Podd: Burning Ambulance Podcast

Cindy Blackman Santana

10 juli 2024 | 57 min

Cindy Blackman Santana is originally from Ohio, came to the East Coast to study at Berklee and at the Hartt School of Music, moved to New York in the late '80s and has played and recorded with a ton of people across the spectrum of jazz and rock ever since. She’s made a slew of albums under her own name, including some featuring saxophonist and longtime friend of Burning Ambulance JD Allen; she toured off and on with Pharoah Sanders; she was the drummer for Spectrum Road, a tribute to Tony Williams Lifetime that featured guitarist Vernon Reid, who’s also been on this podcast, plus keyboardist John Medeski, and bassist Jack Bruce. And she’s probably best known to a lot of people for being Lenny Kravitz’s touring drummer for many, many years, but what some people may not know is that she did not play drums on his records — he plays drums on his records. So part of our interview gets into the question of how you make music your own when you’re playing someone else’s parts.

We also talk about her time working with Pharoah Sanders, and recording with Joe Henderson; we talk about her admiration for Tony Williams, and she gives her analysis of the changes in his style over the course of his career and how those manifested in the changes to his kit; we talk about how to lock in with a bassist, the difference in mindset between playing jazz and rock, and much more. This was a really interesting conversation. Unfortunately, it was cut short.

Around 45 minutes in, my internet cut out and took our Zoom call with it. So you’ll hear a sudden fade right as we start talking about the 2019 Santana album Africa Speaks, on which Cindy Blackman Santana plays. So what I’ve done is gone back into my archives and pulled up an interview I did with Carlos Santana when that record came out, and we talk about it, and also about her contributions to the band’s music and his feelings about playing with her. I think it’s a valuable addendum to this conversation, and I hope you enjoy the whole episode. Thanks as always for listening.

Amina Claudine Myers

12 juni 2024 | 63 min

Amina Claudine Myers was one of the earliest members of the AACM, and if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m pretty sure you know what the AACM is, but just in case you don’t, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is an organization formed by Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and a few other musicians in Chicago in the mid-1960s. A tremendous number of the most important avant-garde jazz musicians of the mid to late 20th century and the 21st century have come out of the AACM, including Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Fred Anderson, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Wadada Leo Smith, Matana Roberts, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, and Amina Claudine Myers. There’s a tremendous book by trombonist and composer George Lewis, called A Power Stronger Than Itself, that’s the best possible introduction to the group. You should absolutely read that if you’re a fan of any of the musicians I just named.

Now, all the founders and early members of the AACM worked together, supporting each other, and moving the music forward in large part by composing and performing original work. What’s interesting — and this is something we talk about in this conversation — is that Amina Claudine Myers’ early albums included some original music, but they also included interpretations of other people’s compositions, specifically Marion Brown and Bessie Smith. But she always paired that music up with pieces of her own that demonstrated a really fascinating compositional voice that was a combination of jazz, gospel, blues, and classical music. She took all her influences and early training and combined them into something that sounded like nobody else out there, and was incredibly powerful.

In addition to making her own records, she’s been a part of albums by Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Bill Laswell, and many other people. Her latest release is a collection of duos with Wadada Leo Smith, the first time they’ve recorded together since 1969, and their first collaboration as leaders.

I’m really glad I had the chance to interview her. We talked about a lot of things — the AACM, the role of spirituality in music and the way the term spiritual jazz is used to gatekeep certain things, her work with all the artists I just mentioned, her upbringing in Arkansas and Texas and how it influenced her writing... this is a really wide-ranging conversation that I think will be really interesting for you to hear. I thank you as always for listening.

Carlos Niño

8 maj 2024 | 68 min

Carlos Niño is from Los Angeles, and has been a vital part of that city’s music scene for almost 30 years. He started out as a radio DJ when he was still a teenager, and expanded from that into putting on shows, releasing records, producing sessions for artists, performing and doing just about everything else that a life in music will eventually drop in someone’s lap. He’s developed really long creative relationships with two other people who’ve been on this podcast in the past, vocalist Dwight Trible and percussionist Adam Rudolph, both of whom work at least part of the time in the area that’s currently governed by the term spiritual jazz.

If you look around, you’ll see Carlos’s name on a lot of really fascinating projects. He makes records as Carlos Niño and Friends, which is a good way of summarizing his methods and his aesthetic — he gets together with people who he considers friends and kindred spirits, they make music together, and he assembles it all. But the people he calls friends are some of the most fascinating musicians around right now. He’s worked with Shabaka Hutchings, with Kamasi Washington, with Makaya McCraven, with Laraaji, and right now he’s very involved with André 3000’s New Blue Sun project. He was one of the leaders of the sessions that produced the album, and he’s also part of Andre’s live band.

Carlos has a new album coming out later this month called Placenta. It’s his third release for International Anthem, following a previous Carlos Niño and Friends album and a duo release with South African pianist Thandi Ntuli, and it features a ton of guests, including frequent collaborators like Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina, as well as saxophonist Sam Gendel, drummer Deantoni Parks, Adam Rudolph, André 3000, and many, many others. It’s a mix of live recordings and studio sessions, some of which go as far back as 2018, and they’ve all been reconstituted and overdubbed and collaged with vocals, field recordings, and all kinds of sound design into something really unique and kaleidoscopic. Although it’s got elements of jazz and elements of New Age music, it’s really hard to describe or categorize and it’s not the kind of thing you can just put on in the background and chill with. It demands your attention. When it comes out, I recommend you sit with it and see what you get out of it. I think you’ll find it very rewarding.

I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Carlos Niño. He’s a really interesting guy with a very open and optimistic creative philosophy that I think will be inspiring to those of you who make art yourselves, whether it’s music or something else, and even to those of you who are just interested in art and creativity generally. Thanks as always for listening.

Kenny Garrett

10 april 2024 | 52 min

Kenny Garrett has been playing for more than 40 years. Originally from Detroit, he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the late 70s, when it was being run by Ellington’s son Mercer. He also played with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and with Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, and Freddie Hubbard. He was a member of a young lions group put together by Blue Note Records in the 80s called Out Of The Blue that also included the late drummer Ralph Peterson, and he was already recording as a leader when he was invited to join Miles Davis’s band in 1987. He played on the album Amandla, and was part of the Davis band all the way until the end of Miles’s life in 1991. Miles Davis even made a very rare guest appearance on one of Garrett’s albums, Prisoner Of Love, from 1989.

Kenny Garrett’s discography as a leader has taken him in a lot of really interesting directions. His 1995 album Triology, with Brian Blade on drums and either Charnett Moffett or Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass, is a really intense, high-energy record that kind of marries bebop language to post-Ornette Coleman freedom, but the real key to the whole thing is the way he executes these really complex melodies on tunes like John Coltrane’s "Giant Steps," Wynton Marsalis’s "Delfeayo’s Dilemma," and Mulgrew Miller’s "Pressing The Issue." It’s a tremendous showcase for his technical command of the saxophone. But the album that first got me interested in his work was Beyond The Wall, a 2006 release that was a collaboration with Pharoah Sanders that also featured Mulgrew Miller on piano, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Robert Hurst on bass, Brian Blade on drums, and on some tracks there were strings and harp and Chinese instruments and a six-member vocal ensemble. It’s not spiritual jazz in the way that term is used now, and it’s not world music, it’s entirely its own thing, and it’s particularly fascinating because you might not think of Kenny Garrett and Pharoah Sanders having that much in common, artistically speaking, but they really did. They also recorded a live album together that came out in 2008. Garrett talks about Pharoah a lot in the interview you’re about to hear.

And Kenny Garrett’s latest album is going to surprise a lot of people. It’s called Who Killed AI, and it’s a collaboration with Svoy, an electronic music producer. Garrett plays alto and soprano sax on it, and all the rest of the music is made with synths and programmed drums. Even the horns are multi-tracked and fed through effects at times. It’s structured as kind of a suite — the first track is called “Ascendence,” and there are also pieces called “Transcendence,” “Divergence” and “Convergence.” But there’s also a really beautiful version of “My Funny Valentine,” which lays the ballad melody over these kind of shimmering keyboard sounds and a hard drum 'n' bass beat. It’s not at all what I was expecting when I was told that there was a new Kenny Garrett album on the way.

I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Kenny Garrett. We discussed his history with Miles Davis and with Woody Shaw, his early musical upbringing, his work with Pharoah Sanders, his approach to synthesizing genres and musics from around the world, and much more. I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation.

Arushi Jain

13 mars 2024 | 59 min

I first learned about Arushi Jain three years ago, when most people who are aware of her work did. Her 2021 album Under The Lilac Sky was extremely beautiful, six tracks of droning, pulsing synth music with her vocals kind of floating in the middle like she was singing from the middle of an isolation tank. It was entirely created with a modular synth rig that she constructed and programmed, but the compositions were based on ragas from the Indian classical tradition, including the fact that the album was meant to be heard at a specific time of day, while the sun was setting.

Under The Lilac Sky was described as her first full-length album, but she had also put out a four-song EP, Just A Feeling, in 2018, documenting the earliest stages of developing her sound, and another four-track release, With & Without, in 2019, where each track was inspired by a specific raga, although with that one, she says on the album’s Bandcamp page, “I didn’t always follow the rules of the ragas, I’m sure those who know this art can hear that, and maybe purists won’t approve.”

There’s also a companion release, With & Without (Golem Version), which features two remixes of tracks from the original album for some kind of virtual reality dance piece, and then a 46-minute soundtrack to the piece.

Her music is still evolving. At the end of March, she’s putting out a new album, Delight, on which she’s not working just with the modular synth. She’s also gotten people to play flute, saxophone, classical guitar, cello and marimba and sampled those parts and incorporated them into the tracks, which are also much more conventionally song-like than her previous work. And the vocals and lyrics are much more up front as well. Delight isn’t a pop album, but it’s absolutely more directly communicative than her previous work.

We had a really interesting conversation. We talked about her background singing Indian classical music with her family, how she came to electronic music when she arrived in America to go to college, how modular synths actually work, which I’m still not 100 percent sure I understand, how her live performances have evolved, and even a little bit about her visual presentation and how the music she makes relates to her Indian identity – or doesn’t. So on that note, here’s my conversation with Arushi Jain.

Rufus Reid

14 februari 2024 | 54 min

Rufus Reid is an extremely important but under-recognized figure in modern jazz. He’s always been someone who’s had one foot in the mainstream and one in the avant-garde — he did a lot of work with soul jazz and jazz-funk saxophonist Eddie Harris in the early 1970s, before joining Dexter Gordon’s band when Gordon made his famous US comeback after years in Europe. He was also part of Andrew Hill’s band in the late ’80s, and has done a ton of straightahead records. But he was also a member of Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition in the early ’80s, and he was one of the four bassists on Henry Threadgill’s X-75 album, and he played on Muhal Richard Abrams’ Things To Come From Those Now Gone, and he played with Anthony Braxton on the two Seven Standards 1985 albums with Hank Jones on piano and Victor Lewis on drums. He was also a member of the World Bass Violin Ensemble, which was a group of six bassists that made an album for Black Saint in 1984.

Reid has also done a lot of work as a leader. He’s made a string of albums in collaboration with drummer Akira Tana and various other musicians; he’s done bass duo albums with Michael Moore; and he’s led the Out Front trio with pianist Steve Allee and drummer Duduka Da Fonseca. In 2014, he released Quiet Pride: the Elizabeth Catlett Project, an album that featured a total of 19 instrumentalists and a singer all paying tribute to a sculptor whose work focused on the Black female experience in America. Reid is also an educator and the author of The Evolving Bassist, a book originally published in 1974 that’s still a standard text for bassists.

In this interview, we talk about Reid’s work with Eddie Harris, with Dexter Gordon, with Henry Threadgill, and with his own ensembles. We talk about a six-CD set he made with Frank Kimbrough a few years ago, recording all of Thelonious Monk’s compositions. We talk about his approach to the instrument, his influences, and about his new album, which is a duo collaboration with pianist Sullivan Fortner. This was a really enjoyable and informative conversation, and I think you’ll come away from it with a new or perhaps a renewed appreciation for someone who’s been a major figure in jazz for 50 years and isn’t stopping yet.

