photo:
Christopher Drukker
TEN QUESTIONS WITH RANDAL DESPOMMIER
Randal Despommier's packed a remarkable number of experiences into thirty-eight years. Now comfortably ensconced in New York City, the alto saxophonist grew up in New Orleans, where he earned a degree in jazz studies at Loyola University, acquired his doctorate in music education at the New England Conservatory in Boston, and even spent a year in Italy studying choral conducting at the Conservatory of Perugia and sacred music at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. In addition to teaching at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan, he's taught jazz history at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. Despommier's current focus is his tremendous solo debut album, Dio C'è, a stylistically expansive collection featuring him with members of his quartet (pianist Jason Yeager, bassist Aaron Holthus, drummer Rodrigo Recabarren) and guests such as Jimmy Haslip (co-producer too), singer Aubrey Johnson, guitarist Ben Monder, and flugelhornist Oskar Stenmark. There's much to admire about the recording's blend of introspective balladry (“Saying Goodbye”) and uptempo jazz (“SoHo Down”), with the title composition particularly daring in the way it weaves a stunning four-part choral episode into its ambitious design. textura had the pleasure of speaking with Despommier on April 11th, 2021 about the new release (reviewed here) as well as a number of other topics.
1. I've listened to Dio C'è many times, and after listening to it again earlier today I mentioned to somebody how great it is to interview somebody face-to-face when I can tell that person how special the album is.
RD: Thank you for your kind words and for listening to the music. When I'm writing music, it's the only thing I'm thinking of, but when I finish I do want people to connect with it because music has the capacity, even the power to change your character for better or worse, and even change the soul. I'd like to think that music has the ability to kind of bring us closer together and connect us on a much deeper level, maybe even a metaphysical and spiritual level.
When I finish, I say to myself I hope people connect with this on some level and get something out of it; I am an ‘art for art's sake' kind of guy, but at the same time I do care if you listen. You know that Milton Babbitt article “Who Cares if You Listen?” [High Fidelity, February 1958]? It's kind of like I'm composing, I don't really care if you like the music. I do care if you listen; I want people to connect with it and and experience something, and I do think music should have some kind of impact. Maybe an emotional impact, maybe a political impact, maybe a spiritual impact—something that you feel, you know.
2. I know the details of your bio, that you grew up in New Orleans, for example, but would like to flesh it out a little bit. When did you start playing saxophone, or did you start with piano first?
RD: I grew up just outside of New Orleans in a suburb called Metairie and started playing lots of gigs with my dad's jazz, kind of rock folk, sort of soul band. Those were some of my first experiences playing music as a kid in public. At that time, I wasn't reading much music but was picking up a lot of stuff by ear. So my first musical experiences when I was ten or eleven were playing saxophone with his band at various Mardi Gras functions. I would kind of sit in; I'd go with him to gigs and hang around, and then the kind of leader of the group, a wonderful accordion player by the name of Nat Krasnoff, would invite me on stage, and we'd play a little Mardi Gras tune like “When the Saints…” or “Bill Bailey,” something that kind of gets the crowd going. That's kind of how it all started.
I didn't do that much gigging in high school, but I did play saxophone in its jazz band. And then I started picking up classical piano and really getting into Bach. There was something about his music; it did something to me, like getting struck by lightning. So even though I decided to pursue saxophone performance as a college major, I became sort of like a closeted classical pianist and really wanted to be one. That was sort of, I guess you could say, the beginning of my journey as a composer, as I started thinking about, well, how is this music put together, it's very sophisticated stuff, and I really want to figure it out. Those questions led me to study counterpoint and then studying that made me want to study polyphony in the music of the sixteenth century. I had the privilege of studying polyphony, choral music, and choral conducting for a year in Italy, focusing on early music. I was still playing saxophone, but my goal was to write music and become a composer. Long story short, this led me to graduate studies at New England Conservatory, where I studied composition as a doctoral student. Then when I moved to New York City, I started playing jazz again.
