Photo credit: Elle Jay

The Nth Power grew out of a jam session held during the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival almost 15 years ago, and that event’s communal spirit continues to inform the funk outfit to this day. In May, the groove-driven trio dropped their fourth studio set, Alone Together, a spirited collection of original material that focuses in on the themes of hope, unity and healing. Before recording the eight-track LP in various cities around the country, the trio’s core lineup—drummer Nikki Glaspie, guitarist Nick Cassarino and Nick Edgar—spent time writing together at Mike Gordon’s Vermont space, tapping into the Green Mountain State’s natural beauty for inspiration. They then recruited a cross-generational mix of guests, including revered trumpeter Nicholas Payton, noted saxophonist Skerik and The Soul Rebels brass band, to lend their services as they recorded nomadically between tour commitments and a range of other opportunities.  

However, despite those guest turns and their impressive sideman credentials—the Austin, Texas-based Glaspie has drummed for Beyoncé’s Suga Mamas, Maceo Parker, Dumpstaphunk and Snarky Puppy, Providence, R.I. soul/reggae bassist Edgar has held down the low end for John Brown’s Body and the New York-rooted Cassarino has worked with Christian McBride, Big Daddy Kane and Babyface while maintaining a regular Greenwich Village residency at the Olive Tree—Nth Power remain a true band, committed to their collective vision.

Here Glaspie walks us through the creation of Never Alone, the band’s unexpected origins and how she almost ended up as Primus’ drummer.

Let’s start with the backstory for Never Alone, the new Nth Power album. It has been a couple of years since the band released a full-length record, though you have all been busy individually and on the road as a group. Was there a moment when you decided, collectively, that it was time to work on a new project?  

Yea, want to start writing immediately whenever we finish a project—we like to keep the gas on—but we put out our last release during COVID, so it took a while for us to be able to get together and do some writing. Our last album, Reverence was recorded before COVID and we were putting the finishing touches on it [when the pandemic hit] and we thought it didn’t make sense to put it out then because we couldn’t tour on it, so we had to wait a little bit.

So we had these sessions in Vermont that were pretty awesome because, as artists, it’s better for us to be a little secluded because we can get distracted by all sorts of things when we are working on music. It was really great that we were able to go up there and the only thing on the agenda was to write music and to eat food. [Laughs.] And we were on Lake Champlain. It was really awesome because we were able to connect with nature—we were writing fully during a lunar eclipse, and that was cosmic as well.

We just stood out there and stared at the moon and it was glorious. There was no light pollution. You could see all the stars in the sky. It was so dense. It was gorgeous and that only fueled the creativity.

Did you each enter the writing sessions with some rough ideas, or did you start the tunes from scratch in Vermont?

We all kind of came with ideas, but nothing that was fully fleshed out. Nate brought some basslines. I had a couple of demos, and Nick had some ideas, but this was really an effort to write the songs together because we feel like the best music that we make is when we all collaborate together.

We always try to collaborate but, in the past, people have brought in more fully formed ideas. In the beginning, Nick was writing a lot because he already had some songs that weren’t released. So we started out rolling with some of his songs, and then we all had a couple where we went, “Oh, this is done, this is something that we can use.” But as time went on, we realized that the best writing that we did was when we write together.

You mentioned that you were surrounded by nature—and also that a portion of the album was written during an eclipse. How much of that backdrop seeped into the overall ethos of the music from your perspective?

A good bit, I think. “Simple Life” definitely has that theme. Nate came with the idea. He lives in Providence, R.I, and was like, “You know, I just wanna live in a shack in the woods.” And I’m like, “I love city life, just like the hustle and bustle and the access to amazing food and whatnot.” So we just took the idea that, basically, whatever you like is awesome. There’s something different for everyone and it’s cool to be different. If you wanna live in a shack and I wanna live in a penthouse, there’s nothing wrong with either one of those things. We wanted to bring the central theme home that both of those things could be great. If it makes you happy, then that’s great. We are not looking down on one or the other.

Mike Gordon provided the band with the space where you wrote toward the record in Vermont. I know Nick is from Vermont, but how did you end up connecting with him for these sessions?  

Nick is from Vermont, but I actually met Gordo when I was playing with Dumpstaphunk and he came to a show. Also, Jen Hartswick is a really great friend of ours, and they’ve played a bunch together. But, honestly, I think he just came to a show because we used to play in Vermont a lot. And he was like, “I love you guys.” He reached out a while back and was like, “If you ever wanna come up here and write, it’s gorgeous and you can totally use my space,” We were like, “Absolutely—we will.”

We went up there twice to do some writing sessions, and at the end of it we might have had 12 or 13 tracks but none that were fully completed—or maybe three of them were fully done. But we still had to record them. We just went up there to write, so once we started really recording we took everything to the finish line.

