James Falzone: joyful noise from the pain stick - Transcript

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: Being from Chicago, obviously, as you said, rich musical tradition. What was your first music? As a kid, were you already a deeply sophisticated listener? Were you into pop music of the day? We're roughly the same age, so I know what I was listening to, but where'd you start?

James Falzone: That's a great question because I wasn't really that into music. I don't have a great explanation of why I wanted to play an instrument. I was ten years old, and my public music school teacher, so hooray for public music school, was letting us listen to "Peter and the Wolf," the classic by Prokofiev, where he goes through the different animals represented by instruments.

LP: Yeah.

James Falzone: She would hold up flashcards of the instrument while we heard the music. At that particular moment, I was just a football player, not a very good academic kid, and nothing special. I had a sister who played piano. She was quite a good student, so my parents put a lot of energy into her piano lessons.

The teacher shows this flashcard in class, and I say, "That looks kind of fun." I went back home and said, "I think I want to play a musical instrument" to my parents. My mom's brother is a professional musician. He was a great woodwind player, and he's a film composer, mostly retired now, but he had many successful years as a film composer in L.A. He's won several Emmys, and he was a fantastic jazz saxophone player. So she called my uncle and said, "Alright, the kid wants to play clarinet," and he had played a bit of clarinet himself, so he helped me get an instrument and so forth.

Pretty immediately after playing the instrument, I got hooked on jazz. I wasn't listening to a lot of pop music of the day. In fact, I had to catch up to a lot of rock and pop later on in my high school years. From ten years old to fourteen years old, it was all about classical music and jazz. By the time I was in eighth grade or so, I just looked down upon anything that was not classical, Coltrane, or Stravinsky. It was pretty ridiculous.

My uncle was great. He would come visit over the holidays and we would go to a record store and he'd buy me lots of different records. My parents helped me get a great stereo system, so I was deep into jazz and classical music in those junior high school years. When I got into high school and started hanging out with friends and forming a friend group, they were all really into what I would call more progressive rock bands, like Yes and Rush and things like that. They started playing that stuff for me, and I was always like, "Yeah, it's okay, it's all right."

But then I found myself in high school getting really into, so this is me in the 80s, getting really into English synth-pop and duet bands, things like that. So it was a weird combination, mostly all about jazz and classical music, and then putting on my Depeche Mode records when I wanted to do something that wasn't about that music. It's funny to think back upon that because I could never really relate to what people were listening to at the moment in terms of pop music.

One more thing I would say is that Peter Gabriel became very important to me. Besides liking his music a lot and liking his song structures, he made use of a lot of world cultural music in ways that were very deep and authentic, not appropriating but truly appropriately appropriating, bringing in musicians from around the world to play on his records.

I became fascinated with those sounds, and then I would go explore those sounds. I remember first hearing the sound of this particular flute, not knowing what it was, but it was listed on the record. He was very good about putting the musicians on the record. It was a ney flute player, an Arabic flute player.

So, I began to research that instrument more and understand where that comes from. Then, that would lead me to learn about the oud or the kanun or whatever it might be. I'm very grateful to Peter Gabriel for taking such care on his records to bring in these great musicians and also actually tell you who they were and what they were playing so I could learn more about them.

LP: Interesting that he also came from the prog tradition as well.

James Falzone: Yeah, right. I think that's where I got connected because my friends were like, "You got to hear this Genesis record." I was like, "Eh, it's all right." It didn't really do much for me, but then I liked what he was doing and would follow his trend more than the early bands that he was in.

LP: Yeah. It's funny. I go back to the Peter Gabriel-era Genesis records, occasionally feeling like I should like them more than I do. There are individual songs I really like, but they are more revered than good. (laughter)

James Falzone: Yeah, a lot of music is, that's for sure. If you did any research on me, you may have found that there's this interview with me in which I admit that I'm not a big Beatles fan.

That, to me, falls in that category. I have total respect for that music, and I know its place in musical history, but the music itself doesn't do much for me. I didn't grow up with it. It doesn't have a pull on my heartstrings. My parents weren't playing Beatles records on Sunday mornings or things of that nature.

So I approach it like any other music. I say, "Yeah, I get that it's good, but it doesn't have any real place for me." But yeah, I think that "So" record, the Peter Gabriel "So" record from about '84, '85, I mean, that's a pivotal record to me, like the sound of it, the production, the instruments that he's using.

Youssou N'Dour shows up on that one track; I'm forgetting the name of the track right now.

LP: "In Your Eyes."

James Falzone: "In Your Eyes," thank you. Then, being able to trace back, okay, where's he from? Oh, Nigeria. All this music to explore. I'm very grateful. I hope someday I will meet Peter Gabriel and thank him deeply for his influence on me. It's huge.

LP: That record's almost inescapable, and for such substantial music, it's interesting to go back to some of that 80s synth-pop music now. I just listened to a fairly long interview with Trevor Horn, who produced much of that stuff. That music is actually so well constructed, and I guess you could say professional, but it's catchy as hell. It's really like if you had said to me forty years ago, "You're going to put in an Art of Noise record and be blown away as an older man," but some of that music is really incredible.

James Falzone: That was an era in which they really cared about production, about song structure, and so forth. I think Tears for Fears is another band that comes to my mind; they just really cared about all that structure and so forth.

Even that song "Red Rain," I will forever be fascinated by the hi-hat pattern that Stewart Copeland plays, which is an overdub. He's not even playing it with the kit. It's overdubbed hi-hat on that record that totally adds to the rhythmic interest of that particular song. Yeah, we could probably geek out a long time about that record.

LP: Well, the other thing I want to say, though, is the person who provided a similar model for me was Bill Laswell.

James Falzone: Yes.

LP: And he's on that record. So Bill opened a lot of doors for me in terms of being a genre hopper, a genre integrator, and access to so much great world music. He was really my entryway into Eastern Arabic music as well. He made an amazing record with Simon Shaheen.

James Falzone: I know that record. Yeah.

LP: When I was still living in New Haven, Simon played in one of the chapels at Yale. It was part performance and discourse. He would play a few pieces and talk about the history of the music. It was the perfect type of thing to go see.

James Falzone: Amazing musician and an amazing ambassador for the music. That summer camp he's run for years. I don't know if you know about that, but it's a summer camp for Arabic music and Middle Eastern music traditions. That summer camp has changed many people's lives.

I would say, too, it would be hard not to talk about U2, as well, for me. Not only that, but "The Unforgettable Fire," the production on that record, and the Brian Eno production, again, really set certain sonic elements for me.

One of my teachers in graduate school, a pianist named Ran Blake, always talked about, "You've got to understand your musical DNA. If you're an improviser, why are you making the choices that you make? Can you trace them back to certain things that stuck in your musical way of being?" That DNA that you can't get away from.

I would say that those records in the mid-80s from groups like U2 and Peter Gabriel, of course, along with Coltrane and Stravinsky and all kinds of other stuff, but those records, they're there as part of my musical DNA in ways that I'm not always sure I can understand, but the sound of "The Unforgettable Fire," that record, the overall sonic imprint is something that I still, I feel like I still think about. It's there in the way that I play the clarinet, the way I produce sound, and so forth.

LP: Interesting that you say that because now I can hear it. I can hear the space in the productions on your record.

James Falzone: That's good to hear.

LP: Yeah, very uncluttered, but they breathe.

James Falzone: To me, it's all about sound. As a woodwind player, I'm putting breath into a piece of wood with a little bamboo piece that vibrates and makes sound waves. So it's all about sound.

I would say that, in a way, if we take those two examples, the Gabriel records and the U2 records are really all about sound. Yes, there are great lyrics and cool grooves and things, but the overall production of those records is what I was really attracted to.

LP: Yeah, because both those artists made very strong records before those records, but those records in particular, the ones that skyrocketed them.

The other thing that I would say about that era before we move on is that it's a lesson that I think was lost on the modern music industry, which is there were a lot of left-of-center people allowed to make very big-budget records back then. They let the weirdos have at it. Whether it was a lot of those English bands, those were basically either punk kids or art school kids talking about Kraftwerk and Bowie and just letting them have at it.

Then who would have thought to let Brian Eno make a Talking Heads record or make a U2 record? It was really an incredible time, and to me, the lesson is to let the weirdos have at the pop stars. (laughter) Put them in a room together.

James Falzone: Well, I love that you say that because another influence that is local here is Robin Holcomb's music.

