Name: Benjamin Lackner
Nationality: German-American
Occupation: Pianist, composer, improviser
Current release: Benjamin Lackner's Spindrift, featuring Mathias Eick (trumpet), Mark Turner (tenor saxophone), Linda May Han Oh (double bass), and Matthieu Chazarenc (drums), is out via ECM.

If you enjoyed these insights by Benjamin Lackner and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.  

For a deeper dive, read our earlier Benjamin Lackner interview, and our conversation with him about recording for ECM.



You had 100 tunes or themes to choose from in terms of the material for this new album. So you still have your daily routine of writing one piece per day?

I did one today.

I found it so inspiring to read about that. I really need to find an equivalent for that idea for my writing.

But, you know, in January, we were on tour for two and a half weeks with this album. And obviously, during that time, I do not find time to write. Things have to be kind of calm.

Would you have a keyboard with you on the road?

I do have one with me, I have a little op-1. But I don't have the peace of mind to sit down with it.

This Monday, I started writing again for the first time in a long time. It's a sign that I'm relaxed, and it's almost like there's no other way. I can't get to it unless everything else in my life is lined up. It calms me down, it's a meditative thing.

When you have so much material at your disposal, how does that change your mindset when it comes to putting together an album?

That was actually the hardest part.

I stopped at 100 songs and I spent about four months or so listening to everything prior to the recording, just to get the list down to 20 songs. And half of them were complete crap. [laughs] I mean, after after 30 seconds, you could tell, okay, this is actually almost like the one before, or it's trying to be like something from another album.

So you can weed them out.

You need the distance. You need the time away from it.

I need to let it sit for a while until I can tell if it's something I want to continue working on.

The material all seems to go really deep into one particular mood.

It's kind of like a suite, actually, some of the songs are related to each other in a way. If I were to start writing right now, it would be an even a darker album, because I'm really worried about the political landscape, especially coming up this week. [We're talking shortly prior to the German federal election]

I started writing Last Decade when everything was kind of calm. Spindrift, however, got a little darker because Russia was starting to invade Ukraine. And so the album is tinged with a little bit more of stress and darkness, but it's still calm. People have been saying that it's kind of weird how the darkness creeps in slowly.

There was this constant sense of uncertainty – and the music reflects that.

Making it was an attempt to find a routine that would calm me down. Literally Monday through Friday. Just to know that I'm going to be in that creative space without judging it, that in itself, is helpful,

Even the title, Spindrift … I had the association of an actual tornado which has a home center. I've seen spinners in the desert where there's a mini tornado in the dunes . And the center is calm. So that entire image is about maintaining calmness.

So when you were recording the album, how did you and the musicians get into that very particular mood?

I'll tell you, it was really good to have had the experience of the other record, Last Decade. Back then, I made a lot of demos, and the demos did not at all sound like the finished album. They were too complicated, there were too many things happening at once.

So this time, I prepared everything much more in the vibe that I wanted the album to be in: more spacious, with the actual approach of each song  already mapped out. So the musicians all had recorded songs at home for about three months. But we never talked about specifics. They knew exactly what to do.

I find Linda's performance particularly intriguing – unless you listen closely, she doesn't seem to be doing a lot. But really, she's essential for holding on to that space.

The bass can change everything. I mean, ultimately, every single member of the group can change the music. But the bass player, she has to hold the structure together.

In the song “Ahwahnee,” she has a bass solo and … it somehow naturally happened that the song ended up being a bit out of tempo and then she brought it back in. She made these decisions on the fly and they all made complete sense.



When it comes to the underlying conceptual themes in the music, are you consciously aware of these in the process of writing the music?

No, I'm not aware of any of that. Writing, in fact, will only work when I'm not thinking about it at all. It has to be in a state of flow. And it's the same for playing on stage or having an interesting conversation. You just have to kind of let it go and see what happens.