Ethan Iverson

17 januari 2024 | 64 min

Welcome back to the Burning Ambulance Podcast! To find out about upcoming episodes, as well as all things Burning Ambulance, sign up for our free weekly newsletter.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these. In fact, the last episode was released in December of 2022. I talked then to film critic Walter Chaw about his book on the work of director Walter Hill. Since then, a lot’s been going on. Most notably, I wrote a book of my own, In The Brewing Luminous: The Life And Music Of Cecil Taylor, which will be released this year. It’s the first full-length biography and critical analysis of Taylor, who is not only a hugely important jazz musician – along with Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, he was one of the pioneers of free jazz and really pushed the music forward in undeniable ways – but is also, I believe and argue in the book, a brilliant and under-recognized American composer whose work spans a much broader range than many people realize.

Ethan Iverson is also a really interesting American composer. You could be reductive about it and call him a synthesist of old and new pop and jazz styles, but he has a strong and recognizable voice that becomes easy to hear the more of his music you listen to. There are chords and types of melodies that he favors that set him apart from his peers, and he’s got a real attraction to big hooks, which manifested in the Bad Plus’s work in a number of ways and shows up in his solo work too. The Bad Plus developed a reputation for piano trio covers of pop songs that people often seemed to think were ironic, but were in fact performed from a perspective of real love for compositional form. A great tune is a great tune. And it’s worth remembering that they also recorded Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is an avant-garde landmark but also has some really kick-ass and highly memorable melodies. After all, it was originally written for dancers.

Ethan’s new album, Technically Acceptable, is his second record for Blue Note and he’s doing some things on it that he’s never done before. First of all, he’s playing with two different rhythm sections that are made up of musicians more or less his own age, even younger than himself. Until now, he’s tended to record with older players, legends like Jack DeJohnette, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Billy Hart, Paul Motian, Ron Carter, etc. This is his first time post-Bad Plus making an album entirely with musicians of his own generation. Also, it includes a solo piano sonata – three movements, fifteen minutes, a through composed classical piece that still manages to fit under the umbrella of jazz in a George Gershwin meets Fats Waller kind of way. This album is a real showcase for him as a composer.

Ethan and I talk about Cecil Taylor in the interview you’re about to hear. We also talk about his work and how it’s evolved over the years, the economics of surviving as a jazz musician in the 21st century, and we talk about other piano players of his generation like Jason Moran, Aaron Diehl, Aaron Parks, Jeb Patton, and Sullivan Fortner. We talk about diving into the music’s history, and about how there’s as much to learn and draw from in the music of the 1920s and 1930s as in the music of the 1960s and afterward, and about the increasing movement toward composition in current jazz. This is his second time on the podcast – a couple of years ago, I interviewed him alongside Mark Turner, because they’d made a duo album together. But this time it’s a one on one conversation, and I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did.

Walter Chaw

1 december 2022 | 79 min

This is not a typical episode of this podcast. Normally, as you probably know, I talk to musicians. And in 2022, we’ve specifically been talking about fusion, which means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And we’re going to get back to that subject in our next episode, when I have an interview with saxophonist Dave Liebman, who played with Miles Davis in the early '70s and also had his own band, Lookout Farm, which was a very interesting fusion act. But on this episode, we’re taking a sharp left turn and talking about movies, and specifically the movies of Walter Hill.

Walter Chaw is a critic I read fairly often at the site Film Freak Central. He writes for lots of other places, too, but that’s where I see his work the most. And a few months ago, I saw that he had a book coming out all about the work of director Walter Hill. It’s called A Walter Hill Film: Tragedy And Masculinity In The Films Of Walter Hill, and it’s out now. You can get it from mzs.press.

If you’re not familiar with his name, Walter Hill has directed two dozen movies, including Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs., Extreme Prejudice, Streets of Fire, he directed the pilot episode of Deadwood, he wrote at least portions of the first three Alien movies, he’s done a ton of unbelievable work. He's got a new movie out this year called Dead For A Dollar. Most of his movies are very violent, in an action rather than a horror way, but they’re also a lot more thoughtful and progressive than you might expect them to be. There’s a tremendous amount going on in them in terms of interrogation of masculinity, interrogation of the violence of American culture, interrogation of race and sex and even capitalism, but it’s all couched in these really pulpy, violent, action-packed stories that sometimes start out feeling like morality plays but then go sharply sideways. I might compare him to directors like Sam Fuller or William Friedkin or Michael Mann, maybe even Paul Schrader, all of whose work I love, but his track record is better than any of them. I own more Walter Hill movies on DVD or Blu-Ray than movies by any of those other guys. So the minute I heard about this book, I knew I had to read it. And once I read it, I knew I wanted to talk to the author.

So I did. We had a really great conversation over this past weekend, and that’s what you’re going to hear on this episode. We talk about Walter Hill’s movies in all their aspects, from their politics to his use of music, which is relatively unique in Hollywood, as you’ll learn, and we also talk about the process of writing this book and about some other directors’ work, including Ridley and Tony Scott, Rob Zombie, Sam Fuller, Michael Mann and William Friedkin. It’s a long conversation, but I think you're really going to enjoy it.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE:

The Blasters, "One Bad Stud" (from Streets of Fire)

The Bus Boys, “Boys Are Back In Town” (from 48 Hrs.)

Vernon Reid

23 augusti 2022 | 70 min

I have said two things all season long. The first is that we’re going to be exploring a single topic for ten episodes, and that topic is fusion. But the second thing I’ve been saying is that what I’m talking about when I say the word fusion isn’t a style or a genre, but a state of mind. It’s not what you play, it’s how you approach music-making.

In previous episodes, we’ve talked about what people typically think of as fusion, which drummer Lenny White, who appeared in episode two of this series, prefers to call jazz-rock. That’s the version that more or less starts with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Tony Williams’ Lifetime and branches out to include Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever and Weather Report. But my version of that continuum also includes early Seventies Santana, it includes the Fania All Stars collaborating with Jan Hammer and Billy Cobham, it includes adventurous funk and R&B fusion, like P-Funk and Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players and Slave, and it includes jazz-funk acts like Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard and George Duke.

Vernon Reid is a guitarist who was born in England but grew up in New York. He’s best known as the leader of Living Colour, and one of the co-founders of the Black Rock Coalition along with the late writer Greg Tate, but he’s got a long and varied discography that encompasses solo material, duo and trio work with other guitarists like Bill Frisell, David Torn and Elliot Sharp, and guest appearances with a ton of groups from Public Enemy to the Rollins Band, Mick Jagger, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Santana, and many, many more. His solo album Mistaken Identity from 1996 is the only album to carry co-producer credits from Prince Paul and Teo Macero. Back in 2012, he made an album with a group called Spectrum Road which featured John Medeski on keyboards, Jack Bruce on bass, and Cindy Blackman Santana on drums — it was conceptually a tribute to Tony Williams Lifetime, but it’s very much its own thing as well, so definitely check that out.

Reid got his start, though, with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson’s band the Decoding Society. He played guitar, banjo, and guitar synth with that group, which had two bassists: Melvin Gibbs, who was on this podcast a couple of years ago, and Reverend Bruce Johnson, and then some horn players, mostly Zane Massey on saxophones and Henry Scott on trumpet. It’s high-energy music that’s also really melodic in a kind of post-Prime Time way — jazz, funk, rock, Texas blues and West African music all swirled together and thrown straight at your face at a hundred miles an hour. Their albums Nasty, Street Priest, Mandance, Barbeque Dog, Montreux Jazz Festival and Earned Dreams are all incredible. They’re all out of print right now, too, but some of them are on streaming services, so dig up whatever you can.

Reid has a new record out with the group Free Form Funky Freqs, a trio with bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, who’s also been on this podcast before, and drummer Calvin Weston, and as he explains in this conversation, it’s full-on improv, starting from zero every time they play together, and because it’s so limited – no rehearsals, no soundchecks with all three members – they know exactly how many times they’ve played together. The album represents their 73rd encounter. It’s called Hymn Of The 3rd Galaxy, sort of a tribute to Return To Forever there, who had an album called Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy, and you’ll hear a little bit of the music late in the podcast.

I think you’ll really enjoy this episode. I’ve been a fan of Vernon Reid’s music for about 35 years. The first Living Colour album came out when I was in high school, and I saw them play on the first Lollapalooza festival in the summer of 1991. And I interviewed him once before, about 10 years ago, when he was doing a multimedia presentation called Artificial Africa. So in this conversation, we talk about his work with the Decoding Society, about the Free Form Funky Freqs, about the whole wave of guitarists who came up at the same time he did, including Michael Gregory Jackson and Kelvyn Bell and Jean-Paul Bourelly and Brandon Ross, as well as older players like James "Blood" Ulmer and Pete Cosey and Sonny Sharrock… we talk about a lot of things, and I’m just gonna end this introduction here, so you can dive in.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE:

Living Colour, “WTFF” (from Stain)

Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, “Iola” (from Mandance)

Vernon Reid & Bill Frisell, “Size 10 1/2 Sneaks” (from Smash & Scatteration)

Free Form Funky Freqs, “Outer Arm” (from Hymn of the 3rd Galaxy)

Adam Rudolph

19 juli 2022 | 68 min

In previous episodes, we’ve talked about what people commonly understand as fusion, which drummer Lenny White, who appeared in episode two of this series, prefers to call jazz-rock. That’s the version that starts with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Tony Williams’ Lifetime and quickly branches out with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever and Weather Report and on and on. But as we’ve continued the discussion, we’ve expanded the scope of inquiry to include adventurous funk and R&B fusion, which includes everything from P-Funk and Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players — and wow, do the Ohio Players deserve a place in the fusion conversation that they are very rarely granted — to Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard and especially George Duke.

Adam Rudolph is a fusion artist in about as broad a sense as you can imagine. He’s been a percussionist for close to 50 years, and should be much better known than he is. He’s been around since the early ’70s and has worked with everyone: Yusef Lateef, Fred Anderson, Don Cherry, Roscoe Mitchell, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Wadada Leo Smith, Herbie Hancock, Maulawi, Foday Musa Suso, Hassan Hakmoun, Jon Hassell… he’s part of the Bill Laswell company of players, too, so he’s on a zillion records through that connection. Plus he leads two main groups of his own, Moving Pictures and the Go! Organic Orchestra, which have made many, many albums and even crossed over with each other a time or two.

Adam and I had a really fascinating conversation over the course of two phone calls. The impetus was Symphonic Tone Poem For Brother Yusef, a collaboration between him and reeds player Bennie Maupin that’s just been released. Bennie Maupin of course is a legend on his own — he played on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and On The Corner, he was a member of Marion Brown’s group in the 1960s, he was in Mwandishi and the Headhunters with Herbie Hancock, he played with Woody Shaw, and his own album from 1974, The Jewel In The Lotus, is an absolutely brilliant record that blends spiritual jazz with almost New Age ambient music. There’s really no other album like it; if you’ve never heard it, it’s a must-hear. So obviously Rudolph and I talk about Maupin, whom he’s worked with off and on for decades, but we also talk about Laswell and about Lateef and about the whole idea of world music and fusion-as-creative-mindset that I’ve been discussing with every artist I’ve interviewed for the podcast this year. We talk a lot about the philosophy that goes into bringing together musicians from all sorts of traditions, from all over the globe, and finding ways to make their ideas flow together. That’s what he does with Go! Organic Orchestra, the membership of which is completely open and the music of which is created through spontaneous conduction. So he was really the ideal person to talk about all this stuff with.

I think you’ll come away from this episode with a lot to think about. I know I did. And I hope you enjoy listening to it. All the music you’ll hear, by the way, comes from Symphonic Tone Poem For Brother Yusef.

Bob Stewart

21 juni 2022 | 59 min

The latest episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with tuba player Bob Stewart.

I have said all season long that we’re going to be exploring a single subject for ten episodes, and that subject is fusion. But as I hope has become clear over the course of the five previous episodes, during which I interviewed techno pioneer Jeff Mills, drummer Lenny White, trumpeter Randy Brecker, pianist Cameron Graves, and guitarist Brandon Ross, most of whom come from different musical generations and are not peers, when I say the word fusion, I’m talking about a state of mind, not a style or a genre. It’s not what you play, it’s how you approach music-making.

I understand that when most people hear the word fusion, they think of the big name bands from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. Those groups, and the Miles Davis bands from 1969 to 1975, and many other less immediately recognizable groups, all did a particular thing, playing extremely complex music that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz. We talked about those acts in the second and third episodes this season, with Lenny White and Randy Brecker, both of whom were around then and were actively participating in making some of that music.

If you think of fusion as a mindset, though, rather than a style, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. And that’s really how I prefer to think about it. Because the people who fall into the latter category are the ones who I find to be the most interesting, and the ones who are more likely to have careers where almost every record they play on is at least worth hearing, worth giving a chance. You may not like all of it. But they’re creative enough that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.