All of those styles of music I'd studied over the years and absorbed, they started to sort of weld together, and that's when I felt like, okay, I have something to say as a composer. And that's what led me to work on this album. I finally felt like, at the age of thirty-eight, now I have something to say. Someone once asked Gil Evans, why did you wait until you were in your mid-forties to start arranging music and releasing stuff, and he said the product wasn't ready. And so that made me feel, like, all right, now the product is ready, now I have something to say, now I'm ready. It took a long time, and I have to say there were many, many times when I felt like I was wandering and was lost, stabbing in the dark and without a compass. I was looking for my lodestar and couldn't find it, but it eventually came together. It's still a process; now I'm thinking, okay, what are we going to do next, where am I going, what direction do I want to move in.
photo: Christopher Drukker
3. That brings up an interesting point. You have a couple of albums in the works in addition to Dio C'è, one a classical song cycle titled Circus of the Soul and the other jazz arrangements of Medieval and Renaissance songs. Can you tell us a bit more about those two and when they're coming out?
RD: The song cycle is actually my doctoral thesis and was a kind of a classical song cycle setting of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, all poems from A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). He said when he was writing these poems, it was kind of a ‘circus of the soul' period of his life. I love these poems because they're very sophisticated yet kind of improvisatory, and I really liked that balance. Those are recorded and ready to go; I haven't released it yet for various reasons. I was kind of trying to find the right label, didn't know whether I should release it on CD as that's quite a financial investment. The other reason, I'll just be honest, there's a part of me that felt like maybe it wasn't good enough for public consumption. I'll admit I sometimes struggle with self-doubt. I know it's good, but sometimes I question whether it's good enough. So to answer your question, I think one day I'll release it, I'm just waiting for the right time.
As for the Medieval and Renaissance jazz project, that's a project that's in the works. The idea is to kind of rethink, rearrange, and recreate some of these wonderful but forgotten songs, melodies, dances, and chants from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Just the other day I had the privilege of giving a little talk on early music at Berklee College of Music, and I played some stock chord progressions from the late Middle Ages, I should say early Renaissance. And the idea is that this is material that you can personalize and that you can kind of work with as a jazz musician. The trick is to do it in a way that's convincing and meaningful and artistic, and there's no one way to go about doing that. The magic of Medieval and Renaissance music is that maybe you have just a melody or a chord progression, and the question is, what do you do with it.
So this is something I've been working with for I guess about ten years or so, and now I have enough material ready to record. I just need to find the funds to put it all together. That's an important part of music-making: having the budget to get professional musicians because you should, you know, pay them. I think someone asked Duke Ellington how he got such amazing musicians in his band, and he said, well, I keep them happy, I pay them. So you have to kind of be the shepherd. So as far as when this will come out, hopefully it'll be soon.
I have a few other things on the burner, including a project I'm working on with Ben Monder, who appears on my album as the featured soloist on “Big Empty.” We're going to record some songs by Swedish baritone sax composer Lars Gullin, so there's that, and I have some other stuff I've written during quarantine that I want to release; in fact, I think I want to release that first, these songs and tunes and grooves I wrote during about a year in lockdown. I just moved to a more spacious apartment, but for about a year I felt like I was living in a sort of prison at times. My apartment was maybe 150 square feet, and with furniture and me in it there wasn't much room to move around. But I had my piano with me, so I felt like, okay, this is my saving grace, and thought how might I make the most of this experience while I feel sort of trapped and anxious, so music was a kind of saving grace. I think before releasing these other projects, I want to release this material first.
Being an artist during this horrible pandemic has, for many, been really tough, so there's something in me that really wants to get this out there. These are very difficult times and this is a very dark period in history, but artists can use this experience to go inward and go deep to create music, art, and poetry. I think it was Ovid who said, “Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim”—“Be steadfast and persevere; for one day this suffering will be useful to you”; that's always resonated with me. There's a lot of uncertainty out there, so having the privilege to write music and find a way to express yourself is a real blessing, so at the end of the day I have many reasons to be thankful.
