Tag: herbie hancock

From Goat Rodeo to Songs of Comfort, Yo-Yo Ma Believes Music Builds Bridges

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The world’s most famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma is spending the pandemic at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his family. It has been a situation that he describes, rather humorously, as being an adjustment for everyone. “Two-thirds of my marriage has been on the road. Forty-two years and suddenly my wife sees me home every night, and every day and every morning.”

Yet he says the experience has been a real blessing, too. “All the tensions of being home and preparing to leave, or coming back home to recuperate and then leave again, are all gone,” he explains by phone, before adding “replaced by, of course, the incredible fractures and ruptures in our society.”

Besides pondering a “tsunami of crises,” Ma talks about the joys of getting the band back together — a lineup informally known as Goat Rodeo, which also encompasses Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and special guest Aoife O’Donovan. This Artist of the Month interview is the fourth of four installments as BGS salutes the incredible and iconic musicians behind the ensemble’s second project, Not Our First Goat Rodeo.

BGS: Like the first album, Not Our First Goat Rodeo was recorded at James Taylor’s studio in the Berkshires. Was there a comfort level about returning there?

Totally. The studio is aesthetically beautiful. It is right there in the middle of the Berkshires, the middle of the woods, and it’s a barn that has been built for that reason. We work hard. We play hard. And going back to it is fabulous because everybody in the band is so busy. So, just to get the time from their busy lives to get together is a feat, but when we get together, it feels like we never left. So, add to the great acoustics and the set-up of the barn, another added feeling of “the band is getting back together again.”

Since it was in August, was there a summer vacation vibe?

It was like camp except we weren’t 12 years old. [Laughs] Adult camp! We spend all day together. We have meals together. But it was also work. I have to say that Edgar, Chris, and Stuart worked like dogs, way into the night. Working on scores, working on correcting things. They worked really, really, really hard, but we also had a really good time.

Although the four of you don’t play together often, it seems that a high level of trust exists within the group and with the audience.

That’s such a good question, because you are talking about both the external and internal relationship of building trust. It starts with the trust we have in one another, interpersonally. Between Chris and Edgar. Between Chris and Stuart. Stuart and Edgar. Edgar and me. If you were to draw a networking line between all of us, and Aoife included, it’s trust on every level. Trust and respect. I think the two go together. In that, if someone has a deep opinion about something, there’s going to be deep respect for that. We might try it and it might evolve into something else. There’s never an argument…

The trust also comes from the philosophy: it’s not “It’s my way, your way or the highway.” It’s more like “I know certain things and you know certain things and I love what you know and you like what I know and respect what I know.” So we are just working it out all of the time.

So that allows for the freedom of creativity, to follow a musical idea and see where it takes you?

You know, that other thing about that is where you place your ego. We live in a world where some people think their ego walks in front of them. And [with Goat Rodeo], every one of us has a pretty strong ego because otherwise we can’t go and perform. But the egos never lead. We actually make fun of our own egos or each other’s.

Another thing is, we all have strengths and vulnerabilities, [but] we never, ever pounce on anybody’s vulnerability. I’m the oldest guy there. I’m full of warts. You can probably make fun of me until the cows come home but I think they treat me nice. There’s respect but they never step on someone’s vulnerability. It’s like a great relationship — a great domestic relationship. We didn’t get into pushing buttons. We’re so clear about the work that needs to be done. That’s how you build trust. You accept the whole person, and you treasure the parts that they excel in. You don’t tramp on weaknesses. But while we have a lot of fun!

What is one recording that ranks as a G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) for you?

When you ask a question like that, I can’t help but think about different time periods. If the well-lived life is the life that has been explored, then obviously at all times in your life you will have had different influences that have sparked new interests.

I will give you a musical example of recent vintage. There’s this 23-year-old musician named Jacob Collier from England. He’s almost self-taught. He sings. He plays dozens of instruments. He goes and creates. I find more and more as I get older and older, I am just stupefied by young talent in a way I never was. So someone like Jacob Collier comes along and he does harmonies in ways that are so astounding. I think he studied with Herbie Hancock and his level of inventiveness is so astounding. I feel like Salieri hearing Mozart for the first time. This guy just appears and he can spin and juggle 36 balls in the air while he’s talking to you. I just can’t take this! It’s just so amazing!

Chris is someone like that. Chris has that kind of mind. And I think working with Edgar gives me that sense of him. Because here’s this mind who is a perfectionist mind, in that he works things out in the perfectionist mentality where the abstract is really close to the reality. Usually I have an image of something and I’m going to translate that into a feeling, into a sound, and here it is. Edgar likes manipulating things in the abstract. That’s hard to do, because most of us like to work in the visible world, [which is a] tiny part of the spectrum in the universe.

