Sophie Brous is back in Melbourne for a few months after spending a semester at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. With percussionist Mike Pfaff from the USA and local musicians Eugene Ball, Steve Magnusson, Tom Lee and Thai Matus, the Sophie Brous ensemble is playing gigs at Bennetts Lane during June and July. Where else to meet but Marios in Brunswick Street for this dyed-in-the-wool Melbourne girl. Ms Brous had the hot water, lemon and honey, followed by an espresso. Jazz Australia had the short macchiato and the peppermint tea. Truths were told.
Jazz Australia: You’re here for an exclusive season at Bennetts Lane. Can you tell us about the band and the music you’ll be playing?
Sophie Brous: Mike [Pfaff] (USA, tabla/percussion) is a multi-instrumentalist. He’s studied conducting and percussion in Chicago and then he studied in Boston. I heard him playing with in Ken Schaphorst’s big band, with Bob Moses and with Milo Perez.
While I was in Boston I was aware that these different concepts and sounds were beginning to come together in my head. I was trying not to think about the next project or my next band; I was trying to take a step away from that and concentrate on learning and consolidating… but things were coming together in my head and then I started playing with Mike Pfaff. The tabla really just flicked a huge switch for me. I kinda went ‘Bam!’, this is it. It integrated all these different areas like that seventies psychedelic rock sort of thing, and . . . my rhythmic interest, it totally encapsulated that.
And then there’s Steve Mags [Magnusson] (guitar), Euge [Eugene Ball] (trumpet) Tom Lee (bass) and Thai Matus (piano). It’s really exciting. I was sitting overseas and I was waiting for these ideas… the concept was percolationg and in my head I put together the dream team. Then one night, I was like ‘f*ck it, let’s do it’. I called each of them up and they were into it. I was dancing around my little room in the residence hall…It was perfect. The different sounds within the band… I was really interested… I haven’t worked with many horns. In my old quartet with Aaron [Choulai] and Sam [Bates] and Tamara [Murphy] I didn’t want that. I felt that was maybe an intrusion on what I was doing at the time. But this time I was interested in a really contemporary, open sounding trumpet and Eugene completely came into my head, you know. And then with Steve’s various influences, and Thai—12 Tone Diamonds is one of my favourite bands… I think it’s going to be a really interesting dialogue. I’m getting really excited.
I think that’s one thing… Kurt Elling told me that: ‘Always play with motherf*ckers who are better than you.’ That’s a really good line.
I grew up listening to those guys. When I was sixteen I was going to Bennetts Lane and hearing Euge … he is on one of my favourite albums ever, Angels and Rascals by the Andrea Keller Quartet. And I’ve been listening to Steve for years, so it’s really thrilling for us to be all playing together. I like the idea of the various tensions … musicians 10 years apart or even a week apart are informed by so many different things. And then we have Mike who is a tabla player who fuses south Indian classical percussion with hip hop beats, which is hilarious. And it works, because he feels it.
What I’ve brought to Melbourne is essentially an Australian, more jazz orientated version of what I’ve got in Boston now.
JA: How did Mike Pfaff get involved?
SB: It’s a long story… A bass player I knew in Boston had some recording time and he wanted to do some original music so he asked me. He just didn’t know what to do with the time and he said “what shall we do?” and I said well “let’s get a tabla, let’s get a viola” – it just sort of came into my head. A viola is a very sensual sort of an instrument, to my ears… I like the warmth; I like the creaminess of the viola sound. And I wanted the tabla.
In the end we had a guitar and there was a Rhodes, a viola and a tabla. And then Mike came in. I’d heard Mike play countless times in Boston and he’s incredible. I suppose you don’t think at the time, ‘wow, we’ll definitely play well together’ but as soon as we played together our time and our feel was similar. Even though his concept of rhythm is alot more educated than mine, it was a really nice balance. It was such a gift.
So I started thinking I’d have to get tabla [for this project in Melbourne] and who is there that plays tabla, vibraphone, percussion and drums? I just said to him one day “I’d really like to you to come”. We had been playing every night, a group of us until four o’clock in the morning. It was a really excellent dialogue. He just looked at me and he said ‘well, I’ll come’. Seeing him at the airport today was a total trip.
JA: What took you to America and why Boston? What was the connection there?
