Burning Ambulance Podcast

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.