A perfect example of this is Bill Laswell, the bassist and producer. He doesn’t use the term fusion. He calls what he does “collision music,” bringing together players from wildly disparate areas — stylistic areas, and literal geographical ones, putting African players together with guys from Southeast Asia and New York rock artists and whoever else he thinks has something to say — and seeing what comes out when they all work together toward a common goal. And sometimes you get something glorious, that you never could have predicted or imagined beforehand. Like pairing Pharoah Sanders with a troupe of Gnawa musicians from North Africa. Or putting improvising guitarist Derek Bailey together with drummer Jack DeJohnette, DJ Disk from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and Laswell himself on bass. I heard a recording of that group just a few days ago, and you might not expect it to work, but it really, really did.

Bob Stewart is a fusion artist in that he takes an instrument that has had a relatively low profile in jazz for decades — the tuba — and created a variety of fascinating contexts for it. Not only on his own albums, but particularly in partnership with the late alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe. They began working together in the early 1970s, and Stewart’s playing on some of Blythe’s albums, most notably Bush Baby, where it’s just the two of them and a percussionist, and on Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illusions, where they had some incredible bands that included at different times James “Blood” Ulmer on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, James Newton on flute, and Abdul Wadud on cello. On the album Blythe Spirit, Blythe and Stewart record a version of the spiritual “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” with Amina Claudine Myers on organ, that’s absolutely amazing. We talk about that piece a little bit in this interview.

He’s worked with a lot of other artists over the course of his career, too, including Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Carla Bley, Gil Evans, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, Bill Frisell, the David Murray Big Band, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and on and on. The reason he’s able to do so many different things is that his approach to the tuba is really expansive, conceptually speaking. He treats it as much more than a substitute bass. He understands its full range, and the subtleties it’s capable of expressing, and he uses it in ways lots of other people would never even think of. On his own albums First Line, Then & Now, and Connections — Mind the Gap, he puts together really unorthodox collections of personnel. For example on Then & Now, which was originally released in 1996 but just recently popped up on Bandcamp, some of the tracks feature two trumpets, trombone, French horn, and drums, while another is a duo with pianist Dave Burrell, and others have trumpet, alto sax, guitar, and drums. And Connections — Mind the Gap, which is from 2014, features tuba, guitar and drums, with trumpet and trombone on two tracks, but then on five others it’s the core trio plus a string quartet. Now that’s very much a kind of fusion — jazz which is already in an avant-garde zone, combined with chamber music.

Bob Stewart is a fascinating guy, an endlessly creative spirit who has done a tremendous amount to change the image of his instrument in order to pave the way for guys like Theon Cross, who plays tuba with Sons of Kemet, or with Jose Davila, who plays with Henry Threadgill’s Zooid. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

Bob Stewart, “Bush Baby” (Connections – Mind The Gap)

Arthur Blythe, “Lenox Avenue Breakdown” (Lenox Avenue Breakdown)

Bob Stewart, “The Rambler” (from Then & Now)

Brandon Ross

13 maj 2022 | 84 min

As you know if you've been listening this season, we have a single subject we’re going to be exploring across ten episodes, and that subject is fusion.

Fusion means much more, I think, than just the music that most people think of when they hear the word. I’m not talking exclusively about the big-name bands from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. Those groups, and the Miles Davis bands from 1969 to 1975, and many other less immediately recognizable groups, all did the classic fusion thing, playing extremely complex music that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz. We talked about those acts in the second and third episodes this season, when I interviewed drummer Lenny White and trumpeter Randy Brecker, both of whom were around then and were actively participating in making that music.

If you think of fusion as a mindset, though, rather than a style of music, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. And that’s really how I prefer to think about it. It’s not just a specific narrow slice of music, it’s a way you approach any kind of music you make. KRS-One said rapping is something you do, hip-hop is something you live. And that’s kind of close to what I’m talking about here, conceptually speaking. Fusion can be a style of music, or it can be a way you approach the making of music. And the people who fall into the latter category are the ones who I find to be the most interesting, and the ones who are more likely to have careers where almost every record they play on is at least worth hearing, worth giving a chance. You may not like all of it. But they’re creative enough that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.

Brandon Ross is one of those guys. He’s been on a hell of an artistic journey over the course of the last forty-some years. His first recording was on an Archie Shepp album from 1975, There’s a Trumpet in My Soul. He worked with violinist Leroy Jenkins. He worked with saxophonists Marion Brown and Oliver Lake. He worked with Henry Threadgill for something like ten years, in multiple bands or one evolving band. He worked with Cassandra Wilson on her breakout album, Blue Light Til Dawn, and the follow-up, New Moon Daughter. He’s made albums under his own name. The reason a lot of people probably know his name right now is he’s the guitar player in Harriet Tubman, with bassist Melvin Gibbs, who’s been on this podcast before, and drummer JT Lewis.

And now here’s the really interesting part – Brandon Ross has an album coming out a little later this year on my label, Burning Ambulance Music. He’s got a new group, see, called Breath Of Air, which is a trio featuring violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow. Something I learned in this interview, by the way, is that Brandon has done the guitar-violin thing several times, with Leroy Jenkins and also with Terry Jenoure, a very interesting violin player who isn’t nearly as well known as she ought to be. When I was researching Brandon to come up with questions for this interview, I learned about her and now I’m gonna be diving into her catalog, and I suggest you do the same. Some of her music is on streaming services; she released a 3CD set called Portal last year that’s fantastic. Anyway, Breath Of Air has a self-titled debut, most of which was recorded live in February 2020, right before the pandemic started and live music went away, and like I said it’ll be out a little bit later this year.

In the meantime, enjoy this conversation between me and Brandon Ross. We talk about his work with Henry Threadgill, about his work with Cassandra Wilson, about Archie Shepp and Oliver Lake and Marion Brown, about Harriet Tubman, about the sort of No Wave punk-funk jazz scene of the late '70s and early '80s that included Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society and all the other guitarists that came out of that scene, including Michael Gregory Jackson and Kelvyn Bell and Jean-Paul Bourelly and James "Blood" Ulmer and Vernon Reid… we also talk about his particular approach to the guitar and to sound. There’s a lot to learn and a lot to think about in the hour or so of conversation you’re about to hear. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

Breath Of Air, “No One On Earth Can See You Anymore” (from Breath Of Air)

Henry Threadgill, “Little Pocket Size Demons” (from Too Much Sugar For A Dime)

Harriet Tubman, “Farther Unknown” (from The Terror End Of Beauty)

Cameron Graves

12 april 2022 | 66 min

Episode 73 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with pianist Cameron Graves.

I have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting this season, and that subject is fusion. Fusion means much more, I think, than just the music that most people probably think of when they hear the word. Of course, it immediately brings to mind bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups that were formed by ex-members of Miles Davis’s band, playing extremely complex compositions that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz, while still leaving room for extended improvisation. But if you think of fusion as a process rather than a style, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. Because then you can pull in the music being made by Yes, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Santana, etc., all of which gets filed under just plain rock. And you can talk about the music Latin artists like Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All Stars were making at the same time. Or the really adventurous funk and R&B that was being made by Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament, Funkadelic, the Isley Brothers, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Ohio Players, Slave, which then leads you to jazz-funk names like George Duke, Billy Cobham, the Crusaders, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, Eddie Henderson, and of course Mwandishi and the Headhunters. This is how I prefer to think about fusion. It’s not just a specific, narrow slice of music, it’s the sound of walls being knocked down across the landscape.

So that’s the kind of philosophical starting point for all the interviews I’m doing this season, and that’s what makes Cameron Graves such a perfect person to talk to. Because he’s a guy who crosses all sorts of musical boundaries. He’s had a lot of classical music training, as I learned during this conversation, he spent several years studying Indian music, and obviously he’s got a deep jazz background starting out as a member of the Young Jazz Giants with Kamasi Washington and the Bruner brothers, Stephen aka Thundercat on bass and his brother Ronald on drums, which evolved into the West Coast Get Down and all the albums that they’ve made over the last half dozen years or so. But Cameron’s also a lifelong metalhead — in fact, he played keyboards and guitar in Wicked Wisdom, the nu-metal band fronted by Jada Pinkett Smith in the early 2000s. So he’s not only toured the world with Kamasi Washington and with Stanley Clarke, because he’s a member of Clarke’s band, too — he also played Ozzfest.

And here’s an interesting connection: the drummer for Wicked Wisdom was Philip “Fish” Fisher, the drummer for Fishbone. And when you talk about fusion as the kind of big-tent/umbrella sort of conceptual thing that I’m talking about, you have to include them in there. They mixed funk and hard rock and punk and metal and ska and reggae and jazz into one big swirl, particularly on their most ambitious album, 1991’s The Reality of My Surroundings. There’s all kinds of music on there, from Bad Brains-style hardcore to Last Poets-style abstract jazz poetry. And of course they were the best live band on the planet from the mid ’80s to the early ’90s.

Fishbone were never as big as they deserved to be, but they were absolute heroes in L.A., and they were a huge inspiration to all kinds of open-minded musicians who came up in their wake. Last year, I interviewed Terrace Martin, who’s an alto saxophonist affiliated with the West Coast Get Down but is also a hip-hop producer who’s worked with Snoop Dogg for years — in fact, he put together a live band for Snoop in about 2010 that included Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Ryan Porter, who’s been on this podcast before, and other people from their circle as well. Anyway, when I talked to Martin, he expressed a lot of love for Fishbone. And he’s now a member of Herbie Hancock’s band, in addition to being part of R+R=NOW, a group that also includes Robert Glasper and Christian Scott. And Thundercat and his brother, Ronald Bruner Jr., were both members of Suicidal Tendencies, playing straight-up punk and thrash, for years. There are so many connections between jazz and funk and metal, when you look for them, and bands that combine them in various really fascinating ways. It’s all fusion, in the broad sense.

Another thing that’s really interesting, to me anyway, is that there are so many direct connections between the West Coast Get Down guys and the Seventies fusion artists. Like I said, Cameron Graves is in Stanley Clarke’s band. Terrace Martin is in Herbie Hancock’s band. Ronald Bruner Jr. played with George Duke before Duke died. Thundercat covered a George Duke song on one of his albums, and had Steve Arrington from Slave on his most recent record. It really is like they’re the next generation of fusion. And we talk about all this and a lot more in the interview you’re about to hear. This was a really fun conversation that went in some very interesting directions, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

Cameron Graves, “Planetary Prince” (from Planetary Prince)

Cameron Graves, “The Life Carriers” (from Seven)

Cameron Graves, “Red” (from Live From the Seven Spheres)

Randy Brecker

13 mars 2022 | 59 min

This season on the Burning Ambulance Podcast, we’re going to have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes, and that subject is fusion.

Fusion, of course, is a term that means different things to different people. When most people hear it, they probably think of bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups that were formed by ex members of Miles Davis’s band that played extremely complex compositions that were sometimes closer to progressive rock than to jazz, but which still left room for extended improvisation. What’s interesting about that positioning is that it’s very easy to draw lines between that stuff and the music being made by Yes, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Santana, all of which gets filed under just plain rock. And if you extend the boundaries out just a little bit further, you get to the music Latin artists like Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All-Stars were making at the same time. Or think about some of the really adventurous funk and R&B that was being made by Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament and Funkadelic, the Ohio Players, Slave, the Isley Brothers... This is what’s so interesting to me about fusion, is that at its best it’s about all kinds of musical boundaries being knocked down.

I recently spent some time listening to a whole bunch of albums by keyboardist George Duke, released on the MPS label between about 1971 and 1976. Duke was a really fascinating figure, because he traveled between worlds to really unprecedented degree. He had his own trio in the late 60s, and somehow or other hooked up with electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. They made an album together, and the gigs they played in L.A. brought them to the attention of Frank Zappa and Cannonball Adderley, two people who couldn’t have been doing more different things. But Zappa hired Ponty to play on Hot Rats, and then wrote and produced an entire album, King Kong, on which Ponty played Zappa’s compositions, and George Duke was the keyboardist on that record.

And after that, both Zappa and Cannonball Adderley – who, don’t forget, had Joe Zawinul in his band before that, who composed “In A Silent Way” and played with Miles Davis, and formed Weather Report with Wayne Shorter – both Adderley and Zappa wanted George Duke in their bands. He wound up taking both gigs, doing two years with Zappa, then two years with Adderley, then going back to Zappa’s band for three or four more years. He had left the group by 1975, though, so he was not part of the concerts recorded for the album Zappa In New York. But Randy Brecker was.