I remember getting one of her Nonesuch records. Again, a major label letting—and I know Robin well so I don't mind calling her a weirdo—but like an off-center songwriter, she makes a pretty well-financed record. That record had a huge influence on me. I got it from the local library in Chicago. I was probably in eighth grade or freshman year of high school. "Wow. This is songwriting that I can connect with." There were some great jazz players from New York on it. That's well said. That was a time when you had left-of-center records that were super important, and you could find them.

LP: Pretty easily. Well, Nonesuch is a great example. They did some important work in the '80s in terms of letting Zorn make some records and just the distribution that comes with a major label.

I'm sure there are musicians that we know and that you've worked with who are from places not in urban centers who came across Nonesuch records that probably changed their lives.

James Falzone: Yeah, agreed. On the jazz side, I would say the same thing about ECM. Those records, the early Pat Metheny records, the Bill Frisell records, and many, many others have such a sonic imprint. I was listening to one on the way here, a great Swedish folk music musician named Ale Möller, who produced a bunch of great records on ECM. I will always try to imitate the sound of those records. Some people don't like them, but I don't mind saying I do. I like the music.

LP: What's the criticism that you hear on that? What's the knock on that? Because the sonic imprint—I find it comforting and enjoyable.

James Falzone: The critique is usually too much reverb, which is natural reverb, cause he's often recording in churches and things like that. But it's too spacey, too open. People will critique the music for being a little bit… I'll use the word "soft," or not angular enough, or something along those lines. But I think the major critique is the sound; it's not close-miked, it's very atmospheric, and it sounds like you're in a church. If you know something about me, I don't mind being in churches, so the sound of that is totally fine by me.

LP: Yeah, I was going to say, to me, everything you said, it's like, those are all positive attributes. (laughter)

James Falzone: Growing up in Chicago, coming out of the free jazz scene in Chicago, which I love, and those are my dearest friends, many of them, we would have many a fight in a tour van talking about, I would stick up for ECM. "How could you listen to that crap?" Because they want to hear things right up front. It's all about the sound of the music in terms of the players. So close mic'ing, having a much more upfront sonic imprint or anything that has where you've got to sort of listen somehow, I think, is not interesting to some people.

LP: Yeah.

James Falzone: Yeah.

LP: To go back to Chicago for a few minutes and that timeframe when you picked up the clarinet, and you mentioned your uncle, I'm assuming as a physical presence he wasn't always there?

James Falzone: True.

LP: So who was navigating you into the world of Coltrane and Stravinsky and whatever else you were listening to? Did you have a musical mentor or were you just dropped off at the record store and you went for it?

James Falzone: (laughter) Well, there's a little bit of all that at play. First off, Uncle Jim Di Pasquale is his name. I was, in part, named after him. I called Uncle Jim all the time. I can't believe the guy gave me so much time, to be honest.

LP: That's beautiful.

James Falzone: It would be nine o'clock in Chicago, and it's seven o'clock in LA, and I would just call him and say, "I have just learned about somebody named Schubert. Can you tell me about Schubert?" Then Uncle Jim would stop his life and tell me about Schubert. Very grateful to him.

Uncle Jim grew up in Chicago, attended Northwestern, and was very involved in the Chicago music scene until he went to New York and then L.A. Before he left, he was a very good friend of a great jazz musician named Richie Corpolongo.

Richie is still living. I'm hoping to see him in just a few weeks when I go visit Chicago. Richie is a saxophonist, clarinetist, a quintessential jazz doubler. He played saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, and all of the woodwinds so that you could have a career as a working jazz woodwind player.

Uncle Jim connected me to Rich Corpolongo when I was eleven years old. Now, as an educator, I can say, Lawrence, that I was getting a graduate education when I was in junior high school. I would go to Richie's house for a Saturday lesson. The lesson would last an hour. Then, I would usually cut his lawn to help pay for the lesson.

I would go back in, and we would talk more about music, and he'd play records, and we'd talk more. So it was pretty deep. At the time it was also really hard because he was incredibly demanding and I was practicing a lot and my brain development couldn't always keep up with what he was giving me. So I would be practicing and it wasn't getting right. He was a taskmaster. Sometimes it was painful. But that was the person who was guiding me.

LP: Different time, too.

James Falzone: We can't advocate for that kind of education these days because you'll get sued. (laughter) But it was the right thing for me at the time. It was the kind of thing where you'd practice, you'd have an etude or something you're working on, you'd bring it in, you'd play it really well. He'd say, "Yeah, but can you play it backward?"

You could never figure it out, and you'd never satisfy him. But I tell you, by the time I got to college, I looked around and was like, "Wow, how come people can't do these things?" I realized I had been given a pretty special education.

Sometimes, when Uncle Jim came in from California, they would give me double lessons with the two of them in the room. They're old buddies. They would just be coming at me like, "You got to do this. You have to be able to do that. You have to be able to transpose it. You got to be able to play this in this key." It was overwhelming at times, I have to say, but I was so smitten by music that I put the work in. It was fascinating to me.

I would hear these records, these great musicians, and I like, "How do you do that? How do you get to play that fluidly? How do you make sounds like that?" Okay. The answer seems to be that I have to keep working at this to be able to master the instrument.

Then that's not enough. I have to know something about theory, harmony, and composition. That's not enough. I have to know about orchestration. How do I write for different instruments?

I had a couple of good buddies around. I went to a good high school, a public high school in the suburb of Chicago, and there were a couple of great musicians there. We would get together and jam and try to figure stuff out and had formed little bands and things. Playing jazz.

I remember this great drummer, Darren Scorza, who's still a great player in Chicago. We would get together and play tunes. We probably sounded terrible, but we could do it together in a safe space because we were twelve or thirteen, and nobody was listening.

LP: Who were your guys? I mean, you mentioned Coltrane a few times now. Sounds like maybe you're an Eric Dolphy guy.

James Falzone: Yeah, for sure. Dolphy was important. Charlie Parker. I mean, all the jazz greats. Ritchie and my uncle worked great about just getting me schooled with the traditional players. So I had a ton of Charlie Parker records, and I transcribed some of the solos, and Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman.

Richie was definitely a more experimental, free jazz player. He was schooled very much in the tradition of playing over changes and so forth, but he loved to play in a more free context. He exposed me to all kinds of people, including the late Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

LP: Did you stick with Coltrane till the end?

James Falzone: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. In fact, I started at the end. I think the first record I got was "A Love Supreme." Then I got like "Interstellar Space" and "Om" and all those later records. I just thought, "This is what he sounds like." Then somebody said, "Have you heard 'Blue Train'?" I didn't, and I went back like, "Oh, that's a whole other side of it."

Because I'm a clarinetist, there's a certain element in which I had to find clarinet heroes. The first couple of clarinet heroes were actually a very deep Seattle connection, a guy named Bill Smith, who's also known as William O. Smith. Bill lived here in Seattle for forty years. He just died a few years ago.

When I moved to Seattle, I started spending time with him. He was a big hero of mine. When I was about twelve or so, I started listening to Dave Brubeck. Brubeck was a great musician. He had this clarinet player named Bill Smith on many of his records.

Bill was really not very well known. Incredible clarinetist, great jazz musician, great improviser. Bill was a big hero of mine. I got to spend a lot of time with him here. When I moved here, he was in his 90s and starting to become quite ill, but we played duets together.

LP: That's beautiful.

James Falzone: Yeah, it was great. Eddie Daniels, another big name in the clarinet world, was a jazz clarinetist. I mean, during that time, the late '80s and early '90s, you could count on one hand the people doing clarinet in a jazz context. There's a lot more now, but at that time, there were really not very many. Many were doublers playing multiple woodwinds.

Then around '92, I suppose it was; I can't remember the exact year, but Don Byron came along, who is a really important jazz clarinetist. When I heard that first record of Don Byron, which was called "The Tuskegee Experiments," I was sold.

At that point, I was playing a little saxophone because it was unclear if I could make a living as a working musician just playing the clarinet. It sounds crazy now because there are so many clarinetists these days, but in the late '80s and early '90s, there really were not that many, and many were doublers playing multiple woodwinds.

I was playing saxophone, and I had a really good one. That record came out, and I listened to it nonstop, transcribed things, and understood what he was doing on the clarinet. That's what I wanted to do. Then I sold my very nice saxophone, went to Europe, and backpacked around with the money, which was awesome. I've never played anything but clarinet and penny whistle since. Those are my doubles.

LP: For the benefit of listeners, can you talk about why a clarinet player can play a saxophone?

