Name: Ezra Feinberg
Nationality: American
Occupation: Guitarist, composer, psychoanalyst
Current release: Ezra Feinberg teams up with John Thayer and Robbie Lee for the self-titled Earth Room debut album on Related States. Physical copies available here.

If you enjoyed this interview with Ezra Feinberg and would like to know more about his music, visit hin on Facebook, and twitter.



When did you first start getting interested in musical improvisation?  

Right away I think.

Learning guitar, there were chords and there were notes, and there were the right chords and the right notes and then there was feeling unsure of where you'd found yourself after veering off from the right notes and chords. You’re not sure which is which and what’s right or wrong because there is no right or wrong when you start to wade out past all that basic stuff.

As a teenager (and as an adult) I loved the Grateful Dead and that was the first thing I knew about them: they improvised. But they also had songs with chords and melodies so it was the perfect gateway.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances involving prominent use of improvisation captured your imagination in the beginning?

Other than the Dead I’d say the Electric Miles period, and a show I saw once at tonic in the late 90s with Arto Lindsay and Joey Baron, all improv guitar and drums, and just cracking each other up! But also so fluid and fun and really, really good.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage?

Of the three of us in Earth Room I have the least experience improvising. John and Robbie are always ready to go and I kind of pretended to be as ready as they always are even though it’s not my natural musical habitat (which is more compositional).

Both of them listen with this kind of active sensitivity, and that affected how I listened during those sessions. I definitely learned a lot about listening by playing with them.

Tell me about your instrument and/or tools, please. How would you describe the relationship with it? What are its most important qualities and how do they influence the musical results and your own performance?  

Guitar is my main instrument, and what I play in Earth Room. It's not as central to the sound as all the woodwinds, synths, and percussion on the record, but it provides texture above and between where your ear goes most of the time.

I love the guitar, but for the last few years I've been on a quest toward something like my own version of "extended technique" on the acoustic. Generally I feel like the acoustic guitar is an under-used tool in experimental / improvised music, but actually it can serve a comparable function as some kinds of synthesizers when you start running it through different effects and processors - an open sound to be colored in and sonically directed.

I often have my best ideas on the guitar because I know it, but that can be a hindrance too, and for that reason sitting at a keyboard is something I enjoy almost as much because I don't know it as well - I know the notes and chords more or less but I can't actually play keyboards for shit - so it's more unpredictable.

It's frustrating because lack of technique is just a frustrating thing, but being in that unknown realm can open up so much too.

How do you feel your sense of identity influences your collaborations? Do you feel as though you are able to express yourself more fully in solo mode or, conversely, through the interaction with other musicians? Are you “gaining” or “sacrificing” something in a collaboration?

The Earth Room collaboration was interesting in terms of gaining and sacrificing because it started as a situation where Robbie and John were sort of my backing band - I asked them to join me for what was billed as a solo performance at Nowadays in Bushwick. But it wasn't a solo show at all, it was the three of us jamming, just going on playing, with nothing worked out beforehand.

So dynamically there was a shift, rather quickly, from leader to no leader, and I found that really freeing. I've almost always been the leader in every musical project I've had, and this was a welcome change just being one part of the whole.

When you're improvising, does it actually feel like you're inventing something on the spot – or are you inventively re-arranging patterns from preparations, practise or previous performances?

For me probably more the latter, even though the former sounds cooler.

I have areas I like to go to, ideas on the guitar that feel like inviting colors for the other guys to mess around with. But there's a temporal factor too since those places I like to go are usually where things will start for me, but by midway through I've been pulled somewhere else, often somewhere new and unfamiliar.

There were a few times in these jams where I found myself in the midst of a repetition that became very literally uncomfortable, like we'd sunk into something really cool sounding with me on one chord pattern or even just one chord, and at a certain point I'd be like "damn this is hurting my hands wtf do I do?"

Deep jamming is a good way to persevere through pain. :)

To you, are there rules in improvisation? If so, what kind of rules are these?

No rules really, though a given jam may take on a certain definition that you're responding to. I feel like it would have sounded bad if, for example, in the midst of one of our spacey improvisations I'd started finger tapping like Eddie Van Halen.

But would that have been against the rules? I'd say no. And who knows maybe it would have been cool!

In a live situation, decisions between creatives often work without words. How does this process work – and how does it change your performance compared to a solo performance?

Playing in Earth Room is similar to a solo performance in a way because in both there's very little talking. Almost none actually. When I play on my own there's no one else there, so yeah zero words. And with Robbie and John 90% or more of the time we were all in the studio we were playing, with nothing planned out or discussed before or after.

We did more talking as we edited of course, you sort of have to if you're sitting in front of a computer with someone, but that was a secondary process to the playing part.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? In which way is it different between your solo work and collaborations?

I'm not a fan of "ideal states of mind" for anything really. Life is always a lot and you just put one foot in front of the other and move forward and see what happens, that's how it is in music for me at least.

I have a family, a wife and two little kids, and a practice as a psychoanalyst, it's a busy life which means I'm always making music in the midst of so many moving parts. I just try to clear out whatever space I can for music, and I'm able to, fortunately, but it's not easy. I plan it into my weekly and daily schedule.

If I required an ideal state of mind I'd never get anything done!