An Interview with Will Guthrie

Will Guthrie is an Australian-born, France-based improvising percussionist. Guthrie came up in the Australian jazz scene while also performing in a wide net of regional groups, and later honed his craft as an experimental musician in Europe. His singular approach to percussion is deeply textured, but also rhythmic, melodic and colorful. His music weaves influences from electroacoustic music, free jazz, gamelan and hip hop into soundscapes that are loose and frenetic while still maintaining a sense of control. He’s collaborated with artists as diverse as Oren Ambarchi, Victoria Shen, Keith Rowe, Roscoe Mitchell and Mark Fell, among others.

I first became acquainted with Will Guthrie’s music sometime during the doldrums of the pandemic, through his 2020 album Nist-Nah. Free jazz was my primary gateway into the wider world of experimental music, but before that, listening to gamelan for the first time greatly expanded my understanding of what music can evoke both texturally and physically. Nist-Nah, which has roots in both gamelan and free jazz that manifest in a completely hypnotic and original form, blew me away, and I quickly sought out his other recordings sometime after hearing it. Four years later, this past November, I got to see Guthrie do a solo percussion performance at Corbett Vs. Dempsey in Chicago, a highlight in a year full of amazing shows. The day before, I met with Guthrie for an in-person interview, and we talked for over an hour about jazz heroes, boundary-pushing collaborations, and more.

What are your earliest musical memories?

Sitting on my brother's bed, listening to Led Zeppelin. I’m sure there were other early ones but I remember being kind of blown away by listening to that stuff. And there was music before as well but that was probably my earliest, really clear musical memory that seemed powerful.

Do you still listen to a lot of Led Zeppelin?

Um, I still like it, I wouldn’t say I listen to it anymore. The three bands that my brother listened to the most were Led Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd - he was like 8 years older than me. My sister was more into hip-hop and punk, so I probably listened more to the stuff she was listening to. That stuff I do still listen to - old school stuff like Minor Threat and Dead Kennedys. And also early hip-hop, going up to KRS-One and Public Enemy and that sort of stuff. I definitely still listen to that. That was the first kind of music that I completely became obsessed with, and then after that I kind of got into jazz.

What was your gateway into jazz?

It’s actually this weird scene where I heard “Birdland” by Weather Report in a Chinese restaurant [laughs]. And I completely freaked out, actually. I loved the melody, I felt like I’d already heard it but I don’t think I would have. And then I spent a really long time trying to track down and work out what that song was and try to hear it again. I finally met this family friend of my mum’s whose dad was an insane jazz collector. And this friend of mine, Danny Fisher, he was my age and he was learning drums, obviously tapping into his dad’s record collection. So that kind of kicked it off and he introduced me to a real bunch of… everything, basically. I kind of stayed with fusion for quite a long time and then got more into bebop, hard bop, that kind of stuff. Then after that, free jazz and more experimental stuff.

That sounds like a great Chinese restaurant.

Ha! Absolutely. I just remember being blown away by music without vocals, without it being classical music, you know. That you could play instrumental music and make it interesting for a ten minute song or a 40 minute song or whatever. For me the voice always kind of got in the way because it took so much place in the music. So I remember loving “Birdland” and then realising after there’s no voice, as opposed to everything being orchestrated around the vocals. It seemed to open up the possibility of playing music in a really different way, of it not just having to be accompaniment to the voice.

I listen to a lot of early jazz compilations and sometimes I get kind of disappointed when there’s a vocalist, even though I feel like I shouldn’t.

Yeah, I mean I’ve learned to love - I still love - great singers and stuff, but I think when you grow up only listening to pop music or whatever’s on the radio, song-based music, and then you discover there’s other things out there, I remember it being a really important door that opened up at that time.

I remember when I first got into experimental music, I felt like it rewired my brains. Now I’ve kind of had to rewire them again to be able to listen to other music too.

[laughs] Yeah, I hear you.

I read somewhere that you took drumming lessons with Tony Williams?

