Ingrid Laubrock - "I grew up in a literary household with parents who paid close attention to the written word. My father was a Goethe scholar, and my mother often read to us, pointing out the beauty of the sound of words. I have always felt an affinity for poetry. I appreciate its emotional power to move us and to make us think less literally.
Miles Davis stressed the importance of knowing the lyrics to standards, and I’ve always believed that understanding the meaning of the words provides an added dimension when improvising over them.
In my formative years as a musician in London, my first band was Nóis 4, a collaboration that included Brazilian singer Mônica Vasconcelos. We played original songs as well as our arrangements of works by Brazilian masters. Mônica is a journalist and a great lyricist in her own right, and she only sang songs whose lyrics she loved. We often discussed the meaning of the words, and I learned Portuguese to delve deeper into the music.
I prefer playing original music by living composers and composing for musicians I know personally. When choosing the text for this project, I decided to follow the same approach. I met Erica Hunt at a party in 2019, and we had a fascinating conversation about her poetry. So her work immediately came to mind when I started looking for a text for this project. The poem, “Mood Librarian - a poem in koan’ in Erica’s collection Jump the Clock stood out to me. It’s a collection of sixty micro poetic fragments—cryptic, intuitively relatable, sometimes funny, and, true to the nature of koans, open-ended.
I began setting the words to music in February 2021 as part of a master’s degree in composition. The first duo I composed for was Duo Cortona: mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway and violinist Ari Streisfeld. I initially found this instrumentation daunting, as I thought the limited low range and polyphonic possibilities would be a challenge. However, I discovered that the violin has nearly limitless orchestration potential, and working with musicians of Rachel’s and Ari’s caliber revealed rich possibilities. Once I had composed a handful of pieces for Duo Cortona, the seed for the rest of the album was planted.
Apart from Rachel and Ari, I knew all the other musicians on this record before embarking on this journey. I have worked with Sara Serpa on two of her projects and love the purity and unpretentiousness of her voice. Out of the four singers, her voice is closest to mine, which made the compositional process quite natural, as I could sing her songs myself. Matt Mitchell is a pianist with razor-sharp time and he can play polyrhythms with the degree of accuracy and ease I needed for some of the songs. I heard Sara and Matt perform a duet as part of Sara’s group Intimate Strangers, and I knew I wanted them to be one of the duos.
I have long been a fan of Theo Bleckmann and Ben Monder’s partnership, as well as of their work as individual artists. Their duo music is refined and deep, with a dark edge. In 2021, I played opposite them on a double bill. Listening to their set prompted me to reach out to them soon after.
Fay Victor and I have worked together on several occasions. In 2023, we performed with Patricia Brennan as part of double bassist Mark Dresser’s and trombonist Michael Dessen’s bi-coastal Telematic Project: Widening the Embrace. We all brought in arrangements of our tunes, and as I was working on Erica’s koans at the time, I arranged three of them for this larger group. I loved what Fay brought to the pieces, and as her voice and delivery is also closest to the poet’s own, the choice felt right.
Mariel Roberts and I first worked together when she was part of Mivos Quartet and Bojan Vuletić invited me to be a guest soloist for his composition “Recomposing Art VI: Guernica”. We have since performed together in projects such as Nate Wooley’s Mutual Aid Music and with the Wet Ink Ensemble. I featured her in my composition “Fight Flight Freeze” for Wet Ink. Mariel is a virtuoso contemporary classical cellist and a profound improviser. Fay and Mariel were the only duo of the four that hadn’t played together before, but they seemed to have an immediate understanding of each other’s approaches."
(198846719085)
SKU | 198846719085 |
Barcode # | 198846719085 |
Brand | Pyroclastic Records |
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