James Falzone: Sure. It's really about the reed. They're both single-reed instruments. You're not dealing with any other kind of embouchure. Embouchure is where you put your mouth and teeth on the reed, on the mouthpiece. For instance, playing the flute is a whole other embouchure.

LP: Yet saxophonists often play flute.

James Falzone: That's because of the big band tradition. Let's say you're playing the second tenor in a big band, and the second tenor might have times when you have to play flute and/or clarinet. So you need to be able to play those doubles to make a living playing that music.

Now, the truth is that big bands are no longer a big thing. They're still out there, and it's awesome, but that's not so much a part of it. I was always interested in original and creative music, and I didn't want to play other people's music, but it's mostly about the embouchure and then fingerings, as well.

The clarinet has a slightly different structure than the saxophone, which is why a lot of saxophonists struggle with the clarinet. The fingerings do change in the second octave, which messes saxophonists up. So a lot of people, when they call it the "punishment stick" or the "pain stick," things like that.

LP: It's awful. It's like playing the piano, and then all of a sudden, at this end of the keyboard, it's painful.

James Falzone: That's right. You've got to change your fingering suddenly and think in a different way. But I think I was becoming a decent saxophonist, but it never felt comfortable to me. It was never something I had a voice on.

I was glad to be able to do stuff with the "pain stick." I stuck with the "pain stick," and never, it's not painful to me. It's joyful and beautiful, but I have to say that now there are a lot more clarinetists doing creative music and jazz and so forth. It's Anat Cohen and François Houle, and these are all people who are friends of mine, Mike McGinnis, and I could go on and on. There are just great people who are playing the instrument and are really focused on the clarinet now. It's great.

LP: You've filled in a great gap in your story for me because I was curious as to the how and why behind going to conservatory. I wanted to ask you a little bit about conservatory training and how it impacts, influences, contrasts with, and conflicts with being a new music performer, especially improvised music. Was there room for being an improviser in the conservatory you went to or was that trouble?

James Falzone: What a great question. The term, of course, means conserve, to be conservative, to hold on to a tradition. Let's backtrack one step. For my undergraduate, I went to a state university. Then, for graduate school, I went to a conservatory.

At the state university level, I was a classical clarinet major. I played in orchestras, chamber ensembles, and so forth. I was learning the instrument in a very deep way. But I had a very open-minded clarinet teacher. His name was Mel Warner. He has passed on now, but he allowed me to do a lot of creative things, and that was rare.

Normally, clarinet teachers, especially back in the '80s and '90s, would have been like, "You play this repertoire, then you play in the orchestra, your recital needs to be the Mozart clarinet concerto," which is a very prescribed way of doing it. Mel said, "I can see your interests are different. You want to pursue this instrument in a different way. I want to give you the training and mastery of the instrument so that you can realize whatever you want." Thank God.

LP: What a beautiful thing.

James Falzone: I've always had good teachers, so my junior and senior year recitals, which are supposed to be playing repertoire of the instrument, he allowed me to play all of my own music.

LP: Amazing.

James Falzone: I'm not even sure he should have gotten away with that, but because there were actual hoops you had to jump through as a woodwind player studying at that school, he allowed me to get around in different ways. But what's wonderful is that he helped me gain mastery of the instrument.

Now, the clarinet is so hard that nobody ever masters it, but at this level, I have a certain proficiency in it. I'm always grateful to Mel for that freedom and also for the discipline of being a really good clarinetist.

So, I took that undergraduate degree, started working in Chicago as a musician, formed my own groups, and so forth. I had gotten married at that time and started thinking about life in the future.

I thought I should go to graduate school because I think I'd probably, at some point, like to teach or be involved in the university setting. I've always liked the life of the mind, learning, libraries, and things of that nature, so I thought that's probably a good place for me to have a foothold. But I also wanted to pursue the next level of artistry.

I started looking at what's out there. There have always been jazz programs, but I wasn't interested in studying jazz. At that point, there had begun to be more open improvisation programs. My master's degree is actually in improvisation writ large. Yes, jazz was a part of it, but so was Indian music, Arabic music, and free improvisation.

LP: Interesting. So, any tradition with an improv element.

James Falzone: That's right. Yeah. I was studying the art of improvisation, and then I could figure out how I wanted to assign that to different kinds of playing.

There are now many more of those kinds of programs. We've been developing that here at Cornish, which I can talk more about at some point. But at that time, there weren't very many. I found one of the only three or four in the country, which was at the New England Conservatory.

At that time, it was called the Contemporary Improv Program, but Gunther Schuller and Ran Blake founded it. It was first called the Third Stream Program.

Third Stream was Gunther Schuller's belief that you took classical music and jazz and brought them together, the two streams, and they formed a third stream, which was genre-less music that was bringing in these different influences.

LP: It sounds very European.

James Falzone: And very ECM. That's where I went to conservatory, and the NEC, New England Conservatory, is a very special, open-minded place. To answer your question, a lot of conservatories will indeed, to this day, conserve the tradition. If you're at Juilliard and so forth, they're expanding these days. However, suppose you're a violinist going to a place like Juilliard or even NEC. In that case, you're stepping into this long tradition of your instrument, and there is a kind of repertoire and tradition to conserve.

I did not experience that at all. I experienced quite the opposite of a complete openness to studying anything I wanted to. But it's because of that particular program founded by Gunther and Ran Blake. Now, there are many more programs like that, even at the undergraduate level, like here at Cornish, but you could go to the University of Michigan. 'U Dub' here in Seattle has a more open program.

LP: Can you talk a little bit about how the modes of pedagogy have changed? Like, we talked about on the individual level, the types of teachers you had.

I've talked a lot in other conversations on this podcast about when my son was little. He started playing the piano at five. He went to a music school in Brooklyn, where the first day he came home from a lesson, he could peck out a little melody, three or four notes, but he was playing. So he was excited, he jumped in, and he was off to the races.

When I started taking piano lessons at five or six years old, I don't think I touched the piano for a year. I sat there with theory books, drawing half notes and quarter notes. It was awful. It was very stereotypical, like a mean, stern female teacher. (laughter) Sorry about that.

James Falzone: That's a little hand slap once in a while.

LP: There was no joy.

I'm curious about what you've seen and how that's influenced the students who walk in there now. Are they coming in differently? Then what happens here that's different from maybe a generation ago?

James Falzone: Beautiful question and a deep question. It deserves its own podcast about just education itself. (laughter)

LP: We'll do it again.

James Falzone: Yeah. Right. Unpacking your question, let's go from different vantage points.

Let me start with Cornish. One of the things that we experienced here when I got here several years ago to look at the music program is that students were coming in with many different kinds of vantage points who were still good musicians but didn't have the traditional ways of coming into music studies the way that I might have had. Music schools were missing out on a lot of really talented young people who, because they didn't have ten years of music lessons like I did or maybe you did or others, still needed to come in.

They might have been making beats in their bedroom with GarageBand, but they have a lot of really great musical potential. So, one of the things that we were thinking about when we reformed our program here was this notion of sound before symbol.

LP: Sound before symbol.

James Falzone: Symbol meaning notes, notation. These five lines and so forth. Your son immediately started learning music by listening to the sound of music. What is music about? It's about sound. It's not about symbols. Notation is a relatively early, recent part of music's history. Music's been around from the beginning of time, even before then, I would offer, metaphysically speaking. Notation is a fairly recent development about how to put that stuff down on paper. Of course, many of the world's musical cultures don't use notation.

So we train musicians how to read here. Of course, you can't leave a music school, I believe, without learning how to read music because it allows you to have a certain fluency to be able to have a career in the art form, but we no longer require it to come in. That's been a big change in the last even ten years.

LP: That's incredible, actually, to hear that.

James Falzone: There's also a component there that has to do with the economics and racial disparity and equity element. Absolutely, like you're missing out on a great gospel pianist who does not read music but can play the hell out of the instrument and has incredible ears and a great sense of arrangement and musicality and ensemble playing and so forth.

So, if the litmus test, which was here for many years, was something that you had to read to get in, we have changed that here. Now, you don't have to read to get in. Our first music theory class starts with how to read, but you can test out of that if you know how to read. So we've created a system here, an ecosystem, which allows different ways of interacting when entering music school.

I feel really strongly about it. I noticed that many other departments are doing that now. Now, there are still folks who say, "No, that should not be. You've got to have a standard of at least coming in with this level of musicianship." I understand that impetus, but I would offer to ask yourself how many great musicians you are missing if you do.

