Ingrid Laubrock: Purposing the Air with Music and Voices
The innovative composer discusses her new album, Purposing the Air, and the three-year process of transforming Erica Hunt's sixty cryptic koans into musical miniatures for four distinctive vocal-instrumental duos.
Today, the Spotlight shines on saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock.
Ingrid’s just released Purposing The Air, a double album that sets 60 brief poems by Erica Hunt to music through four different vocal-instrumental duos. It’s an ambitious project that transforms Hunt’s emotionally sharp koans into what Ingrid calls “a library of moods”—each piece capturing a different feeling, from the everyday to the searching.
The project began during Ingrid’s master’s studies, when she met Hunt through a friend and immediately connected with the poet’s work. What started as writing for one duo became something much larger: a collection where poems float through musical space, each tailored for specific performers, such as Fay Victor and Mariel Roberts, or Theo Bleckmann and Ben Monder.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Ingrid Laubrock’s album Purposing the Air)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Ingrid Laubrock at ingridlaubrock.com and follow her on Bluesky, Facebook and YouTube
• Purchase Purposing the Air from Pyroclastic Records, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
Collaborating Musicians:
• Sara Serpa - vocalist
• Matt Mitchell - pianist
• Theo Bleckmann - vocalist
• Ben Monder - guitarist
• Fay Victor - vocalist
• Mariel Roberts - cellist
• Duo Cortona - Rachel Calloway (voice) and Ari Streisfeld (violin)
• Tom Rainey - drummer and life partner
Literary Connection:
• Erica Hunt - poet whose Mood Librarian koans inspired the album
• Jump the Clock by Erica Hunt - poetry collection
Educational Institutions and Mentors:
• The New School - where Laubrock teaches composition
• Jean Toussaint - early saxophone mentor
• Dave Liebman - influential teacher and saxophonist
London Music Scene and F-IRE Collective:
• F-IRE Collective - innovative London-based musicians' collective
• Steve Coleman and M-BASE - influential collective that inspired F-IRE
• Information about London’s contemporary jazz scene
AACM Legacy and Influences:
• Anthony Braxton - composer and AACM member who greatly influenced Laubrock
• AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians)
• Muhal Richard Abrams - AACM founder and composer
• Henry Threadgill - composer and AACM member
Contemporary Creative Musicians:
• Mary Halvorson - guitarist influenced by Braxton lineage
• Tyshawn Sorey - composer-drummer from Braxton lineage
• Steve Lehman - saxophonist-composer
• Jason Moran - pianist who called Laubrock a “visionary”
Artist Residencies Mentioned:
• Ragdale Foundation - artist residency near Chicago
• Ucross Foundation - artist residency in Wyoming
Record Label and Production:
• Pyroclastic Records - label founded by Kris Davis
• Kris Davis - pianist and label founder
• Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio - recording engineer
Contemporary Music Ensembles:
• Wet Ink Ensemble - contemporary music collective
• Mivos Quartet - string quartet specializing in new music
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I am curious about your move from London to New York, and if you could tell me a little bit about what was going on in each of those cities from a working musician's point of view, and what prompted you to move?
Ingrid Laubrock: The main reason for the move, working backwards, is that my husband—now husband—and I had a long-distance relationship for about three years, and there was a crossroads. There was a point where one of us would have had to move, and the agreement was basically, "I'll try New York, and if it ends up not working out, we'll reconfigure." But obviously, as a jazz musician, someone who grew up playing jazz, New York is an incredible background for music and has an incredible wealth of talent and musicianship.
Lawrence: What was happening in London at that time? It seemed like in the early teens, the jazz scene kind of—I don't want to say exploded, but evolved in a much different way in London. There seems to be more of a vibrant scene over the last ten or fifteen years than had existed for a while. Could you talk about that?
Ingrid: I think what happened, at least in my personal experience, is that in the early 2000s and nineties, we founded a collective called the F-IRE Collective. The person who really started this collective is a percussionist and saxophonist called Barak Schmool. He was friends with Steve Coleman, so he was very into rhythmic music and into the idea of a collective. The initial idea was to do something akin to M-BASE or follow that kind of plan.
And it developed into a collective of musicians who really couldn't find a home in the mainstream scene that was so prevalent in London. It was really like a post-bop scene where not much else worked, or you would have the complete free players—also super interesting, but they were not interested in composition and were not interested in playing forms. So there was a bunch of us in the middle who felt like we didn't really find a place, and promoters wouldn't touch us. Organizers were worried that it wasn't jazz enough.
