Burning Ambulance Podcast

Cindy Blackman Santana is originally from Ohio, came to the East Coast to study at Berklee and at the Hartt School of Music, moved to New York in the late '80s and has played and recorded with a ton of people across the spectrum of jazz and rock ever since. She’s made a slew of albums under her own name, including some featuring saxophonist and longtime friend of Burning Ambulance JD Allen; she toured off and on with Pharoah Sanders; she was the drummer for Spectrum Road, a tribute to Tony Williams Lifetime that featured guitarist Vernon Reid, who’s also been on this podcast, plus keyboardist John Medeski, and bassist Jack Bruce. And she’s probably best known to a lot of people for being Lenny Kravitz’s touring drummer for many, many years, but what some people may not know is that she did not play drums on his records — he plays drums on his records. So part of our interview gets into the question of how you make music your own when you’re playing someone else’s parts.We also talk about her time working with Pharoah Sanders, and recording with Joe Henderson; we talk about her admiration for Tony Williams, and she gives her analysis of the changes in his style over the course of his career and how those manifested in the changes to his kit; we talk about how to lock in with a bassist, the difference in mindset between playing jazz and rock, and much more. This was a really interesting conversation. Unfortunately, it was cut short. Around 45 minutes in, my internet cut out and took our Zoom call with it. So you’ll hear a sudden fade right as we start talking about the 2019 Santana album Africa Speaks, on which Cindy Blackman Santana plays. So what I’ve done is gone back into my archives and pulled up an interview I did with Carlos Santana when that record came out, and we talk about it, and also about her contributions to the band’s music and his feelings about playing with her. I think it’s a valuable addendum to this conversation, and I hope you enjoy the whole episode. Thanks as always for listening.

Amina Claudine Myers was one of the earliest members of the AACM, and if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m pretty sure you know what the AACM is, but just in case you don’t, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is an organization formed by Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and a few other musicians in Chicago in the mid-1960s. A tremendous number of the most important avant-garde jazz musicians of the mid to late 20th century and the 21st century have come out of the AACM, including Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Fred Anderson, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Wadada Leo Smith, Matana Roberts, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, and Amina Claudine Myers. There’s a tremendous book by trombonist and composer George Lewis, called A Power Stronger Than Itself, that’s the best possible introduction to the group. You should absolutely read that if you’re a fan of any of the musicians I just named.Now, all the founders and early members of the AACM worked together, supporting each other, and moving the music forward in large part by composing and performing original work. What’s interesting — and this is something we talk about in this conversation — is that Amina Claudine Myers’ early albums included some original music, but they also included interpretations of other people’s compositions, specifically Marion Brown and Bessie Smith. But she always paired that music up with pieces of her own that demonstrated a really fascinating compositional voice that was a combination of jazz, gospel, blues, and classical music. She took all her influences and early training and combined them into something that sounded like nobody else out there, and was incredibly powerful.In addition to making her own records, she’s been a part of albums by Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Bill Laswell, and many other people. Her latest release is a collection of duos with Wadada Leo Smith, the first time they’ve recorded together since 1969, and their first collaboration as leaders.I’m really glad I had the chance to interview her. We talked about a lot of things — the AACM, the role of spirituality in music and the way the term spiritual jazz is used to gatekeep certain things, her work with all the artists I just mentioned, her upbringing in Arkansas and Texas and how it influenced her writing... this is a really wide-ranging conversation that I think will be really interesting for you to hear. I thank you as always for listening.

Carlos Niño is from Los Angeles, and has been a vital part of that city’s music scene for almost 30 years. He started out as a radio DJ when he was still a teenager, and expanded from that into putting on shows, releasing records, producing sessions for artists, performing and doing just about everything else that a life in music will eventually drop in someone’s lap. He’s developed really long creative relationships with two other people who’ve been on this podcast in the past, vocalist Dwight Trible and percussionist Adam Rudolph, both of whom work at least part of the time in the area that’s currently governed by the term spiritual jazz.If you look around, you’ll see Carlos’s name on a lot of really fascinating projects. He makes records as Carlos Niño and Friends, which is a good way of summarizing his methods and his aesthetic — he gets together with people who he considers friends and kindred spirits, they make music together, and he assembles it all. But the people he calls friends are some of the most fascinating musicians around right now. He’s worked with Shabaka Hutchings, with Kamasi Washington, with Makaya McCraven, with Laraaji, and right now he’s very involved with André 3000’s New Blue Sun project. He was one of the leaders of the sessions that produced the album, and he’s also part of Andre’s live band.Carlos has a new album coming out later this month called Placenta. It’s his third release for International Anthem, following a previous Carlos Niño and Friends album and a duo release with South African pianist Thandi Ntuli, and it features a ton of guests, including frequent collaborators like Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina, as well as saxophonist Sam Gendel, drummer Deantoni Parks, Adam Rudolph, André 3000, and many, many others. It’s a mix of live recordings and studio sessions, some of which go as far back as 2018, and they’ve all been reconstituted and overdubbed and collaged with vocals, field recordings, and all kinds of sound design into something really unique and kaleidoscopic. Although it’s got elements of jazz and elements of New Age music, it’s really hard to describe or categorize and it’s not the kind of thing you can just put on in the background and chill with. It demands your attention. When it comes out, I recommend you sit with it and see what you get out of it. I think you’ll find it very rewarding.I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Carlos Niño. He’s a really interesting guy with a very open and optimistic creative philosophy that I think will be inspiring to those of you who make art yourselves, whether it’s music or something else, and even to those of you who are just interested in art and creativity generally. Thanks as always for listening.

Kenny Garrett has been playing for more than 40 years. Originally from Detroit, he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the late 70s, when it was being run by Ellington’s son Mercer. He also played with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and with Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, and Freddie Hubbard. He was a member of a young lions group put together by Blue Note Records in the 80s called Out Of The Blue that also included the late drummer Ralph Peterson, and he was already recording as a leader when he was invited to join Miles Davis’s band in 1987. He played on the album Amandla, and was part of the Davis band all the way until the end of Miles’s life in 1991. Miles Davis even made a very rare guest appearance on one of Garrett’s albums, Prisoner Of Love, from 1989.Kenny Garrett’s discography as a leader has taken him in a lot of really interesting directions. His 1995 album Triology, with Brian Blade on drums and either Charnett Moffett or Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass, is a really intense, high-energy record that kind of marries bebop language to post-Ornette Coleman freedom, but the real key to the whole thing is the way he executes these really complex melodies on tunes like John Coltrane’s "Giant Steps," Wynton Marsalis’s "Delfeayo’s Dilemma," and Mulgrew Miller’s "Pressing The Issue." It’s a tremendous showcase for his technical command of the saxophone. But the album that first got me interested in his work was Beyond The Wall, a 2006 release that was a collaboration with Pharoah Sanders that also featured Mulgrew Miller on piano, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Robert Hurst on bass, Brian Blade on drums, and on some tracks there were strings and harp and Chinese instruments and a six-member vocal ensemble. It’s not spiritual jazz in the way that term is used now, and it’s not world music, it’s entirely its own thing, and it’s particularly fascinating because you might not think of Kenny Garrett and Pharoah Sanders having that much in common, artistically speaking, but they really did. They also recorded a live album together that came out in 2008. Garrett talks about Pharoah a lot in the interview you’re about to hear.And Kenny Garrett’s latest album is going to surprise a lot of people. It’s called Who Killed AI, and it’s a collaboration with Svoy, an electronic music producer. Garrett plays alto and soprano sax on it, and all the rest of the music is made with synths and programmed drums. Even the horns are multi-tracked and fed through effects at times. It’s structured as kind of a suite — the first track is called “Ascendence,” and there are also pieces called “Transcendence,” “Divergence” and “Convergence.” But there’s also a really beautiful version of “My Funny Valentine,” which lays the ballad melody over these kind of shimmering keyboard sounds and a hard drum 'n' bass beat. It’s not at all what I was expecting when I was told that there was a new Kenny Garrett album on the way.I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Kenny Garrett. We discussed his history with Miles Davis and with Woody Shaw, his early musical upbringing, his work with Pharoah Sanders, his approach to synthesizing genres and musics from around the world, and much more. I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation.

