Bending and Building Bridges: A Mary Halvorson Interview

[Conducted in 2012 in person and over email, this interview was the basis for the liner notes to the 2LP edition of Mary Halvorson’s Bending Bridges album, released by Firehouse 12.] Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson is probably close to a household name in modern jazz — or at least we’d like it to be so. Since getting started with Anthony Braxton, MAP, and her long-running duo with violist Jessica Pavone in the early part of the 21st century, Halvorson has become one of the most recognizable (and busiest) guitarists in modern jazz and improvised music. Her current working ensembles include Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, the collective trio Thumbscrew, and her own variably-sized groups. She also appears regularly in concert and on record with such luminaries as drummer Tom Rainey, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, cellist Tomeka Reid, brass multi-instrumentalist Taylor Ho Bynum, pianist Kris Davis, and Deerhoof members Greg Saunier (percussion) and John Dieterich (guitar). Halvorson is also a 2019 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship. On a personal note, her 2015 solo guitar release, Meltframe (Firehouse 12), is one of my favorite guitar records ever. This previously unpublished interview covers a particular time in her career, but points to future directions.

Images courtesy Peter Gannushkin/downtownmusic.net

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For starters, I’m mostly curious about the band you’re working with now – the trio/quintet/septet – and how that came together.

It’s the result of many gradual steps, and the reason I did it that way was that it’s less overwhelming. I’m adding one element each time, so with the quintet I was just starting to figure out how to write for horns, and starting with two seemed less overwhelming. Once I had that in place and felt comfortable, I thought ‘why not add a couple more’ and see what happens.

The obvious question is, well, if you’re a composer, you want to see how much you can put in and figure out how things will work. For you personally, as you were growing this band, what was it you were looking for?

I’d been writing for small groups for so long that I was ready for a change. I’d been listening to a lot of smaller jazz ensembles, and I was curious what my take might be if I tried to write for a group like this. And it was fun – it was something I’d never done before, so it was a really enjoyable process. Suddenly I had a wider palette to work with, and I’ve really gotten into it. It still feels like an experiment and I’m still figuring it out, and that has kept me interested. The more voices you add, the more choices you have and the more you can do. I like to do a lot of theme and variation work – the guitar might have the melody, and then that could be translated into a three-part melody with horns, or it might go to the trumpet. I like having situations like that to experiment with. 

On Bending Bridges, it does seem a bit more reigned in to my ears, as far as the arrangements are concerned, than previous dates. Was that a conscious decision?

There’s a road map and improvisations are bridging these different sections, but within that I try to keep it pretty open. If I say that there is a saxophone solo here, it may or may not have to be set on top of the form. If the musicians want to use the forms I’ve written, great – if not, that’s okay too. I like to think a left turn can always happen. I like to try to allow for as much variety as possible; there was one part where a saxophone solo was supposed to be over a form and suddenly everybody dropped out, so it’s unaccompanied. I like for things like that to happen, but I do like to have structures tying it all together to give the music a sense of direction. The forms have gotten longer since the last album, so maybe that’s what you’re picking up on, but it’s not any more or less structured. It wasn’t a conscious thing, necessarily. The septet pieces are even longer-form, actually.

Is the septet enough of a going concern that you’re thinking about recording it?

Yeah, I actually have plans to – it was already hard enough getting together these seven people, so I had to make sure to document it. I found a time in the fall around our Roulette concert in September, so I have rehearsals and a concert planned. Who knows when I’d have the opportunity again? That’s kind of how I’ve done a lot of these records – you pick a date far enough in the future and hope everyone can come together for it.

You’ve known the people in the quintet for a long time, I presume. How did you pick these musicians? Of course, your relationship with Ches Smith goes back very far.

Yeah, he’s probably one of my most frequent collaborators, if not the most frequent. He was the first person I thought of for this group. When the trio came together I knew he’d be part of it, and then John Hébert came next. I loved his sound and energy, and in my head I thought he’d mix well with Ches. 

How did you and Ches meet?