SB: I had heard alot about the New England Conservartory of Music (NEC). It is a very good school. I knew that Julien Wilson had gone there – various people, Steve Mags [Magnusson] was going to… I had a gig at the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) two years ago with James Morrison, and that went very well. As a result of that I met the heads of admission at NEC and Berkely and they were really very generous and organised an audition. I took a beautiful train trip through Connecticut, which was really nice, because Philip Roth is my favourite writer so I’m definitely into that New England scenery. I had the audition and I got admission and scholarships. It was really exciting and I was very very happy. NEC has an amazing faculty so that’s why I ended up there.
I didn’t really get to know Boston very well. I got to know my schoolmates — I could never have prepared myself for how amazing these musicians are. Even having played with some great people here… it was just a different sort of vibe, a beautiful thing.
I’m looking forward to going back again. The initial time was taken just to acclimatise and I was living in the residence dorms and sharing a room with someone. It was really intense. It was a bubble. It was all I lived. People ask me about Boston and I really don’t know anything about it – which is what I wanted. The opposite of the way I lived here. That was partly it. I mean I’m very much a Melbourne girl – I really love it here and I’m really interested in the different kinds of artistic communities. I write for Beat and do RRR stuff and with all that going on it was difficult for me to focus at times.
JA: Would you recommend something like this, for young musicians, the travelling and the experience. Do you think it’s essential?
SB: No it’s not essential at all, but it’s a really great help. And if we believe that jazz and improvisation is a tradition and that learning from those elders above you is part of that … The faculty there is priceless.
And yet, the first or second day in classes I sat there and I breathed a massive sigh of relief. It was like, ‘okay, this was worth it’. It is impossible not to be inspired there. It is like this throbbing organism of creativity; if you believe in symbiotic creative relationships, holistic relationships, developing your own sound from others then imagine this, this is like the most massive beehive of that you’ve ever seen.
JA: So your voice is added to all those voices…
SB: Yeah, definitely, I think I very much became a part of that community. I was really interested in doing that. Because otherwise, what’s the point? I learned that from Aaron Choulai — from his liner notes for the album Korema. He talks about music as a holistic artform. I thought that was so well put. He said something like ‘I made this album overseas but this is a Melbourne album and if you believe that music is a holistic thing then this music speaks of Brunswick Street and too much late night drinking or hanging out at the Tankerville — all these Melbourne things’. There are alot of international students at NEC as well so it is a very fertile ground for some really interesting music.
JA: And some of what you’re bringing back to Melbourne on this trip has grown out of that experience?
SB: Mmmm. I think so. Yes. Absolutely. I think ethic and a sense of calm as well because I was under age in Boston. I couldn’t go out and so I worked. I was given this entirely new chance to be a 16-year-old again. I was going to frat parties [laughs] – and at times I would sit there and think I cannot believe that I am living this again. I’m only 20 now but still 16 feels like a while ago and I really felt like I was turning back time or something but it was great! I will probably never get this chance again. All you’ve got is yourself and your progress and you’re around all these other young people from all over the place … all of them by themselves, no-one is living with their families because essentially in America people travel for college. One of my closest friends there is a very talented 18-year-old from New York — she’s doing jazz composition at NEC. We were staying up every night until six am finishing a score. I think that it says something that people were that committed. I think that’s probably what I got out of it the most actually. When you have a large group of people that are so completely directed towards one goal it just becomes incredible inspiring and motivating.
JA: So what can people expect to hear in these gigs you’re doing now?
SB: I guess it’s original like contemporary jazz kinda groove-based stuff with folk and psychedelic inflections — inflections from the different sorts of things that interest me. Like drone psychedelic music… not too much, just in texture, in harmony and in different movements of things. It’s bringing those together as best as I can . It’s a tension that it’s been a nice trip to explore.
JA: And these are original tunes?
SB: Not all mine. A few tunes of Mike’s, a few people in the band are going to be putting in some tunes. We’re going to be doing some Bob Moses; I worked with Bob in Boston. He was one of my mentors there. He’s a great writer as well as an amazing musician.
It’s nice to talk about it. It’s therapeutic. I’m young and I’m young in my compositional career. This is an entirely new project and I started writing it since I got back. You can sit in a room eight hours a day and be a world unto yourself and be very self fulfilling but it’s not really what I want. I don’t want to be a one woman band.
I’ve been listening to jazz since I was 14. That’s when I first heard bop and that’s what got me interested but then when all these other interests started coming in and melding together I thought … surely they don’t have to be so separate. I started working with some different managers before I left last year and we were talking about different recordings and releases. We started talking about the jazz and the ‘NJP’, which was the ‘non-jazz project’. I began to get so sick of that because I … didn’t think they could be separated. I think that people are much more open minded than that.