I noticed an interesting thing. We just had 12 concerts in a row, and the concerts kept getting more and more free-minded because we were playing the same songs every night. By the 12th Night, it was a completely different animal. We knew exactly what was going to happen in terms of which song we'd play and so we would do something else with it every night.

The album itself also has a remarkable flow, even within its restricted dynamics.

In this particular regard, Manfred Eicher affects the albums a lot positively.

In the order of songs?

Yes, we changed the order probably five times for this album. The fact that it now starts with the quartet piece, although we actually have a quintet, was definitely an interesting choice.

And also the most energetic song is the first track …

And then it descends ...

Yes, it gets quieter and quieter and into this dream state almost.

I think I'm so used to playing live that I always tend to put the most energetic song last in each set. So probably my instinct would have told me to start slow and then build it up. But I think that the way it ended up totally works.

Didn't you have a few more uptempo songs among those 100 initial ideas – or even the 20 you selected?

I did. But I didn't go by the style of song. I went by the melodies that I felt most connected to.

One thing that I learned before doing the new album is that Manfred doesn't need to hear any of the songs before. I actually asked him if he wanted to look at the music beforehand, but I guess he trusts me enough. So he's sitting in the control booth, and he'll be calling the songs in the order that I want them to appear.

So then I just picked the ones that I really wanted on the album.

The way I understand it, you wrote all of the tunes with a particular voicing in mind.

Yeah, I wrote them, definitely with two horns in mind. And the biggest question mark, actually, was what I myself was going to play in the studio.

Because on the first record with Matthias, I played the second voice. And so I kind of wrote myself into a corner where I had to figure out what my role was.

I think both your records on ECM in that when you hear them without knowing the background, you could argue that any of the instrumentalists could be the leader.

Yeah, I get to hear that often.

So what role did you define for yourself in the end?

I stayed calm and observed what they would do with it. After all, as a band, we only met, what, the evening before the recording? Linda flew in from Boston and Mark Turner from LA and Matthias from Oslo and Matthieu from Paris. And I had never played with Linda or Mark.

That said, Matthias and Mark Turner had been on tour before, and Linda and Mark knew each other. So there were lots of cross connections. Which is always important to me, that there's a chain of musical connection or a history between people.

But it's definitely kind of insane that I turned out with albums that I'm happy with both times because we didn't rehearse.

What are the benefits of this particular voicing, with a trumpet and a tenor, rather than, say, three brass instruments?

I'm actually thinking that the next project will have one more position!

But right now, I feel if I start with too many people, I'm not sure if I'm hearing everything in my head that I'm writing.

Are you writing on the computer?

No, I'm working with pen, pencil and paper.

Why so?

When I when I start using the computer, I start going for stupid shortcuts, like cutting and pasting sections because I'm lazy. Or I'll have the computer come up with some kind of a harmony line. Then you listen to that a week later and it sounds like theatre music.

It's a very delicate thing, to keep, chiselling away at what you actually heard.

Although the album was written and motivated in a way by a politically charged situation, the titles seem very personal.

It's not that different from my first ECM album in terms of the emotional attachment. The themes are all about family, getting married, but also the loss of someone really important in our family – which ended up going onto “See you again, my friend”. I wrote that the day after he died.

And the original idea behind the song “Spindrift” was for it to be a tribute to Wayne Shorter. I wrote it after Wayne Shorter died, but then I didn't want to talk about Wayne in relationship to Mark Turner, so I made it into something completely different.



But at the same time, some of the titles changed after they were recorded. When my son was born, he didn't have a name for 10 days. You just have to wait till the right name appears. And that was the same thing with the song titles.

Someone described them as “micro poems,” which I think is a beautiful idea. You just have one word to describe the song.

Just as an example, “More Mesa”  is the name of a beach that I used to go to. Stuff like that.



With many artists, the track titles are almost interchangeable. They could be anything.

Actually, the older I get, the more important the titles get to me. It's the only reference that listeners have.