ArtStorming
Ever wonder what makes really creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? In each episode of ArtStorming, we’ll explore how new ideas come to life, and how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new.
Host Lili Pierrepont takes us on a journey of discovery; inviting us to ponder what drives and sustains the creative spark within each individual.
With great appreciation for music written and performed by John Cruickshank.
ArtStorming
ArtStorming the City Different: Catherine Sikora
Catherine Sikora doesn't just play the saxophone – she uncovers ancient musical truths that have always existed in the ether, waiting to be discovered.
Music for ArtStorming the City Different was written and performed by John Cruikshank.
Ever wonder what makes really creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside?
Speaker 1:Hello, I'm your host, lili Pierpont, and this is ArtStorming, a podcast about how new ideas come to life and become paintings, sculptures, plays or poems, performances or collections. Each episode I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. Today, I'll be artstorming with Catherine Sikora. Now, how I met Catherine is another magic moment in the unfolding of artstorming.
Speaker 1:At the beginning of this year, I put a post on our local community foundation bulletin board in search of someone to help me with my nonprofit ArtBridge and also with this podcast. Within a very short period of time, I started getting inquiries and setting up meetings. The quality of the people that I met through this process was truly astonishing. I honestly wish I could have incorporated all of their talents. Anyway, my next guest, catherine, was one of those applicants. As we were getting to know each other over coffee, she impressed me more and more, and that was before we even got to the part about her musical career. She was poised, sophisticated, worldly and way overqualified for what I had in mind. But then she started to tell me about her life as a musician and the light bulb went off in my head. She wasn't going to be my assistant, but she sure as hell was going to be a podcast guest. I knew that she was about to embark on a music tour and we vowed to keep in touch. I told her flat out that as much as I would benefit from her marvelous skills, she was destined for bigger things, but still I was serious about getting her on the show.
Speaker 1:As you'll hear in our chat after our initial meeting, life unfolded in some unexpected ways for Catherine, but we finally got caught up, and here's our conversation. Parenthetically, that search for an assistant led me to finding two of the most superb and wonderful team members I could ever have hoped for. I cannot imagine my ArtBridge, art-storming life without Lindsay and Mia, my two stars. They each deserve a podcast episode too, but for now here is Catherine, all right, so I am sitting in my living room with Catherine Sikora, and I'll give the backup of how we met in the intro when I do that, but I think it's great that we're finally together. We met back in I guess January was when I was conducting those interviews yes, and so it's been a busy few months. We're now June, so that's six months since I met you.
Speaker 2:Yes, it feels like a couple of weeks to me. Yeah, it's been a crazy time so it feels very compressed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So say a little bit about what you've been up to since January, because I know you went on tour. I should start by saying that you're a musician. Yes, and I'll let you describe what type of musician.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I'm an improvising saxophonist. What I do is essentially free improvisation and I work with a number of different musicians, in addition to having a really very highly developed solo practice. It's free playing. It's not exactly jazz, even though people tend to hear saxophone and think jazz. That's not what I consider it to be. And in January when we met, I was planning a tour in April with a really amazing musician, pedal steel guitarist named Susan Alcorn, and I think it was a week after we met that she suddenly passed away, so that for me that's the start of the year. It was a huge shock and a huge blow, personally as well as professionally, because she was a friend and I had to figure things out. I had to obviously rebook the tour with someone else because our tour was already in place. We were about to book flight to that that week. We were emailing about booking her flights. So this year sort of feels like kind of a bit of a gut punch really um as it does anyway to everyone, I think.
Speaker 2:But yeah, we've got the macro version of exactly that punch and then what you went through personally but, that's, I mean, really speaks to your metal as a musician.
Speaker 1:The show must go on. And how on earth did you? You had, you probably had your sets all figured out. And well, it's all rapport. Or is it because it's more free form?
Speaker 2:we had definitely a rapport and I was so excited to play with her and she was coming out here to the Southwest it was shows in New Mexico and Arizona so luckily, my husband, who's also a musician, was going to be around and was able to jump in, take over the shows and the people who were putting on the shows were happy with that. So that was wonderful. But what we did was very different. You can't, when it's improvised and when it's a real dialogue between creative artists, you can't replicate one situation with another. So we paid tribute to Susan and she was very much present in our minds. We listened to her music as we drove across the desert and we yeah, we- what an emotional experience.
Speaker 2:It was. It was incredibly difficult. I'm still dealing with the fact that she's gone and that there's no more music to be made with her.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sort of that phantom arm experience that you know where, you just sort of expect them to be there and you have to remind yourself that they're not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, very much, because it was so sudden and so shocking.
Speaker 1:And you had played together, obviously before.
Speaker 2:Yes, we had played together before and we had made a record which was released last year, so this was a part of promoting that recording and there was. I was hopeful to develop that and do a lot more touring in support of that recording, and then it all disappeared overnight, which was really devastating.
Speaker 1:I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:Oh man. So how do you bounce back from something like that? I mean, obviously you were really lucky to have somebody that you were very intimate with that could step in and do a show with you. So there was. There wasn't that much of a recount, I mean obviously a big recalibration, but but at least there was somebody that you felt like he had your back right.
