John Seman: The Story of Monktail

Some of them are kind of straightforward melodic material, basically a melody with some changes, and some of them are just a harmonic background. This is a twelve tone row with a bass line and then this is the matrix of the twelve tone row serialized in an inversion, retrograde, retrograde-inversion, etcetera, etcetera, which is used for improvisation. You know, four segments that are broken up into different segments, and the band has just adapted and been able to incorporate these things in a way that it doesn't sound like a 1930s chamber orchestra playing serial music, but it also doesn't sound like just a bop sextet. I think we have sort of found this new ground. And then plus we can roar some super fast swing and free jazz.

In college, my composition professor was Richard Hoffman, who was Arnold Schoenberg's amanuensis. He was his assistant at the end of his life. So Schoenberg weighed very heavily on me in serialized music and we delved pretty heavily into the late-period Schoenberg works, the string trio. You get what you get out of it, but it has been interesting to try to apply that to the jazz sextet. Given the added hustle in working in my own studio plus having my own group-that is still Monktail but is kind of something new, where we are not just improvising [but] we are playing compositions-and then playing in some other groups where I am really just the bassist, that has been profoundly satisfying but at the same time inspiring. I kind of want to find out what else is new.

Plus, everyone in Monktail is finding different roles; Fandrich putting together a different weekly, and everyone else from the original core finding new things, Stephen Parris moving to California to be a composer, Izaak Mills moving to New York as a professional musician. And then what is going on in Seattle over all in the last 10-15 years, you see these cycles. There is a lot going on, like when I moved here in 1999, 2000, 2001, between the Speakeasy, I-Spy, and the Oxygen series, and then things sort of fell apart. We had the Messiah going on for a while, and then there was Polestar and Gallery 1412. It seems to me that we are on an uptick again, between all of the different monthly and weekly series plus seasonal programs of creative music. It has got to be the best time to be in Seattle yet.

Selected Discography

Ask The Ages, Ask The Ages (Ask The Ages, 2012)

Floss, Vitamin A (Monktail, 2009)

Deal's Number, Show Me What Ya Workin With (Monktail, 2007)

Special O.P.S., Arm Me (Monktail, 2007)

Floss, Unwaxed (Monktail, 2004)

Monktail Creative Music Concern, Non Grata (Monktail, 2003)

Non Grata, Live At Chop Suey (Monktail, 2002)

Photo Credits

Page 1: Courtesy of John Seman

Page 7: Daniel Sheehan