Darius Jones: From Johnny Hodges To Noise Jazz

Categorizing Music

AAJ: Avant-garde is not necessarily "free." Avant-garde can mean just inventive and new, a new direction, like Stravinsky was when he was new. It's "before" ("avant") everyone else. But "free" is basically completely free playing from "1, 2, 3, start." Would you describe yourself as a free player at all?



DJ: I struggle with what that word means. Would you consider Roscoe Mitchell free, would you consider Thelonious Monk free? I've listened to everybody. I've listened to Ornette Coleman, I've listened to James Spalding. I've listened to a lot of dudes. Ornette for me is taking the music back to the root of creativity. He's just saying "Be creative, be you." [That's] how I see his music. When he called his records "free jazz" I think he was really saying, "I think of it as a verb not an adjective." You know, like "free jazz; free it from its constraints so we can do some other [stuff]."

Here's another thing, is Eric Dolphy free? I've studied with this pianist who was on this Booker Little record. I took a few lessons from him, and we were talking about Eric Dolphy, and he was like "Man, Eric would play over the [key], he would not play the changes. He would play something other than what the changes were. He would play at the changes." If the concept of free is about not playing changes [relative to] playing tonal [and] inside of harmony, then I would have to say I exist somewhere in the middle of all that. I do not consider myself a "free" jazz musician at all, because there's too much structure in almost everything that I do.

[Cooper-Moore and Moses], are they free, or avant-garde? It's hard to know. If you were to sit down to talk to either one of them they would, I don't know what they would say, but they both encouraged me to be the best musical person I possibly can be, which is not ignoring melody, harmony, rhythm, time, all those things. I talk with Matthew Shipp a lot. Is Matthew Shipp a "free" player? I consider myself to be more "avant-garde" in the classical sense of that word. [That] is what I am. Because I can't say that I want to be playing straight-ahead because that's not what I want to do. I don't feel that compulsion to play so like my heroes. I feel the need to be me... insanely [Laughs]. It's like an insane desire to be like myself. I don't want to be like Ornette Coleman.

AAJ: Yes, he's already been done. There's already one of him. People following him need to be themselves.

DJ: Matthew Shipp came up to me one time. He heard me play and he said "Man, I don't hear any Ornette in what you're playing." But I'm not really thinking about that. I'm not thinking, "Woa, today I need to pull out my Ornette Coleman chops or my Cannonball chops, or my this, that or [the] other." I'm like, "Today we have to play in the context of this music, whether it has changes or whether it doesn't." That's how I operate. I don't feel that you have to prove anything in music. I think when horn players and piano players and everybody get on the stage where you have to prove all this stuff. It's like, that's crazy. Just play music. It's just about music. Whatever touches you is what touches you.

I feel, [that] for a musician like myself, it's [as if] I only get two categories to go in. I've got to be either a Steve Coleman, Greg Osby-esque cat, in that world of just the black hierarchy of jazz improvisation, or I'm gonna be, like, free and just [be like] Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, the sky's the limit; Julius Hemphill, you know, just [an] out kind of guy. And I think what I'm trying to say is, "I've got something else for you. There's a third category in there, and it's me. And I'm about to show you what it is."

I don't really fit into any of those worlds completely, I just don't. I remember spending a summer just studying Steve Coleman's music and working on some of his concepts, and at the end of the summer I had a headache. I had an intense headache and I realized that I would never want to play that structured, where it's like, I'm so so cerebral. I need the organic process, or [an organic] part of it. [That] is a huge thing that is important to me. That's no dig on Steve Coleman or anyone else. That's just my process. The organic process is important to me. That means that time is important to me, that means that melody is important to me, that means that harmony is important to me.