LP: By the way, that modality only works in the world where we still had great music education in the public school context. Where you're going to get kids who could afford private lessons for twelve years.

James Falzone: Yeah. The problem is if you hold entry into undergraduate music studies as being able to read music, you're negating the last twenty-five years of the exodus of music education in the school system.

James Falzone: Go back to what we were talking about twenty minutes ago. I started playing the clarinet because I had a full-time public music teacher showing me flashcards of instruments. Now, my son's public high school, he's lucky if he gets a theater class once in a while. They actually just cut that at his public high school.

LP: You mentioned being around ten years old when all this happened? So, around 5th grade-ish?

James Falzone: Yeah, that's about right.

LP: When I was in 5th grade, the first half of the school year, the teacher had us clear the desks out of the room and to the sides of the room, and we square danced twice a week to record.

James Falzone: I did some square dancing, too, yeah. (laughter)

LP: Then, the second half of the year, she had us listen to a box-set version of "Carmen."

James Falzone: Wow.

LP: Yeah, in public school in fifth grade. I don't even know what class that was supposed to be. It wasn't music class.

James Falzone: Right. It's incredible. That's changed so much, even for your well-funded public schools, though that training is now gone. Yet people are still fascinated by music, doing music, making music, and kids playing instruments, even if they haven't had a lot of lessons yet.

They're learning how to play the piano on their own, or maybe they picked up a woodwind instrument or something, or they're playing bass or guitar. We have a lot of students who come to Cornish who have never had a private lesson. So their first lesson is here at the college level.

Don't get me wrong, that's a struggle at times because we've got incredible faculty here who are saying, "Wow, this student really doesn't know what it means to practice." So that's our job, is to help them figure out, like, yeah, you gotta put some time in on this instrument, or with your voice, or with your songwriting, whatever it might be.

They get it pretty quickly because you don't apply to a school like this unless you want to pursue this passion. We're looking for the level of potential. I'm more interested in how a student graduates than how they come in.

LP: That's interesting, yeah, because it's a self-selecting bunch anyway that show up at your door.

James Falzone: Absolutely, yeah. Graduating artists who will likely not have any particular kind of job waiting for them.

LP: Terrible ROI on this. (laughter)

James Falzone: Right, yeah, that's exactly it. I've got a kid in school right now, in college, and I understand what you're looking at: "Okay, I'm going to be shelling out some money here for my child, and they're going to be working hard. What is going to happen after this?"

My training as a musician makes me ready for almost anything. Young artists make great administrators. Often, not always, but very often, they can think in conceptual ways. They're systems thinkers. They know what it means to be self-disciplined.

Even if you come out of a BFA in dance here at Cornish, which is one of our legacy degrees here, it is hard to find a life, a career in dance right now in America. My daughter is a dancer. I'm watching her work through that. But the discipline of dance, the discipline of thinking as a choreographer, as an improviser, as a maker, you can do so many things with that work. I think that's what we're helping our students to do.

Now, in a larger way, though, I want to say that there are still very conservative music programs around the country. If you're interested, look at my Facebook feed from the last couple of weeks because I actually got into this issue regarding a Juilliard professor who made some public rants about his students, and I took him to task about that.

What's interesting is that the rather long post I made was shared a lot—six hundred times. I'm surprised people even read it. I think it just touched a nerve because we're in a moment in which music schools have to rethink how we're doing this project of educating future musicians.

I have to say, even though I encounter some curmudgeonly thinking these days, I also encounter some really exciting things. We're in a moment of really seeing things change, and I'm excited about the future of music education at the college level, which then filters down to the public school level and the private instruction level. I think there are some really great teachers around there now. I think people are realizing, again, the sound before the symbol.

Get them to make, experience, and enjoy the sound and beauty of music, and then fill in the blanks. You can play these chords; you're getting a facility of hearing it. Let me show you what you're doing. When you put those two things together in that order, it makes more sense, and it becomes more enjoyable, I think.

Who knows what young people will do with that if they want to pursue it as a career or not? But if they don't, they've got this knowledge about how music works.

LP: Well, talking about all the changes in the world and the workforce and the greater culture, someone coming out of art school with a degree in dance or any of the arts, they're going to be a lot harder to displace in the workforce. It's a lot harder to teach an autonomous robot to do modern dance than it is to teach an AI to replace a computer programmer.

James Falzone: A great point. Here at Cornish, one of the areas that is most concerned about AI is design. We've got a wonderful design program here.

LP: That industry has been decimated.

James Falzone: We had a presentation last week from one of our design faculty who was showing us that Adobe products now use AI for recommendations. You might be working on something, and it might say, "Would you like me to do this part of your design for you?"

He showed us how this works, and indeed, it was making some fairly interesting designs. The students and the faculty looked at it, going, "I had no idea it would be quite that compelling." You're right. There's not going to be a lot of AI stuff replacing your local improvising clarinetist. Thankfully.

LP: That's another rabbit hole that we can go down, and maybe we won't go too deeply, but I have felt over the last six months or so that there might not be a better time to be an artist. First of all, we need artists, given the state of so many things in the world, but they have so many more tools at their disposal.

The AI thing in design has been so disruptive to the commercial part of the industry. But I would imagine it's a lot of fun for a fine artist, or I guess this is a little bit of ignorance or maybe idealism, but it doesn't strike me as that different from Jeff Koons or somebody else having a studio full of people. He's giving them what amounts to prompts. He's setting the North Star. He's saying, "This is what I want."

James Falzone: That's interesting. Yeah. That's a great analysis. The person who's listed as the composer is not doing all of the work. They have a whole army of people doing orchestration, coming up with melodies, all kinds of things.

That's been a way of practicing in film scoring for a long time now. So that's a really interesting point. AI, I think of it as just a room full of people helping you out. I accept it in so many small ways. I use Google platforms a lot for various things. It now finishes my sentences for me, and most of the time, it's right, and I'm fine with that, but I would get nervous if it's finishing my music for me. We have to make decisions about it, I think.

LP: The thing that I've said a few times on this podcast when the topic comes up is I am much more worried about AI in the context of weapon systems than I am in a lot of other areas.

James Falzone: (laughter) For sure. Let's get real, right? Yeah.

LP: In reading a bit about you in your biography, because you're sort of like the ideal guest on this podcast in that you're a multi-hyphenate. Actually, you find that most people are. But I'm really curious: do you have a line of active research you're involved with? If so, what is that?

James Falzone: The answer is yes. I still have an active line of research because I still am a professor and teacher. Teaching needs to be fueled by constant research.

I teach an improvisation course every spring for our students, a required course for every student who studies music here, which I'm proud of. That's great. I'm always trying to keep up with the research and current research about thinking about improvisation and how to teach improvisation, even outside of jazz. This is not a jazz improvisation course. It's improvisation writ larger.

There's a whole area of academic study that is about critical studies in improvisation, led in some ways by a great scholar named George Lewis, who's a great trombone player but also a scholar about this practice. So lots of reading and research about improvisation practice. That's still a big part of my life. I go to conferences to learn and hear people present on it, and I present myself on that subject. So that's a big part of it.

Also, the research, what I would call practice-based research, is for us as artists, practicing artists. Right now, I'm working very deeply on—this gets really nerdy really fast—but I'm working deeply on ornamentation on penny whistle traditions.

The Penny Whistle is an Irish instrument that I've been playing for many years. In the last two or three years, I've really been going deep into the history of the instrument, into certain ornamentation styles, and then trying to transfer that into my own language as a composer and improviser.

So that's some pretty deep research. What does that mean? It has to do with listening, sometimes reading, and sometimes finding videos from different archives. There are some places that archive very traditional Irish music traditions.

LP: That's incredible.

James Falzone: So I'm looking at that stuff and trying to figure out what's happening there and so forth.

There's constant research. I'm not in a library as much as I might've been in the past. Now, it has to do with practice-based research. Getting together with musicians, working with other musicians, practicing together, and finding a common language is research.

But I would say, particularly, it's about keeping up with the understanding of improvised music, as well as the literature and the body of research that's coming out in that field. There are some great things happening in that realm. The University of Guelph in Canada now has an institute of research on improvisation. I try to keep up with a lot of what they produce.

LP: Something that's been very exciting for me and that is reflected a lot in the guests we have on is there's a really great, I was going to say movement or scene, but it's probably multiple scenes making up a movement in Western Europe, specifically Germany, Switzerland, of this sort of, if there was a Venn diagram, it's improvisation, jazz, and electroacoustic music.

