Jason Crane

You’re listening to the Jazz Session with Jason, Original Jazz Interview Podcast, episode #540

 You ever talk to someone and you feel like you could talk to them for days in a row? That’s how I felt about Yelena Eckemoff, whose music I really, really love. You’ll find an album of hers that came out earlier this year called ‘Nocturnal Animals’ mentioned in this show, talked about at some length. And we’re also talking about and giving you a sneak peek of her forthcoming album, which comes out in March. But in any case, let’s start with Nocturnal Animals.

Yelena Eckemoff, welcome to the Jazz Session.

I’m glad to be here.

I am very glad to have you. We’re going to talk today about two albums, one that came out earlier this year, which is called ‘Nocturnal Animals’, and another that’s coming out in early 2021, which is called ‘Adventures of the Wildflower.’ They’re both fantastic. And I wanted to start by saying that I once heard someone compliment an actor by saying that when he was on the screen, you could see him think. Like you could see expressions on his face, even when he wasn’t talking that conveyed emotion and thoughts. And as I was listening to your albums, of course, I can’t see you performing them, but I had the sense that I could almost hear you searching, hear you looking for the next thing, which is a very exciting part of music to me. And I wanted to ask if, if that rings true to you at all, if that seems true, like while you’re playing a part of it is a search.

Of course, yeah, I’m very thinking person. So, I guess my thinking starts with composing, of course. And there’s a great deal of thinking when I edit my compositions. But then finally, when I bring my compositions to the recording, that’s another stage of thinking when, especially when we have free solos, that’s ground for immediate enveloping of thought. Your guess is very right, even though I have a lot of things composed. So, it’s not just free improvisation all throughout. There are a lot of free improvisation, but it’s all embedded into the composition.

Not only there’ a lot of composed material, but there’s a lot of thematic composed material. In other words, your recordings before this one, that was often true too, that there’s some sort of overarching thematic idea. For example, for ‘Nocturnal Animals’, the theme is exactly what the title suggests it might be. Each piece is named after a nocturnal animal. Will you talk about the research process? I guess first of all, the inspiration for that, but then the research process that led up to the compositions.

I don’t know how ideas come to people, they just come [to me]. Nature was always a source of inspiration for me, anything in the nature. And of course, I’m an artist who expresses myself but what else can I express? mean, I can express the world through my own feelings. And I have a lot of thinking going on about the world and the life and the meaning of it like everybody else. But since I’m a musician, I’m fortunate to have this ability to not only think about it, but actually to express it in the music and more than that, like, of course, through words and visual art, like a supplement to music. So, but yeah, I mean, I’ve done projects about different things but I’ve never done project about the animals. Naturally I thought how was I to write about animals. What can I express? Of course, I can express the animals, but I didn’t want to make a cliche and what can I say about the fox? What can I say about the bear? So, I almost like wanted to see if I myself have some features or some other people, had features of those animals, like trends of the animals. So, almost like combined features, you know, like sometimes you look at the person and say, this person looks like a bird or so on. And I, I thought, you know, we all have some animalist, you know, features in us sometimes and that gave me the very interesting, very exciting angle to express the animals. Not really humanize, well, maybe a little bit humanize them, but also vice versa to go from the people to animals, say, how the person could be behaving like the hedgehog.

The album has a thematic idea, but I’m wondering how programmatic the music is. In other words, when you thought about either a person behaving as a rattlesnake or a hedgehog or a toad, or you thought about those animals themselves, is it more like an emotion that then leads to the music, or is there something in the music that is really directly tied to the movement or something like that?

Of course, music is expressing the emotions and if it’s a fox, it runs. If it runs, the music should run. And if it’s a snake, the music should kind of give you, yes, give you that impression of the snake. And not just behavior, it’s more like cicada, for example trying to emerge after a very long preparation, it emerges and worries about how the world is going to accept it. So, it’s like I wrote about myself. I’ve gone through so much in my life, immigration, well, of course, the great deal of education. And then I started my career so late. So, that’s almost like, it feels like I express myself in that cicada.

Very important to the way this music is expressed are the people who perform it with you. Tell me about who is on ‘Nocturnal Animals’ with you.