Speaker 2:Very much. Yes, that was really fortunate, and had had Eric, my husband, not been available, I don't really know what I would have done. Luckily, I didn't have to think about that and the people who booked the shows were amazing. The morning I got the news about Susan, I was completely in shock and the first thing was that I let them know. So they didn't find out on social media. So I let them know and I said I don't, this is all I can do is tell you this right now. And they all said just take your time, don't. There was no pressure from them, which was really nice.
Speaker 2:But now, as you said, there's this whole branch of work that I had with her. We had a cd, we had another recording, we have another recording that was made but is not out, and so there's this whole path that I envisioned of creating music with her into the future. That is just gone. So I'm trying to figure out what that looks like, because that, you know, one normally has a number of different projects and you're trying to cultivate all of them and and nurture them, and then one I've never had this happen where one is suddenly gone and I'm I'm actually kind of taking time to really try to process that and try to figure out where I really want to go um from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well it's actually, I mean, it's perfect for our purposes because, you know, part of the whole reason that we're doing this project is to sort of put the creative process that a creative goes through kind of out front instead of kind of the mysterious place that it usually abides, you know, and so it's interesting to watch a creative person struggle with the creative process. So I'm curious, what kinds of things have you thought about? Going back to being solo, or what does that look like for you, or what are the types of things that you're thinking about?
Speaker 2:Well, the solo work is ongoing and is always there. I don't even know if I'm ready to answer that question. I'm trying to really dive into my own daily practice, which is always the thing that's your anchor.
Speaker 1:That's the work.
Speaker 2:That's how I process everything, and commitment to the instrument and to that time spent every day is the core of my work, as opposed to performances. Performances are wonderful, but the day-to-day showing up every day is the real work.
Speaker 1:I think that gets lost on people who are not actively engaged in the creative process on a daily basis. They see the result of all the practice and all the work and all the thought that goes into something. But you just articulated beautifully that it's really the day-to-day that you consider your work and then the performance is sort of I don't know, it's like you sharing it with us or something.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting. It's a mix of sharing it and it's also definitely a part of the work and interestingly for me at least and for some other musicians I've spoken to about it when I perform I get really clear guidance on where I'm going to go next in my practice.
Speaker 1:From the internal process or because of audience feedback.
Speaker 2:From the internal process and from what comes out in the music, because what I do is improvisational, so it can be aspects of the music that I want to dive into. Something comes up, new things tend to pop up in performance, which I find very sort of mystical and magical that you do all of this prep work, all of this being ready on the instrument, physically being mentally prepared on the instrument, emotionally aligned with it and with the sound, and what is going to happen, which is always sort of an open question. But then in performance new things pop up. I tend to make discoveries, so it feels like real research, and then I take it back to the practice lab and sort of work out that, oh, this thing happened. Now I can dive into it, but there's something about performance that seems to bring these new things.
Speaker 1:And what do you think it is about? Is it having that third force, the audience, the listening component that brings that magic up, do you?
Speaker 2:think I think it could be, because I think of performance as a collaborative process, because I think of listening as a creative process, of listening as a creative process. So when people are listening really attentively and really involved with what's happening, to me that's a creative exchange.
Speaker 1:So you feel the energy coming from them in their active listening or somehow.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It gets translated or transmuted somehow.
Speaker 2:Right and I think it's energetic. I think there's something about being in a room with people and focused on this one thing. That's also energy work, like qigong or yoga, or where there's something really special about being in a room where everyone is involved with and paying attention to this one thing and not necessarily talking about it. Something else happens yeah.
Speaker 1:Something alchemical actually happens. But it's interesting because the performing arts are so different from the static arts in that sense. As you know, a painter or sculptor is doing all that work and all that magic happens in the studio, and oftentimes they're not even there to see other people interacting with their work. So it's a really rare experience for you to have that component folded into work and then bringing it back into your studio, as you said.
Speaker 2:Fascinating it is. It's very fascinating and I think that the COVID pandemic, with the lockdowns and all of that, really heightened it for me and heightened my awareness and understanding of it, because all of a sudden, live performance was not a thing for a while. So that was taken away and it was. You know, I did a lot of thinking and writing and practicing.
Speaker 1:Did you feel like you were in a vacuum?
Speaker 2:Somewhat, but not entirely, because the practice is always there. But I think when I returned to practice, I had a new awareness of things that happened, and the first live performance that I did after the lockdowns was in May 2021. And it was this series of one-to-one concerts that was done in New York at the Brooklyn.
Speaker 1:It was.
Speaker 2:BAM and Silk Road Wow. So actually the setting was not even BAM, it was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. So Silk Road and BAM got together and they put together I think it was two weekends of solo, one-to-one concerts. So they put a musician in all of these spaces all over the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is enormous. There are all of these big rooms so they could safely have a person, a listener and a performer Right. So I was. I arrived to this day of performance, was put in this big room, sort of a warehouse type space in the Navy Yard, and every 10 minutes a different person was brought in. I would give a 10 minute, one to one performance, and then they were taken out, surfaces were sanitized and I had a little break and then the next person came in and that was a six hour day of 10 minute micro concerts.
Speaker 1:Whoa, how did you sustain the energy for that?
