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Jamie Masefield of Jazz Mandonlin Project
Contemporary Things on Pastoral Strings
When one thinks of jazz music, the last instrument you would expect to hear (aside from an accordion) is a mandolin. Traditionally a bluegrass instrument, mandolin has been a part of American music since the 1700s. Jazz represents a genre of music that is uniquely American, yet the mandolin, despite its long history, has never been used as a jazz instrument, until now. Introducing Jamie Masefield, the first certified crusader for non-traditional methods on the mandolin. His aim is to shatter the preconception that his instrument can only be used in bluegrass music. His intense love of jazz, and undying thirst to be original, keeps Masefield on a life-long venture to discover the possibilities of the mandolin. His quest, aptly named the Jazz Mandolin Project, has featured a number of different musicians during its eight-year history. The two constants are Jamie and his mandolin. From traditional jazz standards to drum & bass fusion, Masefield has taken it all on and is prepared to go further. musictoday.com sat down with Jamie Masefield before a recent performance as headliner in Blue Note Records' fall tour.
musictoday.com: Let's start from the top. You started in Vermont?
Jamie Masefield: I started in Vermont. That is where I live. That is where JMP started. I grew up in New York State, but went to college in Vermont.
mt: New York, for a lot of people, is just New York City, but there is a lot more to offer in the upstate areas. There is a lot more green, more space, a much more rural environment. What was it like growing up out there?
JM: I grew up in a musical family. There were jam sessions going on at family gatherings. In general, I had a very rural upbringing. All that helped to influence my interest in music—being from a musical, artistic family and being outdoors a lot.
mt: Did your parents play instruments?
JM: Neither of my parents did, but my grandfather was a professional bass player with Tom Dorsey and those kinds of big bands. I have a number of uncles and cousins who were all playing music. I asked for a tenor banjo, not a five string, for Christmas, when I was eleven, because I heard these guys playing. I took lessons from an uncle of mine for seven years—every Saturday at 1 p.m.—until I had to go to college. In Burlington, there are actually a fair amount of traditional New Orleans-style Dixieland bands that need a banjo player. I surprisingly had a fair amount of work with the tenor banjo as soon as I got out there. I started making some money. I moved to the mandolin. The mandolin is tuned similar to the tenor banjo, so everything I learned on the banjo I could play on the mandolin. So, when I got to college, I started playing the mandolin. I am an odd ball to the mandolin world, in that I haven't come to jazz through bluegrass. I started my interest in early jazz on tenor banjo. So, I am a mandolin player that doesn't have a bluegrass background. That's what helps make my sound different from most mandolin players. I am using different jazz cords and different strumming that I have been doing for a long time. I haven't built up a knowledge through bluegrass.
mt: Do you listen to bluegrass?
JM: Not that much. Most of the people that have influenced my playing are modern jazz guitarists. I was listening to all kinds of older jazz, but it was the newer guys that got me to think about how I could do something similar on the mandolin. Players like Jim Hall, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, that is what made me go in that direction. I had been playing a very old style of jazz for an older audience for a long time. I finally realized that I wanted to do something more contemporary for young people. That is what made me lean into the mandolin and start writing my own tunes.
mt: But, you didn't study the mandolin when you went to college?
JM: No, I never took one music course at college. Since I have been out of college, I have studied composition under a wonderful composer in Vermont by the name of Ernie Stires. He has helped the way I write songs.
mt: What is it that is helping you enhance your technique?
JM: Basically, he convinced me that I had to learn how to play the piano to compose. So, at the age of 26 or 27, I started sitting down at the piano with no skill. I started with Bartok's Music For Children. After I went through that, I went on to Bach's Two Part Conventions. I went through that whole book and got into three-part conventions. That is where I stopped, because I am on the road so much. But, after that comes Bach's Preludes and Fugues, which is four-part conventions—four voices, which is really complex. I met Ernie through Trey from Phish. Trey studied with him also. He got me listening to a lot of classical music and the harmonic power used there. He got me to develop a craft. To be a great composer, you have to sit down at the piano and analyze all your options. You can't just be like, "Oh, this sounds cool. I'll stick this to that." It is a much more crafted process, where you start with a theme and you vary that theme, develop that theme, and make it grow and blossom through arrangement. That is often the difference between a song that people hear and they go, (nonchalantly) "Oh, that is good," and a song that could possibly last longer than the person who wrote it. There are two things that I am really interested in. One is composing and the other is improvising. I try to compose at home, give the guys a tune so they can learn it, then we get out on the road and there are places for improv. Composing comes into play when we are on the stage. I'll hear someone play one note, and then I play a certain note, and it starts to come together like a crossword puzzle.
mt: Do you feel like, in the past, you were focusing too much on improvisation, and did not have much composition and structure to your songs?
JM: The problem was that I was writing tunes on the mandolin and I came to a wall. I felt like what I was doing was sitting in my room finding cool sounds, cool progressions, and clusters of notes, then I would find another cool sound or progression and glue them together. I didn't really have much of a cohesive feeling. I didn't know how to expand it. The songs were all what I call "happy accidents." One day, I am trying this and that and finally I find something cool. That is not composing. The piano is the ultimate tool for composition, because all the notes are laid out right in front of you and every note is easily accessible. Whereas, with a string instrument, some notes are harder to grab, so you wouldn't think to grab them because it is too difficult. With more things available to you on the piano, you can figure things [out]. After you have laid it out, then you can go back to your instrument and try to learn it, and you end up discovering new things that you never thought of.
mt: I never really thought of the piano in that way before.