Yeah, well, of course, Arild Andersen, the bass player who I started to work with back in 2012. And he’s been very important figure in my musical journey because of our collaboration, I would call it collaboration, even though it’s my music, but he’s just a sideman. When we work together, I think there’s some kind of a magic, you know, how we understand each other even though we come from so very different worlds. I come from classical word as composer and he’s improviser mostly but then we meet somewhere in the middle and it’s really great. It was our fifth album together. I wanted to have Jon Christensen one more time and I was right because he passed away soon after we recorded. I also wanted to make sure that Jon, who was not feeling that good already, is not pressured to be only drummer on the project because I wanted to make sure that he’s not stressed out. I asked another Norwegian drummer, percussionist Thomas Strønen, who really was growing up listening to Jon Christiansen, so I thought it could work and it did work. So, I had two drummers, not because I didn’t want just one drummer, but I decided to have two drummers, I was excited about the opportunity to, you know, have more percussion, not just drum set, but you know, a lot of percussion, which actually hard to do sometimes when it’s just the one drummer like, say Marilyn Mazur. Jon is a great drummer who actually incorporates a lot of percussion. And actually, Olavi Louhivuori who plays on my upcoming album, is also very good with incorporating percussion into his drums. But a lot of drummers just use the drum set, like Billy Hart, and, you know, it’s fine and great. But for ‘Nocturnal Animals’ all those sounds were needed, I thought that this came out perfect with two drummers. It can be difficult to make it work, but they play together so seamlessly. And it doesn’t surprise me to hear that, you know, was an inspiration because they just fit together so, so well throughout the recording. Jan Erik Kongshaug, the sound engineer who was great friend of Jon and Arild knew how to do it. So, they were playing in the booths side by side. So, they were almost like, you know, exchanging everything, exchanging the glances through the glass. Jon doesn’t need any music or anything. He just listens. He just plays when he feels like playing. And, of course, Thomas was very connected to what Jon was doing. It did work because we wanted it to work. And it was not about both drummers playing together and showing off. It was about them playing with that music and with Ariel and me. And it was just, we had so much fun interplaying like this.

You mentioned earlier the addition of things like art or poetry or prose to the music as a kind of additional ways of expression, which features in a lot of your work, features very heavily in ‘Adventures of the Wildflower’, which we’ll get to. But I’m just curious about that, about your use of additional media and additional means of expression. Can you talk about how you started doing that?

First of all, I need to say that I wish that I didn’t do it because I know I’m confusing people and especially music critics because like, what is she doing? Why is she doing this? Is she like thinking that her music is not enough or anything? I always foresee questions like that from majority of the people who wonder why in the world I am doing this. You know, it’s probably sometimes could be harmful because I can confuse people with this, who don’t understand where I’m coming from and why should I go to that extent. And I do go to that much more extent when I prepare my release. If I didn’t have to do all of it, it would be so much easier to prepare it. But the truth is that I just love doing this. This is something that, you know, when I like conceive the project, it’s, I’m creating a world around it. I’m thinking about it as you know, something like a movie, just the whole world I’m starting to live in. So, I’m getting that all of those images in my head and feelings and everything. For example, well, I don’t know, if it’s a good example, but just from the top of my head, when I was recording ‘Lions’ with Arild Anderson and Billy Hart, I was traveling in Europe I was making pictures of lions. Everywhere I saw lions on the doors, sculptures, know, anything, because I was searching for the lion’s theme everywhere. Well, it’s a kind of example. I was obsessed with figuring out everything I could about lions and just kind of living through it. So, this is just my way of processing my music. I’m not trying to show off, I’m not trying to show everybody I can do this or I can write or I don’t know if I can write, I don’t care. I do what I can and I’ve been always interested in drawings and painting. But I know I’m not professional writer or artist, I’m a musician, but this makes me feel I do everything I can and I make those images that are in my head to come alive.

I’m very disappointed that anyone would ever be critical of that. I mean, it would be like telling a filmmaker not to have music in the film or something. mean, art is much larger than any one discipline. And if your primary discipline is music, but you feel compelled to express more of the story visually or through writing, I mean, to me, that just makes the world that much richer. It’s not like I can’t listen to the music without those things. I can. And as a matter of fact, it’s always been my practice that when I listened to music for the first time, I don’t read anything. I don’t read the song titles or anything. I just start playing the music. But then after that, to have this whole rich world to go into, to read your words, to look at the illustrations, it just makes me, it makes me feel surrounded by your vision. And certainly, music alone can do that, but that’s not to say that that’s the only way to do it. And I think your way is, beautiful.

Well, thank you. I’m very glad to hear those words from you.

You mentioned, that’s interesting in the recording of ‘Lions’, how you were kind of capturing images of lions everywhere. Just to stay on that particular example, when you were capturing these images, had you already written and recorded the music? Had you written it, but not recorded it yet? Where in the process are you kind of starting the visual piece or the poetry piece or the prose piece?

