Part 2

Thanks to technological advances, collaboration has become a lot easier. What have been some of the most fruitful collaborations for you recently and what approaches to and modes of collaboration currently seem best to you?

Jacob: All my in person collaborations have the been the most successful, but there is more capability to connect with more people than ever through social media as well.

Eli: I spent this past winter in northern Thailand, so it was really great to be able to send demos and tracks back and forth to the band to plant seeds for new tunes. It flexes a different set of muscles to work in that way, and then when we finally got back in the same place, we were able to improvise around these ideas and a way that seems super natural for us, so for me the in persnoo “play” element is the best method for collaboration.

Jazz has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

Eli: I’m not nearly as schooled in the early jazz roots as my bandmates, so I’m far less interested in paying homage to where it came from and far more interested in where it’s going.

I definitely appreciate the lineage and the culture around it, but the tonality of the early era doesn’t really impact our music. If anything does, I’d say the attitude and the intention behind it, when thinking about music as a rebellious expressive art form and also edging into dance music, which means something super different now than it did then.

How much potential for something “new” is there still in jazz? What could this “new” look like?

Joe: Infinite potential. Jazz is about the pushing of the boundary itself, that's where jazz happens. So by definition, the “new” is whatever is coming out today, whatever you're hearing or playing today, or whatever is involved in pushing consciousness and feeling forward.

Right now, a lot of jazz is leaning into groove based, more compositionally structured stuff. I like that a lot.  

For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. How co you see that yourself?

Joe: Seeing people connect to our music is the best. We have so much fun live because we love each other. The crowd is an essential component to the “life-changing” live experience. The more people we play for, the higher the vibration gets.

We played at Shakori Hills Festival in North Carolina, and our last song of the set, “Dance Tune,” went on for probably 15 minutes (which is a long time considering that the whole song is pretty much a 6 beat loop with a fun little B section).

The crowd is like the 4th band member, and their energy feeds us, and vice versa. It’s an incredible feedback loop to be a part of.

How, would you say are your live performances and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?

Joe: Man it’s funny. We used to play our songs a certain way. Then we made the album. Once the album became structured and produced the way it is, we now play the songs more like that, since we’ve all listened to the album versions of the songs sooooo many times.

It was kind of nice, I feel like the live versions of our songs are more “complete” now that we’ve processed them through a {Play live → Make album versions → Play live} flowchart.

Eli: Piggy-backing off Joe’s response, it’s interesting to me how fast you can get attached to an idea via demo-itis, so our original recordings heavily influence where we are coming from when we perform.

But then we will often stray into new territories by introducing different themes or vastly different tempos, so the whole thing is a symbiotic relationship, especially when the recordings are more of a demo than final recordings, so then it impacts how we go into the studio with those tracks.

Improvisation is obviously an essential element of jazz, but I would assume that just like composition, it is transforming. How do you feel has the role of improvisation changed in jazz?

Joe: The structure of the solo section used to be like, you solo, now you solo, now you solo, etc. Now, and for the past while, the improvisation is more fluid, more nuanced, and more baked into the music. The section that one person solos on will be different than another section that someone else solos on.

Solos can happen at the same time. Maybe the whole band improvises together.

Eli: I feel like improvisation has seeped into so many other genres beyond jazz (experimental, jam, electronic, etc) that, to me personally, it’s less about how it functions in a specific setting. Everything is improvisation - when you water a plant and it grows, it’s taking a new path that hasn’t been taken before, it’s just doing what comes naturally.

That is sort of how I view our music. We’ll have a seed of something that impacts the tonality and form that grows from it, but how we get there changes all the time and it feels super organic and I love listening to music that feels similar to that.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to Improvisation?

Eli: Doing what feels right in the moment by allowing everyone to have space to express how and where the music is going in real time. That means maybe a different person is in charge of where it goes from time to time.

The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feel it’s important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?

Eli: I love what I’m seeing from labels like Brainfeeder, Stones Throw, Ninja Tune, etc who are all pushing jazz adjacent music into new realms.

I think what is happening at festivals like Newport Jazz and Big Ears and Montreux is all super incredible and to me, archiving that music is super important, but I also think there is an element of “having to be there” for some things.

When I hear live recordings of certain bands, there is a disconnect from the mentality that band and crowd has versus me listening to it on a walk around my neighborhood - the context is missing and so I think it impacts the way it’s heard but I do think it’s important for the music to live on.