We brought it together and were really, really active. We had festivals, we had a label, we had nights spread out over the city—series. I had my own series. Many of us had this; we would share resources. At the time it was mailing lists. We would basically share everything. We were sharing musical resources. We had a string quartet in there, we had a samba school, we had West African percussion groups. Barak was a percussionist who also taught at City University, so we could use their rooms to practice large-scale pieces. We really basically shared.
It just became much larger. There was a point where press and promoters could not ignore us. We had nonprofit status, so we could also apply for grants. The whole thing kind of grew.
Musically, it was super interesting because anything goes, but it has to be good. We still had a sort of quality control. We didn't just take anybody into this collective. There was a certain aesthetic alignment, even though it was quite wide. There was a point where this collective was—younger people wanted in. We said, "Well, if we grow too big, this is not manageable, so why don't you have your own collectives and we umbrella you in." We started sharing with other collectives that became our sister collectives. We had a good rapport with similar collectives in France, Denmark, the Netherlands. We really kind of—it was musicians taking it into their own hands a little bit more and being proactive. For the first time really, I felt at home musically in a sense. It was just this network and this support and the learning together, the studying together, the constantly practicing together. That was really fertile ground.
It really made me grow.
Lawrence: You ended your comment right where I wanted to begin, so thank you. I'm curious about how having that collective and having that known group of musicians and colleagues aided in your development as a composer.
Ingrid: The really nice thing—and this is also a reason why I'm always very happy to also be a sideperson—is that we learn so much from each other. When you have the resources to not just rehearse for a gig, but you rehearse for the sake of the music, you can ask the composer questions. You can ask, "Why did you organize it like that?" All of that, if you have a curious mind, it just lets you study and search where maybe somebody else has come from.
At that time, with the F-IRE Collective, we researched a lot into rhythm, into cultures that have their roots in African rhythms. But later on—this is really a little bit post-collective—when I moved here, I discovered the AACM for myself a bit more. The wealth of creativity that comes out of those composers makes you then revisit sources that maybe they have used, but also brought out a more experimental side and made way, because they are so attuned to their own creativity as well as very knowledgeable about other musics that have been there before them.
I've always been interested in classical music as well. I grew up in a kind of classical music household, so that side has always been there, and as it has informed so much jazz of the past, I studied that a lot too.
Lawrence: I was curious about the influence of your family life, because it sounds like there was also quite a literary influence that you got from both of your parents, or a love of words. I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about that—what role your parents played in your intellectual and creative development.
Ingrid: I think my parents played a huge role, but they were never dogmatic about it. Both my parents are completely crazy about music—my father passed away, but they were completely crazy about music. They both sang in choirs. I would come to these things and sing mass and "St. Matthew Passion" or "St. John Passion"—long, long-form pieces. I would be there as a kid listening to it.
As a young kid, I guess it didn't really occur to me that long music wasn't an issue. Long-form music was just something you kind of absorb. The other thing is that my father played these musical games with us. I remember, for example, driving home from school with him, and we would try to hold the pitch in our head and try and guess what pitch that was, and we both raced to the piano and played it. There's a certain really playful sense of interaction with music that I think helped me massively with pitch recognition, which is a big part of improvising. But it was given to me in a playful way.
I grew up in the countryside. Music wasn't my first love as a kid—my first love was playing with animals and being around animals just because of the nature of where I grew up. But music was always there. Literature was also always there. My father was crazy about Beethoven and crazy about Goethe, absolutely obsessively crazy about it. So there was a deep appreciation, I would say, for the classical side of things coming from my dad, and my mother had always a very intuitive—she's also a very knowledgeable, intellectual kind of person, but she has a real intuitive connection to music, a very emotional connection to music.
She grew up in very poor surroundings, and she always used music as a refuge, which is also obviously a big part of any musician's life—the refuge in music that we have.
Lawrence: I'm also curious about some of your early teachers and mentors—Jean Toussaint, Dave Liebman. Might you be able to cite maybe a lesson or something from your studies with them that has stayed with you and informs your work today, or informs you philosophically?
Ingrid: With Jean Toussaint, he gave me lessons when I was a beginner, a fair beginner. I had played for about two or three years when I asked him for lessons, and he took me on. I think because he heard how much I wanted it—he actually doesn't teach beginners, but he took me on anyway.