No, was just like, initially that idea came to me when Ariel told me at the recording of ‘Glass Song’, our first project together, that he’s having a bass with a lion’s head on the neck made for him in France. I thought, well, he’s going to have a lion’s bass. And that kind of triggered my imagination, and I thought what we need to record? The CD about lions. But when I started to, I didn’t know how I’m gonna approach this, because, you know, how can you approach it? So, it took me so much time just to kind of figure out what I’m gonna write about it, how I’m gonna approach it. And I was searching everywhere. I even went to the zoo for the whole day making pictures of lions, I had hundreds of images of lions. Finally, I just painted my own picture because nothing was fitting what I envisioned and that’s how I actually started to paint pictures because before that I was using my photographs but then after ‘Lions’ when I couldn’t find any photograph, I could use I started to paint my own. But you asked me earlier, I guess I didn’t answer that question, why I started to write and include those in the CD packaging. And that was this ‘Glass Song’ also. I have a friend who’s the age of my mother, but she’s my friend. She’s originally from Germany. And it’s my only friend who pretty much here in America. And she was listening, yeah, I was showing her my rough mixes. I was kind of explaining to her what I see, what’s going on, what I see there. And then she said, ‘How interesting. You know, I’m not musician, but when you talk about it, I kind of like start understanding your music better. Why don’t you write it and include in your CD booklet?’ And that’s how she advised me that. And I thought, why not? So, I did that for ‘Glass Song’ the first time.

Again, I appreciate that. It has always been a thought of mine that, music can stand on its own, but if we have an interest in broadening the audience or in bringing people in to our vision, then telling them something about what’s happening is just a kind thing to do. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be explained. But I’ve met so many musicians over the years who say like, you know, I don’t talk to the audience because the music stands on its own, or I don’t put anything in the liner notes because the music stands on its own. And sure. Okay. That’s fine. But it doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it. And I think audiences, I know I’m, part of the audience as an audience member. I’m grateful when the musician acknowledges me and brings me in and says, here’s, here’s the vision or, here’s a piece of what inspired this or here’s another way to think about it. I appreciate that when it happens.

Yeah, well, me too. Me too. I know that a lot of musicians I work with, they actually don’t really buy my approach. I mean, they say, well, even titles are not important, you know. Actually, Arild is one of them. But yeah, but when he plays, he actually expresses things. Yeah, and Billy Hart was so excited when I told him I want him to express the dog and he was thinking, and then he was asking me, ‘Well, Yelena, what kind of dog is it like a grown dog or a puppy?’

That’s great.

And then I said, well, here’s the grass grows and the wind blows. I mean, he was just so excited. He said, ‘I love it. I love this. You know, you want me to express how the grass is going.’ The fireplace’s crackling and yeah, and actually, yes, and he did do all of it.

That’s beautiful.

I know where to point out when he was doing all of it. We recorded three times with Billy and every time he was excited to express all these things. In ‘Lions’, for example, I have track about hunger, and he was playing pangs of hunger and stomach growling of the lions.

That’s wild. I love it.

Well, it was not really like, of course it was more complicated than just, right? But yes, he felt it and he actually bought all of those ideas of mine. With Jon Christiansen, when we recorded ‘Everblue’, I said, could you show the shells. I think you can hear how the shells are like rolled over the beach sand.

Let’s turn our attention to the forthcoming album, folks will get a very short sneak peek of here in this episode. It’s called ‘Adventures of the Wildflower’, much like ‘Nocturnal Animals’, it has a theme, and that theme is expressed in the album title. It is, in fact, this life cycle of a Columbine flower that is expressed throughout the album, there’s a lot of poetry and art in the additional materials to add even more depth. Again, if I’ll just ask you, where did this idea for the long, essentially almost suite of music based on the Columbine come from?

Again, I was kind of thinking about what life is about and how, you know, I’ve just done the ‘Nocturnal Animals’ and how the animal world is connected to the human world and we can be connected, interconnected. And then I actually read the science article in the magazine about how plants communicate, trees and all kinds of plants. I had no idea that they communicate. But apparently, they connect throughout the root system and even through the air. So, I’m not a scientist and probably I didn’t understand 50 % from the article was saying but…

Not to interrupt you, but I will just add that that’s actually a subject that I am fascinated by and have read several books about plant communication and so when I learned that this album was partly inspired by that. I was so excited because I think it’s amazing. It’s fascinating how plants community I mean they can warn each other of danger they can express, you know joy and comfort I mean, it’s incredible and so I was very excited when I thought oh, well, here’s an entire album I can listen to that is based in that concept. I’m sorry to interrupt you, but please continue.

I feel like closer and closer to you like personally, because it seems like we share a lot of the same passion. I was so also excited about that, because I love nature. And I think we can’t get enough of nature, right? you know, every day we, we don’t get tired of it.