4. Before we get to the album, I'd like to ask how you ended up in Italy and about your involvement with Bard Prison Initiative at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility for men.
RD: The journey to Italy started during my last year at Loyola University of New Orleans. I began taking private lessons with this contrapuntalist and theorist James MacKay, who really got me interested in counterpoint. So I wanted to take this further, to study at an institution where I could really dig deep and explore the roots of counterpoint. I did a little research and found this conservatory in Perugia and so applied there and was accepted. I wanted to study composition, but they had already filled up their slots so they said, well, why don't you study choral conducting. It worked out because I had the privilege of studying with a wonderful conductor, theorist, contrapuntalist, and scholar Gabriella Agosti, who's sadly no longer with us. She was so passionate about early music that I thought, well, I want some of that; there must be something to this music if my teacher is so full of joy and life. I studied at the conservatory for a year and concentrated on polyphony, madrigals, motets, and two-part canonic pieces, and had an incredible time. Although my stay in Italy was brief, it changed the way I see the world. You know when you go live abroad and you learn another language, it changes your brain, how you see the world, you come back a different person.
How did I get involved in the Bard Prison initiative? In the summer of 2017, I taught a jazz history course called “Freedom, Expression, and Transcendence: History of Jazz in America,” which I'd been teaching at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan for a few years. I wanted to do something more with the course and then heard about an opening at the prison initiative at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Bussing back and forth was quite a challenge, but it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life as an educator. I don't think I'd ever met a group of students who were so hungry for knowledge and so passionate about learning. The experience really, really moved me, so much so that I said, well, maybe this is the answer to mass incarceration: education, art, music, philosophy, and languages. Now, I know critics might say, well, this is kind of, you know, pie-in-the-sky, utopian thinking. I would argue, no, it's not. I think pragmatically it's a strong practical solution to a very serious problem in America and even a global problem. A robust liberal arts education is not the solution, but it is a solution, and I think every state should invest in some kind of college prison education program.
You know, people sometimes make horrible mistakes, but everyone deserves a second chance. And when I saw how driven and hungry and passionate and smart these students were, it made me excited because they were excited, even though the resources they had at their disposal were minimal at best. So when my students at Bard High School would complain, like I don't have this or that, I'd say, look, use the materials you have and make the most of them. The Bard Prison students didn't have access to, you know, Columbia University's library, but the papers and the projects they wrote were outstanding. The experience was transformative, life-changing, and eye-opening on so many levels, so I'm hoping I'll be able to do it again.
It's interesting that you mightn't realize at the time how much an experience will later inform the work you're creating. You don't know what's going to influence you or even how until maybe one day you're just like, wait, I have this idea and, this is the mystery, you don't know where it comes from. Not all creative ideas just come to you, sometimes you have to sit there and struggle and struggle and struggle, and it's painstaking. There's a lot of nitty-gritty work going on. Sometimes I'll spend weeks on one progression, because I really want to get it right. There's an insane level of detail that goes into craftsmanship, really good craftsmanship.
5. What was it like to release the album during the pandemic when you're not able to promote it with live playing?
RD: Fortunately we recorded everything just before the pandemic. Then we did a little tour (one not promoting this music)—me, pianist Jason Yeager and vocalist Aubrey Johnson—of China, and one of our ports of call was Wuhan; we got to play at the Qintai Concert Hall, which was an incredible experience. While we were there, we didn't know this virus was circulating, so that's a whole other story. When we came back, I had the album to mix, and in a strange way—I don't want to say the pandemic sort of brought the album to fruition—but the recording engineer, Michael-Perez Cisneros, a wonderful person and incredibly gifted and creative mind, had a lot more time on his hands, and so he and I worked in the trenches to really mix and master and finesse this project. I have to really give him credit for helping me make difficult creative decisions; he was more than just the guy who mixed and mastered the album. Another person who assisted me was the great Jimmy Haslip, one of the founding members of the Yellowjackets. He was also invested in this project and helped to guide me.
