Part 2

What role does improvisation play for your interpretations?

Improvisation is absolutely integral to our creative process as a band. It’s where we come from spiritually as Jazz musicians, and it plays a huge role in our process of arranging and interpreting other artists' music, as well as developing our own original material.

We often use improvisation in the arranging process to discover new musical language for a piece – new sounds, new textures, and new contexts. We find that this process of collective and spontaneous discovery often leads to completely unexpected solutions we would not otherwise find. This might mean a new way to present a melody, a new texture to accompany a melody, or a new harmonic color that totally changes the mood of the song.

Though there is often improvisation in live performance, the improvisation is more prominently part of the group’s arranging process, and then those discoveries will be formalized into a more definitive arrangement and score.

A few examples from the new album – solutions to translate many of the extended string techniques on Entr’acte were found through improvisation (The breath sounds, and some of the percussive sounds). And a big chunk of the middle movement of “This is Water” features layers of trombone improvisations, sculpted and shaped into the present form on the recording, and completely differently each night on tour.



Interpretations can be wildly different live compared to the studio. What is this like for you?

We think of live performance and studio creation as quite different artistic practices.

Our creative process usually has three phases – First the composition / arranging / development of material, then the recording process to realize that material as clearly, dramatically, and colorfully as possible, then the live performance and touring that follows. Sometimes the order gets jumbled a bit, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get to tour a piece quite a bit before recording.

But we’ve always felt that the music really comes alive when we tour a piece a lot, over years, and hundreds of performances. Because we perform without sheet music, the music takes on a new life when we get off the page. We can be completely attuned to each other, observing and reacting to every subtle detail in the phrasing, the breathing, a new embellishment, or the energy of that moment. That’s one of the things that keeps the music so fresh and exciting for us.

There are pieces we’ve been playing for over a decade, performed hundreds of times, and they continue to evolve and take new shapes each night. We recently put out our first live record which was a fun example of how the music evolves over time from the original studio recordings.

With regards to the live situation, what role do the audience and the performance space play for your interpretation?

Live performance is thrilling for us because it's such a shared experience and exchange with the audience. We feed off the energy in the space, which greatly affects the music. Sometimes a piece might want to exist at a different tempo than the recording or a melody may take on a certain feeling depending on the energy in the room.

As brass players, the acoustics of space also has a huge impact on the performance. A large hall that has a long resonant reverb will elicit a different performance than a space that is very intimate and dry.

In many ways, the space is a 5th member of the band that we are listening to and reacting to in real-time.

With regards to the studio situation, what role do sound, editing possibilities and other production factors play for your interpretation?

Sound recording and audio production is such a deep art form in its own right. We love the creative process of making records and utilizing all that the studio has to offer in terms of creative, sonic, editing, and production possibilities. Our artistic and sonic goals vary from project to project, depending on what we feel serves that particular body of music.

On our latest album, Move, we approached the production in a more traditional classical manner than some of our previous records, aiming to capture our best performances as perfectly as possible, with vivid sonic detail and clarity, and minimal post-production, like sitting in the perfect seat in a perfect hall.

Other projects we’ve done utilize the full range of modern production tools and technology, multi-tracking parts, mangling, transforming, or re-amping sounds through various forms of manipulation, and creative mixing with effects.

We love all that stuff as a means of realizing the sonic vision of a piece.

Some works seem to attract more artists to add their interpretation to it than others; some seem to even encourage wildly different interpretations. From your experience, what is it about these works that gives them this magnetic pull?

The process of interpretation involves transforming the raw material of an existing work through your personal lens. What pulls us to certain works or materials is, first and foremost, their emotional weight, but also their openness and potential of the material to be transformed into something personal to us. Material that has space for us to tell our own story within it.

There are many examples of works that have immense emotional weight or personal meaning to us, but may have been realized so strongly and specifically in their original form, that it is impossible to imagine any other way of it existing (or at least impossible to imagine existing as a brass quartet interpretation.)

Some works elicit a lot of gravity and weight simply because they are great, or capture a particular feeling at a particular moment in time that can only exist in that time, place, and context, with that particular collection of people. Other material feels more open in a sense, more universal, more timeless, and perhaps more fertile ground for other interpretations.

All that said, with enough creativity and ingenuity, I think any material can be transformed into something deeply personal and compelling!

Artists can return to a work several times throughout the course of their career, with different results. Tell me about a work where this has been the case for you, please.

One of the songs we’ve been playing for as long as we’ve been a band is called Saro, an old English folk song (sometimes called "Pretty Saro") that’s been covered by a million different folks over centuries.



Our arrangement and approach hasn’t actually changed all that much since we first started playing it 10+ years ago, but what has been fascinating and beautiful is that the meaning and weight of the piece seems to grow and broaden.



We find new colors and feeling in the melodies, and audiences continue to resonate with the piece in beautiful and surprising ways. We’ve been told that the record has accompanied weddings, funerals, births, and deaths, and one of the reasons we keep coming back to it is that the song creates space to process the full spectrum of emotions we are facing in any given moment.

Part of the intrigue of interpretations is that the process is usually endless. Are there, vice versa, interpretations that feel definitive to you?

We agree — music is endless, and songs that may feel definitive can be reimagined in new ways that completely turn your expectations upside down.

A piece like Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte may seem definitive to many listeners who have been in love with the string quartet for years, but we hope that we surprise listeners with our version.

At the end of the day, whenever new voices are reinterpreting the canon and taking risks along the way, they deserve to be heard.