I think the biggest takeaway for me out of all the lessons with him was that he would play at me and make me copy him for hours, which was, I think at the time, a really great thing to do because I had grown up playing classical music. There was that disconnect when the music is no longer in front of you. I was used to playing with something and reading something. I played classical piano as a child. So just basically copying by ear for hours at a time and trying to copy his sound, emulate his sound, was I think the biggest takeaway from it.
He did pass on some of his harmonic systems, but for me, the visceral copying, hearing a huge tenor sound directed at me and trying to emulate that, was great. He also made me write my own solos.
That was sort of a beginning of composition, although I didn't think about it at the time. He was very honest with me at the time when I really needed it. He simultaneously kind of destroyed me and then built me back up in the space of fifteen minutes. (laughter)
Lawrence: You're not the first artist who's told me that about Liebman. In fact, he comes up—something that's amazing is how many people he's taken the time to work with over the years. But it sounds like he's a tough teacher.
Ingrid: He's very honest. He's really old school that way, but he's really honest, and I very much appreciated it because people generally aren't honest with you. It's also very difficult to be honest when you're actually criticizing somebody. He brought out this kind of—I was always driven and I was always motivated—he nudged it up even more.
After I had taken part in one of his master classes, I went back to Germany where I hadn't lived at the time for over ten years. I went back to my mother's house and basically took some sort of self-directed sabbatical from whatever I was doing and only practiced. I practiced like eight, ten hours a day for six months. And then I did the same again later for a few months—fifteen months or so—because I had basically moved to London and immediately lived on music, although I couldn't play at all. I was so motivated to make my own way and to pay my own rent, even as an eighteen-year-old, that I had never had that time that people have when they go to school where they really just shed. So that was my shedding time. He motivated that.
After that, whenever he was in London, I was kind of his driver. I would drive him around to his recording sessions or to his mixing sessions, to have his mouthpiece made. He can really hold court and he can really talk about music. There was just so much wisdom coming from him. It was really beautiful. For years, I sent him CDs and I would ask for his criticism, and he would always take the time—which I hugely appreciated because he's a really busy man who was traveling a lot.
I think in a sense, although he was so honest and he was so direct, he also was very giving and he took time. Plus, for me, he played with Miles Davis and with Elvin Jones. You go to the—it felt like I'm going as close to the source as I can possibly get this day and age.
Lawrence: If you're going to take feedback or criticism from anybody, it's a pretty good lineage to take input from.
Ingrid: Exactly. Because I was mainly unschooled and mainly—whenever I had this kind of relationship, however brief they were, I would take these things to heart and try to get as much as possible out of them.
Lawrence: My understanding is Purposing the Air is really your first major work involving words and voices. What drew you specifically to the Erica Hunt Mood Librarian text, and at what point in this project did the text inspire the project, or were you looking for a way to fuse words with music?
Ingrid: I was actually at the time doing my master's. This was during the pandemic, and I had not—because I didn't have any formal qualifications and both my husband and I are musicians—I thought that would be a time where I could actually try and get a qualification. So in case this pandemic wasn't going to end, I'd need to get a teaching job or anything like that. So I did a master's in composition, and the first duo that we were going to compose for—one of the options was Ari Streisfeld and Rachel Calloway.
This is how it started. I picked them—it was a little random start because I don't think voice and violin would have been my first choice, but we were in the middle of a pandemic, and they are married and they could play together. They could work together in the same room. All the other groups would have had to overdub their parts and do this kind of laborious recording. I was just so fed up at that point in time with anything overdubbed. So I went for the unusual voice-violin combination.
I fell in love with writing for them, especially for the violin. At the time I was looking for words by somebody who's still alive. Erica came to mind. I met her at a party just before the pandemic started, and we had a really long conversation. We talked about books, talked about all sorts of things. I really liked her a lot, so I ordered her book and read through her collection Jump the Clock, and those stood out to me as good material for compositions.
Once I got started on the project, writing for Ari and Rachel, I just got so into it. I just wanted to do all of them.
Lawrence: What do you find first from the text? Is there a rhythm in the words, or do the words conjure melody? I'm really curious—at the risk of asking you to deconstruct process—what's your way into the text musically?
