Of all the jazz I’ve been listening to the last 20 years, the names that seem to consistently come up producer-wise are Rudy Van Gelder, Bob Thiele and Manfred Eicher. Those are the big three I see that produced a gargantuan amount of sessions. You wonder when someone walks into the studio with one of these guys how it works out.

What was nice for me to experience was how genuinely perceptive he was and how much he listened to what other people said. He was a very positive thing, it wasn’t like he was telling us what to do. Some cases he’d offer his opinion. Sometimes that opinion made a difference in what we did, other times I had a different opinion. It was genuine, that’s what I could say about it. He did his job very well.

When you first started and you looked at the jazz labels, was ECM the goal you wanted to attain?

I don’t know about that. It’s a great honor, I’m very happy to be doing it, but I’ve had a lot of other very major personal milestones to me. I guess I’ve been on enough labels at this point that I don’t see the process as something magical, you know? In a way, you know, they’ve been rightly framing it as a collaboration. We have common interests here, so it’s working well, but it’s you know, I’m still very much the same person. I’ve listened to a lot of music on the label over the years, maybe the last thirty years…so I guess it’s nice to be in that lineage now. I guess I hadn’t really imagined that I really would be in that same space, you know?

Do you have any personal favorite ECM albums?

ECM puts out sixty albums a year. I think people tend to think of the label as the Keith Jarrett label or something but there’s a huge range of stuff on there that I like, from Craig Taborn’s last album Avenging Angel to stuff from back in the day, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette….

What I love about ECM is how they’ve been on the forefront of the way electronic music is being utilized in a creative way in jazz, far beyond how it has been utilized in the past where it was more of like a novelty. Were there any albums that you kind of point to that came out on ECM that have been reference points for that incorporation of electronic music into jazz?

To me it’s more about just paying careful attention to the sonic details, which you hear on almost just about every ECM album. I think back a lot to those early Art Ensemble of Chicago albums from the late 70s and 80s. There was a real sense of mystery in the way sound evolved. There’s an interesting sense of space in there. You kind of hear the process of music being created. I think there’s always this sense of putting that process on a pedestal, you know, as the process is what matters, meaning the creative process in real time, people interacting and listening to each other. And I think even when you throw electronics in the mix like with the Food albums or Eivind Aarset, it’s still subject to that sensibility, which is very appealing to me. Even in the case of this piece, for me, the fact that there are electronics in it is not really the point, it’s just another piece of the palette.

How did you incorporate the electronics into this?

The main thing I did was I sampled the string instruments playing percussive sound, so what you hear is percussive textures here and there. Whether it’s tapping on the body of the instrument or hitting the wood of the bow on the strings, things like that. So that was a way of multiplying the sound of the instrument. Most of the time it doesn’t sound like it’s from another place, the electronics are kind of in the same sonic world as what you really hear coming from the strings. So it kind of created more polyrhythm. There are several things where I record them doing something and then I use it later. That long upward glissando that’s in Movement 2, that comes back in Movement 9. It’s basically the sample.

Like a reprise.

Yes, exactly.

One thing I really loved, and what kind of drew me toward your music, is your interest in electronic music. I loved the review you wrote on the Flying Lotus album Until the Quiet Comes for the Talkhouse. Did Lotus ever reach out to you?

He didn’t. I know Thundercat through him, however, and we talked about collaborating. He asked me to do a tour with him last year. It didn’t work out though.

I know the late Austin Peralta, who was an active player in Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder crew, was a student of yours.

He had lessons with me. Real intuitive guy. Part of the reason he was able to work with all those guys were those affiliations. They basically had a community unto themselves. They believe in each other, that’s where it comes from. That’s why you see them showing up on each other’s albums, so he was part of that mix just by virtue of being from L.A. and being friends, and they’d hang out and do crazy stuff together. So it was a sort of sociality behind all of it. It wasn’t just, “Oh this guys making cool stuff, let’s go try and network with him.” It was more like, “We’re all friends that play music together.” It’s organic in that way, that people are just kind of, they have this almost familial relationship and collaborations kind of grew out of that.

Do you consider what Flying Lotus does to be jazz in its own way? Do you feel like this is Alice Coltrane’s nephew when you listen to his music?

Well it certainly is in his ear bones. He’s certainly in the strain of that creativity. Ravi Coltrane told me a story once, when Alice Coltrane was still alive that [Lotus] found himself in a taxi with Alice and Ravi Coltrane and they were talking to the taxi driver and they told him they were musicians. And Alice Coltrane said, “Yes, I’m a musician, and Ravi’s a musician, and Steve [Ellison, aka Flying Lotus] is a musician, too, he just doesn’t know it yet.”

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