, I frankly like to comp more than solo, and I love when music is collective, I guess I am a composer first and foremost. So I actually have set up all our gigs to be a set trio and a set with a guest. Some guests coming up include Naomi Siegel, Sara Schoenbeck, Tim Young, and Peggy.