Ingrid: I feel it was different for many of them, but I think as a whole, the words and the rhythm came first. There was a sense of speaking them, sensing the rhythm, so there's a sense of my own natural rhythm that flows into this. I sang them and then played around with them, and then I figured the instrumental treatment is more like orchestrating the vocal in that sense.
But sometimes some of the words are really, really short, so there's not that much to play with. In those cases, I was coming at them from the other way around, so I'd be maybe starting on the musical thought and see how it directed to the vocals.
And then there were a few of them that were really intuitively just connected with the mood of the poem. They're really open, and you can read into them. I think she just—there's no clear meaning in many of them. As the poem, the overarching title is "Mood Librarian," I kind of took her at her word. Sometimes I just went from the mood that the poem gave me.
Lawrence: That's fascinating. It's almost an ideal textual context for music—being more evocative, less literal, more open to interpretation. Along those lines, I'm curious about writing for others rather than doing the performing yourself. What are you delivering to your artists or your interpreters in that case, and specifically, how do you maintain creative control while allowing your performers room for interpretation? That seems like it would require some intentionality on your part.
Ingrid: I try and compose for the performers. I think that is really the jazz side of things. I love Mingus, I love Duke Ellington—people who write these little frameworks and they control those for the players. So I try to front-load the process like listening to their music and try and see them live if I can.
In all the cases—Sara, Mariel, Matt, Ben Monder and Theo Bleckmann—I've worked with them and I've seen them play so many times, so that makes it a lot easier to imagine what you can write for them. With Ari and Rachel as the classical musicians, I knew I had to write everything out. I think that is why singing the rhythms and singing the words became really important to me—so that I could bring something in that is me.
Also, the rhythmic interaction between the violin and the voice—I was thinking, how can I bring the thing that interests me in rhythmic interaction, for example in improvisation? How can I bring this a little bit into this classical duo so it still sounds like I wrote it? Similarly, the way I deal with intervals and with harmonic relationships—that is kind of my language, and I wanted to bring this into that classical setting.
For them, I wrote everything out. For people like Mariel Roberts and Fay Victor—Mariel, I know from a music context. I have composed for her before, and I know she can read absolutely everything, every tiny detail, and she's very happy to do it. She also has great time, and she's a great improviser. So I knew I could throw a lot of different things at her, and that made her parts a lot more concise than, for example, Fay Victor's, because she has such a strong delivery and improvisational skill that I didn't want to rein her in. I think I wrote more for the instrumentalists in general.
Then I checked with them. If something isn't possible—I went over to Ben Monder's house to work with him on his parts, to let him show me his effects and what they can do, because I know nothing about it. So it's cooperation and collaboration as well as writing for people.
Lawrence: It's really beautiful, the amount of time you've spent understanding each of your interpreters or each of your musicians on this project. I love hearing those anecdotes. I'm curious about the different relationship dynamics between the various duo participants. My understanding is you have Fay and Mariel, who were strangers, or at least not collaborators, and then you have the other extreme of a married couple.
Ingrid: Yes. (laughter)
Lawrence: That seems rather deliberate on your part—let's take these pieces and put them together and have some confidence that what will come out on the other side will be interesting, successful, or however you'd categorize it. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the role of the relationship dynamics.
Ingrid: I feel like part of making a good record or part of making good music is really the characters and the musicians you put together. I think I've always been good at putting bands together, or being able to imagine combinations of people who work with each other.
In the case of Sara Serpa and Matt Mitchell, they have worked together, for example, but hadn't really worked as a duo. But I went to one of Sara's concerts at Roulette, and they had a very brief duo moment in the middle of it, and it was like, "This is it. I'm going to write for this." Sometimes it's as easy as that. You just sit in a concert and something sparks. You listen to a concert and something sparks off an idea, and then you just go and make it work.
So I knew they have a rapport. I knew they have amazing time, a really centered feel of rhythm. It's almost like trying to figure out what makes this musician special and writing to bring that out, which I think is what Duke Ellington did, for example.
With Mariel and Fay, I reached out to them individually because I knew that they didn't know each other, so I didn't want to put them in a situation where they're like, "I can't really quite see it." Both of them were so keen on it. They had met each other once before, and then I saw them together and they're just really hitting it off and they really enjoyed it. It was just a lucky coincidence that what I kind of cooked up in my head worked out on a human level.
Lawrence: Your intuition served you.
Ingrid: I find it also—I'm just really—I like collaborating with people, and I prefer working with people who get on with each other. It's just not needed. We don't need to work with people—you know, I think you're from a rock background?
