DB- In terms of compositions, do you have many new songs worked up for this tour?

JM- There are a few although I wish there were more. But we were out touring and then we recorded a new CD in August in Trey’s barn. Blue Note is going to put that out in the beginning of May. I was just mixing it and mastering it in December and now I’m writing liner notes, and doing photo shoots and all this stuff. All the various aspects of having a touring group and putting out CDs takes a lot of time and energy.

DB- Who plays on it?

JM- Chris, Ari Hoenig and myself.

DB- From the very beginning you’ve always said that you play jazz, so it must be very satisfying to be on a label such as Blue Note.

JM- Yeah, well I think it’s a tremendous leap of faith for them because a lot of things we play you could call jazz but a lot of things we play I don’t know what you’d call them. I thought it was really wild that they’ve been excited to put this music out. They have Medeski Martin and Wood, and Charlie Hunter also, so I think it was a great that they brought us on board also. I am really excited about this album in particular. I just think that it’s really full of energy. It’s a pretty intense chunk of music.

DB- Do you have a title yet?

JM – It’s called Xenoblast. That’s the first tune. It’s like a jungle tune, that type of music. The drums are doing a million miles an hour, I’m strumming a million miles and hour and Chris is doing crazy things with his bow, octave pedal and all kinds of stuff. It’s a lot of fun. There’s some pretty crazy stuff on the CD and it’s all very live. Trey wanted to record in the Miles Davis tradition of just getting the guys together, setting up mikes around the room and then just going for it. Everything bleeds into everything else so there’s no way of me changing my solo over the rhythm section. It’s all one glob of music.

DB- Did Trey produce the album?

JM- No, I did. He just orchestrated our using his space. Paul Languedoc and his partner Pete Carini did the engineering and Trey helped with the engineering too. He’s become quite a whiz at the mixing board.

DB- People will be looking forward to hear the results. There are plenty of people out there who are quite willing to follow you in a number of directions. Speaking of which, you played a gig with Doug Perkins as a duo the other night. How often does that happen and what sort of material do you perform?

JM- Tomorrow night, Doug and Mike Gordon and I are playing a benefit at a church in my home town in Starksboro that needed attention. We’ve raised three thousand dollars to help restore the church and we’re going to perform there. Last winter Perk and I started playing at a little coffeehouse in Burlington called Muddy Waters. It’s right next to Nectar’s. We basically just call each other up spur of the moment and go in there and play for free. We start whenever we want and we end whenever we want and we don’t publicize it. Basically it’s like rehearsing in front of people. So we did that as a way of rehearsing for this benefit gig. We’re going to be doing jazz tunes, a bluegrass tune or two, a few tunes of Perks and a couple of mine. Mike and Perk are actually going to sing a couple of songs. It will be three guys getting together and kicking up a storm. A lot of improvising, and just doing whatever the hell we want. The show sold out, which is somewhat surprising to me because it’s only open to Starksboro residents. We were joking about going around Vermont and doing a Town Hall tour. It’s cool to play in old creaky-floored places that just need some attention and have great acoustics. I also have a German television crew here, and they’ve been up interviewing me on the tree farm where I live. They’re going to make a little program on the concert and myself. I had a piece one on me on All Things Considered back in May and a German public television channel heard the piece and decided to do this.

DB- When will that appear?

JM- That’s going to be aired in Germany in March

DB- I was looking at your web site where you say that the audience is part of the adventure. What is the role of an audience?

JM- Well when you play gig after gig you really start to notice the differences between audiences. The people in the audience may not realize it but they add so much to the gig. You can’t believe how much the band feeds off the audience. If you’re playing a ballad, a really slow tune. sometimes you can sense that a particular audience might not want to hear it and it brings you down a little bit. On the other hand, sometimes you can play a ballad and they are right there soaking up every note you play and they are just feeling the emotion and it’s an amazing feeling to get that surge from the audience whether it’s in a quiet way or in a loud way. Another thing we do is called the collage, which is when we try to get ideas from the audience to try to create an improvisation. We ask them to yell out ideas, and the only rule is that we ask them not to yell out anything that has to do with music. The more abstract and the more ridiculous the better. They throw out the ideas and we have a huddle where we pick out one of these ideas, and then we just start trying to play it. It’s been a wonderful mechanism for bringing the crowd and the band closer together. It also makes every show unique. It’s the one thing that people remember about a show two years later. They’ll say, “I was at the show when you did the collage about so and so.” It makes the experience totally a one-time unique thing. It’s been pretty cool.

DB- What inspired you to start doing that?

JM- We were playing gigs every night and playing the same tunes. So we thought, let’s just just try to improvise something on our own. At first we came up with the ideas ourselves but then we realized that we were replicating the same process every night. That’s when we decided to do this, because it would challenge us and keep everything fresh and original. Going back to your first question, that’s an essential component of my underlying philosophy. That’s what I love to do.

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