I first learned about Arushi Jain three years ago, when most people who are aware of her work did. Her 2021 album Under The Lilac Sky was extremely beautiful, six tracks of droning, pulsing synth music with her vocals kind of floating in the middle like she was singing from the middle of an isolation tank. It was entirely created with a modular synth rig that she constructed and programmed, but the compositions were based on ragas from the Indian classical tradition, including the fact that the album was meant to be heard at a specific time of day, while the sun was setting. Under The Lilac Sky was described as her first full-length album, but she had also put out a four-song EP, Just A Feeling, in 2018, documenting the earliest stages of developing her sound, and another four-track release, With & Without, in 2019, where each track was inspired by a specific raga, although with that one, she says on the album’s Bandcamp page, “I didn’t always follow the rules of the ragas, I’m sure those who know this art can hear that, and maybe purists won’t approve.”There’s also a companion release, With & Without (Golem Version), which features two remixes of tracks from the original album for some kind of virtual reality dance piece, and then a 46-minute soundtrack to the piece.Her music is still evolving. At the end of March, she’s putting out a new album, Delight, on which she’s not working just with the modular synth. She’s also gotten people to play flute, saxophone, classical guitar, cello and marimba and sampled those parts and incorporated them into the tracks, which are also much more conventionally song-like than her previous work. And the vocals and lyrics are much more up front as well. Delight isn’t a pop album, but it’s absolutely more directly communicative than her previous work.We had a really interesting conversation. We talked about her background singing Indian classical music with her family, how she came to electronic music when she arrived in America to go to college, how modular synths actually work, which I’m still not 100 percent sure I understand, how her live performances have evolved, and even a little bit about her visual presentation and how the music she makes relates to her Indian identity – or doesn’t. So on that note, here’s my conversation with Arushi Jain.

Rufus Reid is an extremely important but under-recognized figure in modern jazz. He’s always been someone who’s had one foot in the mainstream and one in the avant-garde — he did a lot of work with soul jazz and jazz-funk saxophonist Eddie Harris in the early 1970s, before joining Dexter Gordon’s band when Gordon made his famous US comeback after years in Europe. He was also part of Andrew Hill’s band in the late ’80s, and has done a ton of straightahead records. But he was also a member of Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition in the early ’80s, and he was one of the four bassists on Henry Threadgill’s X-75 album, and he played on Muhal Richard Abrams’ Things To Come From Those Now Gone, and he played with Anthony Braxton on the two Seven Standards 1985 albums with Hank Jones on piano and Victor Lewis on drums. He was also a member of the World Bass Violin Ensemble, which was a group of six bassists that made an album for Black Saint in 1984. Reid has also done a lot of work as a leader. He’s made a string of albums in collaboration with drummer Akira Tana and various other musicians; he’s done bass duo albums with Michael Moore; and he’s led the Out Front trio with pianist Steve Allee and drummer Duduka Da Fonseca. In 2014, he released Quiet Pride: the Elizabeth Catlett Project, an album that featured a total of 19 instrumentalists and a singer all paying tribute to a sculptor whose work focused on the Black female experience in America. Reid is also an educator and the author of The Evolving Bassist, a book originally published in 1974 that’s still a standard text for bassists. In this interview, we talk about Reid’s work with Eddie Harris, with Dexter Gordon, with Henry Threadgill, and with his own ensembles. We talk about a six-CD set he made with Frank Kimbrough a few years ago, recording all of Thelonious Monk’s compositions. We talk about his approach to the instrument, his influences, and about his new album, which is a duo collaboration with pianist Sullivan Fortner. This was a really enjoyable and informative conversation, and I think you’ll come away from it with a new or perhaps a renewed appreciation for someone who’s been a major figure in jazz for 50 years and isn’t stopping yet.

Welcome back to the Burning Ambulance Podcast! To find out about upcoming episodes, as well as all things Burning Ambulance, sign up for our free weekly newsletter.It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these. In fact, the last episode was released in December of 2022. I talked then to film critic Walter Chaw about his book on the work of director Walter Hill. Since then, a lot’s been going on. Most notably, I wrote a book of my own, In The Brewing Luminous: The Life And Music Of Cecil Taylor, which will be released this year. It’s the first full-length biography and critical analysis of Taylor, who is not only a hugely important jazz musician – along with Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, he was one of the pioneers of free jazz and really pushed the music forward in undeniable ways – but is also, I believe and argue in the book, a brilliant and under-recognized American composer whose work spans a much broader range than many people realize.Ethan Iverson is also a really interesting American composer. You could be reductive about it and call him a synthesist of old and new pop and jazz styles, but he has a strong and recognizable voice that becomes easy to hear the more of his music you listen to. There are chords and types of melodies that he favors that set him apart from his peers, and he’s got a real attraction to big hooks, which manifested in the Bad Plus’s work in a number of ways and shows up in his solo work too. The Bad Plus developed a reputation for piano trio covers of pop songs that people often seemed to think were ironic, but were in fact performed from a perspective of real love for compositional form. A great tune is a great tune. And it’s worth remembering that they also recorded Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is an avant-garde landmark but also has some really kick-ass and highly memorable melodies. After all, it was originally written for dancers.Ethan’s new album, Technically Acceptable, is his second record for Blue Note and he’s doing some things on it that he’s never done before. First of all, he’s playing with two different rhythm sections that are made up of musicians more or less his own age, even younger than himself. Until now, he’s tended to record with older players, legends like Jack DeJohnette, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Billy Hart, Paul Motian, Ron Carter, etc. This is his first time post-Bad Plus making an album entirely with musicians of his own generation. Also, it includes a solo piano sonata – three movements, fifteen minutes, a through composed classical piece that still manages to fit under the umbrella of jazz in a George Gershwin meets Fats Waller kind of way. This album is a real showcase for him as a composer.Ethan and I talk about Cecil Taylor in the interview you’re about to hear. We also talk about his work and how it’s evolved over the years, the economics of surviving as a jazz musician in the 21st century, and we talk about other piano players of his generation like Jason Moran, Aaron Diehl, Aaron Parks, Jeb Patton, and Sullivan Fortner. We talk about diving into the music’s history, and about how there’s as much to learn and draw from in the music of the 1920s and 1930s as in the music of the 1960s and afterward, and about the increasing movement toward composition in current jazz. This is his second time on the podcast – a couple of years ago, I interviewed him alongside Mark Turner, because they’d made a duo album together. But this time it’s a one on one conversation, and I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did.