Lawrence: Somewhat. My days are mostly—
Ingrid: You have an interest in it. (laughter)
Lawrence: Professionally, it's how I pay the bills, but my jazz and creative music is where I spend most of my listening time.
Ingrid: I think we don't need to—there's so much talent out there. I don't think we need to live in this—we don't need to be fighting with each other while we're making music. This can be good for a minute, but it's not sustainable.
Lawrence: Something that's fascinating about all of this is—again, you're foreshadowing one of the questions I wanted to ask you, which was the idea of purposing, and so much of this project seems to have been infused with this intention, whether it was the time you gave in understanding each musician before inviting them in, or allowing your intuition to suggest some of the pairings. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the word purposing and purpose and what that means to you as a collaborator, as a composer, as what I would call a producer of a project. It's a fascinating word.
Ingrid: It is actually from a lyric. I don't know if you saw the poster, but in the middle of the record there is one of the poems—"59: Birds Purpose the Air as You Purpose Pen and Paper"—which is what we turned into the title. The producer, David Breskin, suggested that as a title because the original title "Mood Librarian" is being used for something else by Erica.
But I always felt that many of my projects are like an hour-long record, and there's no break basically. I think of a sort of set-length curve, even if there are breaks between pieces, because I love improvised music and I often find the transitions are just as interesting as the composition itself. So I think of the whole thing—I think of a curve of roughly an hour, forty minutes to an hour.
Here, all the pieces were so short, but because there are so many of them, I always felt like this will be a space where these poems just kind of float through. So all in all, they become kind of a long space with silences and little floating statements.
Lawrence: Is it collage in that regard?
Ingrid: I don't see it as a collage.
Lawrence: Mosaic?
Ingrid: More of a three-dimensional space. At least this is my hope—that these are like maybe thoughts that kind of puff through your consciousness and then disappear again. That kind of thing. I think that's why I like the word purposing the air. I felt like, here's the space I'm purposing—it will be little fragments and these miniature pieces.
Lawrence: I get that as a listener. I find that I notice the thoughts more than the transitions, if that makes sense. I found myself hearing, being drawn in by a statement or a moment and not necessarily—I heard it as a suite almost.
Ingrid: Yes.
Lawrence: Very subtle transitions.
Ingrid: No, I mean, when I was referring to transitions, I meant my usual music that—not on this record. There's no real transitions. I guess the transitions are silent. I meant I usually have this kind of long-form thing with transitions that lead into—sometimes within pieces.
Lawrence: With those improvised moments where you're figuring out where you're going next or what have you.
Ingrid: Exactly. For me, this just stood out. But I think that because I don't have this—I really wanted to do something where, just as the poems kind of have one idea or maybe two ideas, maybe they have an idea or they have an ambiguous idea because they're koans, I wanted to also limit the writing to that. So it's an idea per poem, maybe two ideas per poem, but they're really self-contained and they exist by themselves. Because they're organized for duos, there is still a sense of here is a set of music that exists by itself.
Lawrence: Is that type of compression or distillation—was that difficult for you, or was that a challenge you were ready for? Because there's something minimalist in that approach, whereas sometimes improvisation could become, in the wrong hands, a bit maximalist.
Ingrid: It can go there for sure.
Lawrence: There was something almost chamber-like in this music.
Ingrid: It was, to me, a real fun meditation, a game.
I think I describe it in the liner notes. It became somewhat a travel companion also because I was always—I was writing on the road, and it kind of helped me. My life is pretty disjunct at this point. I'm always a little bit here, a little bit there, just traveling a lot, and music has always been this thing that kind of holds it together. This was helping me even more because I could find this—you must know this too, because you write—when you write, there's a certain stillness and a certain focus. It's really a gift, I find. Having the time to write and having the time to be with your own thoughts in your own time, not having to—it's a focus that is really unequaled. It's a very different focus to playing, where you're really concentrating maybe more on what the other musicians do than what you do. This is really your own time. I thoroughly just enjoyed the whole process of it.
Lawrence: I do understand what you mean. There's that focusing or that tunnel vision that happens where, when I think about those moments, there's just what's right in front of you.
Ingrid: Yeah.
Lawrence: And even your peripheral vision sort of is gone and it's just—
Ingrid: Exactly.