Brecker and his brother, saxophonist Michael Brecker, who died in 2007, worked together in dozens if not hundreds of contexts from the late Sixties to the Nineties. They were both part of that Zappa concert, which was related to their being part of the Saturday Night Live band at the time; they played on a million recording sessions for everyone from Aerosmith to Bette Midler to Aretha Franklin to Lou Reed to Dire Straits to Donald Fagen. They were part of drummer Billy Cobham’s band in the early to mid ’70s, playing on Crosswinds and Total Eclipse and Shabazz and A Funky Thide Of Sings. And right around that same time, they formed the Brecker Brothers band and made a string of albums for Arista that were extremely successful.

Now, what matters for the purposes of this introduction is that the side of fusion the Brecker Brothers represented was very different from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Weather Report side. That was, for lack of a better term, white fusion. It was marketed to white rock audiences. Those bands toured with rock bands. They played arena concerts. Lenny White talked about it in the previous episode of this podcast — the members of Return to Forever hung out with members of Yes.

On the other side of the coin, there was black and Latin fusion. Like I said above, there was some incredibly challenging music being made under the headings of salsa and Latin jazz in the 70s – you should check out the episode of this podcast where I interviewed Eddie Palmieri to hear more about that, as well as the episode with Billy Cobham, where he talks about performing with the Fania All-Stars. There are funk records that are every bit as complex as prog rock. Jazz artists like Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard, George Duke and even Joe Henderson were all making records that can really only be described as fusion in the early 70s, and that’s without even getting into what Miles Davis was doing, particularly with his live band from 1973 to 1975. But except for George Duke, who actually had Frank Zappa cut a couple of guitar solos on his 1974 album Feel, they were drawing more from funk than from rock, and they were marketed more to black audiences than white. And as Randy Brecker explains in this interview, that was where the Brecker Brothers fell. They had more success on black radio and on the R&B chart than in the rock world.

Now, eventually, that more funk-oriented, R&B-oriented side of fusion slid in an explicitly commercial, radio-friendly direction, and a lot of it ended up as smooth jazz. Which is to some degree why the term is vilified in some quarters today. But that doesn’t take anything away from the good stuff, and Randy Brecker has been involved with some very good records over the years.

This was a really fun conversation that went in some very interesting directions. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music in this episode:

The Brecker Brothers, “Some Skunk Funk” (Heavy Metal Be-Bop)

Billy Cobham, “Taurian Matador” (Shabazz)

The Brecker Brothers, “Sneakin’ Up Behind You” (The Brecker Brothers)

Lenny White

12 februari 2022 | 68 min

This is the sixth year of the Burning Ambulance Podcast. This is episode 71, and I decided at the beginning of this year that it was time to change things up a little. So for all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting this season, we’re going to have a single subject, and that subject is fusion.

Lenny White played on one of the most important albums in the history of fusion, Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. In the clip that you’re gonna hear when I finish talking, right before the interview begins, he’s on the left hand side, with Jack DeJohnette on the right. And you want to hear something insane? That was his first ever recording session! He was recommended to Miles Davis by alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. White was in McLean’s band at the time.

Within a year, he had also played on Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy, and Joe Henderson’s At The Lighthouse. In just the first half of the Seventies, he was on Eddie Henderson’s Realization, on two albums by a Latin jazz-rock band called Azteca, and For Those Who Chant by trumpeter Luis Gasca, a record that also had Henderson, and Carlos Santana, and a bunch of other people from across the jazz and rock spectrum.

In about 1972, he joined Chick Corea’s band Return To Forever and made four albums with them – Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy, Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery and Romantic Warrior. He also played on solo albums by Stanley Clarke and Al Di Meola, and made records under his own name that were like a perfect storm of jazz and rock players working together. His 1977 album Big City has Herbie Hancock, Neal Schon of Journey, and Verdine White of Earth, Wind and Fire on it. But despite being at the heart of the fusion movement at the time that it happened, he doesn’t actually like the term. He prefers to call what he does jazz-rock, and when you listen to what he was actually playing, that distinction is very clear and makes perfect sense.

A lot of people think the use of electric instruments, particularly synths and other keyboards, is a key dividing line between fusion and the jazz that came before. But for me, it’s about the beat, it’s about the drummers. Lenny White is one of maybe five drummers who really shaped an entire genre in their image — the others are Billy Cobham, who’s been on this podcast before, and Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, and Alphonse Mouzon. These guys played with Miles, they played with Weather Report, they played with Herbie Hancock, they led their own groups, they were the guys who established the sound of fusion by finding a way to combine the aggressiveness and drive of rock with the subtlety and suppleness of swing, and in Lenny White’s case in particular, he brings a tremendous Latin feel to the music as well.

The Latin element is really important, because Latin musicians were stretching out just as much as their jazz and rock peers in the crucial years between 1969 and 1975. Listen to the Fania All-Stars’ Latin-Soul-Rock album, which featured guest appearances from Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer, less than a month before they would leave the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Listen to what Eddie Palmieri — who's also been on this podcast — was doing on albums like Superimposition, Vamonos Pa'l Monte, and Live At Sing Sing. Listen to Santana’s run of albums from Caravanserai through Borboletta. A lot of this stuff is hardcore jazz fusion set to a Latin beat, and in terms of complexity and intensity you can put it right next to King Crimson, Yes, and all the other prog-rock acts of the time. And funk was going through a radical evolution, too — listen to how complex the songwriting and arranging is on albums by Parliament, Earth, Wind and Fire, Slave, and the Isley Brothers — and these guys all knew it. They all knew each other, they all knew what they were doing, individually and collectively. There were no borders. There were no limits. Lenny White has a hilarious story in this interview about hanging out with some of the guys from Yes.

I really enjoyed getting the chance to talk to Lenny White. He’s had an incredible career, and he was there at the beginning of a musical revolution. I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation.

Music in this episode:

Miles Davis, “Bitches Brew” (Bitches Brew)

Luis Gasca, “Street Dude” (For Those Who Chant)

Lenny White, “Rapid Transit” (Big City)

Return To Forever, “Sofistifunk” (No Mystery)

Jeff Mills

13 januari 2022 | 66 min

This is the Burning Ambulance podcast's sixth year, and our seventieth episode, so I decided it was time to change things up a little. This season, we’re going to have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting, and that theme is fusion.

Fusion is a very charged term. When most people hear it, in reference to music, anyway, they probably think of bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups formed by ex-members of Miles Davis’s band that combined a certain freedom to improvise with extremely complex compositions that were closer to progressive rock than to jazz. I mean, when you listen to the first two Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, side by side with King Crimson’s Larks' Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black, they really fit together quite well. I mean, they’re even using the same instrumental palette: guitar, violin, keyboards, bass, drums. The only real difference is that King Crimson had a singer.

What interests me about fusion, the term and the concept, is that it lives up to something saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one of the co-founders of Weather Report, has said many times — that to him, the word jazz means “I dare you”. I dare you to play as loud as the rock bands. I dare you to embrace funk and multi-part suites and the most advanced studio production techniques available. I dare you to go big, to be ambitious. Because that’s what the best fusion of the 1970s was, and what modern-day fusion is. It’s ambitious. It doesn’t recognize externally imposed limitations, people saying “you can’t do that”. Why not? Why can’t you? It refuses to stay within the boundaries of genre. It’s not jazz, it’s not rock, because there’s no such thing as jazz and no such thing as rock.

One of the things I discovered, or became more certain of, while writing my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century, which is out this month from Zero Books in the UK, is that jazz is ultimately about artistic intention. There’s no one instrument or rhythm or harmonic relationship that defines it, but there are two crucial values: innovation and improvisation. There must be an attempt to do something new, or to put a new spin on something old, and there must be an element of uncertainty and a real-time exchange of ideas, or in the case of solo performances, there must be an element of real-time thinking and spontaneous creation. Because it’s absolutely possible to play something that startles or surprises yourself, and then respond to it.

So fusion is about taking ideas from seemingly disparate genres and combining them. And taking the philosophies that govern those seemingly disparate genres and figuring out what they have in common. That’s what the Seventies artists did, and that’s what modern-day fusion acts are doing. I would include people like Thundercat, Cameron Graves, Christian Scott and even Kassa Overall, who’s been on this podcast before, in that category. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about all year long on this podcast, through interviews with prominent fusion artists of the past and present.

Many people may not think of Jeff Mills as a fusion artist. He’s normally thought of as one of the most important musicians in techno history. I’m not gonna run down his discography here, that’s what Wikipedia’s for, but suffice it to say that his influence in the 1990s was massive, but what makes him interesting to me is that he’s taken the creative space his fame has brought him and used it to really expand his own sonic parameters. He’s made an album with a full orchestra. He’s created new scores for silent films. He’s made albums inspired by astronomy, science fiction, and his interest in the supernatural. And he’s collaborated with musicians who are geniuses in their own fields. In 2018, he made an album called Tomorrow Comes the Harvest with legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen. And that project led to the first of the three albums he put out in 2021. It’s called Counter Active, and it’s a collaboration with keyboardist Jean-Philippe Dary under the name The Paradox.

The second album he released this year was called The Clairvoyant, and it’s about two hours long — if you buy it on vinyl, it’s three LPs, and he says that the best way to experience it is to lie back in the dark and listen to the whole thing from beginning to end. It arises out of his interest in spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th century and his perception of the similarities and connections between that era and now. That’s one of the topics we discuss in the interview you’re about to hear, in fact. And I have to admit I was surprised by how willing, even eager, he was to discuss social issues. A lot of electronic music is deliberately anonymous, deliberately emotionally blank — it’s a canvas on which you can paint your own feelings. But it also reflects broader social conditions, as any art produced by human beings inevitably must. Detroit techno represented the frustration and anger, as well as the hopes and dreams, of the citizens of that city, and Underground Resistance, a collective Mills formed with Mike Banks and Robert Hood, was explicitly political, taking on social conditions in their city and the overall politics of the music industry.

The third album Jeff Mills put out in 2021 was The Override Switch, a collaboration with Rafael Leafar, who plays a number of instruments on the record, including tenor, alto, soprano and baritone saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, flute, cornet, and a wide range of keyboards. The music they make together is fusion in the purest and most genuine sense: the rhythmic steadiness of electronic music combined with the melodic and harmonic adventurousness of jazz. The individual pieces, and the album as a whole, take the listener on a real journey. And frankly, on a purely sonic level, I find it easy to draw lines between this and the music that people like Stanley Clarke and George Duke were making in the 1970s.

Anyway, I feel extremely lucky to have gotten the chance to talk to Jeff Mills for an hour. He’s an incredibly busy guy, so tracking him down was a challenge, and the day we were initially scheduled to talk, he had to run from Paris to London, so we moved it, and then when I did catch him, I thought he was still in Paris but it turned out he had returned to London, which meant I was calling him an hour later than expected. Still, it was a fascinating conversation that went in some really unexpected directions. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Music featured in this episode:

The Paradox, "Super Solid" (Counter Active)

Jeff Mills, "Someone Who Feels Things" (The Clairvoyant)

Jeff Mills & Rafael Leafar, "The Sun King" (The Override Switch)

Billy Harper

16 september 2021 | 65 min

Andrew Cyrille

19 augusti 2021 | 71 min

Andrew Cyrille is the last man standing from the first wave of free jazz drummers. He and Milford Graves, Sunny Murray, and Rashied Ali really revolutionized jazz rhythm in their playing with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and other musicians in the early to mid ’60s. Their influence was huge, and each of them brought a different perspective and instantly identifiable style to the music. What I hear when I listen to Andrew Cyrille, whether he’s playing with Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton or in any other situation, is an incredible precision and consideration. He really seems to be thinking about every single strike and placing it with unbelievable care, even when he’s playing ridiculously fast.

In the last few years, Cyrille has been making some really interesting records as a leader for ECM. He started in 2016 with The Declaration of Musical Independence, which featured Bill Frisell on guitar, Richard Teitelbaum on synth, and Ben Street on bass, then he made Lebroba with Frisell and Wadada Leo Smith, and now he’s got a new album out, The News, which features Frisell and Street again but has David Virelles on piano instead of Teitelbaum. And right before that string of records, in 2015, he was on guitarist Ben Monder’s album Amorphae. And I also want to mention a record he did in 2017, Dione, a trio record with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp. He’s had an incredible career as a sideman, too, working with David Murray, Leroy Jenkins, Muhal Richard Abrams, Marion Brown, Horace Tapscott, Peter Brötzmann, and of course he’s also one of the members of Trio 3 with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman — they played at the 2021 Vision Festival, where he also presented a solo tribute to Milford Graves.