So people come from an electronic tradition, even maybe a hip-hop tradition, but they integrate improvisation in the way they use the tools on stage, processing and giving things for musicians to respond to. This is really exciting music.

James Falzone: Oh, I totally agree. That's happening here too. Last week, two great musicians from the Bay Area visited: Philip Greenlief and Scott Amendola. Philip's a saxophonist, and Scott, this great drummer. Scott was live-processing his drums while they were improvising. He also had a microphone on Philip to capture live sounds and process them.

So yeah, that's coming out clearly out of an electronic music, hip-hop kind of sense of live processing. But he was doing it while he was playing drums in a really organic way. It's a big influence on a lot of improvised practice right now. I love it. I don't myself work in electronic music, but I love working with people who are using that in a great musical way.

LP: It's a sign that the music is alive. It's still moving and innovating.

James Falzone: Agreed. Yeah. My only concern is it's boring to watch somebody playing a laptop. We got to train our laptop players to look a little bit more interesting.

LP: What they're doing is so interesting, and there's no way to convey that.

James Falzone: Yeah. It's funny. I went to this conference last summer in Europe, and there was a guy who was doing live processing in an improvised context. He had a screen showing what he was doing, and I was really into it. He was controlling Max/MSP, which is a pretty sophisticated platform, and I could watch him doing all the stuff. So that's one way to solve it.

LP: It's funny you say that because I like Kraftwerk a lot, and I'll see them any chance I get. I went down a YouTube rabbit hole of people who were able to film angles in the room of what they're actually doing standing at those podiums. There's this big debate about whether they are just pressing a button and standing there. And they're not, obviously. I mean, maybe not obviously, but they're not; I can definitively tell you they are not. They are improvising, and it's truly amazing to watch what they're doing, the different software they're using, and the controllers.

James Falzone: Last week, I went to a concert here in town at the chapel where you heard me play and there was an electronic musician who was playing uninteresting visually. The music was fantastic. I was really enjoying it. But it completely took out the element of interacting with a live performer. I was really enjoying the sounds, and so that's no problem, but I thought to myself, I could have stayed home and just listened to this.

LP: Yeah.

James Falzone: Because the performance element was gone. So I thought to myself, maybe he should have done it off stage and put a film up, or maybe he needs to think more about the fact that he is performing. I don't really want to look at somebody just with a glow in their face and clicking. I know that he's doing incredible things, but I have to have some synergy with him as a performer. So it's something that I think we're in the infancy of. It's only been happening for the last ten years, fifteen years. So we'll see it change.

LP: Yeah. In the old days, whether it was something like Tangerine Dream or even some ambient artists, they had these big banks of equipment. So it was a little bit more dramatic to watch them.

James Falzone: In a hip-hop context, DJs are people who are spinning records and things. They're super into it. They're grooving along with it and so forth. I feel like right now, the more improvised electronic musicians could be reminded that they are on stage in front of fifty people who paid twenty bucks a ticket to get in. That may sound a little judgmental, and I hope it doesn't sound like that; it's more of like a concern because I want that music to be successful in live contexts, and sometimes I think, "You're on stage, friends."

LP: There's a group here that puts on ambient shows. I think it's called Reflections or Age of Reflections. They've been doing it in a couple of the churches. They have these full immersive light shows that take up the whole room in the church, so that gives you something to interact with. The sound also, I think, might be in surround sound, so it's a little bit more dramatic and a little bit more to get involved with rather than just watching the person.

James Falzone: I'd be interested in that more. I'd like to check them out. Again, I don't want to be dismissive or judgmental because I really enjoy the music. I just am cognizant of the performative aspect of playing live music. So if you're going to play live, electronic, improvised, interactive music, that performer needs to just take into consideration that, from the audience perspective, it is not terribly exciting to watch somebody working behind a laptop.

LP: It's like what a lot of the EDM DJs have done. They've taken to wearing costumes.

James Falzone: I don't have any good answers, but I do notice it as an issue.

LP: I want to talk about Wayfaring, in particular in some of your work. I wanted to ask, what, if any, influence or role does the concept, as well as the actual musical influence of minimalism, play in what you do?

James Falzone: Well, first, I'll say that I've studied that music pretty extensively. The history of what we know as actual minimalism.

LP: We had Kerry O'Brien on the podcast, by the way.

James Falzone: Oh, okay. One of my closest friends. Taught here at Cornish for several years, now caring for her very cute son.

So, I've studied music extensively, including Steve Reich and all the classics, and I have written music using those techniques. I think one of the things to remember is that minimalism has some technique behind it, some compositional practices that you can employ, the idea of phasing, and so forth. It's not just a sound. It's also a way of making. So, I have taken some of those elements and used them in some of my compositions. I think that's important to say.

But then, if your question is a little bit larger about reducing the material that you might be working with, that's something that I think is influencing me more and more as I get older. I love that Kerry and Will's book starts with Miles Davis.

LP: Yeah, it's incredible. The re-contextualization they did is amazing.

James Falzone: Exactly. That's helped me talk about, again, back to research, reading that book, and talking with Kerry about minimalism; yeah, Miles was the ultimate minimalist in a lot of ways. Just the choice notes, like if you think of the solos on "Kind of Blue," the choices that he makes are so minimalist.

Yes, the actual techniques I have thought about and used, and I've recorded some of that music. I have a recording of Steve Reich's "New York Counterpoint" for 11 clarinets. But also just thinking about a reduction of material and choices.

Last night, we had a faculty concert here, and I did an improvisation with two of my colleagues, Greg Campbell and Heather Bentley. It was a great moment at the end, the last three or four minutes. I was playing some piano, and it was so clear to me that there was nothing more for me to play. Greg was making sounds, Heather was making sounds, and there was an audience.

One's ego could say, "Hey, you're the Dean at this college. You should play some, and you should play all the way to the end." But I'm so glad that my training, experience, and long hours put into this practice have just said, "No, there's nothing for you to add." That's a minimalist approach. It's about nothing else except what the music needs.

LP: Yeah.

James Falzone: I'm glad that minimalist thinking has crept into my work. If I have a thirty-minute car ride, I'll put on Steve Reich's "Piano Phase," which drives some people crazy. But I don't know if you know that piece or not. It's this looping piece that has two pianos that are moving in and out of phase. The patterns that develop are still just fascinating to me.

I like elements of that in my own music at times. That's the great thing about being a composer, thinker, and music maker today, which is that everything's fair game. You could put in some moments of very traditional choral writing, work into some minimalist writing, work into some free improvisation, and it all can work now. It's awesome.

LP: I had a piece I was working on for a while that was playing with phasing, and I loved all the weird sounds that came out of it, whether they were sonic artifacts that were acoustic in the room or whether it was in the GarageBand file, it got so dissonant. I loved the dissonance of it, and everyone I played it for said, "That's like cars crashing." And I'm like, "Yeah, it's great. I love noise." (laughter)

James Falzone: It is funny when you realize that as musicians, the things that we don't think twice about for some people are very disturbing. Last night at this concert, a colleague of mine here who teaches at Cornish and outside of music was there, and at the halftime, the intermission, she came up to me and said, "Is the rest of it going to be this atonal?"

LP: You know, if we're lucky! (laughter)

James Falzone: She meant it very well-meaning, but I said, "There was nothing atonal in the first part of this concert. It was totally consonant." I realized the divide between musicians and non-musicians. Now, she works in costume design. She could come up with the most radical costumes that I might look at and go, "What the hell are they wearing?" But in her medium, that's just normal. But she comes to a concert and she wants to hear some melody and some traditional rhythms and so forth. Even at a funky art school like this, we still have work to do in terms of helping each other understand each other's mediums.

LP: I ask you a question that I hope it's not too cheeky. What is the difference between noise, sound, and music?

James Falzone: Let's start with music. There's a great book called "On Music" by Theodore Gracyk. He's a philosopher who's interested in music but not a musician. He's got a lovely, short, but very meaningful book about defining music.

I'm going to stick with the fact that music is organized sound.

LP: Organized around time?

James Falzone: Well, maybe, yes. I mean, music happens in time, so it's inevitable. But it's an organized sound, and I'm going to take out that it used to be called "humanly organized sound." I'm comfortable leaving the human part of it out.

LP: They have to be.