Yeah! I had two lessons with Tony Williams. I have an uncle in California so we came over to visit him, and I’d written a million times to Tony Williams. There’s many drummers I worship but I was full-on, completely obsessed with him. For five years it was basically all I listened to, and I tracked every single album he ever played on. I’d written him fan mail and stuff [laughs] saying “I love you, Tony Williams!” He never got back. But when we got to San Francisco, I just remember being jet-lagged and completely out of it and looking at this local newspaper - just this shitty thing, in the hotel lobby or something. And on the back page, it was this tiny ad that said “drum lessons with Tony Williams.” [laughs] I completely freaked out. I think it was maybe a year before he died, he was teaching out of a drum shop in San Francisco. So I went there and had two one-hour lessons with him. I recorded them and unfortunately lost the tapes.

He was incredible, it was really a great experience. He showed me technique stuff, he was very focused on being disciplined, about playing drums correctly. But we also talked a lot about music, and Miles, and a whole lot of stuff that really surprised me.

What surprised you?

For a lot of us, the music he did with Miles was kind of the quintessential music of Tony Williams, you know, his playing was on such an insane level when he was playing with Miles. But he kind of gave the impression that, because he was a couple of generations younger than Miles, that the people of his generation were way more important to him, like Eric Dolphy, Ornette, The Beatles. He talked a lot about The Beatles. He never said anything about Miles being old school for him, but he definitely made it clear that Andrew Hill and Dolphy and these people who were probably closer in age to him were the ones who inspired him the most. That was his scene. I know he had a run-in with Miles - I don’t know what happened there, it’s not for me to speak on it.

I mean, I’d imagine most people who worked with him did.

[laughs] Absolutely. But I was really surprised about that, just because you kind of rewrite history the way you want to hear it, or based on the recordings.

He was really encouraging about not just copying the jazz tradition. He talked about how he would listen to his favorite drummers, like Roy Haynes or Alan Dawson, and he would take one thing he loved about their playing and kind of make it his own. But the whole idea of recreating other people’s solos, which was a big thing in my generation where you had to learn a Philly Joe Jones solo to be a good jazz player or whatever, that was completely ridiculous to me. So for me, it was really encouraging to be like “yeah, you can listen to these people and learn, but the idea is not to just recreate what they’re doing.” That was important to hear from someone like that who said he’d done the same thing with his idols. So yeah, it was great. I also met Elvin on that trip.

Elvin Jones? Jesus.

Yeah, I went to one of his gigs, saw him play, shook his hand. It was beautiful.

I haven’t met anyone of that caliber. The closest is that I’ve been in the same room as people like William Parker but I’m always too shy to be like “hey, I’m a huge fan.”

You should say hello, because they won’t be around forever. And most of them are cool people. I couldn’t believe Elvin. I went up and said “thank you so much, thanks for the music” and he said “no, thank you, thank you for being here listening.” I was freaking out [laughs]. He was a beautiful, beautiful man.

When you were coming up in the Australian music scene, which artists were you collaborating with early on?

I had a really good year in my uni studying music, and there were a couple of older tenor players who were really influential for me. One guy called Phil Bywater, and another called Tim Pledger. At that time I was probably listening to more bop, and getting into more open ways of playing. And those guys were already really well-versed in more of the free jazz, Archie Shepp / Pharaoh Sanders kind of world. So they opened me up to a bunch of different stuff. There was another guy called Mark Simmonds who was incredibly important to me, who was quite a bit older. He was in his 40s and I was 19 when I played with him. He was what I would consider one of Australia’s no-doubt best jazz musicians, who had really integrated all of that kind of post-Coltrane type playing and was also doing his own thing. He had a band called The Free Boppers, and I did quite a bit of playing with him. He taught me a lot. He was a really, really great teacher.

There were also a bunch of people involved in free improvisation, like David Tolley and Ren Walters, who were important for me in shaping a really inclusive kind of scene.

I don’t know anything about Australian jazz, except for The Necks.

Yeah, Mark was the same generation as The Necks. They came a bit later for me, but Mark played in the late seventies with Chris, who was in his band for a long time. Mark always said in a pretty arrogant way that they developed their style of playing in his band [laughs], I don’t know if that’s true or not. But that was a really interesting generation of jazz musicians, because they obviously came out of the Afro-American jazz tradition, but they weren’t content to completely reproduce that - which was the case of my generation where Wynton Marsalis was on the scene and it was this horrendous kind of neoconservativism. So we were fighting against that. We just saw no sense of growing up white in the middle class Australian suburbs trying to play that music note for note. So I think the Australian musicians that stood out to me were people who were asking these questions from the start of “how do we relate to this music, as much as we love it? How do you do something different with it?”