So the invisible world, whether it is the larger universe or the micro universe, is something that most of us can’t experience… To go to trusting the abstract world, which we can’t see, and say that it’s real is very difficult. And so the question is, What is our faith in the invisible? That’s a big question. For me it is not a political question. It is a human question. As in, who do you trust and on what subjects? That’s very difficult because the world has become so complex.

And the world is so immediate and immense, and you are inundated from so many sides.

So, I grew up in three cultures, and each culture said, “We are the best!” I grew up as a 7-year-old — that is when I came to the States — saying, “Are you all crazy? You can’t all be right because you are claiming you’re the most right and that’s not logical!” So I had to figure out what that means. Just like, is bluegrass music the best? Is classical music the best? Is jazz the best? Is R&B the best? Is hip-hop the best?

I decline to think that way because that just gets me in trouble. Just because it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense logically. It doesn’t make sense to me sociologically. It doesn’t make sense to me as an American citizen because I take pride in all of the inventions we have made to the expressive world. And every new invention we have is a combination of a number of worlds.

You posted some music performances to your pandemic-inspired project, Songs of Comfort, to bring a little solace to people. How gratifying is it that it’s taken on a life of its own, with people around the world uploading videos?

One of the things that I have found out in this first trimester of the pandemic is how deeply people need one another. How deeply they need community. After lockdown, we see the beaches fill up, the bars fill up, and some people say that the economy must move. It’s totally understandable that we have that drive to be together. My way of thinking about it is to say, let’s be a community given the means we have.

In music, in service, it is always asking the question, “How can we help?” So it came from that impulse. That is a very natural impulse, which so many people have added to, or responded to, because we are all going through different versions of the same thing. We’re losing people. We’re stressed. We can’t find food. We can’t earn our living. We can’t plan. We can’t move around. We can’t be with one another.

But guess what? Music travels lightly. This is where the ephemeral is an advantage. It’s not something that needs to be moved by FedEx or a delivery person, but something we can transfer anywhere we want. It goes through walls. That’s why I say, in culture, music builds bridges because the bridges are not physical. Music doesn’t build walls; it builds bridges, because I can send you a link and there you have it.

I relished not only doing Songs of Comfort, but being able to Zoom into hospitals or getting to play for one patient. To send some music to one specific person to say, “I hear this is what you are going through. I’m so sympathetic. I’d like to send you this piece of music. Here it is. I recorded it on my phone.” And then send it to someone. That’s pretty personal. That to me is the essence of the aesthetic experience.

(Editor’s note: Read the remaining installments of our Artist of the Month interview series here.)

Photo credit: Josh Goleman

SMALL WORLD: Guitarist Lionel Loueke Brings Gentility to ‘The Journey’

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Lionel Loueke sat in a hotel room while on tour somewhere in Europe about a year and a half ago, watching the news on TV. The Benin-born guitarist, whose inventive playing has astonished many through his roles with Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and his own band, was horrified by what he was seeing.

“It was a ship,” he remembered of the coverage. “A boat that came from Libya, I think. Many people died in the sea. I remember seeing kids, pregnant women in a boat and in very ugly conditions tossing the Mediterranean.”

It was a boat carrying refugees from North Africa to Europe, people trying to escape war and famine, only to perish on route. He was overwhelmed with emotion. He responded in the way most natural to him.

He picked up his guitar.

“I wasn’t thinking of composing that day,” he says. “Just playing some simple triads. I recorded myself improvising, all triads, more of a classical style.”

As much as what he was watching tore him apart, made him angry and pained by the horror and violence of it, the music he was making didn’t sound angry, did not reflect the violence and brutality. Instead it was music of gentility.

“I’m personally a non-violent person,” he says. “I practice Buddhism, with Herbie now for a few years. That comes through my playing and my music. There are other ways to resolve problems than violence. I think we touch more people this way — maybe the gentle part will catch more people’s attention than something angry and aggressive. That’s the way I see it.”

And that is exactly the tone throughout his new album, The Journey, which includes “Vi Gnin” (“My Child” in the Mina language of a coastal district of Benin), the piece that grew from those triads he played in the hotel room.

It’s a tone that tied to a lot of things for him as he watched and played that day. He thought of other ships, ships that took people from his home region in an earlier era across the Atlantic to be slaves in Brazil. And he thought of the music of Brazil of more recent times, echoing the earlier eras, sounds that thread through the album.