I’m a 20 year old Australian girl and I can listen to as much Wayne Shorter as I want but what can I contribute? And if I do want to feel relevant and have a voice … what is my voice? I went to New York and yeah, New York is New York. But how many people are speaking. There’s the aesthetic and then there’s the person and it’s so nice when there’s a real balance but so often the aesthetic begins to tower over the artist and that’s in writing or rock bands or anything.
So that’s sort of a big thing that happened for me, just learning to accept some vague little areas. That’s like when people say so what does it sound like? I get a bit confused sometimes, and I think what do I tell them?
JA: Doesn’t that just mean you’re developing a unique voice?
SB: The artists that inspire me the most are the ones that speak with a unique voice. And I think that generally they are the most successful.
I’ve been listening to so much Leonard Cohen recently. I’m very lyrically interested at the moment. Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room (1969) is genius. He is a stunning artist. The themes on that CD are so obvious but done beautifully. The whole CD deals with paths to redemption and the various flawed ways that people try to seek it.
What I’m struggling with at the moment with my writing is that maybe sometimes things can be a little bit less harmonically interesting if they’ve got the complexity of content. It’s always that issue…I think everyone has that issue…
JA: So in your lyrics, do you find yourself going more towards that complexity?
SB: Not so much any more. It can sound really affected and over-sentimental when I get too complex. My work is really shifting a lot at the moment which is kind of exciting for me… I used to feel as though I was a little bit too intellectual in my writing and that’s shifted a little bit. There are some things I maybe don’t talk about, or I talk about them differently.
I wrote a song . . . this was like a turning point for me. I write a lot of things on guitar; interesting harmonic folk stuff. This song started sounding like an Italian folk song, and for some reason, everybody was saying ‘sing some words’, so I started ‘Maariaa,’ just being funny. Then I thought of this idea of this woman called Maria and she was the wife of this orchard owner in the 1950s and they are recent immigrants to Australia and they have this beautiful, prosperous orchard. Her husband doesn’t understand why the orchards do so well, but he loves his wife and she walks up and down the rows of trees. What he doesn’t realize is that by night she sleeps with all the orchard boys and that makes the apples grow. When I tell some people they are disgusted and they think it’s awful, but to me it’s a beautiful story and it made a lot of sense to me. And what may seem like sexually explicit or wrong was really her gift or something. Writing that song did a lot – because it wasn’t directly about me…
JA: It’s a lot about the feminine, and the goddess…
SB: And sensuality as credible, respectable… People have really responded to that tune and I didn’t realize they would. In fact I don’t directly say that she sleeps with the men but there are lines that allude to it and even if people don’t get it … it’s interesting and that’s what the thing is. You don’t know what people are going to think of something that you’ve written.
JA: So where are you right now as a vocalist?
SB: There’s a singer called Theo Blackman in New York who I’m very into who plays with Ben Monda and John Hollenbeck and a lot of New York players. He doesn’t even sing with words half the time but it’s so f*cking emotionally engaged and connected. And I think that’s it. Being a vocalist is a weird place in the jazz landscape and I used to want to sound as instrumental as I can but now I think… ‘well let’s be truthful here, and speak with some truth’.
JA: And truth can come out in words or in non-words.
SB: Yes absolutely, but it’s interesting how even an abstract truth, i.e. through notes is just as noticeable or decipherable. Paul Grabowsky plays with a lot of truth. His playing is just astounding. It’s a multi-faceted music. He’s very sophisticated. I’m interested in Paul and the work of the Australian Art Orchestra. And his career … a major interest at the moment is composition too, and that’s what I’m doing in Boston. Years ago, when I was 15, I went and saw Love in the age of Therapy which was the piece he did with [playwright] Joanna Murray-Smith. That was a big ‘ting’ in my head when I saw that – a real turning point.
I’m interested in truthful dialogues now. They are rare but when they really happen it’s amazing.
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The Sophie Brous Ensemble continues its season at Bennetts Lane in Melbourne through June and July (June 30, July 8, 15 and 29) The 29 July concert is a live recording for the ABC.
The ensemble:
Mike Pfaff (USA) – tabla / percussion
Eugene Ball – trumpet
Tom Lee – bass
Steve Magnusson – guitar
Thai Matus – piano
Sophie Brous – vocals
Bennetts Lane website: www.bennettslane.com