[Duke Ellington], he didn't go to school. He did what sounded good, and that's how we got Duke Ellington. As I said, I feel like for a young black creative musician there are only two worlds that you can go into. I refuse to work along those lines. I want to be free. I want to create a universe that's my universe. That is, the universe of me, and right now that's Man'ish Boy. Man'ish Boy, that person that you're seeing, he's a character, he's a person from a different planet, he's from outer space. He's not of this world, but he's coming to this world. And that's definitely going to influence things, that's gonna affect the outcome of certain events. With an alien being in a certain environment, that's gonna affect you. Especially if people are listening, I think that's the greatest thing. You know, listen to the music—I might not be the prettiest dude but it doesn't matter. It's all about the music. Listen to the music. I'm letting the music speak for myself; I'm letting the music talk for myself. In interviews you're just getting the insider perspective basically, the special features [laughs].

AAJ: There was a review of the Man'ish Boy album that described you as "a part of the New York underground." Do you think you are part of "the underground'"?

DJ: I'm glad you noticed that. When he said that, [it was] a great glowing review, but it's almost like a slap in the face when he said "underground." I was like, "Whoa!" It's funny, for weeks I asked my friends, "What is the underground? Who is in the jazz underground? Who is considered the underground of jazz music, and do I want to be part of that?" I don't know who the underground is. Obviously he has some intense ideas about who that is and the people who belong in that category, which is fine, but I was personally just a little taken aback by the whole thing. "The underground," I guess that's the people who don't paid! If that's who they are, man, I need to get a day job.

Do you consider Vijay Iyer mainstream, Chopin, Ligeti? He's [Iyer] coming from all kinds of different ideas. Maybe the people are not familiar with where it comes from. You can look at it and say this is different, that is different, but come on; we're talking about apples and oranges here. If you listen to David S. Ware and you listen to John Coltrane, are you saying that David S. Ware can't play his instrument? He just chooses to go on a different path. Some Duke Ellington. It's so original that it's avant-garde. It's so him, it's so Duke. I don't subscribe myself to any of what I would almost say [are] unhip terms, [or] unhip categorizations of sound. Sound is free and my role is to be free, and when I say "free," my desire is to be free to organize it in any way that I see fit. That is my goal.

That may be pleasing to you sometimes, and it may not be pleasing to you sometimes. I play in a lot of bands. Some of the stuff is super mainstream. I play in this one band, it could almost be considered folk music, folk jazz or something like that, where we're playing the prettiest [stuff] you could ever imagine. And then I'm in Little Women. And then you can listen to my record [Man'ish Boy]. It's like a soul record. Or I play with William Hooker, or something like that. Really? You hear me do "Teen Spirit." I wrote that. I can't write that if I'm so out; it's crazy. I always believe this: in The Bible it talks about in the beginning there is chaos. And I think chaos is only chaos when you don't understand. And when you do, when you can actually hear something, or when you can understand something, it's no longer chaos. It's no longer weird; it's no longer something that makes you question everything on Earth.

I used to tell people, "Really, if you think about it, Jesus Christ was normal. That's normal. All those other cats weren't normal, but he's considered the anomaly." If we were to check out what's mainstream or normal in every day society in the aspect of people—that would be some sad [stuff].

AAJ: The point is that music is either good or it's the other thing, as the quote attributed to Ellington says. It's all one thing. For example, do you listen to classical music?

DJ: There's this Mozart wind ensemble [that] really influenced me in a compositional sense, of creating counterpoint where you have this one thing happening above. And then you have this middle ground and then you have the bottom. Mozart was just fascinating me how he would structure and orchestrate, where he would have the counterpoint and have certain instruments come in, and I felt like his music was almost like pop music. It had a pop essence to it, and I really love that. I really love that about him and I love that in general, when I can hear this general [music that is] super connected to regular life. I don't feel like his music was that disconnected from the human condition. Maybe it was just the time that he lived in.

AAJ: You can hear some recent popular music in Mozart. For example, some of "A Groovy Kind Of Love" is in one of his early Salzburg Symphonies, and the main theme from the hit "Oxygene" [by Jean Michel Jarre] is there, in a different tempo, in a single movement for piano and orchestra, [It is K 302 in the catalog of his works, a standalone piano and orchestra rondo originally written for a piano concerto]. There's even something by Luis Bonfa, the famous thing he wrote ("Manha de Carnival") that has the same opening notes as something by Mozart.

