M U S I C
ALBUM FEATURE
OLD FRIENDS BECKONED
NEW SOUNDS RECKONED
MATT STECKLER • YAYOI IKAWA • LONNIE PLAXICO • TONY LEWIS
By Dave Lisik | SkyDeck Music
Published October 22, 2024
OLD FRIENDS BECKONED NEW SOUNDS RECKONED
East Coast saxophonist, composer, and bandleader, Matt Steckler has released his new quartet album of original music (October, 2024). With an outstanding cast of New York jazz musicians: Yayoi Ikawa, piano; Lonnie Plaxico, bass; and drummer Tony Lewis, the album, Old Friends Beckoned - New Sounds Reckoned, is a nod to past musical relationships between the members of the band and how that level of familiarity is an essential element of the recording’s artistic success.
Matt has an extensive discography of saxophone performances and compositions including the projects Dead Cat Bounce and Persiflage and, over the years, he has performed with many of New York’s premiere jazz artists: Gary Smulyan, Lee Konitz, Anthony Braxton, Jon Hendricks, Jim McNeely, Lenny Pickett, Randy Brecker, Joe Lovano are just a few from a long and impressive list.
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Matt earned his PhD and Master of Arts degrees in Composition from New York University, a Master of Music in Jazz Performance from the New England Conservatory in Boston, and a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Jerry Bergonzi, Jim McNeely, Danilo Perez, Cecil McBee, Nick Brignola, Paul Bley, Anthony Braxton and George Russell were a few of his many outstanding artist/educators.
In addition to some common connections in the New York area, Matt and I share some acquaintances from his time on the faculty of the Brandon University School of Music in Manitoba, Canada (my home province). Matt was on a term contract there from 2017-2020. I spoke with him online between his home in southern Vermont and mine in New Zealand.
SkyDeck: Hey, Matt! Congratulations on the great new album. And greetings from the other side of the world.
Matt: Thanks, Dave. Coincidentally, my mom's about to go on a solo trip to New Zealand.
SkyDeck: She's coming to New Zealand on her own? Does she know anybody here?
Matt: No, it's part of a tour group that she booked for herself. It’s pretty wild, but she's determined. She'll be there visiting for a few weeks. It seems like it must be a gorgeous place. It looks like the scenery from Lord of the Rings.
SkyDeck: Given that it’s what we would describe as the “dead of winter” here right now, the weather is pretty great. I know you lived in Manitoba for a few years [my home province in Canada] and understand what actual winter can be like. New Zealand does have a lot of beautiful places. And compared to living in the northeast, where there are a lot of people, it's a very different vibe.
Matt: I’ll bet.
SkyDeck: A lot of the top jazz musicians we’ve had here as guest artists say, “Man, it'd be great to retire here and get a break from the ten million people I'm surrounded by every day.”
Matt: Right, I can see that.
SkyDeck: I kind of did the opposite. I came here when I was in my mid-thirties and just sort of circumvented that whole, having to do thirty years of a job in a pressure cooker level of chaos. I guess there were some advantages to that and some compromises. But it's worked out all right.
So let’s talk about the new album but also a bit about your background and previous work.
Matt: I grew up in Schenectady, New York, part of the Capital Region. That's not too far from Arlington, Vermont, where I live now.
SkyDeck: So I’m sure you’re familiar with the Philip Seymour Hoffman film loosely named after Schenectady?
Matt: Yes, Synecdoche, New York.
SkyDeck: One of my former students wrote a jazz orchestra album based on concepts from the film. I'm sure everybody there is familiar with it.
Matt: The town has a small handful of claims to fame, and that film is one. And then there's, like, a Sci-Fi novel called, “It Came From Schenectady,” which campy people like to talk about.
SkyDeck: And also having a name that's hard to pronounce for people who probably aren't from there, even before the film title muddied the waters.
Matt: Yeah, I think it's a Mohawk with Dutch spelling. ["Place beyond the pines;" also from a recent movie.] It's where Thomas Edison did a lot of his tinkering and research and General Electric basically started there. There's been a real decline in manufacturing throughout the whole nation, but particularly in these rust belt towns around here. GE was a big part of Schenectady at one point, but not most of my lifetime, really.
SkyDeck: Often, successful musicians fall into one of two camps: either they were fortunate to have a quality program of music education in their schools or they benefited from having parents or other family members who were really into music. Does your experience fall into either of those?