I met Ches in 2003 in Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant. I have always identified strongly with his sound on the drums. I love his thoughtfulness and sensitivity, his ability to integrate jazz and rock approaches seamlessly, and the fact that he isn't afraid to take risks. He is comfortable with awkwardness and vulnerability, and (like all the musicians in my band) he is extremely open-minded. He also has an amazing ability to enhance the sound of any music he touches. So I knew I wanted Ches in the band, I just needed to find a bassist. 

I had heard John play live a few times over the years, most notably with one of Andrew Hill's later bands which completely blew me away. I was struck by his enormous sound on the bass, his unique style and fluidity. He has a searching quality to his playing, and an extremely energetic presence. He’s an incredible soloist and instinctively knows how to give depth to whatever is happening in the music. He is a great jazz player, and he's always interested in exploring and testing limits of what can happen. I had a feeling that him and Ches would sound great together and I was right.

After a couple years, once I felt I had a solid footing with the trio, I thought it would be interesting to add a couple horn players and see what happened. My original inspiration for adding horns was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – Ches had lent me a DVD with a configuration of the Jazz Messengers featuring Benny Golson and Lee Morgan. Though I hadn't listened to the Jazz Messengers much for years, for some reason I was resonating really strongly with that music at that period in my life, most particularly the sound of the two horns together and the harmonies they created. With the trio I had been thinking more melodically, and during this period I had started to think a bit more harmonically. I wanted to see what it would sound like if I put my own spin on the idea of a jazz quintet. The inspiration I took from the Jazz Messengers was more from the overarching feeling the music gave me, as opposed to specific elements of the melody, harmony etc. I had no intention of having the music sound like the Jazz Messengers, but it happened to be the perfect music to inspire me to go in a new direction. 

So the question was who I should get for saxophone and trumpet. Jon Irabagon was an immediate choice for saxophone. Though Jon and I had never played together, I had known him for quite a while through mutual friends, and I had long admired his playing in Moppa Elliott's band Mostly Other People Do The Killing.

He’s kind of a wily player, sort of winking at both the tradition and the avant-garde. Though perhaps I’m buying into the critical reception too much there… he’s eminently more respectful than critics who follow Mostly Other People Do The Killing might give him credit for.

A lot of critics think they’re making fun of the tradition, and they actually aren’t. They’re just having fun, and yet he does get tied into that to some degree, because he has a sense of humor in his music. It’s not a defining element, however. In my band, he might play that down a little – which isn’t to say that my band is humorless!

I had watched Jon perform numerous times and was blown away by his insane virtuosity. He would play things so crazy that they would make me laugh (in amazement, not because he was trying to be funny). Jon has that same openness and searching quality that I keep coming back to. He has the ability to deal with complicated material, changes, etc. and is also comfortable dealing with wide open musical terrain. It was very important for me to have horn players who could operate in both worlds.

Jonathan Finlayson I met the most recently, in Tomas Fujiwara's band probably sometime in 2008. Although Jonathan and I did spend one year at the New School together in 2000, I don't think we ever spoke. Still, I had been aware of Jonathan and his music for a long time, and I had heard him play with both Steve Coleman and Steve Lehman. He has an extremely commanding presence and focused intensity. Like Jon Irabagon, he can deal with insanely complicated material and flow through it effortlessly. I have always loved Jonathan's tone on the trumpet. It's incredibly pure and also has a particular vulnerability to it. I enjoyed working with Jonathan in Tomas' band and pretty quickly realized that he was the perfect trumpet player for the sound I was envisioning.

All of it took time to meld together. It was rocky at first. I can remember not being totally thrilled with the first trio gig I ever did, and I had the same unsure feeling with the first quintet gig. I knew it would work, it just wasn't there yet. It took a lot of time to get to where it was on Bending Bridges, and hopefully it will continue to grow the longer the band stays together. It's very important to me to keep the same band over a long period of time. There's a certain level of trust and communication and other intangibles that develop in longstanding bands (Jason Moran's Bandwagon and Henry Threadgill's Zooid come to mind), and that's what I'm striving for with this project.

I should also mention that I love all the members of my band. They are fun to hang out with and they have all become good friends. It's important to me to have a band I can count on and who I would enjoy spending a couple weeks with on tour. I feel lucky that everyone in the band fits that category!