Speaker 2:It was. It was challenging, but it was there. I guess there were enough breaks. It wasn't ever a long period of playing, but it was definitely a challenge. But it was absolutely magical for that to be my first and were you able to get feedback from the your individual audiences.
Speaker 2:Well, we weren't allowed to speak, and so the way it worked is they came in, they were instructed not to speak, I was instructed not to speak and they would sit down and then I'd play for 10 minutes and then at the end I was allowed to write a little note on a postcard. They provided us with postcards and let them know who I was and you know where they could find my music and the name of the piece I played for them and I would hand it. So some people emailed afterwards, which was really beautiful, and there are people I'm still in touch with who were at that Great idea. It's amazing, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so did you get to chat with the other musicians afterward to see what their experience was like.
Speaker 2:Not really we all finished. I think we were all so fried after playing for six hours that we all kind of said goodbye and dissipated. And also the campus is so spread out that my location was actually a 10-minute walk from the central check-in desk. So I think we all a lot of us left at different times, yeah, just sort of dispersed yeah.
Speaker 1:And has that ever been repeated? Or was that specifically because of COVID that that somebody thought of that? Well?
Speaker 2:it's one-to-one concerts is actually a German nonprofit. Who started it? And I'm I think it was because of COVID, but I'm not entirely certain, and I think it was because of COVID, but I'm not entirely certain, but they started it in Stuttgart Airport, I believe, and they had members of the orchestra there in these different rooms in the airport giving individual concerts to one person at a time, which is just the most beautiful thing I can imagine doing in an airport.
Speaker 1:And people from all over the world in the Stuttgart Airport, right? So I mean not only the concert receivers, but I imagine the musicians as well. So an international kind of event.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so now they do that at different times and you can contact them, and it was definitely done in collaboration with them. So BAM and Silk Road did it with them as a presentation of this concept, which I absolutely love, and I think that really, for me, triggered a lot of understanding, because I hadn't performed in front of people since it was. My last performance was March 2020. Right, right at the beginning of March, and even then, audience members were canceling. You know, things were starting to go, so I was hypersensitive to the change, sure, and it was just phenomenal as an experience to live through.
Speaker 1:Well, can you imagine, was that something that you got compensated to do, or was this like a free concert, or how did that work?
Speaker 2:It was they compensated to do, or was this like a free concert, or how did that work? It was they compensated the musicians. There was a structure in place where everything all the musicians were paid, but the concerts were free. So people could just sign up but they never knew who they were going to hear. You just got a slot and then you got brought to some musician somewhere, but they did. I think they took donations for maybe some other cause, I don't remember now.
Speaker 1:Well, it's just such a great idea because, you know, typically musicians need a venue, and finding a venue and getting people to come to that venue I mean that's the big difference between, again, the performing arts and, you know, the more static arts is that you can have a gallery space and the person doesn't have to actually be there. But for performers you need a venue and it's not always easy to collect an orchestra or you know, whatever I mean, I'm sure, how do you find gigs for your solo stuff?
Speaker 2:That tends to be through networks of people that I know or people that I'm in touch with remotely. You know, there's quite an established solo improvised music scene.
Speaker 1:And what size are the venues? For that I mean a typical venue like a concert hall for something or something more intimate, usually more intimate, so salon, series types of things.
Speaker 2:Right, or I mean New York City is the perfect example, where there are art galleries and there are basement venues or record stores, all these different kinds of places that will provide space for that kind of event.
Speaker 1:Well, certainly, speaking of galleries Santa Fe with 300 or something I mean I'm wondering why we don't see more music in our gallery spaces. This is something to explore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Actually, my husband and I played it in a gallery recently as a part of a series. It was a concert that should have been with Susan. We played at Entropy Gallery and they offer their space to concerts, I believe, fairly regularly, which is really nice.
Speaker 1:Wow, do you like performing solo? Tell me the difference between a solo performance and interacting with another musician.
Speaker 2:For me, the solo thing is it's very much between me and the audience. It's really a dialogue, in my head at least, where I'm trying to communicate whatever it is that I communicate that I can't do verbally on my saxophone with the audience, and it feels very connected in that way to the audience, whereas when I add in other musicians, there's also communication there, but it's much more focused on the other musician or musicians and it's it's more like a dinner party instead of a one-on-one.
Speaker 2:Right, I guess. So yeah, and it depends, because sometimes there's predetermined material, other times there isn't, when it's all improvised, then there's a certain aspect to it that's very internal, because I'm working so hard to listen and respond to the other musician or musicians with absolute honesty, because that's part of my philosophy is that I try to only play what I really hear, instead of having manufactured responses that I have in place that I know this will sound good, so I'm just going to pop it in. I try to not do that. I try to really respond honestly in the moment, with really improvised responses.
Speaker 1:So can you tell the difference between when you're listening to another musician, when they're coming from a place of authenticity, versus just dialing it in? I think so.
Speaker 2:I think there's a, I mean well.
Speaker 1:I mean, you've become attuned to that Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can certainly hear where there are things that are sort of worked out in advance and you hear them getting plopped in Right.
Speaker 1:Like sort of I don't want to say a gimmick, but it almost feels like you're approaching a gimmick or just a tried and true. Right, exactly A bridge from one moment to another, and so do you approach it with. Do you have like a story in your mind? I mean, how do you prepare for a solo improvisational show?