This is not a typical episode of this podcast. Normally, as you probably know, I talk to musicians. And in 2022, we’ve specifically been talking about fusion, which means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And we’re going to get back to that subject in our next episode, when I have an interview with saxophonist Dave Liebman, who played with Miles Davis in the early '70s and also had his own band, Lookout Farm, which was a very interesting fusion act. But on this episode, we’re taking a sharp left turn and talking about movies, and specifically the movies of Walter Hill.Walter Chaw is a critic I read fairly often at the site Film Freak Central. He writes for lots of other places, too, but that’s where I see his work the most. And a few months ago, I saw that he had a book coming out all about the work of director Walter Hill. It’s called A Walter Hill Film: Tragedy And Masculinity In The Films Of Walter Hill, and it’s out now. You can get it from mzs.press.If you’re not familiar with his name, Walter Hill has directed two dozen movies, including Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs., Extreme Prejudice, Streets of Fire, he directed the pilot episode of Deadwood, he wrote at least portions of the first three Alien movies, he’s done a ton of unbelievable work. He's got a new movie out this year called Dead For A Dollar. Most of his movies are very violent, in an action rather than a horror way, but they’re also a lot more thoughtful and progressive than you might expect them to be. There’s a tremendous amount going on in them in terms of interrogation of masculinity, interrogation of the violence of American culture, interrogation of race and sex and even capitalism, but it’s all couched in these really pulpy, violent, action-packed stories that sometimes start out feeling like morality plays but then go sharply sideways. I might compare him to directors like Sam Fuller or William Friedkin or Michael Mann, maybe even Paul Schrader, all of whose work I love, but his track record is better than any of them. I own more Walter Hill movies on DVD or Blu-Ray than movies by any of those other guys. So the minute I heard about this book, I knew I had to read it. And once I read it, I knew I wanted to talk to the author.So I did. We had a really great conversation over this past weekend, and that’s what you’re going to hear on this episode. We talk about Walter Hill’s movies in all their aspects, from their politics to his use of music, which is relatively unique in Hollywood, as you’ll learn, and we also talk about the process of writing this book and about some other directors’ work, including Ridley and Tony Scott, Rob Zombie, Sam Fuller, Michael Mann and William Friedkin. It’s a long conversation, but I think you're really going to enjoy it. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE:The Blasters, "One Bad Stud" (from Streets of Fire)The Bus Boys, “Boys Are Back In Town” (from 48 Hrs.) 

I have said two things all season long. The first is that we’re going to be exploring a single topic for ten episodes, and that topic is fusion. But the second thing I’ve been saying is that what I’m talking about when I say the word fusion isn’t a style or a genre, but a state of mind. It’s not what you play, it’s how you approach music-making.In previous episodes, we’ve talked about what people typically think of as fusion, which drummer Lenny White, who appeared in episode two of this series, prefers to call jazz-rock. That’s the version that more or less starts with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Tony Williams’ Lifetime and branches out to include Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever and Weather Report. But my version of that continuum also includes early Seventies Santana, it includes the Fania All Stars collaborating with Jan Hammer and Billy Cobham, it includes adventurous funk and R&B fusion, like P-Funk and Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players and Slave, and it includes jazz-funk acts like Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard and George Duke.Vernon Reid is a guitarist who was born in England but grew up in New York. He’s best known as the leader of Living Colour, and one of the co-founders of the Black Rock Coalition along with the late writer Greg Tate, but he’s got a long and varied discography that encompasses solo material, duo and trio work with other guitarists like Bill Frisell, David Torn and Elliot Sharp, and guest appearances with a ton of groups from Public Enemy to the Rollins Band, Mick Jagger, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Santana, and many, many more. His solo album Mistaken Identity from 1996 is the only album to carry co-producer credits from Prince Paul and Teo Macero. Back in 2012, he made an album with a group called Spectrum Road which featured John Medeski on keyboards, Jack Bruce on bass, and Cindy Blackman Santana on drums — it was conceptually a tribute to Tony Williams Lifetime, but it’s very much its own thing as well, so definitely check that out.Reid got his start, though, with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson’s band the Decoding Society. He played guitar, banjo, and guitar synth with that group, which had two bassists: Melvin Gibbs, who was on this podcast a couple of years ago, and Reverend Bruce Johnson, and then some horn players, mostly Zane Massey on saxophones and Henry Scott on trumpet. It’s high-energy music that’s also really melodic in a kind of post-Prime Time way — jazz, funk, rock, Texas blues and West African music all swirled together and thrown straight at your face at a hundred miles an hour. Their albums Nasty, Street Priest, Mandance, Barbeque Dog, Montreux Jazz Festival and Earned Dreams are all incredible. They’re all out of print right now, too, but some of them are on streaming services, so dig up whatever you can. Reid has a new record out with the group Free Form Funky Freqs, a trio with bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, who’s also been on this podcast before, and drummer Calvin Weston, and as he explains in this conversation, it’s full-on improv, starting from zero every time they play together, and because it’s so limited – no rehearsals, no soundchecks with all three members – they know exactly how many times they’ve played together. The album represents their 73rd encounter. It’s called Hymn Of The 3rd Galaxy, sort of a tribute to Return To Forever there, who had an album called Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy, and you’ll hear a little bit of the music late in the podcast. I think you’ll really enjoy this episode. I’ve been a fan of Vernon Reid’s music for about 35 years. The first Living Colour album came out when I was in high school, and I saw them play on the first Lollapalooza festival in the summer of 1991. And I interviewed him once before, about 10 years ago, when he was doing a multimedia presentation called Artificial Africa. So in this conversation, we talk about his work with the Decoding Society, about the Free Form Funky Freqs, about the whole wave of guitarists who came up at the same time he did, including Michael Gregory Jackson and Kelvyn Bell and Jean-Paul Bourelly and Brandon Ross, as well as older players like James "Blood" Ulmer and Pete Cosey and Sonny Sharrock… we talk about a lot of things, and I’m just gonna end this introduction here, so you can dive in.MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE:Living Colour, “WTFF” (from Stain)Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, “Iola” (from Mandance)Vernon Reid & Bill Frisell, “Size 10 1/2 Sneaks” (from Smash & Scatteration)Free Form Funky Freqs, “Outer Arm” (from Hymn of the 3rd Galaxy)