Matt: Since you already have seen my father’s artwork that we’re using for the various album and singles covers, you know I come from a family of visual artists, primarily. My father taught at Union College, the local college in Schenectady. He taught stage design and a host of other studio art courses, like printmaking, collage, and puppetry. And he did a fair amount of drawing. In his retirement, he's been doing dioramas and the paintings that we're using on the album. My mother was an art teacher in a high school near Schenectady for a number of years. Then she changed careers and became a psychologist.
But I don't really have musicians in my bloodline. There's a great aunt, who I never met, who was a singer in the Metropolitan Opera. Her name was Risë Stevens, but her story was just told to me as sort of a hand me down. My grandmother actually played piano at home for most of her life. I guess that was some degree of exposure. But my dad was more than your average fan of music. He had a really decent vinyl collection, music appreciation classes in college, and had friends who were musicians. They had long conversations about listening to music and what recordings to check out. Having all of that vinyl there in the living room, even when I was little, it was just such a thrill.
SkyDeck: There was just something about the level of reverence there used to be for a record collection.
Matt: Even more so for an LP collection than for CDs. There was just something great about the way you pulled the record out, probably protected in a plastic cover. It's just different now. It's a lost thing for most people. I mean, vinyl's made a comeback, but in a very tiny way. I have some but my dad's collection was big. And the old speakers just seemed to be better made. It all had a little more analog, fun aspect to it.
I'll just sort of humor you with this hodgepodge of examples of things that were in his collection. There were children's albums and classics like Carole King or Harry Nilssen. There were some Beatles albums, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, King Crimson, a “Blues in Modern Jazz” sampler with Mingus, MJQ, Jimmy Giufffr, and a Picasso on the cover. And then one day I came across Ornette Coleman's Crisis. It wasn't his earliest. It was like 1969, Civil Rights Era, really militant, revolutionary stuff with a lot of screeching on it. I remember putting the needle down and then taking it off within a few seconds. It was wild.
But as far as the schools and music ed. go, I started piano lessons at a private teacher's studio in town, around eight years old. I think my parents asked me but, basically, it was their decision and I was pretty indifferent. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, you know? So I started doing that before doing band.
And what happens in the States, inevitably, is a district area band teacher will come into your classroom around fourth grade and demonstrate all the instruments, winds and brass primarily. And this guy who came happened to look like Gato Barbieri to me. He had, like, long, flowing hair. Not that I knew who that was at the time, but it just seemed like a fit. And saxophone was his main instrument anyways, you know, so it just kind of made sense. He clearly knew what he was doing with that instrument the best.
SkyDeck: Did they let you start with the saxophone right away?
Matt: I did. It wasn't until a few years in that I learned from, like, old school, earlier generation people that you were supposed to start in clarinet and get the embouchure just right and be very precise. And then they would let you move up. And, at first, the alto [saxophone] was a little big in my hands, but it wasn't impossible.
I wasn't being groomed for, you know, prodigy level stuff. It was just, you know, doing it. But at one point, one of my dad's friends, one of his former students at Union College, was living in our house when I was a baby. They were close in age because my dad was in the early part of his career and they had just hit it off. He was an aspiring saxophone player who was practicing for an audition to get into New England Conservatory for grad school. This was after he’d been a chemistry major in college before that. So there was this guy practicing saxophone in our attic. I have to think that those tones, those sounds were somehow affecting me at a young age. Years later, he would give me some informal lessons.
And he became a kind of mentor. He had a minute or two in the 70s and 80s where he was gigging a lot. Back then there was a kind of a lifestyle for musicians that we’ll never know. If you were in the [musicians] union in those days, you could get a lot of paid work, soundtracks, TV, theme songs, jingles, all those things. He also toured with Blood, Sweat and Tears and Laurie Anderson. So he was like a legit working freelance musician.
And that was my first exposure to someone who knew anything about that. He also had a bit of an edge to him personality wise. You know how it is, like how the cats like to banter with one another. That’s a little shocking to a young person initially.
SkyDeck: Yeah, a lot of guys from that era – I’m thinking about an interview with Marvin Stamm in particular – had a ridiculous amount of high quality work every day, just going in and just playing the trumpet, making a recording and going home with a really good paycheck. They did that daytime and then they went to a jazz gig at night. Some of the Thad and Mel guys did Broadway and could still do the Monday night Vanguard gigs.
SkyDeck: How many kids do you have?
Matt: I just have one, an eleven year old son.