Speaker 2:I do my daily due diligence on the instrument, which is about. Obviously, that's your craft.
Speaker 1:That's the craft.
Speaker 2:But it's also allowing me to get blocks out of the way.
Speaker 2:I think that's the most important thing is that there aren't impediments to things that may come up that I want to do, which is, of course, a constantly evolving thing, because the further one gets on an instrument, the further one can go. So it's this endless, you know, disappearing horizons, sort of thing. But I also have this feeling that has evolved over years, which is that when I can really get out of my own way and it's not a simple thing to stop the mental dialogue, you know, overthinking whatever your day was in your head, head to clear things out of the way, when it happens and this is true with musicians as well as on my own I have this feeling, when the music is really coming, that I'm an archaeologist. It's not that I'm building or constructing this art from scratch, me creating it. It's more that I'm uncovering something that has always been there. I feel like it's really a primal, ancient practice that I think humans have always done, that I'm maybe connecting to, hopefully connecting to that this music is always there.
Speaker 1:That's so. I love that you're saying that, because you know we often talk about, you know, the artist sort of becoming a vessel for something to come through. But this idea that it's already there and that you're just kind of it's still a vessel for it to come through. But I love this idea that there are shards and things to discover and you know that you're discovering things as you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's how it feels, and it feels like there's a kind of an inevitability there. And it happens with other people too. When I develop a close relationship with an improviser, there are things that will come out together and all of a sudden we'll end on the same note, look at each other and go what just happened? You know, things just really coalesce, which feels like being an archaeologist discovering a city or looking at a flock of birds or a school of fish that are just moving together. I think it feels like a very natural thing to me.
Speaker 1:Well, probably one of the most as, as you said, one of the most natural and native to us. I mean, song and dance is sort of so innate to us and it's something that we don't do together in this culture yeah, still very often yeah so how does it feel?
Speaker 1:um, do it? I want to kind of this idea of something that is so natural to us and once upon a time we would have all sung together or played instruments together. So how does how does it feel to have? Does the audience become? I mean, it sounded like you were saying that they were like almost this active force, so that they are bringing something to. It's not just of voyeurs and the audience and you right, you're having a dialogue.
Speaker 1:You said yeah, I think so, and it's probably more energetic than anything else you know, when did you first notice that there was an energetic component to music? Music for you.
Speaker 2:That's a hard question to answer because I feel like my ideas about it that I hold now have been sort of slowly unfolding. You know, I think there were times where I saw glimpses of it, but it took a a lot of time and I think part of that is the work of practice. Definitely there was a huge leap in my concept of that In that time I just spoke about, from COVID and then into this incredible, unique one-to-one concert experience where I realized that just having one person come into a room which prior to that you know normally when one has a concert, if you just have one person in the room, you're kind of depressed. That's my audience, right. You feel like a failure. But this was the whole point. And all of a sudden one person in the room changed the energy completely and then the next person brought a whole different energy. So it was really magnified in that day.
Speaker 1:And has it changed the way you communicate with people in your speaking life? I mean, we're having a conversation now and there's obviously an exchange of energy happening, no doubt about that but did that particular experience shift something for you and how you relate to people in normal life, not just in the musical realm?
Speaker 2:I think it must have it seems like it would.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you develop this, this, this really fine-tuned attentiveness to your one audience person, so it's active listening on your part too it is very much.
Speaker 2:I remember one person. I had my two saxophones I primarily play tenor and soprano and I had both with me and I was kind of deciding, okay, I'll play this one next, or you know. I would sort of have that in my head because that's a physical process of picking up and putting down and one person came in and I had one of the saxophones ready to play and I looked at that person and it was the wrong horn, so I had to change and that was so interesting and there's no dialogue.
Speaker 1:This is just totally based on physicality.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:How cool is that? And how did you decide on a sax?
Speaker 2:I don't know, you don't know.
Speaker 1:Oh, as a child, as a child like as an instrument.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know. It is the strangest thing.
Speaker 1:Because it's not like somebody has like I mean, many people will have a house and sitting around there's a guitar or ukulele or maybe even a piano people will have a house and sitting around. There's a guitar or ukulele or maybe even a piano.
Speaker 2:But you know you have to be pretty deliberate to pursue something like a cello or a sax or something like that, right, yeah, and that's that's why I say I don't know, because I grew up in the southwest of ireland, a very small rural community, no music at all in school, and for some reason, at around the age of maybe 11 or 12, I got this idea in my head that I wanted to play saxophone and I can't trace it to seeing one or hearing one in person, any of that. So it was weird. I was playing flute, so I had early lessons on flute, purely because there was someone in the area that moved there who was a flute player, and my aunt had a flute. So it made sense that my sister and I were able to take flute lessons from this person.
Speaker 2:And then I got this idea about the saxophone that I really don't have anything to base it on and I didn't have a horn and I didn't. There was no school band, there were no school instruments, there was no music at all, as I said. So finally, when I was 16, my parents said, okay, she's still talking about a saxophone. So they got me a saxophone and then I had to teach myself because there was no teacher available. And then I somehow got into college. I went to a conservatory in the UK, so I have a very weird origin story.