It’s interesting you mention sound – as a band works together for a while, you expect a group sound to develop, but I’m thinking in the sense of literal tone. There’s a lot of concentration or emphasis on what things sound like, which is a simple thing to put forth, but isolating those sounds in the sense of creating smaller formal structures seems to be a part of the music.

Totally – I think that with everyone in the band, I really like their personal sound. Hébert has such a beautiful sound on the bass, so just to have that be a focal point is important.

How do you compose?

Usually, it’s a pretty improvisational approach. I don’t sit down with a preexisting structure in mind. I improvise on guitar until I find something I like, even if it’s just a nugget of an idea, and I’ll repeat that and maybe put it into the computer as I go. Then I’ll start filling in other parts – that initial idea, I may not know where it’s going, but even then the germ could take days. Once I get something going I write pretty quickly and I do revise – I try not to think too hard, but that seems to be what works for me. The initial idea could be a horn or a bass line, a chord I’m taking stuff from – it could be a lot of things, and I think that I write for just about everything in this way. I also know what group I’m writing for, so if it’s something for me and Jessica Pavone it will be clearly written for that setting, and so forth. I also don’t always write on the guitar – sometimes I’ll write something entirely at the computer, and for example a couple of trio songs I wrote on the airplane.

It’s funny that we’re using the term “composition” here because I do think of your music as very song-oriented. And especially in improvised music, “songs” and “tunes” can be sort of a bad word… yet I feel that your music is very tuneful, and some of it has an affinity for rock or pop music. Could you speak to the idea of song craft and tunefulness?

I definitely value the idea of a song or a beautiful melody, an interesting rhythmic logic – I like things to feel good and sound good, and I’m not trying to write music that’s either super catchy or super weird. Hopefully what comes out is slightly weird but also has the element of a song to it. I like listening to stuff that is both beautiful and strange.

You mentioned Robert Wyatt as someone who was important to your aesthetic.

I remember the first time I heard Rock Bottom I started laughing, like “is this for real?” The scatting blew my mind, and added to the beauty of the song – he can pull of something that’s totally his own, but it’s so beautiful.

Well, one thing I admire in music and in people is the ability to take complex ideas and make them palatable. Crossover appeal is a “cheap” term but that’s basically it – making the music easy to appreciate, swinging, whatever, even if the root of it is challenging or weird. I’ve felt that a lot in your music, too.

I do think about it, sure – I want to write things that I’d actually want to sit down and listen to. 

Is People still a going concern?

We had really horrible luck in getting our third album released, but it is still going on. It’s finally done – we had three labels string us along and back out of it for two years, so ironically we’re now on the same label that did the first two. We’ve added a bass player, and he sings a lot of harmonies too.

It blends indie rock and out improvisation in a very rewarding way, and it seems to me that there’s not much of a stretch to go from People to your small-group work.

A lot of people don’t hear the link, so that’s interesting – most people are very confused by my singing songs in a band!

The guitar playing and your personality come through in that context really well.

Which is funny because I’m playing through-composed parts, though at the end of the day I did write them. The drums are improvising while the guitar is holding down the beat, which is the reverse of what you’d expect. 

You know, I guess one thing that surprised me with the quintet is how you navigate the harmonic/melodic "feel" of hard bop or post-bop, because I can feel it in the record, but it's somehow tied to this gritty rhythmic underpinning and a ground that, while clear, is also constantly shifting. That said, the logic is unmistakable. I guess that's where I (tentatively) want to bring up names like Berne or Ribot or whomever, even though I know their music is very different from yours… Also I don't want to harp on "rock" or "rock songs" as being too much a part of the mix, but within the trio that seemed like an important nod that you were making. It's less easy to say that when confronted with the harmonic structure of the quintet, at least for me.

The rock influence is definitely there, and it's probably a bit more present in the trio tracks since the guitar/bass/drums instrumentation feels like a more natural vehicle to express that type of energy to me.

It's hard to pinpoint specific genres within the larger umbrella of "rock" because it's probably all over the map, stylistically speaking. I definitely went through periods of obsessive listening with Deerhoof and of course Robert Wyatt. Jimi Hendrix could be said to be at the root of everything. I had spent quite a bit of time listening to the Melvins, and bands like the Velvet Underground. Recently I've been on an Elliott Smith kick, although that came post-Bending Bridges. And you are correct in mentioning Marc Ribot and Tim Berne – I have been listening to both of them since my college days, and they have both had a strong influence on my music.

