Name: Mazz Swift

Nationality: American

Occupation: Composer, conductor, bandleader, educator, singer, violinist
Current Release: Mazz Swift's The 10000 Things is out May 24th 2024 via New Amsterdam.  
Recommendations: I am a huge fan of Bisa Butler’s work. She uses quilt as her medium and creates these wonderful pictures of Black Life. I am obsessed.
Also, Undrowned, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is truly revolutionary and as far as I’m concerned, a manual for how to live and think about life. I am convinced that she is a genius, and I hope the MacArthur Foundation finds out about her and gives her lots and lots of money.

If you enjoyed this Mazz Swift interview and would like to stay up to date with their music, visit them on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

Sometimes I have a melody running through my head, as is what happened with “Don’I Know-dis…?” In this case, it was the Latin prayer Dona Nobis Pacem - over and over again. I was already in the process of making the record, so I figured I’d try some things with it and ended up keeping it for the final product.



Quite a few melodies have come to me in dreams. Sometimes I worry they’re songs I’ve heard before and just don’t know where or how. But I am so compelled, and they have an “inside” feeling, so I go with it.

I dreamed of the violin interlude in “New Anthem” and I couldn’t be happier with how the application turned out.



As for politics, I am really justice driven and I see everything I do as an exercise toward that end: the liberation of myself and us all. It’s a big topic to put into words, so I hope folks will join me on this ride and engage with me. As the t-shirt says, I’m introverted but happy to discuss dismantling systems of oppression. Y’all can find me @mazzmuse everywhere.

Except X because … well, it should be obvious.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

Well, I definitely don’t rock with visualizing the end product in full detail. I’m big on improvisation and following my instincts.

As a person who spent the first few decades of their life trying to fit into other peoples’ ideals and aesthetics,  at the beginning of my journey into improvisation, I found that my preconceived ideas were always based on what I thought might be “cool” to other people. It was almost pathological and it drove me crazy. It was as if I knew I was lying to my own self.

Once I realized that, it became important to me to let my unconscious reveal to me, through constant letting go in improvisation, who I really am underneath the masking, camouflaging and accommodating. So, that’s been my practice for the past 25 years or so.

That said, PRAISE SONGS came about because I had set myself on this personal path of finding and arranging to my liking, the Spirituals and “slave songs” of the (a)merican* south. So, in the case of this record, I chose a handful of songs that moved something in me as soon as I read or heard them. And since they were preexisting melodies, I applied my improvisational approach to freestyling the arrangements.

I do a pass linearly. Then I go back and start sculping based on what brings me pleasure in the moment. That allows me to feel satisfied with my work and know that it’s good regardless of what people think of it.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

I need my station to be set up already or it takes me forever to get started.

And yes, the research does happen, and can last for years (as in the case of PRAISE SONGS). During that time, I start demo-ing ideas based on what I’m inspired by and some type of prototype emerges.

Then when I’m ready to make the thing - whether it be a song, a commissioned piece, or an album - I pull out the prototypes and begin to try to make sense of them.

What do you start with? And, to quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

I think it’s more accurate to say we pluck the ideas out of the fabric of consciousness. If every thing, as a matter of experience, is made up of consciousness, ideas are too. Everything is everywhere, all at once. One expression of consciousness (the artist) teasing out (expressing) another aspect of consciousness (the “idea”).

But of course you can’t ever re/create the idea as it comes to you, because turning it into song or dance or a sculpture, etc, changes the idea itself. We neither create nor discover. We express.
 
Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

Definitely the latter.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

Yes - this is the very thing I try to stay open to/for. I don’t want to control.

The more I try, the less interesting it is, and the less true it feels.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

I shy away from the term “spirituality” but I do like to sidle up to the unknown and try to learn from the discomfort of not knowing. Something about what I understand “spirituality” to be implies that there are answers. And I don’t believe there are any. There is just here, now.

I think being able to access and use a creative state is putting to practice what we learn in meditation. It is rich and very informative of how to live Life.

I also think committing to presence is about as on-the-path to enlightenment as one can get. I love that practicing music is, for me, practicing growth.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

It’s like I mentioned earlier. The snippets I create over long periods of time get recorded/documented as they occur to me, and then I leave them alone and let them marinate in the back of my mind. Occasionally I weed out the list of things that no longer resonate with me.

Eventually, when I sit down to create, months or years later, I generally grab the ones that I can imagine working with in that very moment.

When you're in the studio to record a piece, how important is the actual performance and the moment of performing the song still in an age where so much can be “done and fixed in post?“

Haha - I think once you hear the performances it will become pretty obvious that I value the take over perfection. In other words, there are still moments (I won’t tell you which!) where my inner perfectionist cringes a little bit. But it was important to me to leave them in.

There’s plenty of tweaking that goes on, but it’s all to clarify. Never to recreate.