James Falzone: Right? Organized sound. Because if it's not organized, I would say that it's not musical. Now, don't think that I mean organized has to be systematic in some way. Cage's "4'33"" is a way of organizing sound by allowing no organization for the sound. When I say organization, I'm talking about a very open terminology there. But I'm going to say that music happens when the sounds are organized. It may be organized by the listener, which I think is what Cage was getting at. It may be organized by the composer, by the improviser, and so on and so forth.

Sound is a naturally occurring phenomenon at all times. In our conversation here, it's happening with our voices and the sounds of all that we're making, but the cars going by and the HVAC system going on, which has this nice drone for us. It's happening all the time. It's always around.

I was working in a wood shop once with a friend of mine who was helping me learn about making furniture, which I can't do and I'm terrible at it. But one thing that happened to me is that the machines that were running were creating intervals that sometimes were perfect minor intervals. I'd find myself getting very melancholy during this hour of working session. I realized that's because the pitches were creating these sort of minor chords for me, which was triggering me into kind of a sense of quiet introspection.

LP: That's what minor chords do.

James Falzone: Right. He, of course, never thought about it cause he's just used to it, but sound affects us all the time. I was organizing that into something that resembles music because I'm so attuned to it. That's how I'm differentiating between sound and music. Sounds are the building blocks of music. Everything is sound. The organization of it, whether it's humanly organized or organized by happenstance or whatever, that's when things get musical.

Now, regarding your question about noise, I guess it's not a category for me. I'm not going to find a definition for it. I don't think of anything as noise.

LP: I think a defining attribute of noise is that it's artificially generated. If it's naturally occurring, it's sound. That's completely arbitrary on my part, but it's what's stuck in my head.

James Falzone: Artificial, but who would create it artificially, or what would create it artificially?

LP: Well, here's where your point completely challenges my assumption. A machine makes noise. A volcano makes sound. (laughter)

James Falzone: Because one is natural and the other is fabricated?

LP: I don't know why I relate noise to something that has to do with an industrial process. There wasn't noise pre-industry. Or maybe even the first Bronze Age tools made noise.

James Falzone: Interesting.

LP: That's stupid, I know.

James Falzone: No, no, I appreciate it. Although, I would encourage you to walk down a street with a lot of industrial noise and organize it as a musical performance.

LP: That's the thing. That's where I'm completely wrong because I hear those same things as well. I love the rhythm of machinery. I use machinery as building blocks in a lot of the music or a lot of the soundscapes.

James Falzone: I love the question, Lawrence, and you're challenging me because I don't think I have a category for noise. It's just sound or music.

There's this phenomenon where you can get really irritated by hearing people eat. It's a psychological disorder, a cognitive thing that has a name.

LP: Once you notice it, yeah.

James Falzone: I'm sitting around the dinner table with my three kids and my wife, and I'm hearing them all eat. We love to eat and be together, and it's been growing as I get older. The sound of people eating is disturbing to me, but I still wouldn't say it's noise. I don't think I can't figure out what I would constitute as noise. So I'm just going to keep it as two categories, sound and music. (laughter)

LP: Yeah, I think to close on that, I think noise has a negative connotation. Noise is like, this is not important sound. That's bothering me because, to your point, you could use noise.

James Falzone: Yeah. I'm going to go with Cage who really helped us realize that all sounds are to be embraced. All sounds are there as interesting and as potentially musical if we'd like them to be, but just let sounds be what they are.

Man-made volcanoes. I've never thought about the sound of a volcano. I like that. Or a waterfall. A waterfall can be a very intrusive sound. You can't have conversations around it. The HVAC system still allows us to have a conversation. If we were near a waterfall, this conversation would have been over. (long, awkward pause followed by much laughter)

LP: That's ridiculous. So you and I are here because I saw a performance of your small group Wayfaring. I guess 'duo' would be an accurate way to say it.

James Falzone: The smallest of groups. (laughter)

LP: Well, I guess, yeah, all right, fair. One of the pieces that really blew my mind to see live, and by the way, I hadn't listened to Wayfaring before I saw it, so I walked in not really knowing what I was getting.

James Falzone: Oh, I love it. I love going to shows that way.

LP: "Who Put The Blood."

James Falzone: Mm hmm.

LP: There's a lot of questions I have about that piece. First, seeing the two of you perform it and watching the different things you had to do to build around what Kate was doing was incredible. Just the sonic world the two of you created. But then, when I listened to the recording, I couldn't believe how much of it you pulled off live.

I was expecting the recording to be much different. Did you record that piece? It doesn't cheapen it to say there are overdubs at all. Do you record live with her? Is all of that you picking up instruments and?

James Falzone: So there are overdubs on that particular track, but we always record live. There's always an element that's live.

So I believe on that recording, the bass line, clarinet, circular breathing thing that I'm doing, and her vocals are live and bass. She always plays bass and records together. So we're very dedicated. I am always dedicated to as much live as I can make in a recording. There are lots of ways to make records.

Peter Gabriel, like, going back to our earlier part, a lot of that's not live. It's Frankenstein'ed together. Totally cool, viable way to make records. For what I want to do, and for what Wayfaring's about, it's really about the interaction between Katie and me. So we want to have as much interaction going on as possible.

The initial thing is the (sings) "bah bah dee bah bah dee bah bah bah bah bah," that thing is happening with me, circular breathing and her playing live and singing. Then we put some overdubs on top of that. What you experienced in the moment of us doing it, it's definitely, I think that the smoke and mirrors there is the circular breathing.

People don't know what's going on, and they can't quite figure it out. If you don't see my foot, you don't know that the drone is coming from the shruti box, which is that I'm pumping with my foot.

LP: I saw all that. (laughter)

James Falzone: Yeah. Okay. Well, Katie has this great ability. It's rare for somebody to sing as beautifully as she can while she's playing. It's impressive. It's a really, it's a great thing. There are examples of Esperanza Spalding and people like that, but Katie does it in a way where you really feel like the two are not; you're wondering if somebody else is doing something because they don't seem related.

LP: That's exactly right. The melodic bass line she's playing is such a different melody than what she's singing.

James Falzone: That's right.

LP: I don't want to over-describe it because it's so compelling to watch.

James Falzone: Well, it's, I haven't thought about this much until recently, our last tour, a lot of people are now commenting on that particular song because it's now documented on the record. We're filling up a lot of sonic space.

So, the harmonic spectrum goes from these low frequencies to these high frequencies. When you get bass, clarinet, shruti box, maybe some bells, and her soprano voice all going at the same time, you're filling up a huge amount of that sonic space. That's going to produce some sympathetic partials and harmonics that are coming out.

It's about all that stuff ringing and moving around. There's a lot of sonic ground we're covering, and I think people's experience of that is like there's got to be somebody playing something on a laptop or something like that, but it's not; it's just us filling up that space.

LP: Can you tell me anything about the murder ballad as a form, or why did murder ballads exist? Was murder that common? (laughter)

James Falzone: It seems to be connected to themes of the Middle Ages, of medieval balladry. In the Middle Ages, going around and telling epic stories and tales before any recordings or notated things are happening.

LP: Death ballads and epics.

James Falzone: Yeah. People are going around telling these stories. We still love a good murder. I mean, I love mystery novels, and we like to watch TV detective shows and other things like that. It's just kind of a fascinating thing for humans to experience. Like "Who Put the Blood," the idea of telling this story about somebody getting murdered is often about the mom finding out that there's blood on this boy's shirt and "What happened there, young man?" "Oh, I killed the rabbit." "Oh, but that's different blood than a rabbit should be." Then it comes out that's actually a person. That whole story has been told so many times, and the same kind of stories.

So, it appears to be lodged in a medieval sensibility of storytelling that then starts to accompany the story. The troubadours who would go around telling these stories would accompany themselves almost like a film score. Then, I think at some point, you actually start putting a melody to it and making a song out of it.

By the time you get to the 18th or 19th century, especially in the British Isles, these songs become passed down.

LP: They're a bit more fixed.

James Falzone: Yeah, they actually have a set kind of text. You've got different variations of them. Then, as immigration starts happening, there's also this element of Irish immigration going on because you've got to leave the country and go to America. I don't think it actually says America in "Who Put the Blood," but it's pretty evident that's where he's going. That whole idea of fleeing because of some problem in the homeland. I don't know if it was that way in the show that you heard, but Katie had mentioned that there's even a little myth in her family background that one of her relatives came to the States in the early 20th century because there was some altercation back in the homeland. Very common, sometimes mythologized story.