That feels like a nice segue, if you will, to the recording process. Can you walk us through how you tracked the songs that you started co-writing in Vermont. Was the process just as collaborative?

It was recorded all over the place. We are a self-funded operation, so we record wherever we can and whenever we can pay for it. So we did some recording in Volente, Texas. My friends have a place called Purple Bee Studios, and they started doing a lot of live streaming during COVID, where musicians could come in and play on a stream and people would donate to them. So that’s how they started and now they do a lot of sports television—they do a lot of different stuff that is really cool, but they don’t really record bands who are making albums. They are more doing a lot of live stuff, so it was cool to go in there and use the space in that way. It’s something they are fully capable of but that they had never really thought about doing it before.

Nick had the idea. He was like, “Dude, let’s just go in there. They’ve got all the cameras, they got everything.” And it was really great working there with such a great crew of people. That just added to the vibe of the recording.  And then we also recorded in Asheville, North Carolina. We did some vocals there with our friend Josh Blake at Echo Mountain Studios. And we recorded in New Orleans, of course, and in Brooklyn. We recorded in Long Island City as well—like I said, we were just trying to get it done. So we were in a bunch of different places while we were on the road or at home, working on it.

A number of friends joined you for the sessions. Could you walk us through those guests, some of whom are more familiar than others, and their connection to Nth Power?

We had five guests on the album. My friend—his name is Jon Deas—and he’s an amazing keyboard player and producer and he joined us. He’s probably best known by the community for being Gary Clark Jr.’s MD for many years. He also plays with Sir Woman, and he is the director of the Kill Tony band. And he’s an amazing dude. So when we were recording here, I was like, “Hey Jon, you wanna come to the studio and just mess around with us?” And he was like, “Sure!”  He’s on most of the album, though all the tracks that he did were recorded in Texas.

And then, during Jazz Fest, we recorded “Smile” at Marigny Studios and we invited Dominique Xavier, who is a great friend and amazing player, as well as Nicholas Payton and Skerik to come play on the song with us. We started playing with Nick Payton probably three years ago. He hit us up and was like, “I’ve been a fan of your band, and I’d love to play some music with you guys. I would love it if you guys came and played some of my original music,” and we were like, “Yeah! Absolutely!” He’s Nicholas Payton. He’s a living legend and one of the last true torchbearers in the idiom of jazz, I would say. He played with the greats—he played with Art Blakey and Roy Haynes and a lot of people. So it’s always an honor and a privilege to play music with him. We learn something every time we play with him. I’ve said it a couple of times, mostly to a couple of people in the band, but I was like, “I think he might be the greatest musician I’ve ever played with.”

I play with a lot of great musicians, but the way that he moves music forward and the way that he’s able to sort of command attention without really commanding attention… It’s like the audience, when he plays a note, they’re immediately, completely sucked in and in tune to what he is doing. And it takes true mastery to be able to do that with no words and just the instrument, the trumpet and the keys. He’s an incredible pianist and keyboard player, one of the best. The things that he hears are really incredible. And I learn every time I play with him. I’m like, “Wow, that’s crazy. I can’t believe you just played that.” It’s really an honor to call him a friend and to play music with him.

It must have been an incredibly experience for the band, as a unit, to learn his material and back in a live setting.

Absolutely. Nick is a master of harmony, and it’s incredible whenever he’s like, “Man, what was that?”

Courtney Smith, a former member of Nth Power, also contributes to the track “Could It Be ‘74 Remix” on the album.

Yeah, Courtney used to be a member of the band a few years ago, and we wanted to include him on the record because he was a part of the making of the remix of the song. We started working on it a few years before, and we were like, “Man, we need a recorded version of this. We should get Courtney to sing on it. It’d be awesome.” And he absolutely crushed it.

It was great having him, and we also had the Soul Rebels on this record. [The brass band appear on “Simple Life.”] We’ve been talking about doing something with them for a while. I’ve known those guys for years—I probably met them in like 2011 or something, and we talked about doing stuff because we had done shows together before Nth Power and Soul Rebels. Derek [Soul Rebels drummer Derek “Oops” Moss]was like, “Yo, we need to do something. This is awesome.” So, this is a perfect opportunity for us to get them on the album. We recorded with them in New Orleans as well at Downman studios.

Given how nomadically the album was recorded, were you testing out the material live between sessions or did you want to wait until you landed on a proper studio version before you introduced these tunes into the set?

There were a couple songs that we were already playing, but we had never made album versions of them—”Smile,” “Coult It Be” and “Thirsty.” But besides that, no, we were not playing the songs before they were released.

