Name: Kate Campbell Strauss
Nationality: American
Occupation: Saxophonist, composer, arranger, activist
Current Release: Kate Campbell Strauss teams up with Emily Mikesell for their duo album Give Way, slated for release January 24th 2025 via Ears&Eyes. First single "WWYD" is out now.

[Read our Emily Mikesell interview]

If you enjoyed this Kate Campbell Strauss interview and would like to know more about their music, visit Kate's official homepage. They are also on Instagram.



How did this particular collaboration come about?

Emily and I were in a jazz ensemble class at the University of New Orleans during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Making the most of virtual jazz education, our teacher Brian Seeger would pair us off every two weeks and ask us to come back with an original piece to present.

During our two-week session, Emily and I wrote and recorded “Cloud Castles.” We were so excited about how it sounded - and how it felt working together - that we decided to continue and wrote the other five pieces over the next nine months.

There are many potential models for collaboration, from live performances and jamming/producing in the same room together up to file sharing. Which of these do you prefer – and why?  

For me, the tone of the collaboration is what's most important, rather than the exact model.

That said, Give Way was my first experience with this model, which is more in the file-sharing category. At the beginning of our collaboration, we agreed to some ground rules, including:

record the first thing you hear
pass the files quickly
serve the music

We also agreed not to discuss musical decisions much, if at all. We didn’t know each other well yet but decided to trust each other's musical intuition and ideas. This decision not only served our creative exchange but actually helped me build trust in my own ideas.

Some people may have an easy time with that, but I’ve had to learn and practice self-trust, and I’m grateful that this collaboration is grounded in that.

Describe the process of working together, please. What was different from your expectations and what did the other add to the music?

Each piece started with one of us recording a track (or several). We would then send that as a file to the other, who would then listen and record whatever ideas came to them first. We would pass the files back and forth about once a day, building each one in length and density until we decided it was complete (but trying to stay within the two-week timeframe). We also incorporated the creative prompts from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies.

I never had expectations of what Emily would do next, which made the process really fun and full of surprises.

Is there a piece which shows the different aspects you each contributed to the process particularly clearly?

Every piece does.

Decisions between creatives often work without words. How did this process work in this case?

Yes! This project was one of the first times I’d collaborated long-term with someone without exchanging a lot of words. One of our initial agreements was to simply play/record what we heard, which we basically stuck to.

There was only one piece where I made a specific request of Emily and one where she made a specific request of me. I loved how much this approach made me focus on creating and responding to sound.