We talk about Graves a lot in this interview, as well as Cyrille’s approach to rhythm and to music generally, and a lot of other things. It’s funny, the conversation has kind of a false ending, because I had been told by his publicist that he only wanted to talk for a half hour, and I negotiated us up to 45 minutes, and then at the 45 minute mark I started saying goodbye and thanking him for his time, and he showed no interest in stopping, so we kept going and probably could have talked for another half hour.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Andrew Cyrille/Wadada Leo Smith/Bill Frisell, “Worried Woman” (Lebroba)
Andrew Cyrille, “Go Happy Lucky” (The News)

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Don Byron

15 juli 2021 | 71 min

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Don Byron is originally from the Bronx, and he was kind of a fixture on the Downtown music scene in the late '80s and early '90s. His first album as a leader, Tuskegee Experiments, came out almost 30 years ago, in 1992; it featured a variety of musicians, including guitarist Bill Frisell, two different bassists, Reggie Workman and Lonnie Plaxico, and two different drummers, Pheeroan AkLaff and Ralph Peterson. A year after that, he released Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz, an album of klezmer music that shaped his public image maybe more strongly than he might have liked, as you’ll understand when you listen to this conversation.

The thing with Byron is, every one of his records is completely different from the others — he seems to always be deeply invested in exploring a concept, and once he’s done that on record, he moves on. He’s not one of those musicians who establishes a working band and takes them into the studio every year or two. When he makes a record, it’s because he’s got something very particular to say at that moment, and when he’s done, he’s said all he has to say on that subject. And as a result, his albums require you to really be willing to put the time in and think about what he’s saying and why. That’s not to suggest that the music isn’t enjoyable on a purely sensory level. It is. He’s a great clarinet player, and a really fascinating composer. But he wants you to think about why someone might make the kind of music they make, instead of just taking it — or taking anything — for granted.

I should warn you that about halfway through our talk, Don Byron drops an N-bomb with a hard R while making a point about what is and what isn’t jazz, what is and what isn’t black music, et cetera. That’s basically the subject we spend this entire hour circling around, because his primary instrument, the clarinet, the composers whose work he explores, and all of that are in kind of blurry territory where, as he says, it’s not considered "real" jazz sometimes. Which is on the one hand bullshit, because jazz is whatever a jazz musician plays, but on the other hand, genre distinctions are meaningless anyhow, right? That’s why we end up talking about Biz Markie and Kirk Franklin and Fishbone and all the other stuff that we talk about in this interview. I had a blast talking to him; I hope you'll enjoy listening to our conversation.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Don Byron/Aruán Ortiz, “Black and Tan Fantasy” (Random Dances and [A]tonalities)
Don Byron, “Powerhouse” (Bug Music)

Anthony Braxton

24 juni 2021 | 72 min

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This is an episode I have been hoping to present since this podcast began. I’ve been requesting interviews with Braxton for years, but never gotten the okay until this month. And you know what? In retrospect, I’m glad it took as long as it did. You know the saying “When the student is ready, the master appears”? Bill Dixon said that to me when I interviewed him for The Wire, and I feel like it’s absolutely true in the case of the conversation you’re about to listen to. I was not ready to interview Anthony Braxton when I first started asking. As it is, we probably could have talked for at least another hour, and maybe longer; we got along very, very well. Which was frankly not guaranteed going in. This interview didn’t just take years to set up, it also fell through the first time we tried to do it, and I’m not 100 percent sure why but I have some suspicions. I do know that when I was working on re-scheduling it, I sent over my list of proposed questions in advance, which Braxton mentions right at the beginning, when he starts talking about the late Bob Koester from Delmark Records.

I first started listening to Braxton’s music about 20 years ago, and I feel like I’ve had a few major breakthroughs with it in that time, where it kind of made a little more sense to me afterward than it had before. Because it really is a learning process. You hear other things differently after you’ve grappled with his work for a while.

The first big breakthrough for me was the album Quintet (Basel) 1977, which wasn’t released until 2000; it’s a live album that features George Lewis on trombone and Muhal Richard Abrams on piano. It was maybe the second or third thing I’d ever heard by him, so I mostly knew him by reputation still, as someone who made extremely advanced "weird" jazz that didn’t really swing, but it wasn’t free, either. Well, what I heard was not any of those things. It was a nonstop flow of energy, extremely creative but also swinging hard as hell, and the compositions were absolutely recognizable as such. It made perfect sense to me as jazz.

The second breakthrough was when Mosaic Records put out a box set of his Arista albums, which I reviewed for Jazziz. Some of that music was difficult and alienating to my ear, but a lot of it was even more immediately accessible than I had expected it to be. If you’ve never listened to Braxton at all, you could do a whole lot worse than to start with New York, Fall 1974 or Five Pieces 1975, which were two of his first Arista releases and really do seem like his attempts to make music that would catch people’s ear right away.

The third and final breakthrough moment wasn’t an album, it was a book – Forces In Motion, by Graham Lock. Lock went on tour with Braxton’s quartet in England in the mid-80s, watching all the gigs, and interviewing all the group members repeatedly, and he gives you a 360 degree portrait of all of them as musicians and as human beings. It’s one of the best books about music and musicians I’ve ever read, I recommend it unequivocally.

When I was writing this intro, I looked on the hard drive where I keep most of my music, and I was surprised to find that I only actually own about 40 Anthony Braxton releases, including the individual albums that are contained in the Mosaic box and another box of his Black Saint albums from the 1980s. I honestly thought I had more. But among the others are a 3CD set of large ensemble pieces, a 12CD set of pieces for an a cappella ensemble, a 4CD set of improvisations for quartet, and a 4CD opera, all of which feature one long track per CD. I also have a 7CD set of the music of Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh and other related musicians, an 11CD set of Charlie Parker tunes, a 13CD set of live recordings of standards, and an audio Blu-Ray containing 12 pieces ranging in length from 40 to 70 minutes. All told, I probably have around 80 hours’ worth of Anthony Braxton’s music in my house. If I wanted to, I could spend a long weekend listening to nothing but his work. And that’s probably about ten percent of his total recorded output, maybe less. The man’s catalog could fill a room.

He’s put out two mega releases just this month. The first is that audio Blu-Ray, which is called 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017 and features several different ensembles of between six and nine musicians including harp, cello, accordion, and horns, playing as I said long single pieces composed and then improvised upon using a highly specific and codified musical language of Braxton’s own devising.

The second is Quartet (Standards) 2020, the 13CD collection of live recordings from January 2020, when he played nine concerts in three cities: Warsaw, Poland, London, England, and Wels Austria, with a conventionally structured quartet: saxophone, piano, bass, drums. As its title suggests, they played standards. There are 67 songs on the box, with no repeats. There are tunes by Thelonious Monk, by Sonny Rollins, by Wayne Shorter, by Andrew Hill, but there are also several songs by Paul Simon, including the really excellent version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that you hear at the beginning of this episode, which if I’m being honest reminds me of Aretha Franklin’s version.

In this interview, we talk about both of those releases, as well as the larger issues they reflect. We talk about his compositional languages, the demands he places on the musicians he works with, his relationship to the jazz tradition, Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Dixon, Max Roach, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, and much, much more. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done, and I’m thrilled to share it with you.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Anthony Braxton, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (Quartet (Standards) 2020)
Anthony Braxton, “Opus 23B” (New York, Fall 1974)

Wadada Leo Smith

21 maj 2021 | 65 min

Pi Recordings

15 april 2021 | 80 min

Episode 63 of the Burning Ambulance Podcast features an interview with Seth Rosner and Yulun Wang of Pi Recordings.

As you probably know by now, a typical episode is based around an interview with an artist. But Pi Recordings is such an important label when it comes to the kind of music covered on Burning Ambulance – I mean, Roscoe Mitchell, who’s released music on Pi both as a solo artist and with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was the first ever guest on this show – that I thought it was important and worthwhile to have these guys on to discuss 20 years of the label.

I’ve been listening to their releases pretty much since the beginning – the first titles I heard were The Year of the Elephant, by Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, and Organic Resonance, a live duo album by Wadada and Anthony Braxton, and The Meeting, a reunion album by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I was at one of the Art Ensemble’s performances at the New York jazz club Iridium that was recorded for the live double CD Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City; we talk about that record a little bit in the show. I haven’t heard every record they’ve put out, but I’ve heard at least half of them, and I’ve written about a ton of them for Bandcamp Daily, for Stereogum, for The Wire, for Burning Ambulance, for Jazziz, and probably other places as well. And I’ve known Seth and Yulun personally for years. I’ve run into them at the Jazz Gallery or at the Vision Festival or in record stores, and we’ve always gotten along and I’ve always enjoyed talking to them, and I think that feeling comes through in this conversation.

We talk about a lot of different things relating to the label in this interview. We start from the beginning, but it’s as much about philosophy as history – they talk about why they do what they do, the kind of music they’re choosing to support and promote with their releases, and what it says about the culture that their highly specific niche within the world of jazz has been so well received by critics and the public, and that so many of their artists have received major awards. I mean, Henry Threadgill is a Pulitzer Prize winner and an NEA jazz master. Roscoe Mitchell is an NEA jazz master. Vijay Iyer is a MacArthur fellow. Tyshawn Sorey is a MacArthur fellow. Steve Coleman is a MacArthur fellow. Wadada Leo Smith was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Pi releases routinely land at the top of jazz critics’ polls, every single year. Anybody looking at the landscape would have to say that if there’s any kind of debate about the status of traditional versus so-called avant-garde jazz, the avant-garde guys have won. But it’s still a business, and the music business is tough, tougher than ever, honestly. So we talk about the realities of what it’s meant to run a small independent label and how they’ve managed to keep it going for 20 years, too.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Henry Threadgill, “Tickled Pink” (Up Popped The Two Lips)
Jen Shyu, “Living’s a Gift, Part 1 – Springtime” (Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses)

Joe Chambers

10 mars 2021 | 55 min

Muriel Grossmann

21 januari 2021 | 63 min

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Muriel Grossmann is a saxophonist originally from Vienna, Austria, but now she lives in Spain, and she puts out roughly an album a year entirely independently, though she licenses them to a label for the vinyl editions, which she talks about in this interview. She was very open about the business side of being an independent musician, in terms of self-funding and having the discipline and mental fortitude to keep on pushing until you find the audience that’s waiting to hear your music.

Muriel plays spiritual jazz, long flowing tunes that may remind you of Alice Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders – I hear things that remind me of early 70s Joe Henderson or Azar Lawrence records too, and sometimes when she adds harp and droning elements from tamboura and other instruments, it reminds me of Illuminations, the album Carlos Santana made with Alice Coltrane, or even Larry Young’s Lawrence of Newark. What’s most fascinating about her music, though, is the degree to which she uses the studio as an instrument, adding layers upon layers of percussion and drone and ornamentation so it’s not just four or five musicians, it sounds almost orchestral at times. We talk about that a lot too, as well as the whole definition of the phrase spiritual jazz, which you see thrown around a lot without ever really pinning down what it means, or how you would define it in terms of a set of rhythms or a particular instrumental palette or whatever – it’s just kind of a know it when you hear it sort of thing.

Anyway, this was a very interesting conversation from my perspective, as I’ve only recently become a fan of Muriel’s but now I’m deep into her catalog, almost all of which is available on Bandcamp, so by all means check it out after you’re done listening to this interview. And if you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Muriel Grossmann, "Wien" (Quiet Earth)

Muriel Grossmann, "Wisdom" (Earth Tones)

Ivo Perelman

17 december 2020 | 54 min

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This episode features an interview with saxophonist Ivo Perelman, which is important because he's one of the artists on Polarity, a CD which I'll be putting out through my new label, Burning Ambulance Music, in February 2021. It's a duo album with trumpeter Nate Wooley, and it's intensely beautiful music unlike anything else you've ever heard, I promise. Pre-order your copy now.

I’ve known about Ivo Perelman for about 25 years; the first record of his I heard was Cama de Terra, which came out in 1996. It was actually the very last release on Homestead Records, right before Steven Joerg, who was running the label at the time, left and started AUM Fidelity. That album featured Perelman with Matthew Shipp on piano and William Parker on bass, and they’re two of the people he’s continued to work with ever since, along with many others, including Joe Morris, Nate Wooley, Mat Maneri, Whit Dickey, and a whole slew of other players.