In previous episodes, we’ve talked about what people commonly understand as fusion, which drummer Lenny White, who appeared in episode two of this series, prefers to call jazz-rock. That’s the version that starts with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Tony Williams’ Lifetime and quickly branches out with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever and Weather Report and on and on. But as we’ve continued the discussion, we’ve expanded the scope of inquiry to include adventurous funk and R&B fusion, which includes everything from P-Funk and Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players — and wow, do the Ohio Players deserve a place in the fusion conversation that they are very rarely granted — to Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard and especially George Duke.Adam Rudolph is a fusion artist in about as broad a sense as you can imagine. He’s been a percussionist for close to 50 years, and should be much better known than he is. He’s been around since the early ’70s and has worked with everyone: Yusef Lateef, Fred Anderson, Don Cherry, Roscoe Mitchell, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Wadada Leo Smith, Herbie Hancock, Maulawi, Foday Musa Suso, Hassan Hakmoun, Jon Hassell… he’s part of the Bill Laswell company of players, too, so he’s on a zillion records through that connection. Plus he leads two main groups of his own, Moving Pictures and the Go! Organic Orchestra, which have made many, many albums and even crossed over with each other a time or two.Adam and I had a really fascinating conversation over the course of two phone calls. The impetus was Symphonic Tone Poem For Brother Yusef, a collaboration between him and reeds player Bennie Maupin that’s just been released. Bennie Maupin of course is a legend on his own — he played on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and On The Corner, he was a member of Marion Brown’s group in the 1960s, he was in Mwandishi and the Headhunters with Herbie Hancock, he played with Woody Shaw, and his own album from 1974, The Jewel In The Lotus, is an absolutely brilliant record that blends spiritual jazz with almost New Age ambient music. There’s really no other album like it; if you’ve never heard it, it’s a must-hear. So obviously Rudolph and I talk about Maupin, whom he’s worked with off and on for decades, but we also talk about Laswell and about Lateef and about the whole idea of world music and fusion-as-creative-mindset that I’ve been discussing with every artist I’ve interviewed for the podcast this year. We talk a lot about the philosophy that goes into bringing together musicians from all sorts of traditions, from all over the globe, and finding ways to make their ideas flow together. That’s what he does with Go! Organic Orchestra, the membership of which is completely open and the music of which is created through spontaneous conduction. So he was really the ideal person to talk about all this stuff with. I think you’ll come away from this episode with a lot to think about. I know I did. And I hope you enjoy listening to it. All the music you’ll hear, by the way, comes from Symphonic Tone Poem For Brother Yusef. 

The latest episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with tuba player Bob Stewart.I have said all season long that we’re going to be exploring a single subject for ten episodes, and that subject is fusion. But as I hope has become clear over the course of the five previous episodes, during which I interviewed techno pioneer Jeff Mills, drummer Lenny White, trumpeter Randy Brecker, pianist Cameron Graves, and guitarist Brandon Ross, most of whom come from different musical generations and are not peers, when I say the word fusion, I’m talking about a state of mind, not a style or a genre. It’s not what you play, it’s how you approach music-making.I understand that when most people hear the word fusion, they think of the big name bands from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. Those groups, and the Miles Davis bands from 1969 to 1975, and many other less immediately recognizable groups, all did a particular thing, playing extremely complex music that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz. We talked about those acts in the second and third episodes this season, with Lenny White and Randy Brecker, both of whom were around then and were actively participating in making some of that music.If you think of fusion as a mindset, though, rather than a style, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. And that’s really how I prefer to think about it. Because the people who fall into the latter category are the ones who I find to be the most interesting, and the ones who are more likely to have careers where almost every record they play on is at least worth hearing, worth giving a chance. You may not like all of it. But they’re creative enough that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.A perfect example of this is Bill Laswell, the bassist and producer. He doesn’t use the term fusion. He calls what he does “collision music,” bringing together players from wildly disparate areas — stylistic areas, and literal geographical ones, putting African players together with guys from Southeast Asia and New York rock artists and whoever else he thinks has something to say — and seeing what comes out when they all work together toward a common goal. And sometimes you get something glorious, that you never could have predicted or imagined beforehand. Like pairing Pharoah Sanders with a troupe of Gnawa musicians from North Africa. Or putting improvising guitarist Derek Bailey together with drummer Jack DeJohnette, DJ Disk from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and Laswell himself on bass. I heard a recording of that group just a few days ago, and you might not expect it to work, but it really, really did.Bob Stewart is a fusion artist in that he takes an instrument that has had a relatively low profile in jazz for decades — the tuba — and created a variety of fascinating contexts for it. Not only on his own albums, but particularly in partnership with the late alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe. They began working together in the early 1970s, and Stewart’s playing on some of Blythe’s albums, most notably Bush Baby, where it’s just the two of them and a percussionist, and on Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illusions, where they had some incredible bands that included at different times James “Blood” Ulmer on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, James Newton on flute, and Abdul Wadud on cello. On the album Blythe Spirit, Blythe and Stewart record a version of the spiritual “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” with Amina Claudine Myers on organ, that’s absolutely amazing. We talk about that piece a little bit in this interview.He’s worked with a lot of other artists over the course of his career, too, including Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Carla Bley, Gil Evans, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, Bill Frisell, the David Murray Big Band, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and on and on. The reason he’s able to do so many different things is that his approach to the tuba is really expansive, conceptually speaking. He treats it as much more than a substitute bass. He understands its full range, and the subtleties it’s capable of expressing, and he uses it in ways lots of other people would never even think of. On his own albums First Line, Then & Now, and Connections — Mind the Gap, he puts together really unorthodox collections of personnel. For example on Then & Now, which was originally released in 1996 but just recently popped up on Bandcamp, some of the tracks feature two trumpets, trombone, French horn, and drums, while another is a duo with pianist Dave Burrell, and others have trumpet, alto sax, guitar, and drums. And Connections — Mind the Gap, which is from 2014, features tuba, guitar and drums, with trumpet and trombone on two tracks, but then on five others it’s the core trio plus a string quartet. Now that’s very much a kind of fusion — jazz which is already in an avant-garde zone, combined with chamber music.Bob Stewart is a fascinating guy, an endlessly creative spirit who has done a tremendous amount to change the image of his instrument in order to pave the way for guys like Theon Cross, who plays tuba with Sons of Kemet, or with Jose Davila, who plays with Henry Threadgill’s Zooid. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.Music in this episode:Bob Stewart, “Bush Baby” (Connections – Mind The Gap)Arthur Blythe, “Lenox Avenue Breakdown” (Lenox Avenue Breakdown)Bob Stewart, “The Rambler” (from Then & Now)