SkyDeck: My girls are a little younger. They're seven and four. They’re not doing formal music lessons yet but it's interesting to see what their informal influences have already been and how musical they are compared to their friends. It makes you contemplate what some of your early influences were that were significant. I usually think about junior high or high school and listening to a ton of Count Basie as a starting point. But if you go back to those old Sesame Street seasons, there was just so much great music all through them. And I think, “I watch a lot of hours of children's television with my kids and there’s very little hip music that you think is going to influence them in a positive way. The same goes for that Spider-Man cartoon from the 60s. It's super interesting to compare what they're doing and what you think they're picking up because, when you're a kid, you're not analyzing anything. You're just living.
Matt: Elliott, my son, he's got good instincts, actually. He started taking piano lessons when we were living in Brandon. He was only four, but BU had this sort of youth conservatory division. And the head of composition at BU, his wife was the head of that division, Mary Jo Carrabre. And so it was just like this opportunity to just drop him off for a lesson.
SkyDeck: Ah, so Patrick [Carrabre] was there when you were there? I think he’s moved to British Columbia now.
Matt: Yeah. Right.
SkyDeck: I can't remember the years now, but he was the composer in residence for the new music festival run by the Winnipeg Symphony for quite a few years. Man, that was a hugely influential festival for a lot of future composers. It started when I was in high school and it was like almost nothing I've ever seen, even now. It was seven solid nights in a row of new music of all kinds. And it was in January in Winnipeg so you had to be committed. You were just hoping your car would start after the concerts when it was -35.
SkyDeck: How did you end up in Brandon? Was that a hookup through Greg [Gatien]. Did you know him at NEC?
Matt: At first I applied through the normal channels, primarily on Eric Platz's recommendation. And Michael Cain. It was posted in the usual places. So, yeah. I guess you can call that a hookup. That's about the closest thing to one I've ever had. Interviewing, I did meet other faculty from music education and brass departments and all that. I got to look around and learn a little bit more about the school. I mean, it was on a lark because I had to convince my wife, and Elliot was really young at the time, to make this crazy move.
SkyDeck: Was this 2017?
Matt: Yeah, I went from 2017 to 2020. So we just did it. The experience was actually harder on my wife because of the working restrictions. Hers was an open work permit, not attached to a specific job. There were limits to what kinds of work she could look for. I think Canada has a policy about prioritizing their own people first. So it became a little bit of a tough thing. But she did end up working on an online master's degree while she was there. She found some ways of keeping busy. She did work a little bit in the service industry, and Elliott was going to school there. At one point, we got him into one of those French immersion public schools. We had high hopes that maybe that would continue indefinitely, that he would be fluent in French one day. But, yeah, it wasn't to be.
SkyDeck: They make everybody do the one hour of French every day for nine years so, you know, that's a reasonable amount of French. But you're not bilingual by the end. I think, because they force you to take it, by the end of 9th grade, the last mandatory year, a lot of people go, “I've had enough.” But, in hindsight, having any amount of second language is pretty cool, especially a language tied to the heritage of the country. The French immersion thing is almost everything in French all the way through school. In different places in Europe, it’s just natural to know more than one language. My wife is British though and they seem like the least interested in doing a foreign language.
I often say that nobody understands anti-Americanism like Canadians. We have more balanced opinions than much of the world because we're so close and see all of the American media. But there's more real anti-Americanism in New Zealand than there is in Canada. And it's an unfair rap. Until I moved here, I spent most of my adult life in the US, so most of my friends are Americans. There are fewer differences between people, just in general, than many think. There are good people everywhere and they aren’t the product of their government’s foreign policy, if that’s what people are hung up on.
Matt: They are the deeds of the governments of nations, you know? And then there's the civilian population. And a lot of the population can be indoctrinated into believing that the way their governments do things is the right way. But then everyone else paints them with a broad brush and says, “Well, they're all like that then.”
I'm sensitive to that because in college I did a semester abroad in Russia. This was when the Iron Curtain had recently fallen. And it was like the Wild West. America and other Western nations were going in and creating hyperinflation and it was overrun by the mafia. It was a crazy time. It was Yeltsin’s time. Plus expanding NATO, that helped give rise to Putin. So I don't think of Putin when I think of Russia. I think about the friends I made when I lived there.
SkyDeck: Did you decide to leave Brandon [University] and Canada or was the choice COVID-related?
Matt: Brandon [University] was a three year appointment, and I was filling in because Greg [Gatien] was Dean of the music department. He's actually still that and there is someone else [doing the jazz and saxophone job]. But the fact that it was three year term appointment to begin with, and then Covid hit, created a situation where everything was up in the air.