I first got exposed to your music through Anthony Braxton, which definitely has a different scope to it. Could you talk about how you began working with him?

I just started taking his classes at Wesleyan – I knew about him before I got there, but I didn’t know everything that he did. I’d checked out a little of his music in high school and actually the first thing that I heard from Anthony were his duos with Derek Bailey. When I got there I took his large ensemble course; right away, I knew I would drop all my science classes and major in music. I was thinking about biology and I knew I would do a lot of music at Wesleyan but I wasn’t sure if it was something I would major in. Anyway, Anthony changed my mind – being around him and realizing that music could be “this” – it really made me drop everything else and get so involved in it. As you know, he’s such a charismatic guy, so encouraging and inspiring, and to come across that at age eighteen was pretty mind-blowing. Every semester I’d take any of his classes that were available.

Who else was there at the time, as far as people you’re working with now?

Matt Welch and Jason Cady were there – they were graduate TAs when I was taking Anthony’s classes, and Jackson Moore and Steve Lehman were also there. I have trouble remembering which Wesleyan people I’ve met in New York, and who I was in classes with. Taylor Ho Bynum I met here because we weren’t there at the same time. I met a whole network of people there, though.

Braxton seems like one of those people who pushes you to do your own work in the most concentrated way possible, and I feel like there are a lot of musicians following related paths like yourself, Taylor Ho Bynum, Tomas Fujiwara. There’s something tying a lot of people together.

And it all revolves around Anthony and his music. Even Tomas and Jessica – though they didn’t go to Wesleyan, they were there quite a bit.

Maybe it’s the fact of being there at the same time, being generally in the same age group, that gives a bunch of musicians this affinity. It feels like a straightforwardness, a musical honesty – challenging while maintaining a foundation.

Anthony has a huge respect for all sorts of musical traditions, and he encourages you to find out about other music, but not to explore at the expense of tradition. There was one class I took called the History of the Jazz Saxophone, where he’d just come in and play recordings of saxophonists and talk about them. Because he taught a lot of people, everybody got that from him and maybe that’s why the affinity exists. 

With Anthony, he’s also encouraging you to write for orchestras and things like that – he’s encouraging you to do something big. When Matt, Jason, and Aaron Siegel were studying with him, they did an opera project. Now they’re doing a new organization called Experiments in Opera and Anthony came, just to support the fact that his students were writing operas, which is just what he wanted to see. He’s trying to push people to do more, because he’s probably one of the most prolific composers, so he does a very good job of encouraging everybody else to be prolific too.

How has that relationship been fostered in terms of your own writing, band, and things you’re looking to do in the future?

He’s been very encouraging, but he’s always telling me to do bigger and bigger things. I have been writing for larger ensembles and I wonder if part of that is because I hear his voice in my head telling me “Mary, you’ve got to write for orchestras!” [laughing] But I wouldn’t be doing any of this if it weren’t for him – his influence and encouragement is beyond words, and it’s why I’m doing music. Joe Morris is another.

I was going to New York a lot to hear music while I was at Wesleyan, and one of the concerts I heard was Joe in a duo with William Parker. I asked him if he taught lessons, and it turned out he lived in a suburb of Boston not far from where my parents lived, so when I was visiting them I’d take lessons from Joe. Then he moved to Connecticut, so I could take lessons from him while I was at Wesleyan. It wasn’t a regular thing – maybe eight lessons a year.

What would a lesson entail? Were they more along the lines of talking about music and the guitar, or were they actual lessons?

Well, it was interesting because they were very different from other guitar lessons I’d taken. That’s probably why it struck me at that age (about nineteen) – I’d taken plenty of jazz guitar lessons and learned instrumental technique, scales, and the foundations. With Joe, it was like “we’re going to help you find your voice on the guitar.” I’ve told the story a bunch, but it’s a good story. He would never play guitar during the lessons; he’d only play the bass, because he didn’t want me to imitate what he was doing, which is just such a strong statement. It allowed me to work on finding my own thing.