Lawrence: I guess it's the overused term of the flow state. When we have those moments where it's actually working and we're connecting with the work, it's exciting.
Ingrid: It's really exciting, and it's a different flow state. Actually, when you are playing with other musicians, it is kind of the same state, but it is a little bit more outward-directed. And this is the one where it is really inward, immediately directed. I just love both. I love the fact that you can be slow when you're writing, because when you're playing, there's a different sense of alertness, I think.
Lawrence: Your collaborators are there and they get an opinion as well. They throw things at you that you can't ignore.
Lawrence: Have you seen much of a change in your compositions or your compositional approach as a result of your master's work?
Ingrid: That particular master's was awesome because they kind of let you do what you want to do, and you have advisors that guide you. There's no—it's very undogmatic. People come from all sorts of walks of life and all sorts of musical backgrounds. The advisors that I had weren't—they were really advisors that were helping me.
I think the thing that really went through the roof and got so much better is my notation skills. I'm much, much better at—which is actually really great for writing for classical musicians—so I'm much, much better at notating what I'm hearing. That is a good skill.
The advisors changed every term. One of them was a violinist, so I learned a lot about string instruments, which was awesome. I love learning about other people's instruments, just to go more in-depth into other people's instruments. That was a great addition, I think, to my skills.
And then the advisor I had over the last two terms was incredibly open-minded, and he introduced me to a lot of music I hadn't known. So I checked out a lot of music that I probably wouldn't have. We are still in touch.
Lawrence: Like what?
Ingrid: That's a good question. I knew that was going to come, and now I'm trying to think about it. He introduced me to a lot of electronic music that I—and now I cannot—I would have to actually literally dig through my—
Lawrence: That's okay. How about in your role as a teacher? Because you just said something interesting, which is learning about other people's instruments. In your role as a teacher, you're learning about other people while you're teaching them—their approach, their capabilities, their limitations, where they're stuck. I'm curious how being a teacher impacts your own development.
Ingrid: I think my teaching jobs—it's such a give and take. For example, if I teach somebody composition at the New School, these are usually people who've asked me to give them private lessons, but they're in their twenties and they have completely different references. So there's a great exchange. They show me what they're into, and I show them maybe something that relates to it, but it's from a different decade.
So I always feel like out of composition lessons—with one-on-one composition lessons at the New School, for example—I come back enriched because they check out a lot of stuff. They're smart people who are really curious and really driven. So it really does become an exchange where you point each other to different resources, and it makes you check out more music, more things.
My teaching is pretty limited. I don't do that much of it because I play a lot. So when I do do it, I really do enjoy it and I like interacting with people.
Lawrence: It must be a neat opportunity to see and hear music through a developmental eye again, or to take a student on that experience of pointing out a piece to them or revisiting a piece that was important in your development. That seems like it's a special gift.
Ingrid: It is very nice, and what is also really nice is when you can, for example, if a student asks you, "How do you write this?" or "Why did you write this?" and you can point at what may have influenced you at the time or what you know, and open their eyes to how you can turn influences into something else rather than copying it. Those things are great moments for sure.
Lawrence: When I look at the list of some of the collaborators or the people you've worked with—Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, William Parker—what an amazing set of opportunities, but also musicians with very specific approaches to improvisation. Can you talk a little bit about how working with improvisers of those levels, as well as people who are incredible composers, affects you?
Ingrid: I think Anthony Braxton must be the person I have learned most from, because I've played with him since 2011 in so many different contexts, and I'm always blown away by it. We just came back from playing the gala at Roulette for his 80th birthday here in Brooklyn. We performed some of his pieces—every single time, I'm just amazed at how he found this combination of playing really challenging material yet making it sound so improvisational and keeping such an open, multi-dimensional world. I can't describe it. His music is just bigger than anything else.
He is his own universe, and it is fascinating. I've enjoyed every minute of it. Plus, obviously as a saxophonist—he is older now, but he had such a command of the instrument and such a command of his own language that it's so influential.
After I got back from the gala, Darius Jones held a speech at the gala—there were many different speeches, but Darius Jones was one of them. He mentioned how For Alto scared him when he was a teenager and then really influenced him. So I put it on the next day, and it still kind of blows me away how disciplined it is and how much technique there is, and how much shape there is in those pieces, in those individual pieces. At the time it must have just really shocked people to do this on a major label. It's really special.