It’s crazy to think the Wynton Marsalis jazz politics had that kind of reach, all the way in Australia.

Oh man, it was so fucked. It was ridiculous. I mean, you had people dressing like that, wearing three piece suits dressing like dudes in the 50s, when it was like 30 degrees celsius. But yeah, it was huge. There was a war in my year at uni between people who only wanted to play bop and hard bop and then people that were trying to stretch out into other, more adventurous stuff. When I look back, it probably wasn’t that adventurous, it was probably still pretty derivative.

Yeah, it’s always a thing of “are you actually avant-garde or are you just copying Brötzmann.”

Yeah, exactly. That was my next step. After a while you start realizing actually you have all these codes around free jazz and improvised music that’s just as derivative as playing bebop. Where I’m at now, I don’t really see much difference [laughs].

Have you played with any of the members of The Necks?

Yeah, a tiny bit with Chris. I did a gig with Tony once, maybe Chris was on that same gig. I played with Chris in that band the Free Boppers on one gig, because Chris kind of rejoined right at the end. I love those guys, they’ve been a huge influence on me and they’re really, really important in the Australian scene.

Yeah, they’re really important to me too, hearing them opened up a lot of doors for me.

I saw you reviewed their album recently.

I did! It’s really good, if you haven’t heard it already.

I haven’t. I’d like to.

For a lot of us, that made sense as to how to work with the jazz tradition, but being from Australia. I don’t know if you could say it’s particularly Australian - it could be seen as that. But it could also just be seen as people that have dealt with the music of their generation in an original and kind of searching way, as opposed to just reproducing what’s going on around them.

I got into your work through your collaborations with Oren Ambarchi. Did you two connect in Australia?

A little bit. We knew each other because he used to run a great festival with Robbie Avenaim, who’s a really good friend of mine and a really, really amazing drummer who’s been a big influence on me. Robbie and Oren used to run WhatIsMusic?, an incredible music festival in Australia that brought a lot of artists from Europe and Japan and elsewhere to Australia. A lot of people discovered a lot of stuff through those guys. They did a lot for the scene. So I knew Oren, because I played at that festival, but I knew Robbie better. When I moved to Europe, that’s when we started playing more. He was in Sydney too, and I grew up in Melbourne, so I didn’t see him that much outside of the festival. And to be honest, he didn’t seem to play that much in Australia, he was playing more in Europe by then anyway, so we played more once I ended up in Europe.

You’ve mentioned playing a lot of different styles of music, including flamenco and African music, and obviously a lot of your work is influenced by Indonesian music. When did you start getting into that kind of music?

Basically, in Melbourne, from when I was 17 up until I left, I was kind of a working drummer. So I was just playing in a million different bands, most of them jazz or jazz related, also some pop bands. Then, at a certain point, people just started calling me for gigs. I started working with some West African guys, a guy from Senegal and another guy from South Africa, playing in their bands. I later ended up working with some Ghanaian musicians. The scene’s cool in Melbourne.

You talked to Michael Zerang, I imagine he’s older than me but maybe there’s some similarity, in that as a drummer you get called to play in a lot of projects. I think he did a lot of that stuff as well.

Definitely.

But yeah, I was playing a bunch of different stuff just trying to earn my living as a musician. Then the flamenco thing happened too, which was really great. I spent a few years with that group, which was a dance company from Madrid. It was just a good way to learn about different music, playing with people who were from these places. That’s sort of what it’s about. I’m interested in lots of different musics, I’m also interested in improvisation through many different styles and methods of working, not exclusively “improvised music.” So that’s always attracted me, how you play the way you wanna play in different contexts.

How do you work in so many different fields without feeling like a sort of tourist?