At the same time, he was also trying to find his voice on the bass, most likely.

That’s true – I hadn’t thought of that. I love his voice on the bass because it reminds me of his guitar playing. It’s different, but I can still tell it’s him. We played and talked about stuff on a conceptual level; I was already working on scales and things like that on my own. I’m pretty self-motivated, and I still work on scales. I work on changes and all sorts of things.

I spent some time with Kidd Jordan when he was teaching school kids in Houston for a workshop, and he was going through scales to these extreme registers of the horn. He kept saying “you’ve always got to practice your scales – I practice all the time, every day, and scales are what I do.” To think of someone nearly eighty still practicing scales and finding out how they work was pretty profound.

That’s why he’s such a great artist, because there’s always stuff to work on and stuff to learn. 

I also think of what Bill Dixon said, that “you start from where you are and the rest will come to you in time,” which is really important. In the example of learning fundamentals, they will come to you but knowing who you are is just as important. You can add all the other stuff as it comes around.

How you learn stuff is so important – in jazz school, you have to learn all sorts of basic things, and the way you’re taught that certain scales have to fit over certain modes and so forth, it just wasn’t resonating with me. Now when I practice, I find ways to work with the same basic material but in a way that makes sense to me, and I think because everyone learns differently, you have to internalize what others learn, but in a way that makes sense. Everyone is so different, and I think I’ve found better ways to work on things now than what I used to do.

As far as how you practice and how you put things together, one of the things that first struck me was how different your playing was from what I’d heard before. It seemed to draw from a lot of different sources – oddball rock, “extended techniques,” bent or angled gestures that move in ways that I hadn’t expected to hear from the guitar. Also, these things weren’t beholden to Derek Bailey or someone like that. How did you start working out your approach to the guitar?

Around that time I was studying with Anthony and Joe, I was at the New School and learning traditional jazz and getting fed up with it. I put that music aside and tried to find my own voice. My approach has been writing my own exercises – figuring out what I’m interested in and figuring out how to incorporate that into my sound. I like to use open strings mixed in with non-open strings, so writing exercises that allowed me to do that was important. I’m a big advocate of using a metronome and repeating things for hours. I work on technique a lot, because I want to have control over the instrument and if I do something that’s an “extended technique” or whatever, I want it to be sloppy on purpose, not because I couldn’t execute what I was trying to do. I practice a lot of technique and coming up with exercises around tritones or whatever, spending six months and getting really in depth with things. Now, I’ve come back to practicing changes, arpeggios, chords and scales, but I go deep into things, try to absorb them and try to find a personal approach. How can I incorporate something I like into what I do? There’s so much information out there, and that’s the problem with jazz school – by the end of the week you have ten assignments, you have to play “Cherokee” and go before a jury, and I couldn’t learn like that so I would half-assedly skim over things. Now I have the luxury of not performing “Cherokee” at the end of the week, and this is all on my own time. I can make my own curriculum.

As an improvising guitarist who’s aware of the tradition, I’ve always felt like I could hear Tal Farlow, Billy Bauer and Grant Green in your playing. Maybe it’s not as polemical now as it was at one time, but there are those who might say “you could play straight-ahead jazz guitar so well, so why don’t you? Why did you choose a path that is so different?”

It is interesting, because I actually don’t think I’m that good playing straight ahead jazz guitar. I’m okay, and I work on it, and it’s something I’d like to be good at, not because it’s a goal of how I want to play, but because I could learn from it. I want to be a good guitarist and that would inform what I do.

It’s funny then that I see things like that peeking out, but it might also be me putting my own spin on what I hear. 

They do peek out – I practice a lot of jazz chords and try to find ways to apply them that are different or not in sequence, things like that. I’m sure it comes through, but of course my goal isn’t to play straight ahead jazz at the end of the day. I’m interested in using the elements that I like in another context.

Your music also feels very gutsy to me, rather than the detachment that can be easy to apply to both jazz and improvised music.