See, Ivo’s discography is massive. He puts out albums in bunches, sometimes as many as eight at a time, sometimes three and even four-CD sets. He just recently passed the 100 release mark, which puts him in relatively rarefied company, up there with Duke Ellington, Anthony Braxton, David Murray, and very few others. It can be hard to know where to begin with his catalog, frankly, but his music has evolved a lot over time – he’s really on a lifelong creative journey, which is why he’s constantly collaborating with people in new combinations and changing his approach to the horn and just generally trying new things. So you’re probably best off starting with something recent and then moving backwards, deciding what to listen to based on who’s on a given record.

He’s been living in Brooklyn for many years, but he’s originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and when the pandemic got rolling, he went back to Brazil, which is where we connected for this interview. It was conducted via Skype, so there are a few points at which the sound warps a little, or cuts in and out. Still, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out what he’s saying in those moments. We had a really fascinating conversation, about his creative philosophy and his practice regimen and the role of improvisation in Brazilian music and a lot of other things. I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Ivo Perelman/Nate Wooley, "Four" (Polarity)

Ivo Perelman/Matt Shipp/Whit Dickey, "Garden of Jewels" (Garden of Jewels)

Tim Berne

12 november 2020 | 85 min

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I first heard Tim Berne on a John Zorn album – Spy Vs. Spy, from 1989, where the two of them, plus Mark Dresser on bass and Joey Baron and Michael Vatcher on drums, play 17 Ornette Coleman tunes in 40 minutes. It’s one of the most intense records you’ll ever hear in your life. They play almost all the tunes at hardcore punk speed, and the two drummers are delivering blast beats like they’re auditioning for Napalm Death. Some people love it, and some people fucking hate it. I'm in the former category. Anyway, Berne’s own music doesn’t always have that same punk rock aggression, but it’s definitely intense and can get very loud.

He’s originally from upstate New York, but has been based in Brooklyn for basically his entire professional career, which started in the 1970s when he was studying with Julius Hemphill. Hemphill is Berne’s single biggest influence, as you’ll hear in this interview.

Berne is very independent; he’s started two different independent labels to put out his own music – first Empire, which he used to make five albums in the late 70s, and later Screwgun, which continues to this day. He was signed to Columbia for a couple of years, though, and has made a bunch of records for ECM with his current primary band, Snakeoil. They’ve been together for about a decade.

Berne’s bands tend to have great names – he’s led Hard Cell, Caos Totale, Science Friction, Bloodcount, and Big Satan, among others. He’s also currently a member of Broken Shadows, a quartet with Chris Speed on tenor sax, Reid Anderson on bass, and Dave King on drums. They play the music of Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden, and they have a couple of live albums you can get on Bandcamp and a studio LP that’s only available as part of a ridiculously expensive subscription box set from the Newvelle label.

This interview was recorded last Thursday, November 5, which is why I mention obsessively refreshing Twitter at the beginning – we were both waiting for election results along with everything else. Anyway, we talk about a lot of subjects – Berne has been a really influential composer, particularly among 21st century jazz players from Brooklyn, so we discuss that, but we also talk about Julius Hemphill, about his various bands and his creative relationships with Matt Mitchell and David Torn, about his approach to composing and about the depth of his catalog, and much more. I had a really good time talking to him, and I hope you’ll enjoy listening to our conversation.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Tim Berne/Matt Mitchell, "Increminced" (Spiders)

Tim Berne's Snakeoil, "Moornoats" (The Deceptive 4)

Ambrose Akinmusire

15 oktober 2020 | 60 min

Christian McBride

25 september 2020 | 57 min

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Christian McBride is one of the most widely recorded bass players in jazz. He’s been on more than 300 albums as a sideman, and has won six Grammys. This year alone, he’s put out three major projects. In February, he released The Movement Revisited, a large-scale project that paints sonic portraits of Black political and cultural icons Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama, mixing orchestral jazz with narration. It was first put together in 1998, covering just the first four people, and then revised a decade later, adding a fifth section about Obama and generally rewriting the whole piece. In July, he appeared on saxophonist Joshua Redman’s album RoundAgain, with Brad Mehldau on piano and Brian Blade on drums. This was the same set of players who made Redman’s album MoodSwing in 1994, which I remember was one of the first jazz albums I bought by a young musician; before that, I was mostly buying classic old albums by players who were either dead or long past their prime. And finally, he made For Jimmy, Wes And Oliver, a big band album with guests Joey DeFrancesco on organ and Mark Whitfield on guitar, which is coming out this week.

Obviously, a guy like McBride, who’s played with basically everyone, has a million stories to tell. I particularly wanted to ask him about one show that I saw him at, which was Sonny Rollins’ 80th birthday concert at the Beacon Theatre 10 years ago, where they were joined by Ornette Coleman and Roy Haynes. And believe me, he has stories about Rollins. And beyond making music and talking about music, he’s also the artistic director for the Newport Jazz Festival, and he his wife run a jazz program for kids in New Jersey, Jazz House Kids, so we talk about how that’s been impacted by COVID-19 and what they see as the future of the program and of jazz education. Something else interesting is that he’s an interviewer himself – he hosts a radio show where he talks to other jazz musicians. So we talk a little bit about that, too.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Christian McBride Big Band, "Night Train" (For Jimmy, Wes and Oliver)

Joshua Redman, "Silly Little Love Song" (RoundAgain)

Kevin Richard Martin

3 september 2020 | 62 min

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Episode 57 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with producer Kevin Richard Martin. I’ve been a fan of Martin’s for almost 30 years. The first thing I heard by him was 1992's Possession, by his band God, which also featured Godflesh's Justin Broadrick on guitar; they were an extremely heavy sort of postpunk free jazz group with elements of doom metal and dub — they sounded like nothing else out there at the time, and really nothing since. They released two studio albums and several live records, all of which are out of print and hard to find these days.

After that, Martin and Broadrick made a bunch of records under a bunch of different names, as Techno Animal and Ice and Curse of the Golden Vampire and a few others. The music ranged from extremely spaced-out instrumentals, like psychedelic dream soundtracks, to ultra-heavy stuff that was inspired by hip-hop but with incredible, booming, almost concussive bass. Martin is obsessed with bass, as you’ll hear in our conversation, and he’s spent most of his recording career working on ways to make the bass heavier and more immersive.

In the late '90s, he started doing solo work as The Bug; instrumental at first, but he very quickly started bringing in vocalists and making really harsh, almost industrial dancehall and hip-hop. The three best known Bug albums — Pressure, London Zoo, and Angels and Devils — are heavy as hell, and he's earned a reputation for ultra-crushing live shows, with so much volume and bass that it'll make your nose bleed.

His most recent music is completely different from any of this, which is part of the reason he’s releasing it under his own name, Kevin Richard Martin. He started out with the album Sirens in 2019, which was very atmospheric but also very intense instrumental music that dealt with the difficulties involved in the birth of his first child. Now this year, he’s put out five digital-only albums on Bandcamp called Frequencies For Leaving Earth volumes 1 through 5, and each one is different from the others, but they’re all connected in that they’re all experimenting with a kind of immersive use of sound and bass. I listen to them on headphones, and it’s kind of like having your head wrapped in a towel and very slowly squeezed.

In this interview, we talk a lot about those records, as well as God and Techno Animal and Zonal and a whole range of stuff. I think you’ll find it to be a very interesting conversation. If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Zonal, "In A Cage" (Wrecked)

Kevin Richard Martin, "Requiem" (Frequencies for Leaving Earth, Vol. 4)

Alan Braufman

20 augusti 2020 | 54 min

Wayne Escoffery

16 juli 2020 | 66 min

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Episode 55 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with saxophonist Wayne Escoffery. Fair warning: there are some sound dropouts here and there on this episode, because I got a new iPhone and consequently had to try out a different method of recording. So this conversation was recorded through my laptop using a Skype phone call, and for the most part it worked, but there are a few moments where it doesn’t.

I’ve been following Wayne Escoffery’s career for a long time; the first time I interviewed him for Burning Ambulance was in 2012. For a long time, he was in trumpeter Tom Harrell’s band, and for even longer than that, and up to the present day, he’s been a member of the Mingus Big Band, which played on Monday nights at the Jazz Standard in New York back when live jazz was a thing. He’s also made some really excellent records as a leader. The 2012 album The Only Son Of One and the 2018 album Vortex were real breakthroughs, allowing him to show deeply personal and at times even political aspects of his music.

He was born in England and moved to the US as a child when his mother left her husband, who was apparently not a great guy. Some of the music on The Only Son Of One is about that, and about coming to grips with his father generally. The music on Vortex deals with life in America following the 2016 presidential election, and particularly the cultural environment’s effects on his son. His new album, The Humble Warrior, is autobiographical in a more oblique way, and we talk about that some, but what’s really important on all of these records is that the music is terrific, a blend of hard bop tradition with real melodic and harmonic innovation.

Escoffery is also one of the co-founders, along with trumpeter Jeremy Pelt (who was on episode 21, way back in 2018), of the Black Art Jazz Collective. Their third album, Ascension, recently came out, and while it features three new members, it’s very much in line with what they’ve been doing to date, which is presenting extremely high level modern acoustic jazz. Trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, piano, bass, and drums, playing complicated melodies and extrapolating on them with really skilled and beautiful solos. We talk a lot about that group, too, and where he sees them fitting into the jazz tradition, particularly in relation to the acoustic jazz of the 1970s.

Like everyone else I’ve ever had on this show, Wayne Escoffery is a sharp guy who I had a lot of fun talking to, and I think you’re going to enjoy hearing our conversation. If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Wayne Escoffery, "Chain Gang" (The Humble Warrior)

Black Art Jazz Collective, "Twin Towers" (Ascension)

Ryan Porter

11 juni 2020 | 76 min

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The 54th episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with trombonist Ryan Porter. If you’ve seen Kamasi Washington live, you’ve seen Ryan Porter — he’s the trombonist standing directly to Kamasi’s left onstage. They’ve been friends since they were kids, growing up in L.A. together and playing on all kinds of projects, including Snoop Dogg’s touring band and the sessions for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and of course all of Kamasi’s records like The Epic, Heaven and Earth, Harmony of Difference, the soundtrack to Becoming (the Netflix documentary about Michelle Obama), and more. He’s also played on records by other members of the West Coast Get Down like Miles Mosley, Cameron Graves, and Brandon Coleman. Plus, Porter has made multiple albums of his own, including The Optimist, Force For Good, and Spangle-Lang Lane, which is a collection of children’s music, something we talk about in this interview. He’s also done a lot of session work on his own and as a member of the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, playing on records by Diana Krall, Michael Bublé, Nick Cave, Quincy Jones, Anthony Hamilton and Leon Russell. He gets around.

I talked to Porter on Wednesday, June 3. The interview had been booked a week earlier, and by the time it happened, the protests surrounding the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police had gotten well underway across the country – a lot of cities were under curfew, if they hadn’t already been that way because of COVID-19. So to talk about music with a guy who made an album of children’s music, and made two other albums with the titles The Optimist and Force for Good, almost felt like a kind of really dark irony. I mean, is this a particularly optimistic time in American history, the summer of 2020? I don’t think it is, and I’m straight, white, and middle-aged. If I was young, or not white, I would not feel especially optimistic about life in this country, now or in the immediate future. But Ryan Porter is an optimistic guy. He’s clear-eyed about the environment he grew up in, and how it shaped him, and the world he lives in and what he can accomplish, or put across, with his music. But I’m not gonna misrepresent the conversation we had. We talked about art, and creativity, and making a career as a musician and how that’s not just about taking every opportunity you can – sometimes it’s about realizing that you don’t necessarily want to exist on a certain level, and taking a step or two back.

Like everyone else I’ve ever had on this show, Ryan Porter is a really smart, perceptive, creative guy, and I think you’re going to enjoy hearing our conversation. If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Ryan Porter, "Madiba" (Live in Paris at New Morning)

Ryan Porter, "The Psalmist" (The Optimist)

Dave Alvin

14 maj 2020 | 76 min

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The 53rd episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with singer-songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin, and is sponsored by Harry's men's grooming products. If you’re listening to this, you can get a Harry’s trial set at harrys.com/burning. You’ll get a weighted ergonomic handle for a firm grip; a five blade razor with a lubricating strip and trimmer blade; rich lathering shave gel with aloe to keep your skin hydrated; and a travel blade cover to keep your razor dry and easy to grab on the go. Go to harrys.com/burning to start shaving better today!