It was challenging because we were doing a lot of this work remotely, which I wasn't used to, but everyone was at home and they weren't touring and traveling. Everyone's life had changed dramatically, so they kind of had a little bit more time time on their hands, and so I said, okay, I'm working on this now, let's make this happen. So in a strange way, it was easier to connect with people. If I had a question, I could call Mike in the middle of the day or call Jimmy early on a Sunday and ask, “Can you listen to this ending, what do you think of this.” And I was fortunate because had we not finished recording everything in November, the album would not have come out when it did. There's no way we could have been in the studio with the four singers (Johnson, Allegra Levy, Tomàs Cruz, Patrick Laslie); certainly it wouldn't have been safe. So I feel very fortunate to have recorded this prior to the pandemic and prior to 2020.
6. The pure, lustrous tone in your saxophone playing impresses throughout the album, but the playing by everyone is strong. The rapport between the musicians is obvious the moment the album begins with “Giorgia.” I love the fact that you open with a quartet piece, almost as if to emphasize that the release isn't you plus a diverse assortment of musicians but a quartet album augmented by guests. Did you open with a quartet performance for that reason?
RD: Yes, I think so. Because the core group is a quartet, I wanted to begin with this kind of bright and dance-like piece, and it made sense musically. I wanted the album to have a real flow and a kind of progression, if you will, even though a lot of this gets chopped up and put on playlists, which raises the question of whether you should even release an album anymore. On the one hand, okay, I like putting on Pandora and listening to playlists, but there's something really magical about putting an album on and closing your eyes and taking in the whole thing. If someone takes the time to craft an album that has some kind of logic, maybe it's not telling a story like some kind of formal narrative, but there's something going on with the placement of tracks.
7. I think the track order is superb. You have the opening quartet piece, and you close with a quartet piece as well, so it has this beautiful symmetry to it. You've also got this gorgeous, multi-part composition that's the centrepiece literally and figuratively, plus you've got other performances with different guests, different feels. Yet it all holds together, even though in a certain sense it shouldn't because there's so much stylistic contrast. Yet it does hold together because it has that feeling of flow from one piece to the next, which makes it feel really natural.
RD: This is actually something I was really worried about. When I was thinking about the album and when I was writing it, even after it was all done, I thought, like, how do I put all this together. Should I re-record other pieces that maybe sound similar to some of the tracks on the album, but I said, no, what holds it together is that it's all kind of coming from the same place. The music isn't strictly autobiographical, but it is my musical journey so far, you know. I wanted to say something about where I've been musically. It's not egotistical, it's that you want to share your statement, and one that involves other people. That's an important part of the process; it's not just you telling your story, you're working with other people, maybe it's other people you've met, it could be something trivial like a memory you had from ten years ago at a specific location, at a bar, maybe something happened that night that did something to you, and that becomes fodder for music, you know for art, for storytelling.
8. The addition of vocalist Johnson to “Soho Down” was a brilliant move, and the unison playing between the two of you is remarkable. The joyful main melody made me think of “Birdland” by Weather Report—not stylistically but simply in the uplift and jubilation that's in that track and yours. I also love the electric piano on “Brother Nature.” I don't know whether this is what you were aiming for, but when I listen to it I hear a Crusaders kind of feel.
RD: My dad loved, still loves, listening to fusion, and I grew up with that stuff so, yeah, “Birdland” is a masterpiece. I don't know the backstory to it, but there is this kind of joyful optimism in that piece, you really hear that, as well as forward motion, and I think that's what I wanted in “Soho Down.” In writing it, I'd just moved to a new place so it was the start of a new beginning. If that sounds a little cliched, that's what it was, and I wanted something that was kind of like a high-octane, forward-looking groove.