It’s funny, I guess I’ve always thought about it because I love the physical sound of the instrument, all the buzzes and the sound of the wood, but ever since I picked up a guitar as a kid, I instinctively felt that I wanted to have a strong attack on the guitar. It’s weird – I don’t know why I would have felt that at age eleven, but it’s something I like. I like that the guitar has a very big sound, like an upright bass – I don’t like the real thin and light guitar sound, although there some amazing guitarists who use that well, I wouldn’t want to have that be part of my music. A lot of jazz guitar has a thinner, almost smooth quality to it and you can’t hear any of the acoustic sound of the guitar, and it’s not something I’m drawn to.

It has that strings and wood and muscle sound.

And I love that, that’s why I play the guitar. You can amplify and use effects, and it’s a diverse instrument.

You sort of recently started using more effects, right?

Sort of; I’ve only gotten one new effects pedal, and I’ve generally used the same setup since maybe around 2000-2001. The Line 6 gives me a pitch-bending sound, and I have a volume pedal and a distortion pedal, but I’ve been using them more – the volume pedal I can make my own tremolo, and the distortion I’ll use more or less depending on my mood. I added a handmade ring modulator that a friend made for me, and that’s the first thing I’ve brought in for a long time. I like effects, but I also like to be able to play totally acoustically, so they’re accents or embellishments rather than the main thing.

I think when I first heard your work, I thought there were more pedals and effects than there actually are. In reality, it was just what you were doing with the instrument. 

It’s nice to have them as an option. I remember when I was around 20, getting really disillusioned with the guitar, and that’s when I went out and bought a few pedals. They renewed my interest in the guitar.

I wanted to go back to the notion of bands, and you’re involved in so many projects. There probably isn’t an ideal one for you at this point.

I guess not – I really enjoy doing a lot of different things, and I’d probably go crazy just doing one project, even if it was my own. For some musicians that’s a goal, but actually I need the other things to balance myself out, and I learn so much from playing in other people’s projects – as well as having more than one of my own. But you don’t want to get too scattered either, so you have to try and do a lot without being all over the place. They don’t all happen at once, either – I’m in several ensembles that might only do one gig a year, so it ends up being manageable.

Maybe you could talk a bit about how you pick the side-person gigs and so forth, and how you manage those versus your own?

I really only do ones that I want to do and that I like – musicians I was already working with in some capacity, like Ingrid Laubrock. I was already working with her and then she started Anti-House and asked me to be part of it, and I said ‘of course.’ A band like that is a great example – I like her as a person and I like improvising with her, but I really learn a lot from watching how she composes. It’s a challenge to try to figure out what this music is about and how can I try to add stuff to it, but still be true to its purpose. I enjoy meeting new people, too, and yet you have to have time for your own music – I have to cut down when I realize I’m not practicing or composing, because if I have music to learn, I spend a lot of time on it, even if it’s easier material. It’s almost an OCD thing [chuckles], because I have to make sure I’m prepared. If you’re doing too much of that it doesn’t leave time for your own thing. At the same time there are so many great musicians playing and I want to be part of their projects. Some of it is very challenging, too – Ingrid’s music, for example. 

I think of Taylor Ho Bynum’s music, which you’re intimately part of – his sextet and the Thirteenth Assembly. How did that come together?

Well it was initially two duos – Tomas and Taylor and me and Jessica, so we thought we could put together a double duo tour. Someone would get three bands for the price of one! We did several tours with three-band sets, and eventually it ended up that we had enough quartet music so we could just tour with that. All of us had been in groups together, so it was fun to write the music.

How is the touring mechanism for your work? It seems like it’s mostly in Europe and on the coasts.

Yeah, definitely – it’s tough now, too, because the economy in Europe isn’t so great, so even that’s been hard and things fall through. In the States it’s nearly impossible to get gigs.

It seems like a younger ensemble would be an easier sell to promoters, but I guess not.

It’s tough because if I were to take my quintet on the road and drive across the country, I would love to do it, but… I was able to have a budget for my trio to fly out to California, but that’s rare. If I have a gig in Columbus, OH for a $200 door and five people to pay, it’s impossible. I wish I could tour more of the states, but you’re usually driving around New England rather than going across the country.

The band identities being so strong, it seems like touring as a group should be part of the thing, but that’s less common in this music than with rock bands.