DJ: Great composers didn't shy away from simplicity. Simplicity is in the greatest music. Even someone as out as Ligeti. It's just there. No one really asks about the process of making the music. There is a string that connects that is one. The string is that, I believe you compose something, but when you play something it can be different, it can be changed. The greatest classical musicians are able to lift the music off the page and it becomes them. They are going to manipulate that music to fit themselves, who they are. So for me, it's about how things are played, what your inflections are.

What would you get if you combined Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and Johnny Hodges all into one being? I think about that a lot. A weird hybrid, the whole Ellingtonian world. I think about that.

AAJ: Are you trying to write that combination?!

DJ: Yeah but, of course, there are more influences than that. When I look at the whole Ellingtonian world, [how it flows] into one being, and the spiritual aspect of it, [that] is very important to me. Religion, that's something else. But spirituality has been at the forefront of my desire to play this music from the whole inception. I think it is important that music has the healing force [or] power, that music can touch you, that you can feel it. [It's] not just licks or notes or sound, that it's literally alive and it's touching you. That's what spirituality is. [It's as if] someone stands up and speaks before you, and you feel compelled to change your life.

I feel like cerebral [players] are thinking more than they're playing. That's why I consider myself a soul musician; I'm going to surrender to that rather than my mind, to the soul rather than the mind.

I'm sure you've heard the story where Charlie Parker was getting a blowjob. To be honest with you that's what I want to bring back to music. You gotta live it. You gotta live what you play. That's what I want to bring back to music. I've lived my music. I don't [make] music from the standpoint of "Oh this is cool, watch me play in 7/4 and then switch to 7/8." I don't care about that [stuff]. It's got to come from the heart. Do I work on rudimentary things? Of course, but I do that in the practice room.

I need to feel that organic process so deeply and to live the music, live it, live that music. And hearing that story, man that guy was living it. He was really on a whole other vibe. But you see, Miles was young at that time and Miles didn't get the importance of being out. For Bird it manifested in that way. He didn't give a fuck: [it was] "Get out of the car if you don't want to be a part of that." In a lot of ways Miles ended up living it; he was no better. I've heard the same about Ornette Coleman. He's out of it. Do you think Ornette cares? Greatness is greatness. It's like you were following it and it took you to some place, and [the past] doesn't fit you anymore. At some point you should graduate, and at some point Miles started hearing his own music.

I don't think you should be categorized in any aspect, but I know that categorization is good because it helps people who want to buy your [stuff], or get into you. I'm basically starting my career here. You heard Man'ish Boy, which is a very small aspect of who I am. It is me, definitely, but then I do bands like Little Women which is totally something else. I wouldn't even consider that jazz music, on a lot of levels, 'cause it's very composed. There's a lot of composition that goes into what we're playing there. It's very strategized. Then I play with progressive cats like Mara Rosenblum. My quartet record that I'm working on [the next installment in the Man'ish Boy series], all of these tunes have changes and forms that are strict. I think we live in a time where you need to be able to just play. I don't

Little Women

AAJ: Noise band Little Women are a pretty amazing band. Throat(AUM Fidelity, 2010) is fantastic, and has a lot of variety too—it's not all blast and extreme sounds. People might think that the music is far removed from an acoustic jazz group like the trio on Man'ish Boy. For example, when you played at the Saalfelden Festival in Austria in 2008, a magazine described the band as providing a "first hand [idea of] what terror can mean"! How did that scene happen?



DJ: Little Women is, for me, taking that experience [of playing with Marty McCavitt in Richmond] and manifesting that in a more acoustic situation, but trying to organize it, organizing chaos. How that came about [was] playing with different guys and we had a similar aesthetic: we felt jazz music was lacking something, and we felt what it was lacking was balls. With Little Women, what we are dealing with is four really uniquely individualistic people coming together in a band. Say, for instance, you've got a band of four really innovative people, and they [are] into the idea of being a band. That's going to sound like some really interesting [stuff]. It's not going to sound like everyday ordinary stuff. And that's really what you're getting with Little Women.