The album, the 45-year-old musician’s seventh as a leader, doesn’t start with slaves being taken to South America, though. It starts with some returning to Africa. Opening track “Bouriyan” is a lilting samba, inspired by those who moved back to Benin, once a Portuguese colony, from Brazil as slave revolts racked the country during its fight for independence in the 19th century. It’s something to which he feels a very direct connection, as many of those returnees settled in the town of Ouidah, where his mother grew up. Loueke has indelibly fond memories of his mother cooking feijoada, the Brazilian-rooted beans-and-meat stew. But of course he had no idea of those roots.

“For me, I thought it was from Benin!” he says. “That’s the real connection.”

It was the same with the music that came from the Brazilian ties.

“I grew up listening to Brazilian music, without knowing it was Brazilian music,” he says.

That came later, when he left Benin as a young man to study jazz at the American School of Modern Music in Paris. “I started hearing the Brazilian guitarists,” he recalls. “First guy I heard was Baden Powell. Then of course João Gilberto, Gilberto Gil. All those classic Brazilian composers.” And, of course, Antonio Carlos Jobim, the essential Brazilian guitarist-composer of “The Girl From Ipanema,” “Desafinado” and so many others at the foundation of the canon.

“Jobim! Jobim might be the second one I heard. I was already playing some of those standards, classic songs we all knew.”

For many, that connection may be a bit of a revelation. The evolution of some music back and forth across the Atlantic is well-known — the way Afro-Cuban music sprung from Yoruban roots and then returned to be embraced and reworked in various African locales, most prominently. But the sounds associated with Brazil on which Loueke draws for The Journey are lesser associated with Africa.

“You have the return after slavery, that part is not well-known,” he says. “But pretty much in every country where you have the coasts, some of the slaves who came back on different coasts got together and used the culture back from where they had come from.”

That all provided the starting point for creation of the music here, under the guidance of producer and co-arranger Robert Sadin, starting with Loueke’s guitar and vocals, with words in Mina, Fon, Yoruba and his own “language” of clicks, hums and sighs. They then brought in a variable cast of complementary, enhancing support, a wide-ranging roster including Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, bassist Pino Palladino (the guy who, among many other things, stepped in to the Who when John Entwistle died), New York saxophonist John Ellis, Trinidadian trumpeter Étienne Charles, classical clarinetist Patrick Messina, versatile cellist Vincent Ségal and Benin-born percussionist Christi Joza Orisha, as well as Loueke’s long-time trio partners, bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth.

“We didn’t think about who was going to play at the beginning,” Loueke says. “I was doing three days myself for the project, then we decided based on that who would be the right person to bring something magical. Choice was to find musicians who can bring something different, refreshing.”

Refreshing is a good description of Loueke’s whole approach to music, but also dazzling in technique and originality, something he developed from his youth when he came under the sway of the music of Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and Grant Green, then developed in his studies Paris, in Boston at the Berklee College of Music and in Los Angeles at the Thelonious Monk Institute — his audition at the latter being in front of a panel that included Hancock, Blanchard and Shorter.

All of that, all of him, is in this new album more than anything he’s done before, he says. It comes through strongly when he talks about the songs and their inspiration, what they mean to him.

“‘Kába,’ when something good or bad happens we look up or down,” he says of one. “Kába means ‘sky’ and it’s all about looking to the sky. We look for hope. We are thankful.”

Of another: “‘Gbé’ means ‘life,’ how life is beautiful at the beginning, but sometimes there are the roses and you have to be careful when you’re walking or step on the thorns.”

And another: “‘Molika’ is a song I wrote for my kids — Moesha, Lisa and Mika.”

He’s reluctant to call this a political album, despite the initial matters that spurred it. It goes much deeper than politics.

“It’s a very personal record for me,” he says. “I call it The Journey for that reason. It’s kind of a resume of all I’ve done from the beginning as a musician, and as a person, until today. And this is the right time to talk about these things. I’m not a political person. But to speak out, musically, to make a statement — well, after all for me we are living it, one way or another.”

Photo credit: Jean-Baptiste Millot

Shrimp Quesadilla Pockets

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I think and talk a lot about the power of interpretation. When I left college to become a professional musician, one of the things I did to put food on the table was singing jingles and demos. With the jingles, I had to sell products — anything from clothing to Taco Bell. If I didn’t sound excited to be singing about those products, no one would have wanted to buy what I was selling. The same applied to the demo sessions I was a part of. I learned early on that my job wasn’t just to sing well; it was to help the songwriter properly translate their message. The more I did it, the deeper I delved into the lyrics I was singing, causing such a profound personal connection to the songs, making it feel like the stories were only mine to tell. I found the power of interpretation through music, then, and have continued to explore that power in other areas in my life ever since.