It is very important to tour; part of why I’m starting to develop a sound with this band is because we’ve been able to tour. Even in Europe, doing several gigs with the quintet or around New York every few months is very important. We don’t rehearse a lot – just enough to learn the material and then we work it out on the gig. That’s such an important part of how the music develops, and it develops on the gig in a way that it can’t in rehearsals. I love traveling and I like to do it whenever it’s possible.

And you’re teaching, too – how do you support the music, or can it sustain you?

It is now, but when I first moved here I worked in an office for six years. Looking back I don’t know how I did it – I’d work all day, come home and make a pot of coffee, and then practice all night. I cut down and was doing bookkeeping one day a week for an architecture firm. Gradually I accumulated students, and that varies in amount. I do workshops and then gigs and tours, and hopefully one can do that and make rent, but it’s only recently been working out. I don’t expect it will continue; one month might be good and then three months might not be so good, and you have to learn how to manage your money and spread things out. I’ve gotten used to an unstable existence, but I’m happy I can scrape by doing this.

It’s hard to imagine you working in an office – I do, but I’m not a musician.

I guess you have to make it work somehow. It was a cool office – I could roll in at 10:30 and they were really laid back. When I was touring with Trevor Dunn’s band, I had to take eleven weeks off and I approached them fully ready to get fired, but instead they were like “you’re going on tour? Cool – that sounds so fun! See you when you get back!” I feel really lucky to have had that job – I would leave for weeks at a time and I could always come back. I didn’t get paid while I was gone, but they’d let me go. That helped me to start touring and saving money, and I would have figured out something if it wasn’t there, but I was lucky.

A lot of musicians bartend or have a part time job – it’s an expensive place to live. I don’t have a family to consider; imagine if you had two kids and were a musician in this city, it’d be really hard. If you want to be here you find a way to make it work. I really love the city and I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t here – all the musicians I work with are here, and it would be tough to be somewhere else. Taylor didn’t like the city at all, and he moved and he’s happy – he loves New Haven and he can make it work. It’s a more peaceful space, he’s got a garden and there’s a musical community there he can work with. 

What’s on your plate going forward? 

It’s funny – I never think too far ahead, just one step ahead. I want to finish writing for the septet and record it, and I also have a new collective called Thumbscrew with Tomas and [bassist] Michael Formanek. That’s been really fun and exciting. We’ve been writing for that and we spend a lot of time rehearsing and learning the music – if everyone is equally invested in making something happen, sometimes you get more done that way. We’re like “great, let’s hang out all weekend and learn this music!” I’m also working on a duo with Stefan Crump – he has a studio, so we get together regularly to play, record, and write. Even though we’ve never had a gig, we’ve made two albums’ worth of music. One album is completely improvised and one is more composed. We’ll put that out on Intakt in 2013, and so that’s been fun. 

How do you title your pieces?

I do have a method – I title things later and I want to have a numeric placeholder, keeping the sequence intact. I have a pad of paper next to my bed and I get into this state in between being asleep and being awake, and I write nonsense words and scribble on the pad. I weed through it and take phrases that I like – some of them are just ridiculous, and I have to find the good ones and figure out which ones fit with certain songs.

Is this something that you do across the board with all your tunes?

Yeah, I just started doing this a couple of years ago – Dragon’s Head was the first one I did that on, but now I do that for other groups. Also, my dad also enjoys writing poetry and he will write pages of song titles and he gives them to me. I started using his for certain things – Reverse Blue with Eivind [Opsvik], Tomas and Chris Speed – for that band I used his titles. He was giving me stream of consciousness things, and one of every ten titles he gave me had either the word reverse or the word blue in it, so that became the band’s name. A lot of that band’s song titles have one of those two words in them. We’ve only done two gigs in two years – it’s just hard to get them together – so it might take more time for that band to record. Anyway, for everything else, I’ve been enjoying the dream-state method.

Is your dad a poet, or a musician?

He’s a landscape architect, and he’s also a sculptor and a painter. Now that he’s retiring he does more painting – he’s a huge music fan. He did the drawings on Saturn Sings and Dragon’s Head. I had to have a flight case made and he did the drawing of the guitar for the case company, so that became the cover for Saturn Sings. Sometimes he’ll help – he’ll give me weird sketches that I try to use for things. I enjoy his aesthetic and I like being able to use it in my work.