But yeah, you'll find a version of that song thirty different times. A little different allocation of who got killed or who did the killing or whatever it is. But in other cultures as well, because I know you have experience creating music of other cultures. I mostly see English versions of it. There are probably versions in other cultures. I've not seen those, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a version of somebody leaving Lebanon or Syria that's a very similar kind of thing. Or other parts of Asia. But I see many variations coming out of the British Isles. Scottish version, English version.

LP: Bloodthirsty bunch. (laughter)

James Falzone: I know. Yeah. Yeah. It's often about immigration to Australia, to the United States, and maybe to mainland Europe.

LP: How do you and Katie come up with the repertoire?

James Falzone: It's very often just sending a track as a text, like, "Hey, what do you think of this?" Then I listen, and I go, "Nah," or I like, "Ooh, oh, I think we got one there." Then we'll get together, and I'm going to Chicago next week. We'll get together and figure it out. How do we want to present it in a way that's authentic to us?

"Who Put the Blood" was literally that. I was listening to a version of that while I was washing dishes. I can still remember. I just thought, "Oh, Katie will kill this one." I just texted it to her and found a track. I found a sample of it, and that's it.

Many of the songs on our first record come out of us both directing music at churches. So, we experienced different hymns and old spirituals that we just thought would work well for the group. There's an old spiritual where she's playing like a banjo-style accompaniment.

LP: Yeah, I remember she's plucking.

James Falzone: That's right. That, again, was just a song that I had sung through the church and just thought it would work for us. So, very often, it's just us passing ideas back and forth.

Sometimes, if it's an original composition, we'll actually bring something in that we've written for the group, and it exists on sheet music, and we'll work it out.

I think what's important for that group is that the melodic material, the compositional material, is relatively simple. We're not going for super complex things, at least not in the actual material itself. We make it more complicated by the arrangements and what we do with it. But the material itself can exist on one piece of paper or just one concept if it's not been written down. It's what we do with it that becomes more complex.

We've taken an old murder ballad that is usually just somebody and a guitar accompanying themselves, and now you've got this extended clarinet technique that's now holding the whole thing together, which is just our unique contribution to the music.

LP: Yeah, it's interesting about circular breathing because I'm trying to play melodica. And I keep watching YouTube videos that are like, "Oh, circular breathing is easy. You'll learn in five minutes if you watch this video." I watch all those videos, and I try to do it, and I'm like, "I can't do it." And I'm like blowing bubbles in glasses.

James Falzone: The good thing about it is it's a bit like juggling. Once you figure out the pattern, you can never not do it again.

LP: That's sort of what I'm gathering.

James Falzone: Once your muscle memory clicks in about it, you'll realize, "Oh my gosh, I can never not circular breathe again."

LP: That's good to know.

James Falzone: You might get better at it over time. I've gotten better at it, but yeah, it's really muscle memory and developing some specific ways of understanding the technique. I learned it without ever having anybody teach it to me. I was just interested in it, and I kept working on it until I figured it out. It's also the way I taught myself how to juggle three balls of socks until I was like, "I'm not going to leave this room until I can figure out this pattern," and I did, and I'm pleased.

LP: Of your ensembles, is Wayfaring, do you view that as an ongoing concern? Because I would like another record, please. And maybe another show.

James Falzone: Well, I appreciate that. Katie and I are dedicated to keeping it going. No question. We're enjoying the success of this new record. We have a show in Chicago and a show in Boston. I'm working on some concerts for us in the UK this summer. We'll keep on keeping on.

It's interesting. We're of different generations. We have a really great musical relationship, and it just works. She's not afraid to get into some really transparent, authentic, and scary places as an improviser, which is always what I want to be able to do. Then, both of us can stop all that and execute a line, which is also really important to me.

She's just a great person to hang out with and be with, and she has incredible singing skills. We have very similar interests in melodic shapes. If you've noticed, a lot of what drives that group is about melody.

LP: Sure. Melody and arrangement. It's the two things.

James Falzone: Right, exactly. It's not that sophisticated rhythmically. We're kind of always in this range of rhythms. It's about the melodic shapes and their delivery in terms of thinking about the sound development and how we present it.

LP: In the spirit of the multi-hyphenate, and I saw this maybe referenced in one of the workshops you do or in some context, but the idea of the musician entrepreneur.

You're a musician entrepreneur, and you own a label. I'm just curious: the modern artist, the modern musician, has to be so many things now. You have to master social media and maybe these production tools and all these things. Can you talk a little bit about your realization slash coming to terms slash embrace of all those roles? I can't imagine as a teenager or even in conservatory, you thought someday I'm going to be marketing my own music.

James Falzone: Yeah, it's true. Looking back on that, it was still at a time when I was in undergrad and even in grad school where you still did things like shop around your record. That was still a concept.

LP: Like somebody might actually pay me for this. (laughter)

James Falzone: Yeah, right. I might go to an office in New York and say, "Can I have five minutes of your time?" I mean, that was still a concept.

My recital for my graduate school should have been in 2000. I wrote a suite-length piece with some great musicians on it who are now quite well known, but we were all in graduate school together. It was a really great performance that was recorded very nicely. I thought, "I should release this. I should shop this around."

In the year 2000, I was living in Boston, so I started contacting some people. Of course, nobody was interested in releasing some weird, improvised, hour-long suite. So I started thinking, "What if I just do this myself? How do you do that? How do you actually produce a CD?" Because, at that point, CDs were still the only real mechanism.

So I just learned how to do it when I realized, "Oh, I could start my own label." It gave me the power and the control to do things the way that I wanted to do it. I could choose my own art on the cover. I could do a CD release when I wanted to do the show. Everything about it, "Wow, I can just do this on my own, not have to worry about anybody else." Any of the sales come to me, all that kind of stuff.

So I did. I learned how to do it. I learned about mastering. I learned about the production of the actual product. I learned what it means to put on a CD release concert and maybe do a small tour and all that stuff. At that time, I didn't even have a website. I just thought of that, okay, this is release one on this idea that I had formed, which I call "Allos Music." So "allos" means "other." It was just a way for me to say, "I make other music." It is hard to categorize, and it is not really easy genre-based music.

Then I just started to say, "Well, okay, if I'm going to do this, I better get a little bit more serious about it." Then, to your point, I had to learn about website design and record distribution. Okay, it's one thing to have this thing that I can sell at a concert, but I only get thirty people at my concert. I want to sell more than that.

So then I started thinking about online marketing, and this was when the web was really bursting open and things like CD Baby started helping you sell stuff.

So, I'm now on my 17th release. The Wayfaring release is 16. I've got another one coming out in April. That's going to be the 17th. It's been a joy. It's interesting because I've had some really great reviews in big publications, such as the New York Times and Downbeat. It hasn't really amounted to any bigger paying gigs.

In some ways, I take all that with a grain of salt. It's great to get your work out there and to get people to see your name in print. It's fun to see your name in print, all that stuff. But truly, what I'm interested in is the synthesis of all these things that are coming together. Because for me, it's about live performance. I want to be on stage, not because I want to be egotistical and that's not what I mean. I want the place for improvised music to be in front of people.

LP: Yeah, it's fun to play in front of people.

James Falzone: It's fun. Hopefully, it's fun to experience. I want to curate an experience of that. One way to get people involved in that experience is through the recorded medium, online presence, and so forth.

But I was talking to my wife the other day. I was like, "Remember when I used to send postcards out about my gigs?" I'd have some gig at a local jazz club in Chicago, and I'd send out a hundred postcards that say, "Hey, I'm playing at the Empty Bottle on such and such date." It's the same thing. It's just now I can send out one Facebook post and reach 5,000 people in one fell swoop. Or at least that's the number of friends that it says I have.

So it's such a complex thing, and it fills me with wonder about how to get students right now to think about it. I don't want to overwhelm them with that stuff because they can think, "Oh, I've got to get my brand together." It's like, "No, you got to learn your scales, dude. No, you can brand yourself later, but right now, you can't play your instrument very well."

LP: And your brand is you're a bumbling fool. (laughter)

James Falzone: Yeah. I mean, they will say stuff like that. Freshmen are coming in, talking about getting their online presence together. We all chuckle a little bit and say, "We'll get you there. But right now, we need to get you to sing in tune or learn what a G major chord is and so forth."

So, it is hard and complex. I'm comfortable with it, though. It's really a joy to have different means of letting people know what you're doing. Recordings, online presence, social media, playing gigs—it's all coming together in a rich, organic life.