I think that's another thing. The composers who are part of the AACM—just the consistency with which they have really always done their own thing and continued to do so. Henry Threadgill just released his record. He is over eighty. The couple of times I played with Muhal Richard Abrams, that was shortly before his death, and he was dancing in rehearsal. Just the energy and the consistency to create new work is relentless. It's a relentless commitment to the work.
Really is. In the case of Anthony Braxton, I hold like an introductory class to some of my students about Anthony Braxton. Also, when I give workshops at universities, I always tell the students, I show them who's come out of him—people like Steve Lehman or Mary Halvorson and Tyshawn Sorey, who musically really don't sound anything like him. And then there's many musicians on the classical side, or people like Tyondai Braxton, who grew up listening to his dad's music, obviously. So he has inspired people to do their own thing with great discipline.
Lawrence: I hadn't thought about Mary Halvorson or Tyshawn in that way. But it's really amazing where they—I mean, they are singular, generational voices on their instruments and still so young. When you think about the runway in front of them, it's actually rather incredible what he spawned.
As we sort of near the end of our time together, I'm curious—there's another musician that you've worked with quite a bit, this guy named Tom Rainey, (laughter) and I'm wondering, you know, obviously it's incredible to have such a multifaceted, close relationship with another musician and your personal connection, but can you just talk about having your partner be a collaborator or someone who you use as another one of these musicians in your sort of stable of interpreters or participants in your work?
Ingrid: He is a master. He's also honest and direct, so it's a real pleasure to have him on my side. We will play, for example—if I write music, we will play it here as a duo. We practice it as a duo. We still play together on most days, even if it's just like twenty minutes or something like that. We'll just have a little moment where we improvise together, for example. It's never—it's still thrilling for me to play with him.
Plus, he's a drummer who—although he says he doesn't compose—he has a really sharp, compositional sense. He gets very much involved in the overall shaping of the piece and the compositional side of the piece, much more than many drummers I think. So I will always play my compositions or my music that I wrote with him and ask for his opinion. It's a real—it's been a really fertile relationship.
Lawrence: That's beautiful. My last question for you is, going back to very early on to an album like Who Is It? where you were getting a lot of accolades as an up-and-comer, nominations, et cetera. And then you get someone like Jason Moran calling you a visionary. You've had your share of third-party accolades bestowed upon you pretty consistently over the years. How do you metabolize that? Do you want to accept those flowers, or do you need to not listen to that in order to—how do you accept the compliments that you're given?
Ingrid: That's a very good question and it's an interesting one. My friend Mônica Vasconcelos, a singer I used to work with in London, she always said to me, "You have to really learn how to accept the compliment," because I was never able to do it.
I think what I have sort of settled on, or what I'm trying very hard to do—because obviously not all press is positive. You also get people who do not like your music—so I try my very best to not take either too seriously, because it's difficult. You can ultimately only do what you think is right or what resonates with you. I think you should accept compliments and you should accept criticism, but not believe it too much in either direction.
Because as an artist, I think the more authentic you ultimately can be, the better it is for you, because that is what resonates. But on your path to it, there will always be some criticism that you need to examine. Criticism is one side, and praise is the other. So I think you need to be grounded and let them balance as much as you possibly can. (laughter) It's not easy. Neither side is easy.
Lawrence: I forget who it was who made the point—maybe the quote's attributed to many people—but if you're going to read the good reviews, you have to read the bad reviews. You can't just read the good ones. And the converse is true too. You can't just beat yourself up. You have to be able to accept when something resonates.
Ingrid: That's true. I think the one thing that you do have to do—because I think most musicians or many musicians, you come off a gig and you basically are pondering about what you just did. And no musician I know ever comes off a gig thinking everything I did was brilliant. You just kind of ponder about it. Most musicians are always learning, so we're always beating ourselves up about something.
What I have learned over the years is that you cannot know what really went on because you also are doing it. There's no objectivity really. You do not know what it was like on the outside. So if somebody comes up to you after a gig and says, "Congratulations, we really enjoyed it. Really great," you have to accept it even if you did not love everything you did yourself, because they were part of it and they had—if they had a good experience, then—
Lawrence: That was their night out.
Ingrid: It is their night out, and you should gracefully accept it and leave the pondering for a little bit later, because the audience is just as much a part of this. They're a very important part of it. There's a communion that goes on while you're doing it, so your focus afterwards can't just be on those things that you did not like about yourself.