SkyDeck: In the US, I’ve only lived in the Central Time Zone, but I spent a lot of time in cities, and New York doing recording projects, and compared to having access to the kinds of things those places offer, Brandon must have felt very isolated.
Matt: You know, it wasn't too bad. I had left New York City in 2014, so three years before Brandon. It was my first go around here in Vermont. I had been [in New York] eleven years and in the Boston area six years before that. In my last year or two in New York, things were getting a little more unbearable, professionally. The last year I was teaching in this high school that was just, like, corrupt as hell, and I found myself having to work more club date gigs to make it. Like gigs where you were being sent out to Long Island through an agency. After a while it just got to me. We had just had Elliott and the cost of childcare drove us out of town.
I was trying to escape and find a job that was maybe out of state, a little more low key, and maybe closer to where I grew up so that the grandparents could be around. That was my first rural experience, moving to Vermont, and it was a little odd.
SkyDeck: And was having a kid a big game changer?
Matt: For me, it certainly was. As soon as you have a kid, it's like, well, all the rules are different now. When you think of the life of a full time functioning jazz musician? Having to pay for kids can really put the nail in the coffin. I had another friend who had had kids born around the same time as mine. He was a trumpet player from my NEC days who was sitting in and subbing on Broadway and he was very close to getting a full time gig, you know? But it just wasn't in time before they had to move back to Iowa, where they're from, because the childcare costs got too much to deal with.
SkyDeck: Yeah. Who was that?
Matt: Do you know Dave Rezek?
SkyDeck: Sure, of course. He went to UNI [University of Northern Iowa]. Think he’s still in Iowa now.
Matt: Oh, that's right. I guess I'm not the only story that ended up that way, but it certainly was a change. I think it hits you.
SkyDeck: You probably know people who have gone through the whole process of being a parent and probably just spent no time with their kids.
Matt: Right.
SkyDeck: And so it becomes a choice. You can't do everything. You certainly can’t do everything you were doing before you had a kid in terms of practicing and working. Unless you choose to be absent. Since having kids my advice to all of my students was that I couldn’t recommend having a family any more highly. But also, get some shit done first so that you have at least part of your aspirations taken care of. So that when you shift gears you're not resentful of the fact that I didn't really get to do what you wanted with your life.
Matt: I felt like there's always going to be some level of professional regret. I could have pushed myself harder when I was younger, but I also waited until I was 38 before having a son. So I don't know.
SkyDeck: Yeah, I was forty-two, so even later than that. And my youngest is four. I'm going to be 65 by the time she's an adult. That's pretty weird to think about.
Matt: Sixty-five is the new forty-five, I guess. [laughs]
SkyDeck: I know a few people who have the second family, and are even older, with young kids and the much younger second wife. But to finish the “being isolated in Brandon” question…
Matt: Yeah, so I guess yes and no. I guess it’s relative. It wasn’t as much of a change because of our time in Vermont. There was actually an uptick in playing work as a result of connecting with faculty. First it was at the university with people who wanted to play and then getting involved in the Winnipeg scene. Do you know Jeff Presslaff?
SkyDeck: For sure. You knew Ron Paley in Winnipeg, obviously?
Matt: Yeah.
SkyDeck: Jeff and I both played in Ron's band when I was living there teaching high school. Quite a few of those same guys played in the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra and Ron's band at the same time.
Matt: Jeff and I are actually family friends from way before that time. He spent time in Schenectady.
SkyDeck: He's American originally, right?
Matt: Yes. He's a dual citizen now. And he was married to the composition professor at Union College, Hillary Tang. She was my dad's colleague. That was his first marriage. And then when that ended, he married someone else who was a Winnipeg native. And I guess that's how he ended up that way.
SkyDeck: Okay. I didn't know that.
Matt: He and I and [drummer] Eric Platz keep in touch. We had a quartet that toured last summer and we put out an album the year before. But Jeff now lives in Montreal, so I'm still trying to keep one little foot in Canada, in some way. We're still trying to figure out how to make that project work.
Brandon was actually a creatively fruitful period for me. I was able to get a research grant as a professor and that parlayed into both research and the recording. The recording side of it really integrated the research in a way that I had always been interested in having happen. That let me finish one project and “genre hop” and do different types of things that weren't just straight ahead jazz. And I got to use the resources of the faculty, alums, and students in that community to help make that album project happen.