I am incredibly excited that I got to talk to Dave Alvin. I first heard the Blasters, the band he formed with his brother Phil in 1979 or so, 30 years ago, in 1990, when a compilation called The Blasters Collection came out, and I was just blown away. Their music was a mix of rockabilly, blues, country, hillbilly music, Forties jump blues and Fifties R&B – they basically threw everything into a blender and somehow turned it into one thing, all driven by Dave Alvin’s lead guitar and Bill Bateman’s massive drums, which could really be a whole conversation on their own.

Dave Alvin’s made close to twenty albums since leaving the Blasters, including a couple with Phil in the last few years but also a whole string of records with his band the Guilty Men, some collaborations with country singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore and rockabilly singer Sonny Burgess, and guest appearances on a million things, because he’s a kick-ass guitar player with a unique style and sound that a lot of people want to use for things. And now he’s got a new band called the Third Mind, which was the impetus for this interview. They don’t really sound like anything else he’s done before – their music is highly improvisatory psychedelic rock, with some touches of very early jazz-rock fusion thrown in there, too. So if you were wondering how a roots-rock semi-traditionalist singer-songwriter winds up on this podcast, well, that’s how.

This conversation is really fascinating, and goes down a lot of pathways I wasn’t expecting. We talk about Robert Johnson, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Dick Dale, Sun Records, growing up in California…Dave Alvin’s a hell of a sharp guy who knows a lot about music, and I had a fantastic time talking to him. I’m sure you'll enjoy hearing our conversation.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

The Blasters, "Long White Cadillac" (Non Fiction)

The Third Mind, "Journey in Satchidananda" (The Third Mind)

James Brandon Lewis

16 april 2020 | 111 min

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The 52nd episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, and is sponsored by Harry's men's grooming products. If you’re listening to this, you can get a Harry’s trial set at harrys.com/burning. You’ll get a weighted ergonomic handle for a firm grip; a five blade razor with a lubricating strip and trimmer blade; rich lathering shave gel with aloe to keep your skin hydrated; and a travel blade cover to keep your razor dry and easy to grab on the go. Go to harrys.com/burning to start shaving better today!

James Brandon Lewis is from Buffalo, New York, a city which has produced a surprising number of musicians whose work I listen to a lot, including Grover Washington, Jr., Charles Gayle, Rick James, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Morton Feldman, and Cannibal Corpse. I’ve seen Lewis perform live twice, both times with the avant-garde rock trio Harriet Tubman. One time was a straight double bill – James’s trio with bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Warren Trae Crudup, plus guitarist Anthony Pirog, opened for Tubman. Then, at Winter Jazzfest in 2018, Tubman put together an expanded group to perform a re-interpretation of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. That night, the lineup was Tubman – Brandon Ross on guitar, Melvin Gibbs on bass, JT Lewis on drums – plus James’s trio, plus Jaimie Branch on trumpet and Darius Jones on alto sax. It was really fantastic, one of those things that you only get to see once in your life. You’re either in the room when the magic happens, or you get to hear people tell stories about it for years afterward.

James made two records for the OKeh label – Divine Travels, which had William Parker on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums, plus poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, who runs Heroes Are Gang Leaders with him, and then Days of FreeMan, which had Jamaaladeen Tacuma on bass and Rudy Royston on drums. By the way, if you’re new to this podcast, a lot of the people I’ve mentioned so far – Melvin Gibbs, William Parker, and Jamaaladeen Tacuma – have all been on in the past. Anyway, James followed Days of FreeMan with No Filter, which featured his live trio plus Pirog, and then he made Radiant Imprints, a duo album with drummer Chad Taylor, and An UnRuly Manifesto, with the trio plus Pirog and Jaimie Branch. And every one of those records is absolutely worth your time, so check ’em out.

This conversation with James Brandon Lewis is the longest thing I’ve ever recorded for this podcast, and it went in a whole bunch of directions I wasn’t expecting. I wrote down about two pages of questions, and I think I asked three of them. You’ll hear what I mean – he has a lot to say on a variety of issues. This might be the most in-depth interview he’s ever done, and I hope you'll find it as fascinating as I did.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Heroes Are Gang Leaders, "Hurt Cult" (Artificial Happiness Button)

James Brandon Lewis & Chad Taylor, "Under/Over the Rainbow" (Live in Willisau)

Isabelle Faust

12 mars 2020 | 70 min

Kassa Overall

13 februari 2020 | 78 min

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The 50th episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with drummer/beatmaker/producer Kassa Overall.

Overall is a really exciting musician. He’s much more than just a drummer, although he’s a monster behind the kit; he was a member of pianist Geri Allen’s band for several years, he’s played with Vijay Iyer, Theo Croker, and he’s a member of drummer Terri Lynn Carrington’s band Social Science. But his own albums, Go Get Ice Cream And Listen To Jazz and now I Think I’m Good, are a really unique blend of jazz, hip-hop, and electronic music – they’re not so much virtuosic displays of instrumental technique as they are intimate kind of audio diary-keeping, in the way a lot of hip-hop is now.

Last year, he had a six-month residency at the Jazz Gallery in New York; once a month between January and June, he played with a different pianist, with each set recorded. I saw the first show, where his duo partner was Jason Moran, but it turned out to be a trio set, because bassist Evan Flory-Barnes was added to the lineup. They played for almost 90 minutes, including music by Ravel and Geri Allen, and there was also some sound manipulation going on from the board, kind of like a live dub mix. Overall’s style behind the kit is swinging, but it can be kind of blocky, too; at the show I saw, he seemed happier locking into a hip-hop groove with Flory-Barnes than swinging, and his drum solos had real aggression to them.

That’s one of the things we talk about in this conversation – the fact that musicians under 40, who grew up in a world where hip-hop was basically the dominant form of black music and eventually pop music as a whole, have an approach to jazz that’s fundamentally different than people older than them. Even players from previous generations who have a deep interest in and an openness to hip-hop as an element in their music, like Herbie Hancock, always approach it from the outside. A guy like Kassa just lives in it, like a fish lives in water. So that informs our whole conversation, which covers his time with Allen, his new record and particularly the lyrics on it, the actual sound of the music, his singing style, and a lot more. It’s a really interesting interview, and I hope you enjoy it.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Kassa Overall, "Darkness in Mind" (I Think I'm Good)

Kassa Overall, "Was She Happy (for Geri Allen)" (I Think I'm Good)

Peter Brötzmann

9 januari 2020 | 49 min

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It's true: After a three-month hiatus, the Burning Ambulance podcast is back, with an interview with legendary saxophonist Peter Brötzmann!

Brötzmann first emerged onto the global scene in the late '60s — he released his first album, For Adolphe Sax, named for the inventor of the saxophone, in 1967. A year later, he made Machine Gun, which is a landmark record not just in free jazz but in jazz history, period. A lot of critics have said that the music on Machine Gun was more extreme than anything that had come before, mostly because Brötzmann and the other two saxophonists, Willem Breuker and Evan Parker, seemed to be going even farther on their horns than John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders or Albert Ayler had gone, but when you pay close attention to it you’ll hear that there are actually riffs — really big, honking, fist-pumping riffs, especially at the end. And Brötzmann has said many times that the music was inspired by Lionel Hampton’s big band, which had four saxophonists up front blowing in unison.

I’ve been a fan of Brötzmann’s for a long time, and I’ve seen him live twice. The first time was in January 1997, at the Cooler in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan, with Thomas Borgman on saxophone, William Parker on bass, and Rashid Bakr on drums, a show that was released on CD under the name The Cooler Suite. The other time was at Tonic, with a version of his quartet Die Like A Dog. On record, that band usually featured Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, William Parker on bass, and Hamid Drake on drums, but at this gig Kondo wasn’t there for whatever reason, and Roy Campbell subbed in. I was also a big fan of Last Exit, a group formed by Bill Laswell that included Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock on guitar, and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums. Their music was a combination of free jazz, metal, and funk, totally improvised in the moment, and some of it is amazing. It used to be hard to find their CDs, but now you can get almost all of their albums on Laswell’s Bandcamp page.

This interview was recorded back in early October, and a lot of it’s about his new solo album I Surrender Dear, and about his connections to jazz history. He really loves old school players like Don Byas and Coleman Hawkins, and he absolutely loves the blues, so we talk a lot about that. I think you’ll really get a sense of him as a music fan — he talks about all the bands he saw growing up in Germany in the '50s and '60s. We talk about what he looks for in collaborations, and how he chooses projects, too, 'cause he gets more invitations than he accepts. We also talk about his visual art, which is just as important as the music — he had originally planned to be a visual artist, with music as a side thing, but it didn’t work out that way. Still, he’s designed almost all of his own album covers for the last 50 years, and he’s got an instantly recognizable visual style, very blocky and heavy like a printmaker. It’s a perfect complement to his sound on the horn. And at the very end of our conversation, I ask him about Ginger Baker, who had died just a few days before we spoke. The two of them played together for three gigs in 1987 in a band that included Sonny Sharrock and Nicky Skopelitis on guitars, and Jan Kazda on bass, under the name No Material. So that’s where this conversation ends. I hope you enjoy the interview, and thanks for listening.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Peter Brötzmann, "I Surrender Dear" (I Surrender Dear)

Nduduzo Makhathini

10 oktober 2019 | 74 min

Kris Davis

26 september 2019 | 62 min

Chris Lightcap

12 september 2019 | 64 min

George Cables

29 augusti 2019 | 69 min

Bernard Fowler

15 augusti 2019 | 77 min

Jamaaladeen Tacuma

1 augusti 2019 | 76 min

Allison Miller

18 juli 2019 | 71 min

Whit Dickey

4 juli 2019 | 86 min

Saeunn Thorsteinsdóttir

20 juni 2019 | 75 min

Melissa Aldana

6 juni 2019 | 65 min

Herlin Riley

2 maj 2019 | 64 min

John Corbett

18 april 2019 | 89 min

Dwight Trible

28 mars 2019 | 68 min

Jason Palmer

28 februari 2019 | 66 min

Linda May Han Oh

7 februari 2019 | 73 min

Branford Marsalis

24 januari 2019 | 54 min

Melvin Gibbs

10 januari 2019 | 64 min

Rune Grammofon

20 december 2018 | 106 min

Roxy Coss

29 november 2018 | 87 min

JD Allen

8 november 2018 | 81 min

Keyon Harrold

25 oktober 2018 | 63 min

Zev Feldman

11 oktober 2018 | 73 min

Support the Burning Ambulance podcast on Patreon: http://patreon.com/burningambulance

Episode 27 of the Burning Ambulance podcast—the first episode of Year Two of the show—is the first one not to feature an interview with a musician. Instead, I’m talking to Zev Feldman, who’s a producer working primarily with the Resonance Records label.

Resonance has been around for ten years and has mostly specialized in releasing archival music by legendary jazz artists. Their first big release was Echoes Of Indiana Avenue by guitarist Wes Montgomery—it featured some previously unheard early recordings. They’ve subsequently done several other albums of his music, including a live concert recorded on his only European tour in 1965. They’ve also put out albums by Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd, Bill Evans, Larry Young, and John Coltrane, among many others, and Zev is the guy who actually travels the world locating these lost recordings and putting in all the legwork to get them licensed, make sure they’ve got the rights, and do everything else that leads to the physical release. The thing that makes Resonance releases so great, by the way, is that they’re not just about throwing the music out there—they have really in-depth liner notes, tons of historical photographs, interviews with the surviving musicians or people connected to the recordings in some way, and beautiful packaging overall. They’re all about preserving the love of physical music formats. They do special releases for Record Store Day every year, putting out the vinyl versions before the CD edition and stuff like that.

They don’t just release archival music, either—they also put out CDs by new artists, and Zev and I talk a little bit about that in this interview. We also discuss some of the non-Resonance work he’s done, like the Thelonious Monk record Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 and a big project he did the other year, reissuing 25 titles from Xanadu Records, a small '70s label that really deserves much more attention than it’s ever gotten.

There's a lot more music in this episode than usual. Here's a full listing of everything you'll hear:

Thelonious Monk, "Well You Needn't" (Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960)

Grant Green, "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing" (Funk in France: From Paris to Antibes 1969-70)

Wes Montgomery, "Full House" (In Paris: The Definitive ORTF Recording)

Bill Evans, "Very Early" (Another Time: The Hilversum Concert)

Larry Young, "Mean to Me" (In Paris: The ORTF Recordings)

John Coltrane, "Crescent" (Offering: Live at Temple University)

Andreas Varady, "Radiska" (The Quest)

Mark Turner & Ethan Iverson

27 september 2018 | 68 min

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Episode 26 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features a conversation with saxophonist Mark Turner and pianist Ethan Iverson; it's also the one-year anniversary of the show. I want to thank every single person who’s listened to the show in that time, and assure you that Year Two is going to be even better.