As you know if you've been listening this season, we have a single subject we’re going to be exploring across ten episodes, and that subject is fusion. Fusion means much more, I think, than just the music that most people think of when they hear the word. I’m not talking exclusively about the big-name bands from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. Those groups, and the Miles Davis bands from 1969 to 1975, and many other less immediately recognizable groups, all did the classic fusion thing, playing extremely complex music that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz. We talked about those acts in the second and third episodes this season, when I interviewed drummer Lenny White and trumpeter Randy Brecker, both of whom were around then and were actively participating in making that music.If you think of fusion as a mindset, though, rather than a style of music, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. And that’s really how I prefer to think about it. It’s not just a specific narrow slice of music, it’s a way you approach any kind of music you make. KRS-One said rapping is something you do, hip-hop is something you live. And that’s kind of close to what I’m talking about here, conceptually speaking. Fusion can be a style of music, or it can be a way you approach the making of music. And the people who fall into the latter category are the ones who I find to be the most interesting, and the ones who are more likely to have careers where almost every record they play on is at least worth hearing, worth giving a chance. You may not like all of it. But they’re creative enough that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.Brandon Ross is one of those guys. He’s been on a hell of an artistic journey over the course of the last forty-some years. His first recording was on an Archie Shepp album from 1975, There’s a Trumpet in My Soul. He worked with violinist Leroy Jenkins. He worked with saxophonists Marion Brown and Oliver Lake. He worked with Henry Threadgill for something like ten years, in multiple bands or one evolving band. He worked with Cassandra Wilson on her breakout album, Blue Light Til Dawn, and the follow-up, New Moon Daughter. He’s made albums under his own name. The reason a lot of people probably know his name right now is he’s the guitar player in Harriet Tubman, with bassist Melvin Gibbs, who’s been on this podcast before, and drummer JT Lewis.And now here’s the really interesting part – Brandon Ross has an album coming out a little later this year on my label, Burning Ambulance Music. He’s got a new group, see, called Breath Of Air, which is a trio featuring violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow. Something I learned in this interview, by the way, is that Brandon has done the guitar-violin thing several times, with Leroy Jenkins and also with Terry Jenoure, a very interesting violin player who isn’t nearly as well known as she ought to be. When I was researching Brandon to come up with questions for this interview, I learned about her and now I’m gonna be diving into her catalog, and I suggest you do the same. Some of her music is on streaming services; she released a 3CD set called Portal last year that’s fantastic. Anyway, Breath Of Air has a self-titled debut, most of which was recorded live in February 2020, right before the pandemic started and live music went away, and like I said it’ll be out a little bit later this year.In the meantime, enjoy this conversation between me and Brandon Ross. We talk about his work with Henry Threadgill, about his work with Cassandra Wilson, about Archie Shepp and Oliver Lake and Marion Brown, about Harriet Tubman, about the sort of No Wave punk-funk jazz scene of the late '70s and early '80s that included Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society and all the other guitarists that came out of that scene, including Michael Gregory Jackson and Kelvyn Bell and Jean-Paul Bourelly and James "Blood" Ulmer and Vernon Reid… we also talk about his particular approach to the guitar and to sound. There’s a lot to learn and a lot to think about in the hour or so of conversation you’re about to hear. I hope you enjoy listening to it.Music in this episode:Breath Of Air, “No One On Earth Can See You Anymore” (from Breath Of Air)Henry Threadgill, “Little Pocket Size Demons” (from Too Much Sugar For A Dime)Harriet Tubman, “Farther Unknown” (from The Terror End Of Beauty)

Episode 73 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with pianist Cameron Graves.I have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting this season, and that subject is fusion. Fusion means much more, I think, than just the music that most people probably think of when they hear the word. Of course, it immediately brings to mind bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups that were formed by ex-members of Miles Davis’s band, playing extremely complex compositions that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz, while still leaving room for extended improvisation. But if you think of fusion as a process rather than a style, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. Because then you can pull in the music being made by Yes, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Santana, etc., all of which gets filed under just plain rock. And you can talk about the music Latin artists like Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All Stars were making at the same time. Or the really adventurous funk and R&B that was being made by Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament, Funkadelic, the Isley Brothers, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Ohio Players, Slave, which then leads you to jazz-funk names like George Duke, Billy Cobham, the Crusaders, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, Eddie Henderson, and of course Mwandishi and the Headhunters. This is how I prefer to think about fusion. It’s not just a specific, narrow slice of music, it’s the sound of walls being knocked down across the landscape.So that’s the kind of philosophical starting point for all the interviews I’m doing this season, and that’s what makes Cameron Graves such a perfect person to talk to. Because he’s a guy who crosses all sorts of musical boundaries. He’s had a lot of classical music training, as I learned during this conversation, he spent several years studying Indian music, and obviously he’s got a deep jazz background starting out as a member of the Young Jazz Giants with Kamasi Washington and the Bruner brothers, Stephen aka Thundercat on bass and his brother Ronald on drums, which evolved into the West Coast Get Down and all the albums that they’ve made over the last half dozen years or so. But Cameron’s also a lifelong metalhead — in fact, he played keyboards and guitar in Wicked Wisdom, the nu-metal band fronted by Jada Pinkett Smith in the early 2000s. So he’s not only toured the world with Kamasi Washington and with Stanley Clarke, because he’s a member of Clarke’s band, too — he also played Ozzfest.And here’s an interesting connection: the drummer for Wicked Wisdom was Philip “Fish” Fisher, the drummer for Fishbone. And when you talk about fusion as the kind of big-tent/umbrella sort of conceptual thing that I’m talking about, you have to include them in there. They mixed funk and hard rock and punk and metal and ska and reggae and jazz into one big swirl, particularly on their most ambitious album, 1991’s The Reality of My Surroundings. There’s all kinds of music on there, from Bad Brains-style hardcore to Last Poets-style abstract jazz poetry. And of course they were the best live band on the planet from the mid ’80s to the early ’90s.Fishbone were never as big as they deserved to be, but they were absolute heroes in L.A., and they were a huge inspiration to all kinds of open-minded musicians who came up in their wake. Last year, I interviewed Terrace Martin, who’s an alto saxophonist affiliated with the West Coast Get Down but is also a hip-hop producer who’s worked with Snoop Dogg for years — in fact, he put together a live band for Snoop in about 2010 that included Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Ryan Porter, who’s been on this podcast before, and other people from their circle as well. Anyway, when I talked to Martin, he expressed a lot of love for Fishbone. And he’s now a member of Herbie Hancock’s band, in addition to being part of R+R=NOW, a group that also includes Robert Glasper and Christian Scott. And Thundercat and his brother, Ronald Bruner Jr., were both members of Suicidal Tendencies, playing straight-up punk and thrash, for years. There are so many connections between jazz and funk and metal, when you look for them, and bands that combine them in various really fascinating ways. It’s all fusion, in the broad sense.Another thing that’s really interesting, to me anyway, is that there are so many direct connections between the West Coast Get Down guys and the Seventies fusion artists. Like I said, Cameron Graves is in Stanley Clarke’s band. Terrace Martin is in Herbie Hancock’s band. Ronald Bruner Jr. played with George Duke before Duke died. Thundercat covered a George Duke song on one of his albums, and had Steve Arrington from Slave on his most recent record. It really is like they’re the next generation of fusion. And we talk about all this and a lot more in the interview you’re about to hear. This was a really fun conversation that went in some very interesting directions, and I hope you enjoy listening to it.Music in this episode:Cameron Graves, “Planetary Prince” (from Planetary Prince)Cameron Graves, “The Life Carriers” (from Seven)Cameron Graves, “Red” (from Live From the Seven Spheres)