Looking back a bit, you had all been on the live music/jamband circuit for a number of years before you officially came together for a Jazz Fest set. For readers who don’t know the band’s backstory, can you recount how the original version of the group first coalesced about 15 years ago?

The way that band came about is that Jen Hartswick had a gig in New Orleans in 2011. She had a show at The Maple Leaf, and everyone wasn’t able to make it, so we had to get a sub bassist and a sub keyboardist. So she was like, “You got a bass player?” And I was like, “I got one of the greatest bass players. I’ll call him to see if he could do the gig.” And then, also, she was like, “Oh, what about Nigel [Hall]? Do you think he could do the gig?” I was like, “He could definitely handle it.” So, basically, that night we all ended up on stage together and started playing a little soundcheck song and we looked at each other and were like, “This is a band, this is a vibe.”

This is when we were all living in New York. So we went back to New York, and we started writing and recording immediately. There’s been different forms of band since then. We added [djembe player] Weedie Braimah. He was touring with Toubab Krewe when I met him, but now he’s playing with Wynton Marsalis and Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah and lots of other people—Saul Williams, he’s doing a lot. He’s played with Trombone Shorty, and he’s played with Oteil Burbridge. He makes the rounds. It was really great having him in the band. I learned a lot from him as well, and he introduced us to Courtney when Nigel left to go with Lettuce full time.

Over the years, you and your bandmates have prioritized The Nth Power more and more. Was there a specific moment when you decided to make this your primary project, given how many opportunities you always seem to have?

I was playing with Dumpstaphunk when the band first came together. And there was a moment in 2014 when we decided that this would be our priority.

You attended the Berklee College of Music and the community you fostered there, and at neighboring spaces like Wally’s, continues to inform your career. How would you say your experience in Boston at that time has shaped how you approach music-making in general?

My love for music is pretty much why I do as much as I do. But, also, the reason that I play music is to help people and give them a sense of hope. And as far as how the community plays into what I do, they’re fully a part of what I do and that’s what I learned from there. That’s one of the things that we really love and look forward to. We’re live musicians. And we love taking the music and exploring with it, and we love the fact that our fans—and the jamband scene—allow us to do that because there’s a lot of scenes that don’t allow musicians to really be themselves. So we’re really excited to play this new music for everyone and explore on it and see where it goes.

Speaking of unique, new experiences and exploration, you had the opportunity to do one of the final auditions for the Primus drum chair after they asked the community for submissions. John Hoffman, the drummer playing with them now, said that he was nervous walking into his audition when we saw you leaving before he entered. And, after he got the gig, Primus shared your audition clip. What were your takeaways from that experience? 

It was really awesome. It was just an opportunity to go hang out with Les and Larry and do some jamming because we have a mutual friend in Mike Dillon—and in Skerik. And we’ve been talking about just getting together for a couple of years to play, and this was just, basically, an opportunity for us to play and get some good drama TV out of it. [Laughs.]

So it was a lot of fun. It’s funny too because there were some real-life things happening surrounding that. It played out the way that it did, but it was so much fun playing Les’ basses—he let me play his basses and I was like, “Dude, this is awesome.”

He’s so cool and Larry is just such a positive guy and a really cool guitar player, just the ideas that he comes up with. We probably jammed for like an hour. We literally were jamming, and we just making up stuff. We weren’t playing songs and it was so cool. It’s always fun to do that with a musician because you kind of learn, in that moment, how they listen and where they take things—where they wanna go—and then they follow you and whatnot. You can kinda learn a lot about a person by just sitting down and playing anything with no set agenda.

Finally, I know you always have a number of irons in the fire musically. Is there a project or gig you are particularly excited about outside the Nth Power’s orbit?

I have a band called Super Sonic Shorties, which is more like a collective of like-minded musicians. And we all just happen to be females. It’s funny. We live in an industry where, if you have an all-boy band, you don’t call it a boy band because that refers to five singers, but we have an all-girl band.

When we get together, we have a lot of fun no matter what the stigma is—what people want it to be or want it to look like. These are my super badass friends that are amazing musicians, and it is really an opportunity for us to get together and act a fool. We play a bunch of festivals, and we are looking to record. In fact, we are actually recording something very soon, so hopefully we’ll have something out by this time next year or maybe in the fall—something like that because it takes a while.

The idea was sparked in 2022, but the first time we probably played was 2023—in 2023, did Denver Comes Alive, which I guess was our U.S. debut. Before that, though, we had played in the Virgin Island at this festival and that was pretty much how it kind of came about. And then, after that, we started playing at Northlands, which we’ve been at every year since they started. It’s been really cool to be a part of the festival and a part of the family and to see it grow.