That was the most difficult piece to record in the studio. I'd rehearsed it with the quartet a few times, and we played it live on one occasion, but in the studio. The tempo's fast and some of the rhythms are tricky, so it took a while to nail it, but it worked out. Playing on the track are Yeager, Holthus, and Recabarren, who's an extraordinary drummer, plus Johnson, an incredible vocalist, and also Stenmark, all the way from Sweden. And Jimmy Haslip added some bass overdubs too. They were a big part of the creative process.
And this is the real joy, that when you have an amazing group of creative musicians, they're not just playing the music. They'll say, wait, why don't we go back here or why don't we cut this section out, why don't you solo here—they're thinking about how to bring out the spirit of the piece. That's when you know that you've got the right group of people, when they're invested in the process, and that's what I like. I don't like being a dictator, saying you do this and you do that, though sometimes you have to be, but when you're recording music, it should sound, especially jazz, free and natural. I was very fortunate to meet all these wonderful musicians, and I'm hoping we'll be able to make a lot more music together.
As far as “Brother Nature” goes, Michael-Perez Cisneros, the recording engineer, said it sounded almost like something from a ‘70s TV show. You know, it's funny, that was one piece that actually just kind of came out of nowhere. Not that you always have to connect what you're creating to something, but if I had to do so I'd say maybe it was Herbie Hancock, that there's a little bit of “Watermelon Man” in there. I just wanted to write something that was kind of hip and funky and simple. That's hard to do. A lot of composers, and I've been one of them, feel that to make a profound statement you have to write something that is very cerebral and complex. And while that certainly could be the case, but to write something that has what Fred Hersch calls “stickiness,” that sticks, that's simple and straightforward yet has depth, that's a real challenge.
photo: Christopher Drukker
9. I want to ask about the Stone Temple Pilots cover “Big Empty.” Did you do that because of your love for the band and that particular song or was it because of Scott Weiland and the empathy you felt for him going through what he did?
RD: Back in high school, I listened to a lot of punk and alternative rock and loved the power of power chords, grunge chords. Listening to stuff like White Zombie's More Human Than Human, there was something there I liked at the time, this like high-octane, rebellious music. With respect to Stone Temple Pilots, I never met Scott, but I sensed in his music that he was a searching and suffering soul who was trying to find peace in this life, and sadly, of course, he left us too soon.
When I heard that he died, I was really upset and wanted to arrange this as a kind of tribute to him, and the ending—spoiler alert for those who have not yet listened to the music—is a kind of portal into another world; I wanted it to sound sort of ghostly. I'm a very spiritual person, a body-and-soul person, I believe in that sort of duality, so my thinking was, okay, maybe he found peace in his journey in the next life. That's what I was thinking at the time, that maybe his soul found peace after it left his body.
10. The title composition, I expect, will receive a lot of attention for its audacity but also its gorgeous vocal sections. I love the fact that when it starts with an uptempo jazz intro, you have no idea that three minutes in it will go where it does when the singers come in and take the music in a classical choral and then gospel direction. The transitions are beautifully handled too, the way, for example, you use a bridge to ease the segue from the opening to the pure vocal part. I also admire the fact that there's no irony in this expression but rather genuine sincerity. When you introduce a reference to God or Jesus or whatever into an album, jazz or otherwise, that's a risky thing because it can be divisive, something that doesn't arise in the same way with instrumental music.
RD: It's true that religion and politics can really divide people, and it's unfortunate that that is happening. I mean, look, there are always going to be divisions, whether they be political, tribal, ethnic, or divisions over resources, like fighting over water. I decided to go in that direction, consciously or otherwise, because religion has been a theme all my life. I went to Catholic schools pretty much all my life, an all-boys Catholic school, and there was mass every day. I was always attracted to the music and the mysteries, that's what interest me, and the connection between the two. Take, for example, Tomás Luis de Victoria's O Magnum Mysterium, that is just an extraordinary work of art that taps into the mystical element of Catholicism. As a spiritual and religious person, this is what interests me, this sort of mystical kind of spiritual component. It's a big part of my life but also kind of private too—you're not going to see me on the street holding up a sign.