Speaker 2:Well, no, it's a fantastic origin story.
Speaker 1:So you're in this little town in Ireland and how on earth did you get good enough that you got accepted to conservatory?
Speaker 2:Well, I had the flute lessons. I was lucky. The teacher was really good and gave me a really good grounding in Wind instruments, I guess, right, wind instruments, the fingerings are all a brum system, so they're very similar. Oh, so that was good. And then, when I was probably about 16, I went to a jazz festival in the city Someone must have taken me and I met Red Holloway, who was a great American jazz saxophonist. I went up to him and I said I'm learning saxophone, what should I practice? And he said scales and chords, scales and chords. And I went home and I learned all my scales and all 12 keys and just did all of these studies super diligently. And I think that's what got me in, because I had this, I had given myself a grounding thanks to the beautiful, concise advice that he gave me.
Speaker 1:Wow. And so you finished at conservatory in England. I want the whole story. It was horrible. Was it horrible? You were in London, I was in Leeds.
Speaker 2:In Leeds, the Leeds Conservatory, yeah, and no one wanted to deal with me, I think because I was this kind of a freak. You know, I hadn't had any basis in music theory. All the people I was in school with had been in band. They had gone through all these steps of all these things, kind of shepherded through music education up to college, which I didn't have at all and I was. You know, I was very, very hardworking at this point I really knew how to practice and I wanted to get better, but I didn't have a teacher who wanted to help me with the real fundamentals.
Speaker 2:So it was a real struggle and there was not much support for female musicians in that setting either, which was definitely an issue. So I left college and I was quite traumatized by the whole experience and I was not happy with how I was playing. I was already playing out, doing shows and all of that, but it didn't feel like me. I didn't know what was wrong, but I knew that it wasn't right, which I think for artists, that's often how we get guidance, you know not that Right Adjust, not that adjust yeah because you never know really what you're looking for.
Speaker 2:At the beginning, anyway, I think.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to underscore that, because I think a lot of that's one of those mystiques about artists that people have is that that you know you're born that way. You, you know what you're going to do, you're so emphatic about it that nothing can stop you, and you never have any doubts about it, and and that's just your trajectory. But you're you're revealing that that wasn't the case for you, and yet you persevered.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I still loved the instrument like so much. So I went looking for a teacher. I ended up in New York city, um, within a week I I started a job waiting tables and I there was another saxophonist working there. He said he and I were talking and I told him what I was doing and he said you need to meet this person. He's playing this weekend.
Speaker 2:So I went to hear the saxophonist, who was one of the great educators. His name is George Garzone. He's a phenomenal player, phenomenal educator, teaches, teaches at Berkeley, nec, new School, nyu, like all of the schools. And I went to hear him and I realized that's it, that's what I want to do, which was just amazing. And I walked up to him and I said I want to study with you. He said sure, and I ended up stopping playing completely for what became five years and studied with him once a week, every week, and I waited tables at Birdland, the jazz club in New York, and went to hear music all the time and just studied and broke down everything I was doing and rebuilt from the ground up.
Speaker 1:So when you say rebuilt, so you would practice chords, and what did you say? Scales, scales and chords. Yeah, and so was this different from scales and chords, or was it just different from what you'd gotten at conservatory?
Speaker 2:Different from what I got at the conservatory. So there was a certain amount of musical stuff that I'd worked out at that point, but the real breakdown and rebuilding was on the instrument, which was absolutely amazing. He just opened it all up for me in a way that's really hard to describe. But I had been self-taught and then I was taught by very rigid thinkers in the conservatory setting and was still having issues and blocks, and working with this teacher just kind of removed it all and the thing that it did that was amazing is that I started to understand that you have to be so completely relaxed and you can't do anything without being completely relaxed with the instrument and that's really super hard to get to operating this very complicated machine that's also really physically taxing, and to do it with total relaxation. So everything is just flowing and that was really what I learned and that's why we think of saxophone players as cool.
Speaker 1:I mean because I mean, if you think about it, that's what cool is. You know it's being having all that technical skill and still being relaxed, that command, that yeah that's so interesting. So you don't qualify or you don't classify what you do as jazz, even though it's improvisational.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So say a little bit more about the distinction between jazz, although I guess I understand that jazz can be improvisational, but it's not inherently improvisational.
Speaker 2:How would you describe it? It contains improvisation, but there are many different streams of jazz. But it, I mean there are many different streams of jazz. Obviously there's very straight ahead, the, I guess the great American songbook, and the, the jazz repertoire is a real thing that I have enormous respect for and love for. Um, and I think of jazz as a language, a certain language that uses a certain vocabulary, and what I I do is a lot, I guess, more abstract than that. And for a long time when I studied I came through jazz and when I was doing that, the jazz improvisation, the working with chords and everything was really valuable. Understanding harmony deeply is extraordinarily valuable and I do it with my students. But playing that way for me felt like cosplay. It felt like I wasn't me, I was putting on this other character. That wasn't true and it's not something I was hearing. It was a very manufactured, pre-existing vocabulary that I had to learn to be able to do it.
