Golden ages in the arts are usually identified in retrospect, yet it hard to escape the conclusion that Australian jazz is currently experiencing a particularly creative and exciting period at the moment.
At the centre of some of the most interesting music being produced in the country is Sydney trumpeter, composer and bandleader Phil Slater.
The recipient of most major domestic awards – including Australian Jazz Artist of the Year (2004), National Jazz Award (2003) and the Freedman Fellowship Award (2002) – Slater is at the forefront of attempts to redefine what it means to be a jazz musician in the 21st century.
With regular collaborators pianist Matt McMahon and drummer Simon Barker, he is one third of the much-lauded Band of Five Names as well as the leader of his own quartet, which recently released a superb album The Thousands (Kimnara Records). The CD has been nominated for a Limelight Award for Best Jazz Achievement 2007.
Phil Slater recently spoke to Jazz Australia about the creative process, the weight of the jazz tradition, and the representation of the music in the mainstream media.
Jazz Australia: Can you describe your musical background? Did you do the jazz program at the Conservatorium?
Phil Slater: No, I didn’t go to the Con as a student. I did two years of a Bachelor of Music degree at Sydney University then I transferred to Wollongong University and did a Bachelor of Creative Arts, which enabled me to do subjects such as philosophy, psychology and biology.
I lived in Wollongong with my parents about 10 minutes away from the campus. I was able to practice as often as I liked. I wasn’t paying rent and didn’t have the daily grind of living in a share house, so I could focus 100 percent on music. Because I was, in a sense, isolated from what was going on in Sydney I could cocoon myself in almost a fictional world of wanting to be a jazz musician.
I could play with my friends and develop in a less competitive environment than perhaps was going on at the Con at that time. I don’t think I would have gone very well at the Con as a student. I don’t take very well to the competition element of universities, so I’m grateful in a sense that I didn’t go there. I was able to develop my skills at my own pace.
But having taught there for the last 10 years it would seem we are perhaps in a golden period for young musicians. I don’t know where they’re coming from. But the depressing thing is that there is nowhere really for these musicians to play.
JA: You recently played at the Sound Lounge in Sydney with Andrea Keller, Simon Barker and Steve Elphick. The repertoire was mainly played standards, which isn’t something I’d imagine you do often?
PS: I haven’t played standards in a concert environment for a while but it’s not unusual in the sense that that’s what I practice and it’s still the music that I study when I want to develop my technique on the instrument. Everything that is essential to jazz is in those songs.
So I guess the challenge of playing standards is to play them in an original way, a fresh way. To be honest, I would play standards more if there more opportunities to perform them in Sydney. If you only have a limited number of performance opportunities then you really need to be focused in what sort of repertoire you play. When people were playing in earlier decades there were lots of performance opportunities, so you could have more projects on the go.
JA: Much of the original music you perform is in partnership with Matt McMahon and Simon Barker. What are your ambitions in this context? What are you trying to achieve?
PS: It’s not necessarily that we’re trying to be original; we’re trying to play music that we can play well. There’s a bit of a subtle difference. Often you can’t play music when you’re imitating someone else as well as music that you come up with yourself.
JA: Are you happy with the way your recent quartet album The Thousands worked out?
PS: Yes, I’m especially happy with the way everyone plays on the album. I’m not so keen about my own playing but I really enjoy everybody else’s.
JA: Are you always so self-critical?
PS: I guess so. I’m not sure how many people thoroughly enjoy listening to themselves play. I think you hear all the faults and can only compare it to the roster of other trumpet players that you’ve got floating around in your head – Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis and all your heroes and, of course, it’s not that.
The funny thing is that quite often the stuff you like the least is actually the most original element of your playing. If you’re totally dissatisfied, quite often there may be something good about it.
JA: To what extent is the success of the album a result of the relationship you have developed with your collaborators?
PS: It’s totally dependent upon it. I write music to be generative. I write it so that it creates a playing situation; it’s not a facsimile of a playing situation. So the performance is totally dependent upon the performance itself. Before we play any of my pieces we have rehearsals and I try to be very specific about what it is that I want the music to do and what effects or techniques I want the players to investigate.