I like that you used the word risky because for me it was kind of a risk. When you're making art, you have to be honest about yourself, which means you might publish or present aspects about your life that people may judge. But I said, look, I want to tell my story, and this is a part of my story, it has certainly informed my music and has a place on this album.
To tell you the truth, the last time I listened to that particular piece from beginning to end was when I was just checking it for mistakes. When it's done, I kind of like move on to the next project. But I will say, before we started pressing the CDs, I listened to it in the studio on these amazing speakers, and I said, all right, this is hip, this is really cool, and I really like what we did. And to go from writing this out on the piano in four parts, to go from page to album is quite a journey. That was really gratifying, to take this music on paper and have it come alive in the recording studio, mix and master it, and then release it to the world.
As far as the gospel feel goes, I played piano for a year for the gospel choir in the AME Church of Zion (African Methodist Episcopal), the first black Christian church in America, and they were actually part of the Underground Railroad. I really didn't know how to play gospel; I could play jazz on the piano as an accompanist and had pretty good ears so could figure things out. But gospel was something different. The other guys in the band didn't read music; they'd learned everything by ear and had incredible ears. The pastor would just start preaching and intone his message during the preaching moment, and they would start playing and harmonize with his speech melody. And sometimes I didn't know when to play or what to play. I remember one time the pastor, Pastor Dickerson, said to me, when the spirit moves you, just play. So I tried to capture those musical moments, and there were some incredible ones. I was living in Boston by myself, and though I had a wonderful group of friends, I missed home a lot, and that little church became my home for a year and they embraced me like a member of their family. They even passed the basket around before I went to New York to raise some funds for me to move. I will forever be grateful to that wonderful community in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
photo: Christopher Drukker
Bonus question: Part of the backstory for the composition “Dio C'è” comes from the time you and a friend took a road trip from Rome to Cesena and noticed the phrase spray-painted on various exit signs. You initially took it to mean “God exists” but then learned its real meaning “Heroin is sold here.” Without wishing to be too invasive, were you dealing with a struggle of your own at this moment in your life? I ask because it figures into the theme of the album.
RD: I'll say this. If you're an artist who's really searching, it's very easy to get distracted and to channel your spiritual energy in the wrong direction. We see it with Scott Weiland and Amy Winehouse, the list goes on and on. And it's not just artists but, you know, anyone, though I think it can especially be a problem with artists because they're sensitive creatures. When they experience sadness or happiness or isolation, it can be maybe more pronounced and more extreme, and I think this is why some turn to drugs; they can't find a way out, they get trapped. So that sign was like a message for me, like, okay, you do have choices. Some philosophers don't think we have free will, but I'm of the opinion we do, and I guess I saw that sign as a message for me, don't go down that dark path. It's tempting, but don't do it because it can really be destructive. I don't want to sound preachy; it's not so much a religious message but more a huge message for humanity about the choices you make.
You know, I was reading a Sonny Rollins interview in The New Yorker, and he said very little about music and mostly about spirituality and about cultivating his soul, and it almost seemed like he was preparing his soul for the afterlife. I think it was it Plato who says life is a rehearsal for death, something like that. [In the Phaedo, Socrates states that “those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying, and they fear death least of all men.”] So think about your life and your soul and spirit and cultivate that energy in a way that's healthy to you and your community.
For some reason “Dio C'è” really spoke to me. And interestingly, I realized after I released the album that the singer who popularized the last song on the album, “Almeno tu nell'universo,” also released a song called “Dio C'è.” “God exists” is obviously a very powerful kind of message, and I like titles or messages or signs with some deeper meaning that really make you think, so that's the title I settled on.
website: RANDAL DESPOMMIER
April 2021