SkyDeck: When I was in school, Brandon University was a sort of weird anomaly, jazz wise. It's such a small town but the jazz situation was interesting. My high school girlfriend, her brother was the lead alto player in the BU jazz ensemble. So we drove out there to see some of the the concerts. I think the jazz band director, Wayne Bowman had a particularly good handle on the repertoire. I’m sure it was at BU jazz concerts, when I was in high school, where I first heard any live Bob Brookmeyer or Thad Jones charts. He had left the university a long time before you were there but did you ever run into him or meet him, or had you just heard about him?
Matt: I had only heard about him, yeah. I can't really visualize him.
SkyDeck: I remember his hair and a big mustache. He often played trombone in the big band while he was conducting it. But in some ways it was a higher quality than what was happening in Winnipeg. If we could go back in time and evaluate what was happening, there would certainly be room for improvement among the soloists. That would have been true in a lot of places. That was really our collective experiences in Winnipeg for anybody my age. A few people got enough escape velocity to leave town and then start learning some things, but, I mean, nobody could really improvise when they were in high school. There was a bit of a renaissance in that department after 2000 when Greg got to Brandon and they hired the first real jazz professor in Winnipeg.
Manitoba and Saskatchewan have pretty high quality band programs. The support for it is really strong and it's pretty uniform across the high schools. So that I always said the right jazz person at any of those universities could just start crushing it. The willingness and the instrumental proficiency were basically there.
Matt: Yeah, that's exactly right. It made for an environment that was ripe for solving pedagogical problems in a doable way because there were good conditions. It was also a little strange because some of these students, like, grew up on farms, but it had that midwestern vibe that I think is similar to a lot of the band programs in the midwest of the States as well. They're just stronger than in the northeast.
SkyDeck: Well, yeah. Iowa had two and a half million people in the nineties. For being that size, it was an incredible system of music education in high schools and the universities. Had you ever heard of the Iowa Jazz Championships? It's a hyper competitive kind of concept that probably isn't the best idea for music education. But basically all the best high school bands in the state went to this thing. I remember hearing a bootleg of Ryan Kisor from that festival when he was about 17 – he's only a year older than us – and it was just absolutely incredible. And so was his high school band, Sioux City North High School. To have a tiny state like that have that much quality jazz going on was just really cool.
SkyDeck: You have an extensive and impressive discography from before this new album. What are the projects that you think are the most important creatively?
Matt: My first band that I ran myself and wrote all the music for was called Dead Cat Bounce. That group probably did the most in terms of North American touring. I had a connection with a former teacher of mine at Wesleyan. His name was John Rapson, and he chaired the jazz program at University of Iowa.
SkyDeck: Yeah, sure. John was at Iowa when I was at UNI. We did a joint fundraising concert with their big band before we went to Europe. Their big band had a weird name, “Johnson County Landmark.” He just died a couple years ago, right?
Matt: Yeah. But he was a dear friend. He and his wife would put us up when we were coming through. It was always great, the stuff that he was able to bring to his students there. And we got to do clinics at Iowa. And then Chris Merz had us once at UNI as well.
SkyDeck: Yeah, Chris is a high quality musician and teacher. He came to UNI only a year or so after I graduated and left Iowa. I think it was 2000 when they hired him.
Matt: Chris is a great player. So I did get a taste of what was going on in that little state.
SkyDeck: We've been releasing a few projects for Chris the last couple of years. He did a great Wayne Shorter thing recently, that he’s still performing live, and he did a sort of COVID era quartet CD.
Matt: Yeah, and that program [University of Northern Iowa] goes way back, I think.
SkyDeck: If I remember correctly, North Texas was the first university that had any jazz band, but Northern Iowa started their jazz band a year later. So their jazz anniversaries are only one year apart.
SkyDeck: In terms of you going to school, you went to NYU last, right? And NEC before that?
Matt: Right. I guess I'll go chronologically. I got my undergraduate liberal arts degree from Wesleyan [Middletown, Connecticut]. NEC [New England Conservatory] was a jazz performance master's. I hadn't planned on doing anything beyond that but we were living in New York City. Megan, my wife, had a job at NYU, and that created something of a tuition break opportunity. At first, I took a few classes at a time, oddly enough, starting in the composition program. I just thought, “Well, let's see where this goes.” I actually finished a quick second master’s degree there. It didn't take me long. But then I had to reapply to be get into a doctorate program in composition.
That all still seems ironic because it's hard for me to think of myself as a composer. Like, your output is on an altogether different scale as far as that is concerned. But at the time, I was learning a lot of those tricks of the trade. I even did some big band writing because I was going to Jim McNeely's house and he was teaching there. But I was also learning to write for orchestras and electronic media, a little bit of film scoring, and a bunch of different kinds of things. I just wanted to get a taste of everything and see what was going to feed my inspiration.