JA: Can you say something about one of the tracks on the album, Tedium, which generates an extraordinary tension, largely due to the sustain effect Matt gets on the piano?
PS: I am particularly interested in is the sound of a pipe organ and a trumpet. One way to achieve sustain on the piano is to repeat the note over and over like a zither, which you hear Chris Abrahams do with The Necks. What I was interested in doing was having that sort of texture playing with the trumpet in a hymn-like fashion. It was an effect I was looking for a very long time but just hadn’t quite achieved. It seems as plain as day now but it took a long time to get to that point of being able to sustain notes on the piano.
JA: Is it easier to realize your concepts when you play with artists you know very well like Matt and Simon?
PS: Certainly. The music I try to write and get a band to play is very much like collage. I know pretty intimately the sounds Matt and Simon make. That’s not to say that I’m not often surprised by them but whenever I conceptualise a piece of music or think about an idea it’s always with that sound in mind. So it is a shorthand. It’s like a choreographer who knows what a dancer’s body is capable of doing or will look like doing something.
On Tedium, I knew Matt’s arm strength when he plays the piano. He’s a very powerful technician on the instrument and he gets a certain sound out of the piano. He plays with a lot of shoulder and a lot of the top of his arm. I just knew that that technique would work really well. For other players it wouldn’t work – they wouldn’t be able to get the same harmonic thing out of the piano. It’s very tiring for Matt to do it.
Most of the music on the album is recorded in one take because I knew that the pieces were pretty tiring to play. So we were very disciplined about how we went about doing things. We knew that every time we played, it was potentially it.
JA: Given how you write, is each live performance of your compositions a chance to better realize the concept you had in mind or are you aiming to make it afresh?
PS: In the context of a performance there are things that we can do really easily by improvising. The things that are very difficult to do are gaps that I try to fill with compositions.
The compositions are like seeds. They are intended to grow music, but they are also very much focus points within a performance setting. I’m not necessarily that interested in remaking the composition every time. We know that the composition is there for tension and release purposes – to balance what we can do with improvisation. So in a sense they perform a structural function to refocus the music or to change gears.
JA: The music of your other main ensemble Band of Five Names regularly features electronic sounds generated by a laptop computer. Are these to provide texture or atmosphere, or do the sounds open up different avenues of inquiry to pursue during an improvisation?
PS: Brian Eno once asked his art class to record four minutes of ambient sound and the students had to listen to it repeatedly in the same way they’d listen to a pop song. What tends to happen is that at first the elements sound unorganized but by the third or fourth listen it starts to sound like a piece of music – that horn goes off and then the dog barks and a bird tweets. And after a while it starts to sound like an enjoyable piece of music in the sense that you can get into the rhythm of the repetition.
The idea that you needed to listen repeatedly to hear all the elements was interesting to us and we thought it perhaps hadn’t been explored by many jazz musicians. Digital technology enabled us to implement the idea.
On our latest album Empty Gardens we tried to write a song cycle that would use repetition. We’re also interested in the sounds of the computer doing odd things – like backfiring or other sorts of glitches.
I use the computer in the same way I use the trumpet. The way I think about the instrument is all about determining what can the instrument do well and what it does badly? What is the stuff that all the other players throw out and can I incorporate that stuff in an interesting way in my playing. The same is true of the computer. What the computer does really well is make things squeaky clean and homogenized – all the things I detest about computers. So I’m interested in making them do things they don’t want to do.
Having said that, I’m not really a computer music person. I’m only interested in the sonic effects; I’m not interested in programming computers. I treat them badly and have little respect for them as instruments other than as an amazing tool to generate sound.
So when I perform with austraLYSIS where people care very deeply about computer music I’m very much they roll their eyes at the things I make the computer try and do.
JA: What are the musical developments taking place overseas that interest you?
I’m intrigued by the players of my generation who are finding new ways of doing things, such as The Bad Plus, who I have seen live a couple of times. At first I resisted and wasn’t sure what was going on but I really enjoy their music now. They’re strong in that they’re proud of their influences and they’re proud of the way they play their instruments.