It can happen. I had that playing with the Ghanian guys. You start playing this stuff and then you realize how deep the music is and how much you need to work on it. But they wouldn’t tell me anything, so you kind of have to figure it out yourself and do your own research. You do sometimes end up doing it wrong. I’m playing with a Tuareg musician at the moment, and there’s certain things I haven’t completely got my head around, you know. But I think you just gotta be sincere and do the best you can. Research, but also do your thing. The Tuareg guy doesn’t say shit to me about what I need to do, it’s just that when it’s not happening he’ll say “that’s not it.” [laughs] I think within that, he wants me to play the way I play, you know.

But there’s times where you can still feel like an imposter, for sure. It’s something you try to be aware of where you’re respectful and conscious of the culture that you’re working in. But also, for me, it’s more disrespectful to try and do it note for note, but badly. For me, that’s never interesting. That experience came out of playing bebop in Australia, and then the Americans would come through and blow you out of the water. And I always felt like to respect the culture properly, I should maybe do my own thing a little bit, as opposed to just being some bad copy of a culture that’s not my own. Ultimately, the people I’ve worked with have shown me that. They hear you struggling, trying to play this shit correctly, and they “no, it’s not happening,” so they just tell you to do your thing [laughs]. That’s the best thing you can do for the music. Numerous people have told me that. So that’s kind of encouraging as a way you can navigate your way through different musical environments and be respectful but also true to yourself.

The Tuareg musician you’re working with is Ahmed Ag Kaedy, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I know him through his album on Sahel Sounds. Did he reach out to you or was it vice versa?

No, that was a mutual friend in Finland, who’s done a lot for Ahmed and brought him over to Europe a few times. We were touring at around the same time, and my friend put together this little tour, which was really killer. Ahmed’s a beautiful guy. He’s in a shit life situation. He’s had to move from Northern Mali down to Bamako, the capital, to escape the insane situation there. We’re trying to get him over to Europe next year for a tour.

How did you end up in Nantes?

I moved to London first. I wanted to stop being a working musician and concentrate more on my own stuff. So Europe was kind of the golden destination. Tony Buck was living there, and I had talked to people who were like “yeah, you can actually do the music you want to do and get paid for it,” which you can’t do in Australia [laughs]. So I left for London to study with Eddie Prévost from AMM.

Hell yeah.

I got some funding for that, which helped get me set up. In the end, Eddie didn’t want to teach. He was like, “I hope you get the grant so you can get to Europe, but I don’t teach.” [laughs] He was awesome, because he ran these weekly workshops that were legendary in London, I think it was every Monday night. But when I got there it was kind of on hold, they weren’t actually happening that much. It was very sporadic. And he was like, “you can come and participate in these workshops, but I don’t teach. I’ve got nothing to teach.” But I needed the money to get there, and I didn’t have any. So he was very cool because he helped me. He said “if you need me to say I’m going to teach you, I’ll say it so you can get the money and get your ass to Europe,” basically. I’m forever grateful to him, because that did allow me to get over there and get a foot in the door. And I did end up doing a few of his workshops, but as I said, at that particular time they were a bit sporadic. So I was in London just playing a lot, and then I met someone, so I moved to France to be with her, and then she got a job in Nantes. We were a bit over being in Paris because it was too expensive, too hectic. So we moved to Nantes and have been there for over 20 years now.

Is there a music scene in Nantes?

There is. It’s not super happening from my point of view, not to be down on it. There’s different individuals, but I can’t say there’s much of a scene. There’s a cool DIY scene around a place called The Blockhouse, which has a lot of underground weirdo mainly electronic music. That’s the place and, always has been the place, that’s continued to support experimental music, and the people organizing it are all musicians. I haven’t been there in a while, but that’s still kind of my crew, because it’s just a bunch of weird individuals doing their thing and organizing shows. We organized a festival for ten years that brought a lot of people into town, which was really cool. The people in Nist-Nah, my gamelan group, the lineup has changed and now all of the musicians are in Nantes, and they’re killer. They all do really different things. Some of them come from more of a jazz background, some of them are more pop, one of them is doing more Latin kind of music. They’re all really good musicians, so I’ve been working a lot with them. In terms of the improv/experimental scene, there’s some cool individuals. But yeah, it’s not Chicago [laughs].

How did you go about putting together the musicians for Nist-Nah?