There are no rules to that music. The only rule is we will not use effects. So the guitarist can't plug into an effects pedal at all. All he can use is his guitar. The drummer, Jason, on Little Women gigs he uses nothing but sticks. We're minimalizing, we're making everything smaller so that we can get the most out of it.

AAJ: That could be going back to the early days of sticks and stones!

DJ: Yeah man, some caveman-like shit [laughs].

AAJ: Is the music all composed?

DJ: Little Women's music is highly compositional. It's very structured. That music is highly structured. I don't think we play tunes in that band, we play pieces of music. We're dealing with almost a kind of classical thing, you know, pieces instead of tunes. Little Women works in the suite format. We create suites. A suite is basically a grouping of pieces together to form a vision of one piece. So the record that we released before was called Teeth (Sockets and Gilgongo Records, 2008) and every tune is called "Teeth 1," "Teeth 2," [and so on]. You're hearing just different parts of the suite. And the record that came out in April is called , and basically you're just hearing different parts of Throat.

AAJ: Does the new album see any change is approach to the first one, for example a broadening of sonics?

DJ: In the saxophones we dealt with multiphonics a lot, so that's something that's different [to] the last one. And we're dealing with different aspects of form too, how things begin, end, the ups and downs, the momentum, dealing with different aspects of approaches to improvisation. There is a lot more guided improv, rather than straight going from nothing—we're using certain techniques and improvising within the scheme of those techniques. Also, there's a lot of duo playing, so you hear more improvisation like that on this record. The thing about Little Women is the beginning and the end is always the same but it is re-arranged. So [it's] just like [how] Duke Ellington every night came and played "'A' Train" but it would be slightly different. He would arrange it differently each night, [though] we don't arrange it differently each night. We just play it as hard as we possibly can, and see what happens. And then, you know how people in jazz have an ending tune, to tell people "Hey, it's over"? We have that too, which is basically us screaming and doing things, getting onto our knees and screaming into our horns. We are making that into a whole thing.

AAJ: This is getting into the area of performance art. Bern Nix said to me it was performance art.

DJ: I was in Paris playing with Cooper-Moore, and William Parker was there and he [said] "You can develop anything. It's possible to develop anything you want to develop." He said, "If you wanted to develop a whole thing with just picking up and dropping a fork, you could." And essentially what Little Women is saying when we get to that point, when we're on our knees and screaming out and stuff like that, what we're really trying to say is, "None of it really matters. At the end of the day nothing really matters. Us playing all this technically hard [stuff] that you probably can't even comprehend doesn't mean anything. It has no meaning." At the end of the day it's all about primitiveness. That's what people respond to.

It's funny, Weasel Walter said to me once—he was at a show—he said, "Really, what you guys did [vocally] at the end was what you did in the set with your instruments. You just did it vocally." People responded to it so intensely when we were doing it vocally. That tells me something. It tells me people feel that connection to the organic process. The organic process. I think the only reason we're even remotely interested in intellectualism is because of ego. I really believe that. The human being is so afraid and intelligence and awareness helps us not to feel fear. If we were all big and strong and mighty powerful beings, we'd probably be a lot dumber. The only thing we would really fear would be someone with a mind. It fascinates me that awareness and intellect is something that we all fear, and that's why it's attractive to us. But at the heart of all man is organic-ness, it's primitiveness, because it's part of all of us. We all fuck, man. We all have sex. And that's some raw [stuff]. I mean, if you've ever seen a baby born, that's some serious stuff.

AAJ: How do you allocate the saxophone parts. Does one play fifths, or thirds, or what?

DJ: What me and Travis Leplante do in Little Women is basically, our concept is to become one horn. That's what we're doing. We're not really trying to be separate. We're trying to be one thing. [That] is the goal. And blending those two things together, since he has a lower instrument than me, he's going to operate on a different frequency versus what I operate on. The thing is, there's a point in both frequencies when we are combined. And [you have] also the different techniques... utilized on a horn. Something on his horn may pop out more than something on my horn. So our goal as a group is to create this situation where you're hearing something that you've never heard before. You can't really go, "Is that a saxophone, or is that this or is that that?" You don't know who's who. The goal is, "Is that him, or... who is that?"