JM: Yeah, a really good composer composes on a piano, not a violin or trumpet. A wind instrument is probably the worst, because you can only play one note at a time. With a piano, you can play ten notes at one time. That is so much more.
mt: Thinking of it that way makes me wish that I could play the piano.
JM: I am the one guy in the world that wishes that his parents made him take piano lessons when he was six. When you are that age, you just learn things so fast and naturally. I wish I had that in my background, that natural way of learning when you are kid. But, I don't. It is a pretty hard thing to, at the age of twenty-six, start to play an instrument as complex as the piano. It takes an awful lot of patience.
mt: In the history of your recording, where did you start taking lessons and adding that to your songwriting philosophy?
JM: Actually, the first CD I put out, Jazz Mandolin Project, about half the songs on it were developed after I started working with Ernie. The other half were prior to that. It is not like someone can notice the difference, but I can. Now, we have been playing these songs for a long time on the stage and, generally, the songs that are well crafted we could play anywhere and rock the house, because they work. The ones that aren't as well built you lose interest in after a year or two. If it is a good song, then the options just keep dribbling out. George Gershwin wrote the song "I've Got Rhythm," and that is just a chord progression. That song was a major breakthrough. Now, in jazz circles, you can play any melody and just go to rhythm changes. Rhythm changes, which are common knowledge in jazz, are used all the time. All that means is "I've Got Rhythm" is Gershwin's discovery of the harmonic cycle. Now, every Joe Blow knows those changes. That is just an example of finding a good thing in your music that keeps it going on and on, and takes on its own life.
mt: So, what is the jazz scene like where you are from? Vermont isn't necessarily notorious for its jazz scene.
JM: Well, you have these younger guys like Phish and myself. We grew up listening to rock of the seventies and eighties. But, like a lot of musicians that are really into their instruments, there comes a point with simpler forms like folk, where you are basically just strumming G, C, and D—not saying that that is all that folk is—but comes a point, if you really want to master an instrument, that you end up moving to the classical world or the jazz world. You keep looking for more information and challenges like soloing over different changes. Before you know, you are delving into heavy stuff like Coltrane and others.
mt: Coltrane is so respected because he never stopped searching. The name of your group is Jazz Mandolin Project. The "project" part leads me to believe that you are in constant development of your own sound.
JM: Exactly. The name really explains it. You are going to hear jazz played on the mandolin. There is also that element of project. That is just the experimental side. Most people know that mandolin is not a traditional jazz instrument. There isn't a history of jazz mandolin players, so there is a lot of ground to cover for me. I can't go into a music store and buy five classic CDs that will show me what other jazz mandolin players have laid down, so I can figure out their s**t and add my own to it. What I am trying to do is find a way to improvise in a convincing way on my instrument, and show people that it can be done. That is going to be a process that takes me a whole career. So, I have different guys play with me at different times so I can collaborate on different ideas. I dabble into different styles of music that might be related to jazz, but might not be what people think is jazz.
mt: Speaking of jazz-related styles, you experiment in drum & bass on your newest album, Xenoblast.
JM: The first song, "Xenoblast," is our first attempt to get into that vibe. The interesting thing for me was that I had just written "Xenoblast," and we were trying to see how to get the vibe with just an upright bass, drums, and mandolin. The album was the first time, but we have come a very long way. I want to readdress the drum & bass thing on the next album. It is really interesting now, because a lot of real drum & bass isn't done with acoustic instruments, but we are starting to figure out how to do our own little version of it.
mt: Xenoblast is your first album on Blue Note. How did you get hooked up with such a reputable label?
JM: We actually called them and they had heard of us, but they hadn't been to a show. We were just about to play The Knitting Factory in New York. One of their representatives, Eli Wolf, came to the show and it was sold out. We put on a really good show. Blue Note had already signed Medeski Martin & Wood, so when they saw, with us as with them, all these young people listening to jazz, they liked it. They also saw that we had toured for a number of years and built up a mailing list, Web site, management, and publicity, so the organization was already there. They took us on…
mt: …cause you had your s**t together?
JM: Yes, because we had our s**t together. We were an entity that you could tell was going to keep going, regardless of a label. We went for years without one. We built up a humble empire, and were able to function on our own. I think that that is something that record labels are becoming more interested in. There are a lot of artists that assume that if they get picked up by a label, then the label is going to do everything like it is a free ride. Record labels are in the business of selling records. The more they spend on you, the more difficult it is going to be for you to get money from the label, because you are going to build up a huge bunch of expenses that will need to be paid off. My take has been to do all our touring with our own support; that way, it can be done in the most efficient, cost-effective way. Let the record be a separate deal.
mt: What do you tell yourself when s**t gets really tough and you feel like you want to quit doing what you are doing? What kind of words of wisdom do you live by?
JM: For myself, and for the people I travel with, there is no choice as to whether you want to be a musician or not. You don't have any options, because there is something in you that says that this is the only thing. For anybody that doesn't feel that way, then I wouldn't recommend to them spending too much time on this path. It isn't all glamour. The music has to be the ultimate reward. As soon as people begin to think about being the center of attention, making money, picking up chicks, those people will be discouraged. There are so many people trying to do music, but only the ones with a deep inspiration will be able to find their way out of the rest of the bulls**t. You have to respect the moments on stage. Even on this tour, the best show we played had the least amount of people. There wasn't a lot of pressure on us. The people that were there were fans, and they are going to like what we do. Then, I think that I am a musician, and I get to play my instrument and do what I want to do on stage with these great other guys. That feels great, and the problems of the day just fade away and we have such a great time. That is the greatest thing anyone can get out of this path: the feeling that I get to play tonight. Hopefully, you will make some money and people will appreciate what you do, but that is secondary to the joy of killing a song!
Interviewed by Damani
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