Speaker 1:Well, that is how a lot of people sort of initially get engaged with music. I mean, it's not through a self-expression, because you have to be able to have mastery with an instrument before you can get to that level. And so a lot of people sort of get enjoy, but kind of I don don't want to get say stuff because that feels, you know, derogatory. But but they get, they find comfort in the known and playing other people's music over and over and over again. So you're doing something completely different from that.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, but I have enormous respect for that and there are people who do that and who improvise within the jazz structure and for them it's a completely authentic expression of them and their musical imagination and I love that. I think it's beautiful. It just wasn't available to me, it's not authentic to me. So I've come to think of myself as a folk musician, even though if people hear my music they'll say, well, that's not really folk music, but it's just because, and so it's not immediate to you, exactly it feels like this thing.
Speaker 2:That's just this is how I play and hopefully it continues evolving forever, but it doesn't fit into the jazz heading.
Speaker 1:So when you've played a piece, obviously you've produced recordings, which means that you have to be able to do the same thing twice, at least the first time you think of it and then getting it down. So how does a song, how do you thing a song? Do you know what I mean by that? I mean, it's just like how do you, how do you distinguish an experience that you're having with your saxophone and then it becomes a piece?
Speaker 2:Um, I mean do you remember what you did?
Speaker 1:when you, when you've been playing free form, that's what you're sort of saying.
Speaker 2:You got the information from the experience and then you take it back to the lab, so to speak, be like these little sort of kernels of melody and structure that are things that fit together in a certain way that then I think of in my mind as this piece. So it's not necessarily in a song form, it might be or it might not be, or it can be thematic elements that I develop then in a different way each time I play them, or there might be similar areas that I explore, a certain place that I start in, a place that I end.
Speaker 1:I wish I'd asked you to bring your sax and you could like show me a phrase, because you know I'm fascinated by this. The idea of this, I mean it's almost like a painter painting with one color and, you know, diluting it or or using it very opaquely and changing the canvas on which it's it's applied, or something. I mean that's the best analogy I can come up with in my mind. But when you said single note, I mean not a single note, but a single instrument right and one note at a time.
Speaker 2:I can't, I'm not the pianist, I I can't play ten notes oh right, they're not such nice chords, right. Exactly. Oh, wow, yeah, so it's always a line Right. I sometimes think of it was Paul Klee, wasn't it, who said to take a line for a walk. Oh, and so I think that's beautiful as applied to a musician, that every day you think about taking your line for a walk and see where you go, you know.
Speaker 1:And that's even more astounding to me because you've got how many different sounds with that line can you make? I mean, is that the sort of the game Is figuring out how to make that one line get wider or narrower?
Speaker 2:I mean there's so much because there's also so much that can be done with the saxophone in terms of timbre and just tone itself, changing the color within the tone. But then there's also the fact that you know, in music really there are 12 tones in an octave. There's also the fact that you know, in music really there are 12 tones in an octave. And then when you think about even only Western music, everything you know in Western music is done melodically, just with those 12 tones and harmonically. And that always blows my mind and reminds me that there are really infinite combinations available to us to explore, infinite combinations available to us to explore, right, and so you just gave me another question which is do you tap into music other than Western music?
Speaker 2:I do. I listen a lot to lots of different kinds of music and I use microtones in my playing. So that's you know how. On the piano you have the 12 tones, the white keys and the black keys, so in between those each adjacent key is a half step apart, but you can go a quarter step on other instruments. You can't do it on piano without a tuner, but you can play microtones, so a note can be like a quarter flat or a quarter sharp, and that brings in a whole lot of more available color to the lines.
Speaker 1:And so other cultures of music have more use of that. Yes, okay.
Speaker 2:Yes, in Arabic music especially, there's a lot of use of microtones. There are scales that have 24 tones in them, so you have quarter tones instead of half steps. And then there are instruments where notes are a lot less sort of rigidly defined, that the step between each note is not as specific, so the notes can be bent or manipulated.
Speaker 1:And how do you make a notation of that when you're wanting to reproduce or get somebody? Has anybody else ever played your music, and how do you notate it so that they sound like you?
Speaker 2:Well, that's tricky. I mean, there are quarter flats and quarter sharps. You can write that. You can also write in verbal instructions little lines saying like bend this down a little bit, bend this up. Sometimes different fingerings are used to produce multifonics or different effects in the notes, and in that case it's very common to just write in the fingering for the performer if they're also playing the same instrument as me. Tends to be quite a few verbal directions, though, but the best way to work with a musician and to achieve something that I'm thinking of specifically is to work in person and practice together. You know, rehearse.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's such a different type of collaboration than a typical setup. Wow, and how did you get to Santa Fe?
Speaker 2:That was kind of semi-accidental. So we were my husband and I were living on the East Coast and we were in New Jersey right at the time that the Omicron wave of COVID hit. So once again, all of our shows were canceled and there was nothing on the horizon and we needed to move. So we were looking for a new place. And it was winter, maybe November, it was really dark and wet. And I saw on an artist housing listing thing there was a house in the East Mountains for rent and it was furnished and everything. So we said let's just go there for a while. We knew this area.
Speaker 2:My father actually, before I was born, worked at the lab in Los Alamos. He's a physicist, so I had been here several times and, uh, so we came here for the winter and just put our stuff in storage, drove out, um, and, and then we ended up staying more than 18 months because we really liked it. But we always had it in our heads that we were going back. We hadn't mentally moved. I certainly hadn't. I felt like I had to be back in New York and our things were back there.