By contrast, so much of music played by people of my generation in Australia and elsewhere is full of self doubt and despair that we can’t play like the musicians of the past.
JA: The weight of the tradition … ?
PS: Exactly. And that’s fuelled by the Wynton Marsalis school of thinking. I think he’s an amazing trumpet player but there’s a certain psychosis around his view of the tradition and it has taken musicians a long time to sort that out.
Interestingly, younger musicians – the people I teach at the Conservatorium now – don’t have that level of psychosis that we had about playing jazz. Partly, I think it’s because of bands like The Bad Plus and Jim Black’s projects, John Zorn and Dave Douglas, where the approach is just so ecumenical – the idea that all tastes are equal. Well, it wasn’t quite like that when I was the age of my students. Jazz was a certain thing you did a certain way.
In a sense it took a long time for me to get my head around the idea that jazz can sound a number of different ways; that it didn’t have to swing. I love swinging music but there are all sorts of ways to create momentum.
Brad Mehldau and The Bad Plus are the popular jazz artists now and quite possibly people have finally said that jazz can be lots of different things to lots of different people and that’s fine.
JA: Do you think the term jazz itself has become redundant?
PS: Possibly but not to me.
JA: Who are the musicians in Australia who are doing the most interesting work conceptually at the moment?
PS: The stand out group for me is The Necks. I’m impressed with the way they manage themselves as an ensemble, the kind of discipline with which they go about their practice.
When I hear them play I think this could only be made by Australians. I don’t know why; it’s a myth, I know. It’s really sloppy thinking and all of that but that’s what it sounds like to me. I think that is such a potent thing to have going for you.
There is so much music going on and there is such a variety of musicians in Australia, which is a healthy thing but it’s let down by the lack of performance opportunities.
It would also be nice if all this music culture was represented in The Sydney Morning Herald and on TV shows. Also, this idea that Triple J is the be-all and end-all of the culture is a real mistake. I feel very disappointed in the station’s attitude to youth culture.
JA: You perform in a number of contexts, including in the band of Missy Higgins. What’s that like?
PS: I think Missy’s a fantastic singer – I love her voice. I think she is a fantastic musician and a pure songwriter. For me it’s not like doing a jazz gig – I don’t play that much. But every night I find her singing moving and she has a fantastic band.
It’s actually nice for me to have a set role. I’m just a small cog in quite a big machine and I actually really enjoy that for a change. Often when I play, especially in a jazz setting, I’m the lead voice and responsible to a large degree for setting the tone of the performance and I take that very seriously. When I play I’m trying to shape the music.
So it’s really nice to take a backseat and concentrate on other elements of music that when you’re a jazz musician you don’t often get a chance to work on. There are certain technical requirements playing Missy’s music that are more to do with concentration – making sure that you get that note you have to play right after standing there for 10 minutes.
JA: Is there any solo space?
PS: There is, actually, and what I can bring to the show works well in the live setting. A lot of Missy’s material is very introspective and those moments when the music cuts loose a bit really does add a certain excitement.
JA: What about your recent work at the Belvoir Theatre where you performed in Exit the King, Ionesco’s absurdist play, which starred Geoffrey Rush?
PS: I did a month of touring with Missy and went straight into a month of doing the play. In a sense it was a very similar situation where I wasn’t actually playing that much yet having to be on the ball and concentrating for a length of time. I always find that difficult. It’s not something I’m particularly good at. I couldn’t play in a symphony orchestra.
The play was different in the sense that I was improvising much of the music and I could shape the performance. (John Rodgers composed the main theme and some of the background music.)
Working with actors is really interesting to me. It was amazing to see Geoffrey Rush. He is someone who has had such success yet he remains utterly without cynicism. Every night he was trying his best; every night he would be nervous, studying the script, trying things out with the other actors. It was inspiring to see someone of his experience still so committed to the craft.
*****************************************
Go to Phil Slater’s website
Check out Kimnara Records