This season on the Burning Ambulance Podcast, we’re going to have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes, and that subject is fusion.Fusion, of course, is a term that means different things to different people. When most people hear it, they probably think of bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups that were formed by ex members of Miles Davis’s band that played extremely complex compositions that were sometimes closer to progressive rock than to jazz, but which still left room for extended improvisation. What’s interesting about that positioning is that it’s very easy to draw lines between that stuff and the music being made by Yes, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Santana, all of which gets filed under just plain rock. And if you extend the boundaries out just a little bit further, you get to the music Latin artists like Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and the Fania All-Stars were making at the same time. Or think about some of the really adventurous funk and R&B that was being made by Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament and Funkadelic, the Ohio Players, Slave, the Isley Brothers... This is what’s so interesting to me about fusion, is that at its best it’s about all kinds of musical boundaries being knocked down.I recently spent some time listening to a whole bunch of albums by keyboardist George Duke, released on the MPS label between about 1971 and 1976. Duke was a really fascinating figure, because he traveled between worlds to really unprecedented degree. He had his own trio in the late 60s, and somehow or other hooked up with electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. They made an album together, and the gigs they played in L.A. brought them to the attention of Frank Zappa and Cannonball Adderley, two people who couldn’t have been doing more different things. But Zappa hired Ponty to play on Hot Rats, and then wrote and produced an entire album, King Kong, on which Ponty played Zappa’s compositions, and George Duke was the keyboardist on that record. And after that, both Zappa and Cannonball Adderley – who, don’t forget, had Joe Zawinul in his band before that, who composed “In A Silent Way” and played with Miles Davis, and formed Weather Report with Wayne Shorter – both Adderley and Zappa wanted George Duke in their bands. He wound up taking both gigs, doing two years with Zappa, then two years with Adderley, then going back to Zappa’s band for three or four more years. He had left the group by 1975, though, so he was not part of the concerts recorded for the album Zappa In New York. But Randy Brecker was.Brecker and his brother, saxophonist Michael Brecker, who died in 2007, worked together in dozens if not hundreds of contexts from the late Sixties to the Nineties. They were both part of that Zappa concert, which was related to their being part of the Saturday Night Live band at the time; they played on a million recording sessions for everyone from Aerosmith to Bette Midler to Aretha Franklin to Lou Reed to Dire Straits to Donald Fagen. They were part of drummer Billy Cobham’s band in the early to mid ’70s, playing on Crosswinds and Total Eclipse and Shabazz and A Funky Thide Of Sings. And right around that same time, they formed the Brecker Brothers band and made a string of albums for Arista that were extremely successful. Now, what matters for the purposes of this introduction is that the side of fusion the Brecker Brothers represented was very different from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Weather Report side. That was, for lack of a better term, white fusion. It was marketed to white rock audiences. Those bands toured with rock bands. They played arena concerts. Lenny White talked about it in the previous episode of this podcast — the members of Return to Forever hung out with members of Yes. On the other side of the coin, there was black and Latin fusion. Like I said above, there was some incredibly challenging music being made under the headings of salsa and Latin jazz in the 70s – you should check out the episode of this podcast where I interviewed Eddie Palmieri to hear more about that, as well as the episode with Billy Cobham, where he talks about performing with the Fania All-Stars. There are funk records that are every bit as complex as prog rock. Jazz artists like Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard, George Duke and even Joe Henderson were all making records that can really only be described as fusion in the early 70s, and that’s without even getting into what Miles Davis was doing, particularly with his live band from 1973 to 1975. But except for George Duke, who actually had Frank Zappa cut a couple of guitar solos on his 1974 album Feel, they were drawing more from funk than from rock, and they were marketed more to black audiences than white. And as Randy Brecker explains in this interview, that was where the Brecker Brothers fell. They had more success on black radio and on the R&B chart than in the rock world. Now, eventually, that more funk-oriented, R&B-oriented side of fusion slid in an explicitly commercial, radio-friendly direction, and a lot of it ended up as smooth jazz. Which is to some degree why the term is vilified in some quarters today. But that doesn’t take anything away from the good stuff, and Randy Brecker has been involved with some very good records over the years.This was a really fun conversation that went in some very interesting directions. I hope you enjoy listening to it.Music in this episode: The Brecker Brothers, “Some Skunk Funk” (Heavy Metal Be-Bop)Billy Cobham, “Taurian Matador” (Shabazz)The Brecker Brothers, “Sneakin’ Up Behind You” (The Brecker Brothers)

This is the sixth year of the Burning Ambulance Podcast. This is episode 71, and I decided at the beginning of this year that it was time to change things up a little. So for all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting this season, we’re going to have a single subject, and that subject is fusion. Lenny White played on one of the most important albums in the history of fusion, Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. In the clip that you’re gonna hear when I finish talking, right before the interview begins, he’s on the left hand side, with Jack DeJohnette on the right. And you want to hear something insane? That was his first ever recording session! He was recommended to Miles Davis by alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. White was in McLean’s band at the time. Within a year, he had also played on Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy, and Joe Henderson’s At The Lighthouse. In just the first half of the Seventies, he was on Eddie Henderson’s Realization, on two albums by a Latin jazz-rock band called Azteca, and For Those Who Chant by trumpeter Luis Gasca, a record that also had Henderson, and Carlos Santana, and a bunch of other people from across the jazz and rock spectrum. In about 1972, he joined Chick Corea’s band Return To Forever and made four albums with them – Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy, Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery and Romantic Warrior. He also played on solo albums by Stanley Clarke and Al Di Meola, and made records under his own name that were like a perfect storm of jazz and rock players working together. His 1977 album Big City has Herbie Hancock, Neal Schon of Journey, and Verdine White of Earth, Wind and Fire on it. But despite being at the heart of the fusion movement at the time that it happened, he doesn’t actually like the term. He prefers to call what he does jazz-rock, and when you listen to what he was actually playing, that distinction is very clear and makes perfect sense.A lot of people think the use of electric instruments, particularly synths and other keyboards, is a key dividing line between fusion and the jazz that came before. But for me, it’s about the beat, it’s about the drummers. Lenny White is one of maybe five drummers who really shaped an entire genre in their image — the others are Billy Cobham, who’s been on this podcast before, and Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette, and Alphonse Mouzon. These guys played with Miles, they played with Weather Report, they played with Herbie Hancock, they led their own groups, they were the guys who established the sound of fusion by finding a way to combine the aggressiveness and drive of rock with the subtlety and suppleness of swing, and in Lenny White’s case in particular, he brings a tremendous Latin feel to the music as well. The Latin element is really important, because Latin musicians were stretching out just as much as their jazz and rock peers in the crucial years between 1969 and 1975. Listen to the Fania All-Stars’ Latin-Soul-Rock album, which featured guest appearances from Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer, less than a month before they would leave the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Listen to what Eddie Palmieri — who's also been on this podcast — was doing on albums like Superimposition, Vamonos Pa'l Monte, and Live At Sing Sing. Listen to Santana’s run of albums from Caravanserai through Borboletta. A lot of this stuff is hardcore jazz fusion set to a Latin beat, and in terms of complexity and intensity you can put it right next to King Crimson, Yes, and all the other prog-rock acts of the time. And funk was going through a radical evolution, too — listen to how complex the songwriting and arranging is on albums by Parliament, Earth, Wind and Fire, Slave, and the Isley Brothers — and these guys all knew it. They all knew each other, they all knew what they were doing, individually and collectively. There were no borders. There were no limits. Lenny White has a hilarious story in this interview about hanging out with some of the guys from Yes. I really enjoyed getting the chance to talk to Lenny White. He’s had an incredible career, and he was there at the beginning of a musical revolution. I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation.Music in this episode:Miles Davis, “Bitches Brew” (Bitches Brew)Luis Gasca, “Street Dude” (For Those Who Chant)Lenny White, “Rapid Transit” (Big City)Return To Forever, “Sofistifunk” (No Mystery)