Speaker 2:So we went back for six or eight months a year ago Year and a half ago really, and then a year ago decided to come back here With your stuff, with our stuff, with everything we committed to it. So we really missed it. We missed the space and the light and we had this whole conversation because my husband, eric, is also a musician and artist. The conversation was well, are we going to take the constant activity of New York or space and time that we can have available to us out in New Mexico, which I know we are far from being the first artists to have that conversation, it's probably the big one that people have before moving here. And we went with space and Time, which is just wonderful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially with your particular type of music which really needs to occupy space and time. Yes, I would imagine. Yeah, I mean away from the cacophony of New York.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's really nice. Also, I have a separate space, a little casita, where I can practice more or less any time, so it's it's not, like you know, trying to play into a closet full of coats to muffle the sound right, which I've done lots of, so you're not disturbing people and so the trade off is that you don't have a thousand venues like you do in New York, where you just so.
Speaker 1:How do you work the gigs?
Speaker 2:now. So I'm definitely performing less because I can't do as many. Oh you know, just pick up this gig here, that one there. It's really kind of interesting how coming here coincided almost or very closely with then losing my collaborator, and it feels like sort of yet again another tabula rasa in my existence where I'm dealing with a lot of new questions and thinking a lot about practice. I've been writing about practice for several years and I write practice prompts on my blog and thoughts and things that come up either in my teaching or in conversation with people or in my practice that that I'm trying to work out and I share these things. Um, and I've got a teaching practice that comes from that, and now what I'm working on is coming up with systems of teaching classical trained musicians to improvise, because it's more and more so helping them unlearn all that rigidity that you had to right.
Speaker 2:well, hopefully not unlearn anything, but add, add in, because in reality and this is coming again from a question I got from a musician who was classically trained and all of a sudden they have this piece in orchestra where they have to improvise a solo, which is horrifying, because that's a whole other training, that's a whole other pursuit of technique, of knowledge of everything, in order to improvise. It's not a simple thing.
Speaker 1:I want to hear more about that. I mean the difference between like what it's, like a whole different set of muscles and mindset and everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes. And and also knowledge and understanding of of musical structure, harmonic structure, how to construct things, because the difference between reading material and playing it with you know the extraordinary expression and accuracy and repeatability that classical musicians do it with. That they'll play it in rehearsal and then play it in performance exactly as it is supposed to be in the mind of the composer, and that's been their whole pursuit. The training and your technique is developed so that you can execute what is of the composer, and that's been their whole pursuit. The training and your technique is developed so that you can execute what is on the page. And all of a sudden there is nothing on the page.
Speaker 2:So how do you deal with that? How do you create something? And you know, coming through jazz, we're always dealing with that. We always learn the harmony, learn the function of the chords, learn the possible chord substitutions, learn the variety of expression that is possible within this chord structure and then also learn how to adapt what we know to the musicians we're playing with and to what they do with those chords. So you hear someone do something and then you realize, oh, I can go here with it. Or you hear someone do something else and you realize that you can't go to that other place. So there's this whole exchange. That's happening even in structured improvisation, but the classical musician may not have any of that training, and that's just incredibly daunting Because really, really, when you think about it, if one is being asked to improvise a certain number of measures in a piece, what is really being asked is compose your own part here right, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:it's like the difference. What I'm thinking of is like it'd be one thing to risk to learn a poem in a foreign language French or Italian and to be excellent and your accent is perfect and your cadence is perfect, but then it's very different than trying to have a conversation with somebody in French.
Speaker 2:Right, that's a perfect analogy for it.
Speaker 1:Whoa yeah.
Speaker 2:So it really you do have to have a fluency in music theory of chords and they have the training of how to improvise over a chord structure. They will all come up with something different. So I'm really fascinated by the idea of okay, we have this classically trained musician, we're working to help them to make this improvised part for a piece. Who are they when they improvise? You know what's their voice, because that's really what the composer is asking. They're saying I want the clarinet player to play a solo here. So what do you? What? What happens?
Speaker 1:It just gives me hives thinking about it. I'm thinking about, you know, being in school. I mean, I know this is such a stupid analogy, but you know when the teacher, every once in a while it was a rare occasion when they asked me what I thought about the book.
Speaker 1:You know it'd be one thing to be talking about, whatever the subject was, that we had studied and we knew what facts we were responsible for for the test. We were responsible for for the test. But when the teacher would dig deep and say, well, what do you think about this deer in the headlights? You know, I mean, it took a different type of you know mindset.
Speaker 2:Right, so right, so you're teaching people how to do that yeah, I'm, I'm trying, I'm doing, yeah, and I, when I teach, I don't see it as me really teaching someone in that sense of like this is what we're learning and this is how it is.