Two years ago, I did something that I’ve never done before: I sang songs written by other people and put them out on an album under my own name. Was it challenging? Yes. Not because I was too proud to sing someone else’s songs, but because I had so much respect for the artists who had released those songs in the first place. I wanted to honor their creativity and make sure that I wasn’t doing a disservice to the art itself. Now that I cook nearly as much as I sing, the same principles apply to the food I make.

There are so many cultures whose cuisines I admire. I cook a lot of food that is not from the culture I was born into or raised in. I used to be afraid to cook anything not American or Ghanaian, but then I began to get inside various, unique dishes and study them from the inside out. Once I realized what flavors and techniques make up a dish, as well as the love given to the food from the culture it came from, I gained the confidence to engage in the interpretation of those dishes and I’ve learned how to honor them in my own way. My fiancé, Sam, is originally from California. To him, Mexican cuisine is almost synonymous with comfort. I love Mexican food and I love Tex-Mex, as well. Tex-Mex is a direct interpretation. It is a cuisine brought to Texas by Mexican descendants that reinvents a traditional way of eating while remaining respectful of its origin.

This Autumn, I will have the honor of calling three children, ages 13 and under, my official bonus children. That’s so much cooler than saying “step children” — and they’re so much cooler than that, too. I cook for them often and they help me in the kitchen a lot, as well. Before I came along, my fiancé’s go-to dinner for the kiddos was often some kind of Mexican cuisine — tacos or quesadillas, usually. It’s one of the few things that certain little people I know will eat joyfully! Yet, being the cook that I am, I bore easily if I’m making the same thing the same way over and over again. I want to make my family’s bellies happy, but I also want to make my creative soul happy in the process.

This belly/soul happy recipe, Shrimp* Quesadilla Pockets, is an interpretation of a traditional one. A traditional quesadilla involves two tortillas filled with cheese, stacked on top of each other. When sliced, it’s reminiscent of a pizza to me. Although I very much like pizza and traditional quesadillas (and all of the yummy toppings that fall off or out of them when you pick them up), I needed to create an easy, pocket-sized version for quick pick-up-and-go meals. Call it my new mom short-cut. I’m learning! They store well and the filling doesn’t dry out because it’s not exposed and can be reheated in a flash.

Interpret away, people. It’s the stuff we’re made of. Take Herbie Hancock’s tribute album to Joni Mitchell, River: The Joni Letters, for instance. Put it on right now. Um, wow. Yeah, that’s some power right there.

SHRIMP* QUESADILLA POCKETS
*Omit shrimp for allergies, etc., and sub with any protein of choice

Ingredients

Serves 5 (2 each)
1/2 lb cooked shrimp, sliced in half lengthwise
1/8 tsp red pepper/chili flakes (or omit)
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or omit)
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp lime juice**
2 cloves garlic, minced
Safflower or grape seed oil
10 soft, large, white tortillas
2 cups shredded pepper jack, monterey jack, or cheddar cheese
1 cup black beans, rinsed and drained
2 cups cooked white rice
Condiments of choice — salsa, sour cream, and limes for us.

**I forgot to grab the limes from my house when I came over to Sam’s to try this recipe out on him and the kids … but a bright young man of 11 pointed out that “maybe some lime” would have helped to make it brighter. Don’t forget the limes. Alfie’s orders.

Directions

Preheat your oven to 250° and place a sheet tray lined with parchment paper or foil inside of it. This is where you will keep the quesadillas warm while you’re making a stack of ’em.

Place shrimp and all the ingredients up to (but not including) the oil in a bowl and massage into shrimp and let sit in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Lay out tortillas and sprinkle ingredients lightly onto tortilla in a V shape (reference my tutorial photos) in the following order — cheese, two slices of shrimp in a vertical line, beans, rice, more cheese. Reference tutorial photos for folding.

Heat 1-2 Tbsp oil on medium heat (no higher!) in a non-stick pan. Place folded tortilla in pan, seam side down. Hold a spatula on top of each quesadilla pocket for a few seconds to ensure a proper seal. Check for brownness after one minute and flip when desired color is achieved. Repeat the last step to brown the other side.

Garnish with cilantro and dip in salsa or sour cream.