This is the Burning Ambulance podcast's sixth year, and our seventieth episode, so I decided it was time to change things up a little. This season, we’re going to have a single subject we’re going to be exploring through all ten episodes that I’m going to be presenting, and that theme is fusion.Fusion is a very charged term. When most people hear it, in reference to music, anyway, they probably think of bands from the 1970s like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report: groups formed by ex-members of Miles Davis’s band that combined a certain freedom to improvise with extremely complex compositions that were closer to progressive rock than to jazz. I mean, when you listen to the first two Mahavishnu Orchestra albums, The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire, side by side with King Crimson’s Larks' Tongues in Aspic and Starless and Bible Black, they really fit together quite well. I mean, they’re even using the same instrumental palette: guitar, violin, keyboards, bass, drums. The only real difference is that King Crimson had a singer.What interests me about fusion, the term and the concept, is that it lives up to something saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one of the co-founders of Weather Report, has said many times — that to him, the word jazz means “I dare you”. I dare you to play as loud as the rock bands. I dare you to embrace funk and multi-part suites and the most advanced studio production techniques available. I dare you to go big, to be ambitious. Because that’s what the best fusion of the 1970s was, and what modern-day fusion is. It’s ambitious. It doesn’t recognize externally imposed limitations, people saying “you can’t do that”. Why not? Why can’t you? It refuses to stay within the boundaries of genre. It’s not jazz, it’s not rock, because there’s no such thing as jazz and no such thing as rock. One of the things I discovered, or became more certain of, while writing my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century, which is out this month from Zero Books in the UK, is that jazz is ultimately about artistic intention. There’s no one instrument or rhythm or harmonic relationship that defines it, but there are two crucial values: innovation and improvisation. There must be an attempt to do something new, or to put a new spin on something old, and there must be an element of uncertainty and a real-time exchange of ideas, or in the case of solo performances, there must be an element of real-time thinking and spontaneous creation. Because it’s absolutely possible to play something that startles or surprises yourself, and then respond to it.So fusion is about taking ideas from seemingly disparate genres and combining them. And taking the philosophies that govern those seemingly disparate genres and figuring out what they have in common. That’s what the Seventies artists did, and that’s what modern-day fusion acts are doing. I would include people like Thundercat, Cameron Graves, Christian Scott and even Kassa Overall, who’s been on this podcast before, in that category. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about all year long on this podcast, through interviews with prominent fusion artists of the past and present.Many people may not think of Jeff Mills as a fusion artist. He’s normally thought of as one of the most important musicians in techno history. I’m not gonna run down his discography here, that’s what Wikipedia’s for, but suffice it to say that his influence in the 1990s was massive, but what makes him interesting to me is that he’s taken the creative space his fame has brought him and used it to really expand his own sonic parameters. He’s made an album with a full orchestra. He’s created new scores for silent films. He’s made albums inspired by astronomy, science fiction, and his interest in the supernatural. And he’s collaborated with musicians who are geniuses in their own fields. In 2018, he made an album called Tomorrow Comes the Harvest with legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen. And that project led to the first of the three albums he put out in 2021. It’s called Counter Active, and it’s a collaboration with keyboardist Jean-Philippe Dary under the name The Paradox.The second album he released this year was called The Clairvoyant, and it’s about two hours long — if you buy it on vinyl, it’s three LPs, and he says that the best way to experience it is to lie back in the dark and listen to the whole thing from beginning to end. It arises out of his interest in spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th century and his perception of the similarities and connections between that era and now. That’s one of the topics we discuss in the interview you’re about to hear, in fact. And I have to admit I was surprised by how willing, even eager, he was to discuss social issues. A lot of electronic music is deliberately anonymous, deliberately emotionally blank — it’s a canvas on which you can paint your own feelings. But it also reflects broader social conditions, as any art produced by human beings inevitably must. Detroit techno represented the frustration and anger, as well as the hopes and dreams, of the citizens of that city, and Underground Resistance, a collective Mills formed with Mike Banks and Robert Hood, was explicitly political, taking on social conditions in their city and the overall politics of the music industry.The third album Jeff Mills put out in 2021 was The Override Switch, a collaboration with Rafael Leafar, who plays a number of instruments on the record, including tenor, alto, soprano and baritone saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, flute, cornet, and a wide range of keyboards. The music they make together is fusion in the purest and most genuine sense: the rhythmic steadiness of electronic music combined with the melodic and harmonic adventurousness of jazz. The individual pieces, and the album as a whole, take the listener on a real journey. And frankly, on a purely sonic level, I find it easy to draw lines between this and the music that people like Stanley Clarke and George Duke were making in the 1970s.Anyway, I feel extremely lucky to have gotten the chance to talk to Jeff Mills for an hour. He’s an incredibly busy guy, so tracking him down was a challenge, and the day we were initially scheduled to talk, he had to run from Paris to London, so we moved it, and then when I did catch him, I thought he was still in Paris but it turned out he had returned to London, which meant I was calling him an hour later than expected. Still, it was a fascinating conversation that went in some really unexpected directions. I hope you enjoy listening to it.Music featured in this episode:The Paradox, "Super Solid" (Counter Active)Jeff Mills, "Someone Who Feels Things" (The Clairvoyant)Jeff Mills & Rafael Leafar, "The Sun King" (The Override Switch)

Billy Harper has had a pretty incredible career. He was a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1968. He played with Max Roach. He was part of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band and the Gil Evans big band, and because of those connections he got to play on a Louis Armstrong album. He was on Lee Morgan’s final studio album, recorded in 1971. And he’s had a solo career since the early Seventies, making legendary albums like Capra Black for the Strata-East label and Black Saint for…well, for Black Saint. It was their first release, and they named the label after it!Since about 2008, Harper has been a member of the Cookers, a group led by trumpeter David Weiss that also features Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Donald Harrison or Craig Handy on alto sax, George Cables — who’s been on this podcast — on piano, Cecil McBee on bass, and Billy Hart on drums. All of those guys have long careers as leaders, but when they come together, playing music from their back catalogs and new material, they’re really amazing. I’ve seen them live twice and it’s just astonishing to watch absolute masters get up there and deliver the way they do.I really had a good time talking to Billy Harper. In this interview, we talk about the Texas tenor sax tradition, we talk about his time with Lee Morgan, we talk about the Cookers, about his solo work, about how to teach improvisation, and a bunch of other things. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!Music featured in this episode:Billy Harper, “Call of the Wild and Peaceful Heart” (Black Saint)The Cookers, “Destiny is Yours” (Look Out!)Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

Andrew Cyrille is the last man standing from the first wave of free jazz drummers. He and Milford Graves, Sunny Murray, and Rashied Ali really revolutionized jazz rhythm in their playing with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and other musicians in the early to mid ’60s. Their influence was huge, and each of them brought a different perspective and instantly identifiable style to the music. What I hear when I listen to Andrew Cyrille, whether he’s playing with Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton or in any other situation, is an incredible precision and consideration. He really seems to be thinking about every single strike and placing it with unbelievable care, even when he’s playing ridiculously fast.In the last few years, Cyrille has been making some really interesting records as a leader for ECM. He started in 2016 with The Declaration of Musical Independence, which featured Bill Frisell on guitar, Richard Teitelbaum on synth, and Ben Street on bass, then he made Lebroba with Frisell and Wadada Leo Smith, and now he’s got a new album out, The News, which features Frisell and Street again but has David Virelles on piano instead of Teitelbaum. And right before that string of records, in 2015, he was on guitarist Ben Monder’s album Amorphae. And I also want to mention a record he did in 2017, Dione, a trio record with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp. He’s had an incredible career as a sideman, too, working with David Murray, Leroy Jenkins, Muhal Richard Abrams, Marion Brown, Horace Tapscott, Peter Brötzmann, and of course he’s also one of the members of Trio 3 with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman — they played at the 2021 Vision Festival, where he also presented a solo tribute to Milford Graves.We talk about Graves a lot in this interview, as well as Cyrille’s approach to rhythm and to music generally, and a lot of other things. It’s funny, the conversation has kind of a false ending, because I had been told by his publicist that he only wanted to talk for a half hour, and I negotiated us up to 45 minutes, and then at the 45 minute mark I started saying goodbye and thanking him for his time, and he showed no interest in stopping, so we kept going and probably could have talked for another half hour. If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!Music featured in this episode:Andrew Cyrille/Wadada Leo Smith/Bill Frisell, “Worried Woman” (Lebroba)Andrew Cyrille, “Go Happy Lucky” (The News)Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletter

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletterDon Byron is originally from the Bronx, and he was kind of a fixture on the Downtown music scene in the late '80s and early '90s. His first album as a leader, Tuskegee Experiments, came out almost 30 years ago, in 1992; it featured a variety of musicians, including guitarist Bill Frisell, two different bassists, Reggie Workman and Lonnie Plaxico, and two different drummers, Pheeroan AkLaff and Ralph Peterson. A year after that, he released Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz, an album of klezmer music that shaped his public image maybe more strongly than he might have liked, as you’ll understand when you listen to this conversation. The thing with Byron is, every one of his records is completely different from the others — he seems to always be deeply invested in exploring a concept, and once he’s done that on record, he moves on. He’s not one of those musicians who establishes a working band and takes them into the studio every year or two. When he makes a record, it’s because he’s got something very particular to say at that moment, and when he’s done, he’s said all he has to say on that subject. And as a result, his albums require you to really be willing to put the time in and think about what he’s saying and why. That’s not to suggest that the music isn’t enjoyable on a purely sensory level. It is. He’s a great clarinet player, and a really fascinating composer. But he wants you to think about why someone might make the kind of music they make, instead of just taking it — or taking anything — for granted. I should warn you that about halfway through our talk, Don Byron drops an N-bomb with a hard R while making a point about what is and what isn’t jazz, what is and what isn’t black music, et cetera. That’s basically the subject we spend this entire hour circling around, because his primary instrument, the clarinet, the composers whose work he explores, and all of that are in kind of blurry territory where, as he says, it’s not considered "real" jazz sometimes. Which is on the one hand bullshit, because jazz is whatever a jazz musician plays, but on the other hand, genre distinctions are meaningless anyhow, right? That’s why we end up talking about Biz Markie and Kirk Franklin and Fishbone and all the other stuff that we talk about in this interview. I had a blast talking to him; I hope you'll enjoy listening to our conversation.If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!Music featured in this episode:Don Byron/Aruán Ortiz, “Black and Tan Fantasy” (Random Dances and [A]tonalities)Don Byron, “Powerhouse” (Bug Music)

Support Burning Ambulance on Patreon • Get the Burning Ambulance email newsletterThis is an episode I have been hoping to present since this podcast began. I’ve been requesting interviews with Braxton for years, but never gotten the okay until this month. And you know what? In retrospect, I’m glad it took as long as it did. You know the saying “When the student is ready, the master appears”? Bill Dixon said that to me when I interviewed him for The Wire, and I feel like it’s absolutely true in the case of the conversation you’re about to listen to. I was not ready to interview Anthony Braxton when I first started asking. As it is, we probably could have talked for at least another hour, and maybe longer; we got along very, very well. Which was frankly not guaranteed going in. This interview didn’t just take years to set up, it also fell through the first time we tried to do it, and I’m not 100 percent sure why but I have some suspicions. I do know that when I was working on re-scheduling it, I sent over my list of proposed questions in advance, which Braxton mentions right at the beginning, when he starts talking about the late Bob Koester from Delmark Records. I first started listening to Braxton’s music about 20 years ago, and I feel like I’ve had a few major breakthroughs with it in that time, where it kind of made a little more sense to me afterward than it had before. Because it really is a learning process. You hear other things differently after you’ve grappled with his work for a while.The first big breakthrough for me was the album Quintet (Basel) 1977, which wasn’t released until 2000; it’s a live album that features George Lewis on trombone and Muhal Richard Abrams on piano. It was maybe the second or third thing I’d ever heard by him, so I mostly knew him by reputation still, as someone who made extremely advanced "weird" jazz that didn’t really swing, but it wasn’t free, either. Well, what I heard was not any of those things. It was a nonstop flow of energy, extremely creative but also swinging hard as hell, and the compositions were absolutely recognizable as such. It made perfect sense to me as jazz. The second breakthrough was when Mosaic Records put out a box set of his Arista albums, which I reviewed for Jazziz. Some of that music was difficult and alienating to my ear, but a lot of it was even more immediately accessible than I had expected it to be. If you’ve never listened to Braxton at all, you could do a whole lot worse than to start with New York, Fall 1974 or Five Pieces 1975, which were two of his first Arista releases and really do seem like his attempts to make music that would catch people’s ear right away. The third and final breakthrough moment wasn’t an album, it was a book – Forces In Motion, by Graham Lock. Lock went on tour with Braxton’s quartet in England in the mid-80s, watching all the gigs, and interviewing all the group members repeatedly, and he gives you a 360 degree portrait of all of them as musicians and as human beings. It’s one of the best books about music and musicians I’ve ever read, I recommend it unequivocally.When I was writing this intro, I looked on the hard drive where I keep most of my music, and I was surprised to find that I only actually own about 40 Anthony Braxton releases, including the individual albums that are contained in the Mosaic box and another box of his Black Saint albums from the 1980s. I honestly thought I had more. But among the others are a 3CD set of large ensemble pieces, a 12CD set of pieces for an a cappella ensemble, a 4CD set of improvisations for quartet, and a 4CD opera, all of which feature one long track per CD. I also have a 7CD set of the music of Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh and other related musicians, an 11CD set of Charlie Parker tunes, a 13CD set of live recordings of standards, and an audio Blu-Ray containing 12 pieces ranging in length from 40 to 70 minutes. All told, I probably have around 80 hours’ worth of Anthony Braxton’s music in my house. If I wanted to, I could spend a long weekend listening to nothing but his work. And that’s probably about ten percent of his total recorded output, maybe less. The man’s catalog could fill a room.He’s put out two mega releases just this month. The first is that audio Blu-Ray, which is called 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017 and features several different ensembles of between six and nine musicians including harp, cello, accordion, and horns, playing as I said long single pieces composed and then improvised upon using a highly specific and codified musical language of Braxton’s own devising.The second is Quartet (Standards) 2020, the 13CD collection of live recordings from January 2020, when he played nine concerts in three cities: Warsaw, Poland, London, England, and Wels Austria, with a conventionally structured quartet: saxophone, piano, bass, drums. As its title suggests, they played standards. There are 67 songs on the box, with no repeats. There are tunes by Thelonious Monk, by Sonny Rollins, by Wayne Shorter, by Andrew Hill, but there are also several songs by Paul Simon, including the really excellent version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that you hear at the beginning of this episode, which if I’m being honest reminds me of Aretha Franklin’s version.In this interview, we talk about both of those releases, as well as the larger issues they reflect. We talk about his compositional languages, the demands he places on the musicians he works with, his relationship to the jazz tradition, Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Dixon, Max Roach, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, and much, much more. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done, and I’m thrilled to share it with you.If you enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!Music featured in this episode:Anthony Braxton, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (Quartet (Standards) 2020)Anthony Braxton, “Opus 23B” (New York, Fall 1974)