I mean, we had a group, but everyone was spaced out all over France and it was getting too complicated. I had a few agendas, to be honest. I wanted to work with some younger people, more women, etc. It was just a way of meeting people I didn’t know, too, which was really exciting. One of the guys, Sven, who’s been in it from the start, he’s younger and he introduced me to a lot of younger people. They’re all just rhythmically very strong players. An open mind and strong rhythmic skills, that’s basically all you need [laughs]. They’re all killer musicians in their own field, and some of them have never done gamelan before, so it’s more of a challenge, and it keeps things spicy.

How does your approach to recording music in-studio differ from your live performances?

There’s heaps of different stuff. Do you know the People Pleaser records?

Yeah!

I call that “studio composition.” It’s using recorded sound and then editing and a lot of montage to get things together. It’s piecing the record together in the studio, it’s not like going into the studio with a band and recording, which I’ve also done. But I think when I’m recording in the studio, I’m usually trying to be more precise, I’ll have a specific idea that I want to record. So yeah, it depends on the music, depends on the album, depends on what I’m doing and with who. We’re about to record with Nist-Nah in a couple of weeks, finishing another album, so on that one for sure we’ll be working on specific pieces that we’ve been playing live.

What would you say distinguishes your work with Nist-Nah from more traditional Indonesian music?

I think it’s kind of incomparable in a way. We’re using the traditional instruments, but also mixed with other drums and percussion and gongs. Quite a few of us in the band play traditional music, mainly from Java, but from the start the project was always an aim to mix that with the kind of music I’ve been doing for over 30 years, mixing gongs and bells and resonant metals. For me, it’s really related to the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Roscoe Mitchell, which has been a massive influence on me, but mixed in with Gamelan. Of course you have the connotations of the instruments based on the cultural and musical context of Gamelan, but Nist-Nah has always been interested in going different places with that as well.

It changed a lot too. The first version of Nist-Nah had Indonesian musicians in it, and then COVID happened and the whole thing completely changed and became something else. The idea of Nist-Nah originally was that it could be kind of a shifting thing where maybe a few of us would go to Indonesia and work with people we know over there. At the moment, it’s more of a fixed group because we’ve found it very satisfying working with the same people. But yeah, it’s an evolving, changing thing. For me, it’s got as much to do with gamelan as it does with experimental percussion practices. It’s completely related to what I’ve been working on with the drums for a long time. It’s not a separate thing, like “now I’m doing a gamelan project.”

I’m guessing the project came out of the solo album of the same name?

Yeah, it did. That was the first time I got access to the instruments, and that was a studio album where I wanted to see what was possible using mainly those instruments and a few other different percussion things. The group came together after a little bit to try and reinterpret the compositions on that disk, and then it evolved into a kind of live touring group, which I never would have imagined. We’ve done over 100 gigs now, which is kind of incredible because half of that was through COVID, in the times when things were opening up. Everyone in the group became incredibly close because we kind of shared this experience of getting through those years, through music.

Also, anyone who has played gamelan knows, it’s a real mission. I mean, a band is nothing compared to it [laughs]. You have a van, you have like a million different heavy instruments, setting it up takes like an hour. So it’s kind of a big deal, the actual experience of playing gamelan, just because of the logistics and everything. That kind of brought us together as well, because it solidifies the whole group experience. You can’t just show up with your instrument ten minutes before the gig and start playing.

Are you drawn to the trance inducing elements of Indonesian music and other music you work with?

Yeah, all music to be honest. I mean, for me, Coltrane’s the same. What’s interesting is that you see these parallels through all of this different music, and I am very, very attracted to the kind of physical and emotional states that music can push you to. With gamelan and the gongs, it’s such a rich and all-encompassing sound that it can kind of change you physically. I’ve always related to the feelings I had listening to Coltrane or Roscoe’s circular breathing, where you get into these loops and you’re completely taken by the music. So if that’s what trance is, that’s fine. I think the word trance gets thrown around a bit and it’s a different thing for a lot of different people [laughs]. But powerful music does that to you, it takes you somewhere else, and I’ve been interested in that from day one.

I feel like your music is really good at capturing the energy and sense of danger of improvised music while also maintaining a clear rhythmic sensibility. How do you balance the two?

