Billy Harper has had a pretty incredible career. He was a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1968. He played with Max Roach. He was part of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band and the Gil Evans big band, and because of those connections he got to play on a Louis Armstrong album. He was on Lee Morgan’s final studio album, recorded in 1971. And he’s had a solo career since the early Seventies, making legendary albums like Capra Black for the Strata-East label and Black Saint for…well, for Black Saint. It was their first release, and they named the label after it!Since about 2008, Harper has been a member of the Cookers, a group led by trumpeter David Weiss that also features Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Donald Harrison or Craig Handy on alto sax, George Cables — who’s been on this podcast — on piano, Cecil McBee on bass, and Billy Hart on drums. All of those guys have long careers as leaders, but when they come together, playing music from their back catalogs and new material, they’re really amazing. I’ve seen them live twice and it’s just astonishing to watch absolute masters get up there and deliver the way they do.I really had a good time talking to Billy Harper. In this interview, we talk about the Texas tenor sax tradition, we talk about his time with Lee Morgan, we talk about the Cookers, about his solo work, about how to teach improvisation, and a bunch of other things. 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:Billy Harper, “Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart” (Black Saint)The Cookers, “Destiny is Yours” (Look Out!)Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

Burning Ambulance Podcast

Billy Harper

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)Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

Andrew Cyrille

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletterDon 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)

Don Byron

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletterThis 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)

Anthony Braxton

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletterI’ve been listening to Wadada Leo Smith for a long time; I own a lot of his albums, but his catalog is really large. I interviewed him for a cover story in The Wire in 2009, which he actually remembered — that surprised me a little. He was an early member of the AACM, collaborated extensively with Anthony Braxton in 1969 and 1970, made some beautiful records for ECM and Nessa in the 1970s (you should check out Divine Love and Spirit Catcher in particular), and has really never stopped putting out music. Earlier this year, I wrote about Matthew Shipp‘s New Orbit, a beautiful album that Wadada appeared on in 2001.This year he’s turning 80, and he’s celebrating that with an absolute flood of new work — 20 CDs’ worth, spread across six or seven releases, all on TUM. One of those is a seven-CD box of just his string quartet recordings. That’s one of the fascinating things about Wadada, is that not only is he a brilliant trumpet player with a sound like no one else, but he’s also an extraordinary composer who developed his own musical language, Ankhrasmation. We talk about that in this interview, along with his approach to the horn, his approach to rhythm, which is very much his own, and a lot of other things.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:Wadada Leo Smith/Douglas R. Ewart/Mike Reed, “Super Moon Rising” (Sun Beans of Shimmering Light)Wadada Leo Smith, “Albert Ayler” (Trumpet)  

Wadada Leo Smith

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. 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)

Pi Recordings

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter Joe Chambers is a legend. He made his name in the early 1960s, playing on a string of some of the most adventurous Blue Note Records sessions of the time. He can be heard on albums like Bobby Hutcherson's Dialogue, Wayne Shorter's The All Seeing Eye, Andrew Hill's Compulsion, McCoy Tyner's Tender Moments, and many more. He also backed Archie Shepp on Fire Music, On This Night, New Thing At Newport and For Losers, and he was the drummer on Chick Corea's debut album, Tones for Joan's Bones. He maintained a long creative partnership with Hutcherson; the two men made something like 10 albums together. Chambers didn't record as a leader until the 1970s, but one of his pieces had a significant afterlife in the '90s. "Mind Rain," from Double Exposure, an album where Chambers played piano, duetting with organist Larry Young, was sampled by DJ Premier for "N.Y. State of Mind," from Nas's debut album, 1994's Illmatic. On his new album, Samba de Maracatu, Chambers reworks the piece as "New York State of Mind Rain." This is a really interesting conversation about Chambers' long career as both a musician and an educator (he taught at the New School in New York for many years, and now lives and teaches in North Carolina). I hope you'll enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it. And 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: Joe Chambers, "Mind Rain" (Double Exposure) Joe Chambers, "Visions" (Samba de Maracatu)

Joe Chambers

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter 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)

Muriel Grossmann

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter 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)

Ivo Perelman

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter 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)

Tim Berne

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter Ambrose Akinmusire is a really fascinating trumpet player. He’s made five studio albums and one live album, all but one of them for Blue Note. He’s also recorded with Walter Smith III, with Archie Shepp, with Mary Halvorson as part of her group Code Girl, with Tarbaby, with Roscoe Mitchell, and he’s on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. His latest album, On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment, is one of the best jazz records of 2020. I saw him perform the music at Winter Jazzfest in January of this year, which as you’ll hear in our conversation was actually something like a live rehearsal, because they went into the studio and recorded the album the day after the show. We talked about a whole range of subjects in this interview, I’m not even sure how to preface it all. We discuss his style on the trumpet, which is a little bit unorthodox and to my ear demonstrates a real mastery of the horn; we talk about each of his albums, including why he has occasionally taken several years off in between; we talk about political engagement and how his own life impacts the music he makes; and a whole lot 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: Ambrose Akinmusire, "Confessions to My Unborn Daughter" (When the Heart Emerges Glistening) Ambrose Akinmusire, "Tide of Hyacinth" (On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment)

Ambrose Akinmusire

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter 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)

Christian McBride

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter 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)

Kevin Richard Martin

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter Episode 56 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with saxophonist Alan Braufman. Braufman is about to release his first album under his own name in 45 years. He made his debut in 1975 with Valley of Search, recorded at his loft at 501 Canal Street in New York and released on India Navigation. It was reissued in 2018 by his nephew, Abil Nyers, on the Control Group/Valley of Search label, and it sparked enough interest as a lost artifact of the loft jazz era (full disclosure: I reviewed it for The Wire) that he performed in NYC for the first time in decades, and wound up taking almost the same band used at those shows into the studio. Now he's got The Fire Still Burns coming out, featuring James Brandon Lewis on tenor sax, Cooper-Moore on piano, Ken Filiano on bass and Andrew Drury on drums. Braufman and Cooper-Moore lived together at 501 Canal Street in the early 1970s, along with David S. Ware, bassist Chris Amberger, drummer Tom Bruno, and others. The building had a storefront on the first floor, where they set up a sort of house band, but they also hosted other performers; in our interview, Braufman claims David Murray may have given his first New York performance at 501 Canal. In addition to Valley of Search, Braufman played with Cecil McBee on the bassist's album Mutima, and was a member of one of Carla Bley's groups in the late '70s. I think you’re going to enjoy hearing this conversation; it's full of history and memories of an era that hasn't been documented nearly as well as it should have been. 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: Alan Braufman, "Home" (The Fire Still Burns) Alan Braufman, "Thankfulness" (Valley of Search)

Alan Braufman

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter 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)

Wayne Escoffery

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.

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Burning Ambulance Podcast

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