What I ultimately learned is that a lot of it was all fine and good – and it was really interesting – but I think, in a lot of ways, it kind of handcuffed me into thinking that composing had to be a certain way. And it almost killed my more youthful instincts from that time when writing stuff just came so easy to me because I didn't have really think about the rules. Part of me kind of regrets it and part of me is grateful for having learned new things, you know?
SkyDeck: A lot of parallels to being a player? At first, you might not want to learn anything because you think you're not going to be creative, but if you don't learn anything, you you aren’t going very far.
Matt: And then you get super analytical about it and, hopefully, eventually, you know enough where you can not care about it anymore. It's about creating and having a routine and a process for being open to possible inspiration when it strikes. And then being able to force yourself to sit down and play around with ideas for a while and being okay with letting it go if it's just not all coming together all at once. Having a routine where you're always going to come back to it is important. And the other thing, the other parts of life, I haven't figured out how to balance all that.
SkyDeck: Well, yeah. No, kidding. Once you have all that figured out, you let me know because I’ll take some lessons from you. [laughs] The older you get, man, you know there's not an infinite amount of time left. And, again, about having your kids, that just changes. Like, how much does music matter now compared to what you thought it mattered? It's just put everything in a different perspective.
Matt: I think I've realized that it does matter to me. It's just about how much, you know?
SkyDeck: Sure.
Matt: You know, this record matters a lot to me. I think in terms of any album being stacked up against the vast pool of records in the same category, it's hard for anything to stand out. There are a seemingly endless number of jazz quartet records. But there are a lot of ways for me to look at this album and be prouder of it than most of what I’ve done so far. A lot of that is because of where I'm at in life and maybe the execution of it. It feels a little more sincere and that we were trying to not do too much. But we’re doing things that I know work well. I hired the right people and everyone gave their all, which doesn't always happen. I think it had the benefit of having the right momentum at the right time, you know?
And so, everyone was ready. We didn't have a whole lot of time to do it, but they were ready to do it when the time came. And it’s one of the most satisfying experiences I've had in my music life as a result. And when it happens that way and I can manage time efficiently because I'm balancing it against so many other things, that's a very satisfying experience for me.
SkyDeck: You mentioned the need you had to be particularly respectful of these great players, their efforts, and what they contributed to the process.
Matt: We really got to do it right because of the players I got.
SkyDeck: Obviously they’re all top people. What is it about these players that made you choose them, specifically? How much work had you done with them and why were they the right people for this music?
Matt: Why this project at this time? Well, I was sitting at home here in Vermont, feeling sorry for myself for not being involved in the jazz “nexus” that is New York City for quite some time. I saw something that Yayoi posted on Facebook. We were at NYU together. She's done really amazing things, playing with a lot of great people. And I noticed one day that Lonnie Plaxico was one of them.
Lonnie figured into my life at a much earlier time, even before I met Yayoi. I had hired him to do one of my first records, over twenty years ago, and that was right at the height of when he was blowing up. He was putting out incredible solo albums, mind blowing records. Like his Mélange record is on Blue Note.
When I look back on that earlier record I did with him, I didn't feel I was ready, you know? I didn't feel like I was anywhere near ready. But I reached out to Yayoi and I was like, “Do you want to do a gig together?” You know, “It's been so long. Would you want it? Would you have time for that?” She said, “Of course.” And I asked, “Do you want to do it with Lonnie?” I thought there would be something really cool and interesting about it because I knew him at a different time from her. And they knew each other but we hadn’t done anything, the three of us.
And that's how the idea for “Old Friends Beckoned” came about. The pre-album version of the project was a smattering of gigs that were almost all trio. And those gigs went really well. But at the same time, I know that one of the things that drives Lonnie is playing with great drummers. I think it just galvanizes him and it helps him understand the music he's playing better. So, for the recording it made sense in many ways to add a drummer. Of course there are a lot of great choices. But I did know that Yayoi knows Tony Lewis and I knew Tony through him teaching my kid at this weekend jazz program at Western Mass. It’s a youth jazz ed. program that Richard Bolger, the trumpet player, has been running in North Adams. And then it turned out Lonnie knew him, too. So I was like, “Well, I guess we're all “old friends,” even though I'm probably the one with the least amount of connection, mutually. But maybe this could really work and be something special. I thought about the tunes, and became confident that, as a quartet, it would be great. So that's kind of what happened.