I just got really sick of this idea in improvised music that you can’t be rhythmic or melodic, I always found that kind of ridiculous. So it wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just like, “that’s what I do.” I can’t imagine playing the drums in a strictly textural way, which I have done before. But now it feels like I can mix the textural stuff with more rhythmic stuff, and at the moment that’s what I’ve been working on a lot.

There’s just so many possibilities in rhythmic music, polyrhythmic, polymetric stuff, and I think I can improvise better in those contexts. Using rhythmic stuff in more abstract musical settings is something I’ve always been interested in, and that goes back to what Ed Blackwell was doing with Ornette. I mean, there’s a long history there. Somewhere along the line there’s just been this shitty discourse about what freedom is meant to be, you know? For me, I never really related to that - I mean, I did from a political/social point of view, and still do today. But the whole idea of freedom in music meaning you can’t play rhythmically [laughs], that never made any sense at all.

Are there any other drummers that have influenced you or that you admire, other than the ones we’ve already discussed?

Oh, there’s a million, most of them Afro-American jazz musicians. Tony and Elvin of course, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Tyshawn Sorey, so many others. Jack DeJohnette, of course. I’ve been listening to him forever, I used to listen to his stuff when I was really young. I’ve heard it all a million times and I know all these records backwards but it still feeds me so much. In the more abstract sound world, Robbie Avenaim’s a huge influence, Tony Buck, of course, Burkhard Beins, Paul Lovens, Martin Brandylmyr from Radian, people like that. They really brought something new to the drums, so they’re the people I’m interested in.

How did your albums with Mark Fell come together? It seems like you kind of come from different worlds.

Yes and no. We’re both dealing with this kind of abstract rhythmic music, but we are from different worlds for sure. We met at a festival in Canada called Send and Receive, run by Crys Cole. I didn’t know his music, and he didn’t know mine, but we both really appreciated what we heard.

How long ago was this?

7 or 8 years ago, I guess. But then we started playing together, and the albums came about through working in a studio in Germany where we recorded a bunch of stuff and then spent quite a lot of time re-editing and reworking it. We’re about to start work on another album.

Mark’s incredible. He’s an incredibly intelligent person. But when we talk about music, we don’t use the same language, which I always find really interesting. It’s similar with Ahmed, it’s confronting yourself with people who have very different methods of working with sound. And some of them know exactly what they want, but don’t have the words to express it. Others have ways of working that are just really different to mine. I’ve always found that to be a really rewarding experience, trying to figure out how to do something with people when you don’t really share the same verbal language.

What sort of language is Mark Fell using?

Mark could theorize and explain in technical, scientific, even terms about how his music is working, how a certain piece comes together. But when we were playing together, it was kind of like “oh, I’m just gonna do this thing.” [laughs] You’re kind of dealing with an insanely interesting and intelligent and even academic personality, who came up playing in clubs and also just knows how to get great sound out of a system. There’s also that very theoric, academic side to Mark. I don’t know if you’ve read his writings.

I’ve been meaning to!

I understand half of it, you know. But then when we play, it’s very instinctive and natural. He reminds me of Roscoe Mitchell a bit. I think they’re both incredibly intelligent musicians, but then when it comes to playing, you just play, and it’s sort of like “yeah, I love these people.”

You played with Roscoe, right?

Yeah!

What was the group set up?

It was a duo. We did three concerts in France. That was an insane learning experience as well. He’s similar, he doesn’t say a lot about the music. You’re just expected to bring something. It’s kind of nerve wracking, but it’s an amazing experience.

I can imagine. How long ago was that?

Probably ten years ago?

Going back to the People Pleaser albums, you said the first one was related to a very specific moment in your life. What was going on when you made the second one?

Well, I’m working on People Pleaser 3 now. I’ve always seen it as kind of an oral diary of what’s going on in my life, so the first one was specific because we were about to have our second kid. I used a bunch of stuff that was lying around. I’m still doing that, I try to recontextualize stuff that’s in my life at the moment. So recently, I was back in Australia, and I got a bunch of recordings from old live gigs. I’m using bits of that. I often use snippets of stuff, like films that I’ve enjoyed recently. So it’s all very personal material, not just delving into something without having a reason for it to be there.

What films have you been watching?