Speaker 2:I see it as a collaboration where I am there as a very friendly, helpful coach to remove whatever is impeding them getting to who they are, because I can never know who they are when they improvise, and I want to. I'd love to see people unfold in that way, but I want to give them permission to make them feel safe, to explore the feeling of relaxation, to know, to give them confidence, to give them enough of a basis in something for you know, at the beginning it has to be in specific examples. We say we'll work with this particular place where you need to improvise, and how are we going to do that? So we'll work, I'll give them strategies, I'll give them all of these things that then it's their job to take and assimilate and come up with what they do Well, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1:You just used the word work and strategy, and then we think of playing, an instrument, and so it's really like this dichotomy between work and what you're teaching is play. It sounds like.
Speaker 2:Right it is. And I think work and strategy can exist within playing as well, and more in a sense of when we see children and they say, oh hey, let's try this. And that's the spirit that I want to encourage is that, instead of looking for the one right answer because there isn't one, there are infinite right answers and infinite answers that maybe we don't want, so they're less right, but that idea of uncovering things and then looking at them and instead of feeling like, oh, I'm bad, I did this wrong, we say, okay, that's that result. That's not what I want here, what else can I try?
Speaker 1:Well, it really sort of requires a deeper dig. It seems like and do you find that more mature musicians are better at this? Or like, I would think, sort of mid-career or older musicians who are trying to break out of status quo, or young children who haven't yet learned status quo? But it would be hard for that middle ground where they're kind of still struggling to get it right and still be them. That's got to be the hardest dichotomy.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think so. I remember teaching a young child I think she was nine and she wanted to learn saxophone. This was years ago in New York, and I was trying to teach her how to just make a sound in a way that wasn't forcing it and that was relaxed. I wanted her to start from scratch with that and we worked and worked and were playing long tones and finally she got it. She stopped and she looked at me and she said I get it.
Speaker 2:It's like ice skating you just glide and you just let it go. And that was such a beautiful moment where she felt the embodiment of that feeling of oh, this is where it is. And I know that once you feel it in your body, then that's where the real learning happens and that's where you're really starting to internalize it. So you don't have to constantly think with your conscious brain about every little thing you're doing on the instrument, because there's a lot happening and you want to embody all of that, to absorb it all. So it's like an extension of the body and you can let your imagination run free.
Speaker 1:And I would imagine that the principle of this could be applied to any instrument, including voice as an instrument, I mean, because isn't that? I mean? It seems to me like that you're just trying to help people be their authentic selves as a musician, in whatever media.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I work with musicians on all instruments, so it all translates, you know so it all translates. You know, so do you think this might be the new direction that life is forcing you to go, I think, one of them. I think that obviously I'm still, you know, working a lot on solo performance and and different collaborations, but this feels like a big thing that I want to spend a lot of attention on.
Speaker 1:So right now I'm, I'm writing about it, and well, I would think and we don't have a ton of time left but I would think that this would be all the more important now as AI is emerging and you can you know AI, I'm sure can technically perform a piece of music you know impeccably.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's that human element, that authenticity, that kind of you know, that thing that makes us human, which is what you're trying to help people cultivate Cultivating that creative force, life force that comes through only humans, not yes, not computers or whatever yeah, absolutely and I think that's going to become increasingly more important yeah, yeah, I think so, and I think people are going to crave that connection more um as we as we go through this crazy world that we're living in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah and I guess. One last question have you found that you're impacted by the cuts in funding? Has that impacted your world yet? For the arts, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And how is?
Speaker 1:that manifesting for you personally.
Speaker 2:For me personally, I don't have anything immediately now that has been impacted. There are things that would have been on my list of things to apply for that are no longer in existence, which is huge. There are people I know who worked on grants for weeks and it's all gone. You know, the grants are gone. There's not even the hope of the possibility of getting it. It's just gone, which is really devastating, and I don't know how it's going to play out.
Speaker 1:I don't Well, it sounds to me like this new sort of thread that you're pursuing is so key because, I mean, who knows what the world is going to look like anytime soon? But what isn't going to change is people's we were talking about that sort of innate core need for music that is just sort of so primal to us. And if you can help through this program that you're developing, help individuals just access that, you know, it doesn't have to be in a concert hall, it can just be a way for them to connect to a fundamental, essential part of themselves, to a fundamental, essential part of themselves that hopefully that will take us forward. You know, I don't want to even imagine a world without the arts, the way we've known to have access to the arts. But it makes it a little bit easier to fathom if, instead of people going to the theater to experience the arts, they get to have it, own it back in their own heart and body again, which would be, you know, a good thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's definitely something that I really hope to develop, and I've spoken with some of my students locally about having maybe a once a week or something practice session where we just all come together to just do some very meditative practice. And one thing that I have kind of dreamed about is having a space where I am, an installation, where I practice every day in that space and it's open to the public. It could be a gallery or something I think we can find that for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes. Let's talk about that further, because I think there are a lot of initiatives happening, including the one that I'm involved in with this collaboration lab that we're doing in conjunction with CCA and bringing all these art leaders together to talk about, like, new ways forward, so that you know, empty spaces or spaces with artwork are populated with musicians who need to practice spaces. I mean it's, it's a marriage made in heaven, really. So we'll, we'll explore that further. Well, let's leave it there. It's a perfect conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming. Well, thanks for joining us today. Please like and follow us on artstormingorg, where you'll find a list of our shows, a transcript of this episode with links to the guest page, as well as our other projects. Artstorming is brought to you and supported by ArtBridge and listeners like you. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms.
