Michael Formanek

Bassist, composer

FIRST PART OF INTERVIEW CONDUCTED THROUGH E-MAIL , SECOND PART IN CONVERSATION ON ZOOM

 -Where did you grow up? Was there music around in your childhood? Music/musicians in your family?

 MF: I grew in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a suburban beach town called Pacifica. I had no musicians in my immediate family, although my grandfather on my father’s side supposedly studied the violin growing up in the Czech town of Bruno. My father loved music, had lots of it around in the form of records, cassettes and later, CDs. He always wanted to play guitar and had a few classical guitars around, some very cheap ones from Tijuana and later a few higher quality guitars, one of which I still have. He was a lover of many different cultures, not all Western, so we had lots of Indian music, classical and popular, Japanese music, Egyptian and other Middle Eastern music, etc. Our family was most of Russian decent so there was a good amount of Russian music around as well. As far as my early exposure to Jazz, my Father had many Early Jazz records, including Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, and he also loved the Blues. There were a few more Modern Jazz recordings in his collection but were mostly parts of compilations. There was a Blue Note compilation set of LPs that went fro  Albert Ammons, and James P. Johnson to Thelonious Monk, which is where I first discovered Monk in my early teens. He had a huge book and record collection, way more than he needed, but was a little obsessed with collecting everything he could find about anything he was interested in. I found tons of things just laying around that gave me my first introductions to a huge range of subjects, not just music. 

 -When did you start playing (bass? … or… composing?) 

 MF: Like most other people growing up in the late 1960s I wanted to play guitar! I had taken guitar lessons and a local music store from around the age of 7 or 8. I had a very cool teacher named Ron. Ron had kind of a James Dean haircut, played electric guitar left handed, and would teach me stuff like Secret Agent Man. Ron left suddenly and when I showed up for me lesson the next week I was introduced to my new teacher, a twenty something folky woman. She started teaching me folk songs that I had to sing while I played them, so that was the end of that. Sort of a funny aside about that. That folkie guitar teacher was named Judy, so when I saw a poster in the music store for a Judy Collins concert, the picture kind of looked like her, so for years I thought I had taken guitar lessons with Judy Collins, until I quit. I actually played the string bass for one year during elementary school. The music teacher for that school district was a great and talented musician, but unfortunately his talents didn’t include having the patience to deal with untalented, bratty, noisy, obnoxious kids, so that ended rather abruptly as well. I finally convinced my parents to get me my first electric guitar when I was around 11, I think.  The first band I played in already had two guitar players, and seeing as how I was the newest, and the least talented member, I was told that if I wanted to remain in the band I was told that I had to play only on the bottom four strings of the guitar. At least until I could persuade my parents to let me get an electric bass which probably happened about a year later. The double came a bit later. I was around fifteen and a half. I had been to some gigs at a local venue and seen some real jazz guys play including Ron McClure. After seeing him play extended solos all day long I went up to my high school music teacher who happened to be there and told him that I wanted to do that and asked if I could take the school’s beat up plywood Kay bass and get it fixed up. So that was the start of that. Composing came a lot later. Really not in any significant way until I was at least in my mid to late twenties. 

 -Do you have someone that you’d consider your mentor(s)? If so, who? 

 MF: I had a lot of mentors along the way, some that I had long relationships with and some that I only interacted with briefly.  I was not always the most gracious and appreciative of them at the time, but now look back at them and am grateful at how well I was treated and welcomed into the world of music well before I had much of a right to. A few of them were, Bishop Norman Williams, James Leary, E.W. Wainwright, Teruo Nakamura, Dave Liebman, Ron McClure, Mark Isham, and Mike Clark. Those were all mostly from my San Francisco days. I continued to learn from many people after moving to New York in 1978, but became more independent and was less likely to put myself in those types of relationships where I was more vulnerable to things I didn’t like, such as criticism. There were some exceptions. The late Dave Samuels, the mallet percussion virtuoso, was a mentor of sorts, as was the iconic bassist Red Mitchell. 