AAJ: In a sense, Little Women are more like a rock band than a jazz group. Is it easier to tour with Little Women?

DJ: Little Women is a different band. It operates on a different principle. We will show up and play if you want us. That's the concept for that band. I don't really have a concept for my trios. It's very different. Little Women is like a rock band. It doesn't operate like a jazz group. It operates like a rock group would. We're all a collective force. I'm the leader of the Darius Jones Trio. I'm not the leader; no one is the leader, of Little Women.

AAJ: Is the label "noise jazz" appropriate for the band, or is there another phrase that you would use?

DJ: When people ask me "What do you call this?" My only response is, calling it "noise jazz" is an accurate depiction, and the reason I like that depiction is because I feel that noise music is valid. I feel that people should check out more noise bands, like Lightning Bolt, and Color. There are just a ton of these bands. It's amazing; it's some of the deepest music I've ever heard.

AAJ: Some people may wonder how a Hodges devotee, a serious fan of the performer of a track like "Daydream," could also play in a noise band.

DJ: I think it's something I've always heard. I don't think it's new. It's something that I heard in my head. Noise is really just dealing with sound, purely, without the context of Western harmony or any of that stuff. It's dealing with the aspect of combining sounds and soundscapes and stuff. Getting into [John] Cage got me deeper into that, looking at music from that perspective and really wanting to combine things that may seem un-combinable. Or to combine things that are usually combined but looking at them from a different standpoint. So I think it was a natural progression for me, especially dealing with the voice and my concept of organic-ness. I mean, dude, I walk outside, I hear sounds, and a lot of times people think that's noise, but I don't think it's noise, I think it's music.

Sometimes I find myself getting caught up in sounds in the weirdest ways. I become super silent, [and listen to] people talking and how the rhythms of the way they talk are. And the accents, the inflections that exist in the way they talk.

Continuing Compositions

AAJ: You were awarded the Van Lier Fellowship award by Roulette. [Roulette is a Manhattan arts venue that supports and presents contemporary music and intermedia art]. So you had three nights in March when you were able to present your working trio and also other music that you have written.



DJ: That was an award they gave out last year and I won it, and basically you get ten grand and you put on a concert of your music at Roulette. Us musicians who are up and coming, we need help, man. It's hard out here. It's not easy doing this, and there's very little support. I feel really blessed and lucky to even be able to get my music heard right now.

AAJ: The working trio played a gig at the Tea Lounge in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It's a good venue, but also a risky one in a way, because it's so open. You really have to fill that room up with sound! How did that go?

DJ: We were smoking. Cats were floored. So many people were way into that music, and that book of music [the book for the working trio, to be recorded in 2011]. I was really happy with the response. I've been trying to really finish the book. I believe in writing a book of tunes, getting a group of tunes together for a band and I feel once I do this record with my trio, the working trio... the Man'ish Boy thing is very conceptual, it's pinpointing—all the music falls into this one category. The working band is different. The music is not, "Oh, this is Southern blues-based music." It's all over the map. It's more tune based. It's kind of hard to explain. I feel it fits that group so well, it's like a glove. In that band we do an arrangement of "A Train," based on the arrangement you hear on the MySpace thing, but we've developed it a lot more, you know. It's just been played a lot more. It's more raw and freaky.

AAJ: You wrote music for a group called the Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, with singers Fay Victor and Sarah Dyson.

DJ: I wrote a piece for [Fay], that she sang, [and] she sang one of my older vocal pieces, and a new one that I wrote specifically for her. The piece I wrote for Fay was a piece of music. It's like an art song or something like that. It's running along those lines. I've done some more classical orientated pieces for this other singer Sarah Dyson. My jazz classical chamber ensemble stuff goes under [that] name, the Elizabeth Caroline Unit, and that's usually what you're going to see when you came out to see that band. You're going to see me focusing on music for voice and composition, with a chamber ensemble. It doesn't have to necessarily follow in the classical tradition, but it's a more composed side of who I am. Usually I'm not playing—I'm just being a composer.

