["40 West" from Jazz Trash plays]
WNUR: Ellery, it's a pleasure to have you on WNUR Jazz. We're really looking forward to having you in Chicago tomorrow. When's the last time you were here?
EE: '82 maybe, '83? I was traveling in a big band with Buddy Morrow, a great swing area trombone player. We used to come in and out of Chicago not infrequently. I remember spending lots of time between the pizza places and the clubs down on the South Side, sitting in with Von Freeman and people like that anytime we came into town.
WNUR: Maybe you could talk about the genesis of the trio you're bringing, with Andrea Parkins on accordion and sampler, Jim Black on drums, and you as always on tenor saxophone. It's an odd instrumentation.
EE: Yeah, it is. If anybody's been following my work at all, they've probably noticed that the instrumentation isn't necessarily a traditional rhythm section type of jazz band. In most cases there's no piano, and in some there's no bass. I'm thinking of Joey Baron's Barondown, Phil Haynes' Four Horns and What?, and Joint Venture, groups like that. After years of doing that, I started to miss the sound of chordal instruments, the sonic quality of hearing chords. But I knew that I did not want to deal with the codified language of horn players as soloists with piano players comping. I wanted something different than that, and it took me many years to figure out how to accomplish it. This trio is my answer to that. I was thinking maybe I would do an organ thing, but as I thought more about it and started listening to a lot of music, it suddenly dawned on me that the accordion was an instrument I could take seriously. I started hearing some players here and especially abroad, in Europe, that were just doing some amazing things with the instrument. It took me a long time to find an improvising accordionist--there's not that many of them--but when I found Andrea I hit a goldmine. When I first went to hear her play, she was only playing accordion. I approached her about being a part of the band, and then I later found out she also played sampler, and could do organ things. That made it all the better, because I was able to use some of the ideas that I had when I was thinking about it being an organ band. Now I have the best of both worlds.
WNUR: A lot of people, myself included, when they see sampler listed as an instrument, tend to think of jump-cutting, people using references or appropriations from other places, but actually she sticks to samples of organ.
EE: And piano. I didn't really feel that I should list it as piano and organ, but I guess it functions so close to that that I could have. But Jazz Trash was the first body of work that I'd written for the band. Since then I've written a lot of new stuff which incorporates more samples than we used there, more diverse things. So slowly I'm incorporating more of what she does. In her own music and other projects she does quite a bit of sampling. In fact on some other projects that I'll be doing with her we're going to be taking advantage of that. But for the most part a lot of what she's doing outside of the accordion is organ or piano samples. The organ sounds pretty close. The thing I like about the piano is that we're not trying to fool anyone that it's a real piano, it actually has a different quality that I really like. It's a little harder and a little brighter.
WNUR: Let's talk a little bit about some of the tenor players that have influenced you. I know that you've just completed work on a Gene Ammons project. And to go back to the organ thing, I know your mother was an organist, and we think of organ groups as having a great tenor player. How do you see yourself fitting into that tenor tradition?
EE: Well, that's an interesting question. I can tell you who I've listened to. I come from Baltimore, which when I was young was a total organ town. Clubs all had B-3's in them as a matter of course. They just did. My mother played professionally, had her own band, played a lot of standards. That sound was all around me as a kid, so I grew up loving jazz from the very beginning. Gene Ammons was definitely one of the first tenor players that I felt an affinity for. Sonny Stitt was playing a lot of tenor with Gene Ammons, so he was another one. My stepfather was real supportive, he would buy me Lee Konitz records, and Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan things. I really liked them as well, but I shared more of an affinity with Gene Ammons. It was a little gutsier and I responded to that. That almost R&B style of tenor playing probably was responsible for me picking up the instrument. There were other R&B tenor players that I didn't know who they were at the time, I just remember hearing their records on the radio or wherever, and I was riveted by that aggressive R&B tenor sound, and Gene has some of that in his playing. From there it was all over the map until I heard Coltrane when I was a young teenager. He was central in terms of inspiration for a really long time, although as much as I might have wanted to sound like that, I naturally had a different tone. I feel more connected to Trane than maybe I sound. I can't think of any saxophone players that I don't like, really! All of them, I don't really know or feel comfortable with saying that I come from, you know, the Coleman Hawkins down through whoever, or the Lester Young down through whoever, because I really love them all, and I think they're all in my playing.
WNUR: One of the people that your playing strongly reminds me of is Archie Shepp. He was somebody who was also grappling at that time, the 1960's, with trying to carve something out for himself in a period when a lot of people were playing like John Coltrane. You came up in the 1970's, so you were faced with the same thing, a lot of Trane imitators, people who can't get out of that Coltrane mode. So I wonder how Archie Shepp's music figures in your cosmos.
EE: At the time, in the 70's, I didn't know much about his playing at all. It wasn't really until after I came to New York that I would start to hear things. So things that I share with him in terms of sound or attack or whatever those qualities might be that you hear, I'm not sure if I got it straight from him, but maybe through some of the people that influenced him as well.
WNUR: Ben Webster.
EE: I guess, although again, when I was younger, I wasn't that interested in Ben Webster like I was in Coltrane. I do find that I have things in common with players that I was not so aware of, that did not seem to be a direct influence on me. It's almost inescapable that you're going to sound like somebody. Even more so today than before, just because so much has been done on the instrument. I could put myself in a corner very easily by excluding a lot of tenor saxophone information. Rather than do that, I thought, why don't I just embrace all these infuences, and not be so afraid of it. In the 60's and later, the attitude was trying to divorce yourself from playing changes, from playing structures, and just playing totally free and spontaneously. While I love that, I was not so hung up on whether it was inside or outside, I didn't have a hostile attitude towards more traditional stuff. I grew up with that. But I loved the free stuff too, I wasn't so dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist that I had any problems. It was all fair game to me.
WNUR: Before we listen to the title track from Jazz Trash, maybe you could say a word or two about the title.
EE: It's actually ironic that you would play that one, because it's the one that's based on the head-solos-head format that I've rejected for most of my work. The title was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying, "This is our jazz tune," because basically we state some material that functions as a head, and then there are solos, and then we go back to the head again. It's the only tune on the record that does that. Given the context that it's in, I thought it was funny that we even did something in that format. It's just such a trashed out sound that I started calling it "Jazz Trash," kinda liked it, and then thought, why not call the record that, and hope that nobody shoots me!
["Jazz Trash" from Jazz Trash plays]
WNUR: To my ears Jazz Trash is compositionally one of the most individual records in the last five years. So I'd like to talk with you a little bit about the way that the compositions work.
EE: That's one thing that I'm really interested in, is the format, the shape of pieces, their structure, what I can do with even stock elements, breaking them up and putting them together in a different way. If the context changes, the meaning can change. It just has a different feel and flow and shape than if we were just simply to either play free and open, or just take a conventional jazz format for granted. I try to put myself in different situations, be it by virtue of the instrumentation or the way I write. I'm looking to frame what I do in a different way, put myself in a different context, so that it can set off some of the things that are really my own, for example how I put ideas together in a single phrase on the saxophone, and then incorporating that in a composition, in a structure where it takes on a different meaning depending on what came before or after. I like to give each piece that I write its own sound. There are things on the record where I don't even improvise, I play completely a written part. There are other things where I have very few notes written for myself, and maybe someone else is reading a completely written part. I'm really trying to change it up and give each piece its own vibe and its own little world, its own universe.
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