SkyDeck: So there's a bit of an organic origin to it. Of the three instruments, you could have picked a lot of different players to be on this album and play this music that just could have been unrelated to you. But this feels much better?
Matt: Yeah, I don’t feel like I personally have the guts to approach some jazz luminaries and have them play on random records. You have to ask someone to do your project without having had some kind of prior connection. Even having, like, met them at a party or something and had a conversation at one point? I would just feel awkward about that. And that's on me, obviously. But, yeah, it was a slow process to get the idea for this band together.
SkyDeck: Tell me about these players from a musical standpoint. What do they bring to the table that's attractive to you?
Matt: Lonnie is probably the most obvious person to start with because he has this long track record. He was with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers early in his career, he was Music Director for Cassandra Wilson and has been on countless other things. I had listened to him on Don Byron's Tuskegee Experiments. That was the album that introduced me to Lonnie. So I knew he was into different kinds of shit, and that he brought a funk and R&B sensibility to his jazz, in a way, which is probably part of the reason why I think playing with a drummer kind of galvanizes his playing. And even though I didn't feel that I was ready the first time I had him record something of mine, personally, I loved how he carried himself in the studio.
Working with Lonnie, in his world and understanding of the music, it becomes very much an aural-based art form. He is not married to the page, which has not always been my experience with a lot of, even really high level, conservatory schooled, professional musicians. It's a different orientation to the music and it is so refreshing.
So I've known this about him for many years, but I kind of lost the nerve to keep asking him to do things – until this thing with Yayoi came up – and I knew he already had a connection with her.
I think he's got great sound and his groove is just something I really connect with. And she plays great with him. I can't put words in their mouths but I’d say he loves playing with her because she has a lot of power packed into her body and fingers. She’s extremely dynamic. She can play blue-blazingly fast. And she's got this harmonic concept that – it's not from out of nowhere – I mean, it comes from some certain traditions that I understand and know about, but the way she puts it all together, I just found that very refreshing. She can do things that are very gentle and have almost an ECM-esque quality to it but, when she needs to, really rip and be powerful. She's good for that, too.
She also plays and tours with some world music acts and she's also done some soundtrack work. She's very adaptable and good at reading, and I know how professional she is. And she is a really nice person. So, for me, it's also about the whole person and not just their musical contribution. That's part of what makes the experience special.
Matt: The vibe is so important to me because we've all been in that place where the vibe is really bad, where someone is deliberately trying to tear something down.
SkyDeck: And, as you know, time is money, especially in a studio, right? So these guys understanding that is part of their professionalism.
Matt: One hundred percent. And then, Tony. I've known Tony the least amount of time of any of these players but he’s the guy who will, like, hug you and he’s always really excited about playing the music. His trajectory has been a little different. He's not necessarily all that known to everyone, but he's played with a lot of great people. So it's an interesting thing. I think he started out as a young prodigy. He went to the LaGuardia [performing arts high school] in Manhattan.
SkyDeck: The “Fame” school? Do kids today even know to call it that anymore?
Matt: Yeah, I think they still call it the “Fame” school, unofficially. And he was also a McDonald's All-American High School drummer. And through those auspices and being nurtured by Justin DiCioccio, who also taught at Manhattan School of Music for a long time after LaGuardia, he developed a lot of maturity and musicality. And he's just about the flashiest drummer I've ever played with. I've always been a bit scared of that. I'll often gravitate more to drummers who create more of a vibe or something over technical dexterity. But he’s got everything. And he’s got a vicious “whack” to him.
Once he entered into the equation, I was wondering, “Can he be sensitive?” And, of course, he's one of the most sensitive musicians I've ever played with. I didn't really know what it was gonna be like in the studio with him. But he comes in the studio and he's just like, “What do you want for this tune?” And then he brought something new to each one. And he was always able to come up with something that I was really happy with. He's been through a lot of those crossover artists types of situations over the years, so I think that’s part of what he brings to the studio.
And he did tour with Dizzy Gillespie. That was his first break when he was a really young guy. He did some touring with Dizzy late in Dizzy's life. But then he went into some of these other projects. I think Sting was probably one of many of those. So bringing a lot of those different sensibilities, that's not only about jazz with a capital “j.” I think it's true of all three of these players, honestly, because of the other types of music that they've all done. And I think that's why the chemistry works so well.
SkyDeck: It's super important what you're saying about him coming into a given situation and just wanting to nurture your vision of it.
Matt: Right. “Well, what do you want me to do on this?”
SkyDeck: Rather than be belligerent about it?
Matt: Yeah.