I’ve known both Ethan Iverson and Mark Turner for a while; Ethan actually wrote a blurb for a crime novel I self-published last year – it’s called Fifty Foot Drop, and you can find it on Amazon if you want – and a few years ago, I was hired to run a social media campaign for Mark when he had a new album out on ECM. Ethan and I had never met face to face, though, before this interview, which was recorded backstage at the Jazz Standard in New York on September 18, the night they were there to perform songs from Temporary Kings.

Temporary Kings is their first record as a duo, but they’ve been playing together for more than a decade, along with bassist Ben Street, in a quartet led by drummer Billy Hart. And obviously they’ve both had very strong careers on their own – Ethan of course was the pianist for the Bad Plus for a long time, and recorded a trio album, The Purity of the Turf, in 2016 with Ron Carter on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. He’s also starting to build his own career as a writer, both on his blog and in pieces for the New Yorker. Mark has recorded as a leader for Criss Cross, Warner Brothers and ECM, was – and maybe still is – a member of the trio Fly, and plays a lot as a sideman in all kinds of different contexts. He’s also got a second album of duos out this year – Faroe, with guitarist Mikkel Ploug.

This conversation was really fascinating for me. We talked about each man’s early career, about projects they’ve worked on together, musicians they both know, early influences, social media, and a lot more. At certain points, you’ll notice that it almost becomes me and Ethan interviewing Mark, which I thought was hilarious but also really apt, because Mark is an incredibly smart guy and very philosophical in a really unique way. His attitude toward his life and career is unlike anyone else I’ve ever spoken with, and I’m really glad he was willing to be interviewed for the show.

Eddie Palmieri

13 september 2018 | 64 min

Tia Fuller

30 augusti 2018 | 72 min

Nicole Mitchell

16 augusti 2018 | 74 min

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Episode 23 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell. Mitchell is originally from Syracuse, New York, but she grew up in California and eventually went to college in the Midwest, where she became an important figure on the Chicago jazz scene. In fact, she eventually became the first female president of the AACM there. Her primary group is called the Black Earth Ensemble, which has a fluctuating membership but Tomeka Reid is one of the core members – Tomeka was featured on episode 7 of this podcast, back in January, and spoke about working with Nicole and how important it was to her development as an artist, so we’re getting the other side of the story in this episode.

In addition to the Black Earth Ensemble, Mitchell has led a lot of one-off groups, and been a part of other people’s projects – she’s in some of Anthony Braxton’s large ensembles, she’s been part of several of Rob Mazurek’s groups including the Exploding Star Orchestra and its offshoot projects, she’s in the Indigo Trio with Harrison Bankhead and Hamid Drake. But she’s really made a tremendous impact as a leader, creating music that covers a broad spectrum from jazz to modern composition to theatrical pieces and multimedia presentations, collaborating with and paying tribute to writers – as you’ll hear in this conversation, texts are hugely important to her, even when the music itself is instrumental. Last year, her album Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds got a tremendous amount of critical acclaim – it combines violin, cello, guitar and percussion with traditional Japanese instruments to create a sound that’s both ancient and modern at once, and really is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard.

We don't agree about everything, and you'll hear some interesting back-and-forth in this conversation about a variety of issues, from the audience for hardcore improvised music to how young artists should navigate the industry. I really enjoyed speaking with her, and I hope you'll enjoy this episode.

Regina Carter

2 augusti 2018 | 59 min

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Episode 22 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with violinist Regina Carter. She's one of the best known jazz violinists in the world, as well as a MacArthur fellow and a Grammy nominee. She’s originally from Detroit, and she got her start in an all-female group called Straight Ahead. From there, she moved to New York, joined the String Trio of New York with guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg, and also started making solo records starting in 1995. She’s made 10 albums in all, including one that was a duo with pianist Kenny Barron. She’s worked with a broad range of musicians including Wynton Marsalis, Cassandra Wilson, Oliver Lake, Madeline Peyroux, Steve Turre, Terri Lyne Carrington, and James Carter, who’s also her cousin.

Winning a Macarthur fellowship in 2006 has allowed her to work on some really interesting projects without having to convince a label of their value beforehand. Southern Comfort was an album that explored Appalachian and southern roots music as a way of tracing her own family’s history, and her latest album, Accentuate the Positive, which came out last year, was a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, but it doesn’t feature the songs you’d expect. A lot of the pieces are obscure, and as a consequence she doesn’t really feel the need to perform them in a way that the listener might identify with Ella Fitzgerald.

I met up with Regina Carter at NJPAC’s All-Female Jazz Residency, a week-long program for students from 14-25 in Newark, New Jersey. She was the artistic director, taking over from Geri Allen, who founded the program but who passed away suddenly a little over a year ago, in June 2017. The residency combines lectures and seminars with rehearsals and master classes, so that the women who are taking part learn from each other as well as from people who are already making careers in jazz. And it goes beyond music, as we talk about in this interview – they also learn about branding yourself and maintaining a social media presence, about what radio expects from an artist and how to make an impression on journalists and DJs, and other things that will allow them to become professionals and avoid pitfalls in their careers.

I had originally planned for this to be a joint interview with Regina Carter, saxophonist Tia Fuller, and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, all of whom participated in the residency, but it wound up just being a conversation with Ms. Carter. I think it’s really interesting, though, and she’s got a lot to say not only about her music but about the residency and the state of the jazz business, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Jeremy Pelt

19 juli 2018 | 80 min

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Episode 21 of the Burning Ambulance podcast - we're adults now! - features an interview with trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, who’s been on the scene more or less since the dawn of the 21st century. He made his first album as a leader in 2002, but he really broke out of the pack in 2008, when he formed a quintet with JD Allen on tenor sax, Danny Grissett on piano, the late Dwayne Burno on bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. He made four albums with that group – November in 2008, Men of Honor in 2010, The Talented Mr. Pelt in 2011, and Soul in 2012 – and they’re all terrific. That was where I started listening to him – the first album I heard was The Talented Mr. Pelt, and I went backward immediately and checked out Men of Honor and November, and Soul. I interviewed him for Burning Ambulance in 2011, and have written about him a lot on the site in the years since, because he makes an album a year, and they're always worth hearing.

After that quintet broke up, he started experimenting, changing up the musicians he was working with on every album. He made two records that went in more of an electronic, fusion-ish direction, Water and Earth and Face Forward, Jeremy; then he made a record with two drummers, Tales, Musings and Other Reveries; then he made a quartet record, #jiveculture, with Danny Grissett back on piano and Ron Carter on bass, and Billy Drummond, who’d also played on Tales, on drums. And in the last couple of years, he’s formed a new band, centered around his partnership with Victor Gould. He played on Gould’s album Clockwork, and then brought him into his band for the album Make Noise, from last year, and this new live album.

That’s not all he’s got going on, though. Jeremy Pelt is on about a half dozen records coming out in 2018. He’s on saxophonist Wayne Escoffery’s new record Vortex; he’s on three tracks from organist Jared Gold’s new album Reemergence; he’s part of the band on Don’t Play With Love, a collection of pieces composed by Prince's father, John L. Nelson; he and saxophonist Jim Snidero recorded a tribute to Cannonball Adderley called Jubilation; and he’s a member of the Black Art Jazz Collective along with Wayne Escoffery, and they just released their second album, Armor of Pride. This is one of the longest episodes of the podcast - almost 80 minutes - because Jeremy Pelt has a lot to say, and it's all worth hearing.

Buster Williams

5 juli 2018 | 75 min

Norwegian Jazz

21 juni 2018 | 54 min

David Murray

7 juni 2018 | 66 min

William Parker & Patricia Nicholson

24 maj 2018 | 79 min

Episode 17 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with bassist William Parker, whose latest album, the 3CD set Voices Fall from the Sky, is out now, and his wife Patricia Nicholson, who runs Arts For Art, the organization that has put on the Vision Festival every year since 1996 and has recently expanded to running additional concert series during the fall and winter.

William Parker has been a crucial figure on the international avant-garde jazz scene since the 1970s. His first recorded appearance was in 1973, backing saxophonist Frank Lowe on the album Black Beings, and he’s made literally hundreds of records since then. He was the bassist in the David S. Ware Quartet for something like 20 years, and continued working with Ware until the saxophonist's death in 2012. He played with Cecil Taylor in the 1980s and 1990s, he was the bassist in Matthew Shipp’s trio for decades, and has played with almost everyone else you’ve ever heard of in this genre of music. As a leader, he’s done everything from solo bass albums to massive orchestral projects. Voices Fall from the Sky showcases his work with vocalists.

Patricia Nicholson is also a hugely important figure to the New York avant-garde jazz scene, because she runs the annual Vision Festival, a massive, weeklong event that gathers amazing musicians from all across the spectrum, from players who’ve been around since the 1960s to people who’ve just made their debut in the last few years and are keeping the spirit of free music alive. She’s also a dancer and choreographer who performs at the festival every year, and she’s just made her debut as a spoken word performer on the album Hope Cries for Justice, a duo performance with Parker.

In this interview, I’m talking to William about what he’s doing musically, and I’m talking to Patricia about her thoughts on dance, and what it takes to run the Vision Festival and all the other programs that the nonprofit Arts For Art, which she leads, put on every year. They’re an extremely ambitious organization working in a city and a cultural environment that offers equal parts apathy and hostility, but what they do is pretty amazing, so I hope you’ll find this conversation as interesting and inspiring as I did.

Dave Holland

10 maj 2018 | 66 min

Dave Burrell

26 april 2018 | 71 min

Billy Cobham

12 april 2018 | 71 min

Meg Okura & Sam Newsome

29 mars 2018 | 81 min

Logan Richardson

15 mars 2018 | 78 min

Azar Lawrence

1 mars 2018 | 70 min

John Raymond

16 februari 2018 | 62 min

Orrin Evans

2 februari 2018 | 61 min

UK Jazz Roundtable

19 januari 2018 | 69 min

Tomeka Reid

5 januari 2018 | 63 min

Stanley Cowell

22 december 2017 | 59 min

Matt Hollenberg

8 december 2017 | 72 min

Roswell Rudd

24 november 2017 | 46 min

Myra Melford

10 november 2017 | 58 min

Matthew Shipp

27 oktober 2017 | 48 min

Roscoe Mitchell

13 oktober 2017 | 48 min

Burning Ambulance Podcast

The Burning Ambulance Podcast features interviews with musicians from the worlds of jazz, metal, modern composition, noise, and whatever else piques host Phil Freeman's interest.

Om podden

Avsnitt

Cindy Blackman Santana

Amina Claudine Myers

Carlos Niño

Kenny Garrett

Arushi Jain

Rufus Reid

Ethan Iverson

Walter Chaw

Vernon Reid

Adam Rudolph

Bob Stewart

Brandon Ross

Cameron Graves

Randy Brecker

Lenny White

Jeff Mills

Billy Harper

Andrew Cyrille

Don Byron

Anthony Braxton

Wadada Leo Smith

Pi Recordings

Joe Chambers

Muriel Grossmann

Ivo Perelman

Tim Berne

Ambrose Akinmusire

Christian McBride

Kevin Richard Martin

Alan Braufman

Wayne Escoffery

Ryan Porter

Dave Alvin

James Brandon Lewis

Isabelle Faust

Kassa Overall

Peter Brötzmann

Nduduzo Makhathini

Kris Davis

Chris Lightcap

George Cables

Bernard Fowler

Jamaaladeen Tacuma

Allison Miller

Whit Dickey

Saeunn Thorsteinsdóttir

Melissa Aldana

Herlin Riley

John Corbett

Dwight Trible

Jason Palmer

Linda May Han Oh

Branford Marsalis

Melvin Gibbs

Rune Grammofon

Roxy Coss

JD Allen

Keyon Harrold

Zev Feldman

Mark Turner & Ethan Iverson

Eddie Palmieri

Tia Fuller

Nicole Mitchell

Regina Carter

Jeremy Pelt

Buster Williams

Norwegian Jazz

David Murray

William Parker & Patricia Nicholson

Dave Holland

Dave Burrell

Billy Cobham

Meg Okura & Sam Newsome

Logan Richardson

Azar Lawrence

John Raymond