There are people who do different parts of it better. There are people who run their own labels and certainly sell more than mine do or have more airplay or radio play or whatever, but I'm pretty comfortable with it all right now. It feels good.

LP: As somebody just getting to know your universe. So, looking at it for the first time, there's certainly an aesthetic visual to the discography. I'm not familiar with every note of all of it, but we talked a little bit earlier about this breathy openness to the sound. There's an aesthetic for sure.

James Falzone: I think because I had such good training at an early age, I probably arrived at an artistic voice a little earlier than some people do. I would say by the time I was in my mid to late 20s, I was doing what I'm doing now. I almost get a little embarrassed by that.

I mean, I've grown certainly as an artist, but if you listen to me when I was 29 or 30, it's not much different than who I am at 52. I guess that's a good thing. You know, you find a voice, you stick with it. You're living the life of an artist.

You hear about people having these major changes. I'm a big fan of Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer. I was in Estonia this summer, and I went to the center based on his life. There's this documentary film about the pivotal moment when he discovered the tintinnabuli series of pitches and made this major shift in his composing. I was just like, "I could use a major shift."

LP: I didn't get one of those! I didn't get one of those! (laughter)

James Falzone: I'm still doing the same thing I was doing 15, 20 years ago. I enjoy it, but I notice how I have this thing that I do, and I've been doing it. The truth is I feel very comfortable with it. That's why it's great to have somebody like Katie, who's younger than me and who brings a different energy.

I do play with older musicians sometimes who bring a whole different energy, and so this is a great mix.

LP: My version of that moment is obviously not as large, but my sort of epiphany or breakthrough moment was the permission to do it because I hadn't really been creative on my own behalf. I'd always been helping other creative people with their vision.

I hadn't been creative on my own behalf since probably my mid-twenties. That was the last formal band context I was in. Just over the last few years, I gave myself permission to do it again with twenty-some odd years of life experience, technical experience, and business experience that I could bring to creativity. That's the permission to do it.

James Falzone: I love that. Age brings wisdom. Not always.

LP: But in a certain sense of like, I don't give a fuck.

James Falzone: Yeah, right. Yeah. I know. You understand how things are working. You understand. I mentioned that choice last night to not play. That's a fifty-year-old move. That's not a thirty-year-old move. I would have entered back into that sound last night when I was in my late twenties or early thirties.

LP: Yeah, I was telling you earlier, the phase piece I worked on, I worked on it for, I don't know how many hours, but I worked on it a lot over a period of time. I'm probably going to throw it out. I'm so comfortable with that. Before, I used to think that if I made it, I had to finish it. I have to figure this thing out and finish it and put it out and master it. Now, I'm like, it's not really working for me, or maybe I'll listen to it sometimes. Do something else with it and sample it. But it was like, I don't care.

James Falzone: It's great; it's the lesson of the Buddhist sand paintings. Spending days and weeks creating these intricate sand paintings and then just blowing it away. The transience of it all, I think is, those are important lessons.

LP: So you're bringing me to my last question, which is, you mentioned earlier, you made a reference to music always being there, even before time. It's been there for millennia. You said metaphysically, it's always been there. I wonder what is your metaphysics or what is the role of metaphysics in your music.

James Falzone: It's a fascinating question to ask any artist. In one sense, I have a background in the Christian church. I worked for the church for fourteen years, directing music. Powerful experience working for a church or a synagogue or anything like that. It's completely service music. You've got to be making music for the people, not for yourself. I'm so glad I learned those lessons. Because every time I let my ego get in the way of the music, the people suffered. So it was completely about serving them. I really loved that experience.

There was a time in my life when I thought I was being called into theology or being called into being a musician, a minister, or a PhD in theology, things of that nature. I've always been fascinated from a young age by how people think about spirituality, about God, writ large, like comparative religion. I took a lot of coursework in comparative religion.

LP: That's all fascinating.

James Falzone: Yeah, I want to understand how a Buddhist thinks, how a Muslim thinks, how an atheist thinks, and all these things coming together. My own personal vantage point is coming from a Protestant Christian background, but that's morphed and changed, and so forth.

So, for me, there's this belief in the Middle Ages about musica mundana, the music of the world. There's the music of the world, and there's the universal music that exists in the universe. Sound is always there. What happens when it becomes musical is that we enter into it and make it musical, but all those sounds exist at all times. I'm pretty comfortable with that. So, to me, music is a kind of sound that is a kind of foundational experience of being human.

LP: That's a Sufi point of view as well.

James Falzone: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of different religious vantage points have the same kind of concept. I have a lot of friends who are involved in sound healing, and they're using actual frequencies to help people with different ailments and so forth.

This is not metaphysics. This is science. We know that frequencies can actually change brain waves, which can help people deal with anxiety, blood pressure issues, and other such issues. So, I really do see all those things. I'm not interested in sound healing as a practice, but I'm interested in my music being healing.

So how can I bring that kind of sentimentality into my work so that music can still, even though I'm making music for my own aesthetic reasons, be service music? I care that people listen. A lot of composers and musicians don't. "I don't really care if anybody likes my stuff; I'm just going to do my thing." I get it. I totally understand. But the truth is, at the end of the day, I care if you listen. It doesn't mean I'm going to pander to you or make something that's going to be easier for you to listen to, but I care about bringing you into the moment.

LP: Isn't "I don't care" a defense mechanism? Isn't that, I mean, that's the thing I was taught. The person who tells you "I don't care" is the person who cares a lot.

James Falzone: Yeah, maybe so. Yeah, maybe so. The older I get, the more I care about how people listen, if they listen. Again, I want to make sure it's clear that's not about trying to pander to the audience or necessarily grow an audience, but whoever is there, I want to bring them into the experience.

It's a little bit why the way that "Who Put the Blood" came together, the idea of starting with this repetitive pattern using circular breathing is not by mistake, it draws you in because there's a moment where you're saying, "Why isn't he breathing? Oh, he's doing something" and you're intrigued and then Katie starts singing this haunting lyric and melody and then here comes this drone and it's just, it's there to draw you into the whole experience.

I teach this course on Fridays for a retirement community that asked me to teach a course on protest music.

LP: Oh wow.

James Falzone: So I'm teaching this online course for people in their seventies and eighties and maybe 90s. It's all on Zoom, and they're just lovely, and I can see them in their rooms. It's called Wesley U. It's the Wesley Retirement Community. That's like their little university. So it's awesome. Keep the people engaged.

LP: Yeah, exactly.

James Falzone: Some of these folks are deep people: doctors, lawyers, and educators who are now retired or maybe in assisted living. Maybe they're dealing with Alzheimer's or dementia, whatever it might be.

Anyway, yesterday I played for them Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam." Several of them, many of them, had never heard it before. Those who did had never really analyzed the words before. So here, everybody in that space was white. Here we're listening to this song together. I actually played them in a live version, in which Nina Simone was present. You can see the pain and anguish on her face. It was recorded around '65, I think, in Sweden. So, after some bombings in Alabama. The very reasons why she wrote this song were still going on.

We talked about a lot of things, but one of the things we talked about is how that music, she purposely drew you in because it starts off in this like musical theater kind of, if you know the song, it's like, (sings) "bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, Alabama's gotten me so upset." That's the first line. She draws you in by having music that is completely unrelated to what she's about to say. I was reflecting on that with these folks yesterday about how absolutely genius that is. I mean, true genius manipulation of music. She cared if you listened. She needed you to listen. Was she changing the words or the storyline? No, she called everybody out.

LP: Yeah, she was serving the dish cold.

James Falzone: Totally cold. Yeah, exactly. She controlled the medium of music to make sure you were drawn in so that you wouldn't miss the message. Now, I'm no Nina Simone, and I think of her as a high watermark up there with Bach and Coltrane and everybody else.

But I'm interested in the same thing. I want to draw people in. Going back to your earlier comment about the entrepreneurial aspect, I want to draw you in by having an online presence and visuals that have a certain aesthetic. The records have a certain aesthetic as well as the way I go throughout my day, the way that I dress, and everything has a way of saying, "I'm interested in connecting with people, and this is the medium that I use."

My work now as a dean at a college is the same. I'm just trying to get people to take this work seriously and draw them into the process through meaningful interaction. To me, it's a very spiritual practice.

Making music is a spiritual practice to me, and it's connected to the spiritual practice of just being alive.

LP: It's a good place to end. James, thank you.

James Falzone: My pleasure. Thank you so much. What a blast. It was absolutely my pleasure and we could talk a lot more. Thank you for the good, thoughtful questions.

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