SkyDeck: I have a hypothesis about all that. That's what made them good in the first place.
Matt: Right.
SkyDeck: They didn't become world class players and then start to give a shit about your projects or be nice to you or be nurturing human beings. They started out that way and that's what made them great in the first place.
Matt: Right.
SkyDeck: I don't know if that's universally true but it’s what my impression has been. And for young students, especially, there’s a lot to learn from that. If you're going to look at the world in an insecure, protective, competitive way, like, “I'm only going to get ahead if I can put down a bunch of other people.” I don't know that that's how great players became great. The way I see it in the people I know is quite the opposite. I think that's true.
Matt: I think that's true. I think they're head and shoulders above that other level you're talking about, you know? It's because their attitude is good no matter what station or period in life they're in. Lonnie has clear and strong opinions about the music at different points in the process, but he doesn't ever ruin the flow. But he'll stop in a run through if he hears something. So I just sort of nominated him unofficial captain of the rhythm section. He knows how to talk to Yayoi about what he wants from her and he did say a couple things to Tony about some things he would like from him.
There was actually one moment I remember where what he wanted from Tony for one of my tunes was actually different from how I envisioned the drums part. So then I did feel emboldened enough to say, “I actually would prefer that Tony did this.” I think it was really about the fact that it was a more tom-based type of part, and Lonnie thought that it was going to interfere in the frequency range of the bass. But I was like, “We'll let the engineer take care of that. He can totally eq it to make it all work.” But that was a small thing. For the most part, there wasn't a lot of “stop and go” and certainly not a lot of arguing.
I think he just likes to make sure he has it. He knows whether or not it’s working in the first few seconds. And once that's established, he's okay with doing the whole take without stopping.
But, I gotta tell you, this was gonna be a two day session and Lonnie called me a week before and said, “You know, I didn't realize that the studio was upstate.” It was like a two plus hour drive from New York. “And I kind of told this guy the second night I would go play a gig in the city. Why don't we just try to do it all in one day?”
I was like, “Dude, I don't want to freaking burn you out.” But he said, “Oh, I don't burn out. When I'm doing this, I'm in the zone. Let's just see what happens in the rehearsal the day before, and then we can decide.” The rehearsal comes and, at the end of it, everyone was pretty sure we could pull off ten tunes in one day. I had never had that experience with anyone with half the stature those guys have.
In other situations there would always be complaints. “When are we going to break to eat and stuff?” But not with this group. You know, I did pay them fairly and I put them up for the night and stuff. But when it came time to working and being committed to getting through the tunes, I've never seen such an “all in” attitude that those guys had. To me, this album could easily be renamed “Gratitude,” you know?
SkyDeck: That was very similar to every project I had that I did at Systems II in Brooklyn before it closed down. We always booked two days of recording (after having a couple of rehearsals at Michiko or New School), but we almost always got through recording everything in one day. Most of the time we didn’t even talk about when we would finish but by the middle of the afternoon, it was just done and sounding great. “Well, we don't need to come back tomorrow.” So a few times we could just use the second day to get started on mixing.
I was really lucky at the end of Systems II because I had like two paid days “in the bank” with them. With a grant you have to usually have to pay everything upfront weeks or months ahead of time. And when they closed we had just done a session and had used the last day to mix rather than roll the time over to the next project. Otherwise, under those circumstances, the money would likely have been gone, man. Almost nobody had noticed that Systems was closing. It just happened.
But generally, those great players don’t want to be there the extra day if they don’t have to. If it's your project and you're sort of basking in the studio experience… because being in the recording studio, especially with great people is a wonderful experience, right? It's fun and exciting if it's your project and you want that to last as long as possible. And it's cool to see people on that level work.
But if it wasn't getting done properly, generally everyone is professional and wants it to be good above all else. Like if you'd only gone through half the tunes and it was a big mess, they would happily come back for the second day. But they’d rather not.
Matt: It's also been my thing to adopt a philosophy about the process, to appreciate it and not look back on a project for what it's not, but for what it actually is.
SkyDeck: That's a good philosophy that takes a level of maturity. When did you mix this CD and how long did it take? Was it all done at the same time?
Matt: I did use that second day to start the mix and then I went in one extra day about two or three weeks later.
SkyDeck: Okay. Because sometimes that two or three weeks can be a huge difference.
Matt: Right. There was one attempt at an overdub and with each successive take, it was getting progressively less satisfying. I went back and listened to the original take and I was like, “I think I'm okay with this.” At first, I was probably looking at it for what it was not. Not for what it was.
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