I think so.

listening to birds and looking at the beautiful trees and flowers and everything like ocean and rivers. So, this is, you can’t get enough of it. You can get satisfied with the food, but never with looking at the nature. Of course, I thought, well, how, what about the flowers? What if the flower would feel what’s going on around it and think about it? of course, I can’t help but I always humanize the nature because, you know, I don’t know what flower would think, but I can kind of put myself in the flower’s shoes. So, and it was, I thought about it was so easy. Of course, the seed, seed germinates and looks at the world. And then I just started to think what can happen to that being. I am a gardener myself, not very successful, but I’m trying. So, I know how plants grow and with my garden when I have time and if I don’t, I know what happens. I understood that my task is to describe the life of the plant. I like, I chose Columbine and I actually, I wanted to even call it Columbine, but people told me, that’s not a good idea in America. And yes, wasn’t a good idea. But then I was searching, could I substitute the Columbines with something else? And I couldn’t find any plant, any flower that would fit the same cycle, what I wanted to do with it. So, I still had to, and my grandmother was growing Columbines, not just growing, but they would grow always in her garden. So, I love this flower. It was the flower of my childhood. So that’s how I decided on the Columbine. But I just thought this is not enough just to talk about plants, how they communicate. That’s the whole life around them. So that’s how the story came about. Somebody said it is like a children’s book, but what more could I do? It’s just a CD in sort. It’s not like a novel, right?

You know, it’s interesting to me, and I didn’t make this connection until just now when hearing you describe the Columbine and its cycle. But in some ways, it feels to me like this album is almost like if you took the cicada idea from ‘Nocturnal Animals’ and just expanded that to an entire album. Because when you described the cicada, you talked about this idea of growth, of your own personal growth, of life changes, of long moments of preparation, long years even of preparation, which is not exactly the same for a Columbine, but not dissimilar. And this album is in some ways like taking that idea of growth and evolution and expanding it out as the main idea of the entire record. Maybe I’m off the mark there, but anyway that it suggested itself to me when I listened to you talk about these two different pieces.

That was my way to see the Columbine as a very nice human being, with lifespan of two years, but we, people live longer, hopefully. And of course, we have more things to happen in our life, but we have adversities, and the Columbine did have her adversities, and we have friends who help us, and she did have, and so everything like you know kind of like in very concentrated form that what people experience in their lives, and how they think about their lives, when they get closer to the end of it, and what they cherish in their lives. When I was talking about the flower, but still I was thinking about the human.

As we were kind of drawing near the close of our conversation, this is a very different ensemble from the one on ‘Nocturnal Animals’. Could you just briefly tell us about the band on ‘Adventures of the Wildflower’?

Yeah, well actually it was not the first time I recorded in Finland. The first recording with part of this band took place in 2013 when I recorded ‘Blooming Tall Phlox’. That was something that I really enjoyed because Finnish musicians, they are the best jazz musicians in Finland and not only that, they have a lot of recognition in Europe, but not as much in America, I think. And I met at Jazzahead in Bremen, I met Jarmo Saari, somebody introduced him to me. And I got excited that he plays not only different guitars, but also glass harp and theremin. And kind of I said, well, why don’t you go back to Finland? It’s a good kind of like excuse. Now I met with the guitar player I felt we connected and I listened to his works on the YouTube, on the Spotify and I thought, well, he’s really good. And also, I liked his works with Jukka Perko who is saxophone player. And I thought Jukka Perko and him, they would be great addition to my Olavi Louhivuori,

drummer and percussionist and Panu Savolainen, vibraphonist and Antti Lötjönen, bass player. So, I thought, well, this would be great band. I was so comfortable maybe because Finland and Russia are neighbors and I haven’t been in Russia for almost 40 years, but still, I am from there. So, I do have a Russian soul, guess. It was kind of very easy to work with them and I really looked forward and it really went really well, even better than I thought.

Yelena, people have had a little chance to hear ‘Adventures of the Wildflower’ on this program, just a little short snippet, but they’re actually going to get a chance to hear an entire piece from it coming up pretty soon.

On December 18th there will be a single ‘Winter Slumber’ released from’ Adventures of the Wildflower’. And then I will release probably a couple of more singles before March 19th the release date.

Yelena Eckemoff, it’s been absolutely a pleasure to talk to you. I feel like we could, this show could be four hours long, but I’m so, so glad you took the time to do this. I just, really enjoy your music and I hope you’ll come back on the show in the future when the next projects are out.

It was a pleasure of mine and thank you so much.