AAJ: What is the instrumentation that you have written for them?

DJ: It's a variety of things. It's based on the instrumentation that's needed, so it changes. Lately I've been focusing on violin, bass, guitar, trombone, drums and operatic voice. The tune I wrote for Fay was voice and three horns. And then sometimes I'll do things with piano and voice, or bass, cello, voice.

AAJ: You've also played with former Ornette Coleman guitarist Bern Nix, amongst other musicians. I heard that he likes Little Women a lot.

DJ: Bern's way into Little Women. What he's doing on guitar is so heavy, it's really interesting. I haven't been fortunate enough to be able to have the time to go and sit with him and investigate that more and see what he's doing harmonically, but I did a gig with him and Lola Danza and [violist] Mat Maneri and I have to tell you that was the hardest gig I've ever played in my life. Those guys were switching timbre and tone and keys so much that I felt like I was never on solid ground. It was just like, there is no Earth [laughs], there is only sky!

AAJ:Your MySpace site has a version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," arranged for [South Korean singer] Sunny Kim, and the version of "Take The 'A' Train

DJ: I listen to rock, I listen to a lot of indie rock, and I listen to noise bands. I listen to a lot of music, and It's because I'm down, like I told you, I'm really into music. It's really about music. The "Teen Spirit" thing came about because I just saw a movie about Kurt Cobain, and, you know, he fascinates me as a person, and just the tune itself, I found it really interesting that tune, and I was checking out different versions of the tune. I realized a lot of people did a cover on it. I was like, "Let me do a cover of it, see what I can do with it." And I had this producing session coming up where I was writing for this bossa nova singer. I [thought], "Let's see what a bossa nova singer can do with a grunge tune?" And that's what you got right there.

New Albums

AAJ: What's your next release going to be?

DJ: Right now, I am going to come out with a duo record, but with piano, with Matthew Shipp, actually. [The album was recorded in October, 2010 and is scheduled to be released in 2011.]

AAJ: What about the trio on Man'ish Boy, or the working trio?

DJ: The next trio record you're going to hear from me is the one with Jason and Adam. As for another album with Bob Moses and Cooper-Moore, right now I'm just trying to get that band to tour, trying to get us on the road. It's so difficult—I'm a "quote unquote" "up-and-coming" artist and I'm looking for an agent to get that off the ground and get some European touring going on. It's funny, there are people who are interested, there are a lot of people who are interested, it's just [that] I need an agent to get that stuff really hopping, the way I need it to go down. AUM Fidelity has been working on a West Coast tour with the trio with Bob Moses and Cooper-Moore. I want a lot for that group. I feel that group—that's some legendary [stuff]. You're never going to see something like that again, some younger musician playing with those really pioneering musicians. For me it's a legend thing. It's my dream.

AAJ: Have you settled on any of the personnel for the next album in the Man'ish Boy series, [as it won't be Cooper-Moore and Bob Moses). It's an exciting project. For example, are you going to have Jason Nazary on drums?

DJ: Jason Nazary is very similar to Bob Moses in a lot of ways. But for this group I feel I don't want to interrupt what I feel is happening with Jason's development right now. He's definitely developing a concept and I don't want to compromise that, because it works really well with the trio. I'm thinking of using some wild card that no one has ever heard before. Do a Miles Davis and bring out some cat that no one has ever heard of. [I like to] work with cats that really connect well with me. The organic process, man.

Selected Discography

Little Women, Throat (AUM Fidelity, 2010)

Mike Pride/From Bacteria for Boys, Betweenwhile (AUM Fidelity, 2010)

Darius Jones, Man'ish Boy (A Raw And Beautiful Thing) (AUM Fidelity, 2009)

Little Women, Teeth (Sockets and Gilgongo, 2008)

Tanakh, Ardent Fevers (Alien8, 2006)

Tanakh, Dieu Deuil (Alien8, 2004)

Photo Credits

Page 1: John Sharpe

Pages 2-3: Scott Friedlander

Page 4: Frank Rubolino

Page 5: Courtesy of Darius Jones

Page 6: Simon Jay Harper

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