Ooh, at the moment I haven’t been watching much. I’m trying to read more. Oh, we just watched The Bear! We were tripping out because I was coming to Chicago and I was like “I need to find that place!” It’s actually cool, I enjoyed it.

I haven’t seen it. I don’t watch a lot of TV.

We watch that because, you know, we have kids and we’re wiped at the end of the day [laughs].

I’m also trying to read more, I never feel as well read as I’d like to be.

Yeah, I just try to spend less time on the phone, more time reading. I think it’s a good thing for everyone.

What are you currently reading?

I just bought a book on the Vietnam War. I was in a killer bookshop in Texas, so I picked up a bunch of different stuff. I bought a Steinbeck book, I bought a bunch of different old school classics that are a bit harder to find in France. I’m also reading a book on Sonny Rollins that was too big to bring with me on tour. I read a lot about music, I’m also reading a book about modes in Javanese gamelan music. I geek out on books about music and the musicians I love, I never get sick of reading about the jazz greats.

Same here. I have a big stack of music books I need to read, one of them is that huge Thelonious Monk book.

I read that recently!

I’m kind of intimidated to start it. I’m a big fan of Robin D.G. Kelley’s other writing.

It’s great, I really enjoyed it. It’s interesting too, on the mental health stuff, it was tragic what happened with Monk. He should have been looked after. It’s kind of interesting reading the personal things these people went through. I just got to the part in the Sonny Rollins book where he finally kicks heroin. These people’s personal lives were a mess, as a lot of ours are, and reading about it makes them less legends and more human.

What music have you listened to on tour?

Nothing at all.

I’ve met a few people who have told me something similar about going on tour.

I don’t even have headphones. I’m musiced out. In the States, I listen to the whackball Christian radio stations [laughs], it’s the most out shit I’ve ever heard in my life. I was doing that in Texas. It’s a trip. Some of it might make it onto People Pleaser 3.

I’m also listening to a lot of Mexican radio stations which are playing some really cool, weird semi-electronic takes on traditional music, which I really, really enjoy. You just don’t get that on the radio in France. When I get home, I’ll listen to some stuff. I bought some records.

Which ones?

I bought some Illinois Jacquet records. I’m a massive fan of this.

He’s one of my favorites too.

Yeah, I love that stuff. And I was in Houston, which is where he’s from, so that was really cool.

Any musicians you’re hoping to collaborate with in the future?

Yeah, there’s stuff on the cards. There’s a project with Container. We’ve played a bit, we’re working on a recording. There’s a project with Ellen Arkbro I’m really excited about, it’s the same where the music is moving forward but we haven’t really had much of a chance to play yet. Rian Treanor, Mark’s son, we’ve been talking about stuff. I’d love to do something with him. We just recently played with Oren again after a break, which was incredible. It’s really satisfying to revisit people you’ve been playing with for a long time and see how that changes, and see how after all these years there’s more stuff possible. To be honest, I’d like to work more with the stuff that’s up and running than bring in another 20 new project, though I’d like to do that too.

I saw Container play here in Chicago a while ago and I met him briefly, he mentioned having a project with you.

It’s killer, man. It’s so much fun.

You mentioned your music having this sense of pulse. Do you hear that in a lot of the music you listen to?

Not all of it, but it’s pulse or timing. With someone like Phill Niblock, you hear these subtle changes at the right time, he always understood how to pace the changes or modifications over an hour long piece. Same with Tony Conrad. It’s never boring because they understood that thing about timing and pulse that could be similar to rhythmic music, in a way. You’d never say Niblock’s music is pulse related, but it’s very conscious of timing and how to pace the music over a long period of time. It’s also something that interests me with gamelan a lot. The really big gong in gamelan is called the gong ageng, and it’s used to mark the end of every cycle in the music. When you start really getting into that, you hear how it’s used over long periods of time, and it’s used to mark changes in the music. I see parallels, and that’s something that always interests me in music. It’s asking what the similarities are between someone like Illinois Jacquet and Phill Niblock, or MF Doom and Sonny Rollins, in terms of phrasing. You hear all these threads throughout a lot of different styles of music, and then you stop thinking about the music in terms of style and aesthetics and more about the process and the end result.