 -What does Jazz mean to you? Are you OK with the term?

 MF: I don’t have a problem with the term Jazz, per se.  I do have a problem however, with how broadly it is applied to so much music that isn’t a part of its practices and traditions. Including some of my own.

 -Speaking of bass, below are some names. Any thoughts that come to mind about them? 

Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Charlie Haden, Gary Peacock, Wilbur Ware, Scott LaFaro.

MF: All were important to me at some point during my development as a bassist and musician. Maybe Mingus the most, then all the rest were part of my world. I still love hearing any and all of them but as far as continued inspiration for me, I’d have to say Peacock and Haden still mess me up the most, and I try like hell not to play like either of them. 

 -Some other important bass player(s) for you?

 MF: Too many! Here’s a smattering of them in no particular order. Richard Davis, Red Mitchell, Fred Hopkins, George Mraz, Mark Dresser, Dave Holland, Jimmy Garrison,  Bert Turetzky, Ron Carter, Oscar Pettiford, Paul Jackson, Sam Jones, Palle Danielsson, Paul Chambers, Barre Phillips, James Jamerson, Albert Stinson, Arild Andersen, Sirone, Jaco Pastorius, Miroslav Vitous, David Izenzon, Peter Kowald…..

 Other musicians: 

-Freddie Hubbard

MF: What can I say about Freddie that can’t be heard listening to him? I’m very glad to have gotten to play many gigs with him. Complicated human, but a brilliant musician and very few people could do what he did on the trumpet and also as a Jazz Improviser. 

 -Tony Williams

 MF: A true genius! He would have been 75 the other day had he not died tragically, way too early, at 51. It just hit me that when I played with him he was only around 32, I think. He had already changed jazz drumming and helped change jazz music more than once by that age. I came up listening to the recordings he made between 1963 and 1976, but I played with him in 1977! Everything from Four and More to Believe It, and all that was in between, i.e. Miles Smiles, ESP, Nefertitti, The Sorcerer, Maiden Voyage,  Fuchsia Swing Song, Out To Lunch, Point of Departure, Filles de Kilimanjaro, In a Silent Way, Life Time, Spring, Emergency, Turn it Over, V.S.O.P., etc, etc, etc! I sometimes drove with him in his BMW 530i when we would go on tour. We, mostly he, drove from Southern California to Phoenix, practically non-stop. Barely a word was said the entire time. He just smoked his cigar and drove. That was pretty much it. He got a speeding ticket, and at one point mentioned that he might want to stop off at Wayne Shorter’s house on the way back to San Francisco. That didn’t happen. 

 -Joe Henderson

 MF: Another amazingly brilliant and individual musician. It was said that Joe could speak seven languages. I don’t know how true that was since I only spoke one, but in any case, that was the story. Joe was kind of a phantom and really kept to himself for the most part. During a weeklong engagement in Los Angeles Joe checked out of the motel the band was booked in and from then on we would only see him on the bandstand during the gig. He always sounded incredible, no matter what was or was not happening on the bandstand. The week in LA was with Art Lande on piano. I think it drove Art crazy because he could never tell if Joe was listening to him or not. I think Art was used to a little different type of interaction. 

-The main influences in your composing?

 MF: Again, it’s kind of difficult to narrow it down. I usually say Charles Mingus first, which is probably pretty accurate. At least in the Jazz and Improvisatory realm. I’ve gotten inspiration from many different composers, even the ones whose music I don’t completely understand. Olivier Messiaen, for example. I admire the music Thelonious Monk, Ellington, Herbie Nichols, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Sam Rivers, Julius Hemphill, and of course Tim Berne. I admire good tune writers, which I am not. Although Ornette Coleman wrote incredible large works of great scope and vision, he may still be one of my favorite tune writers. Other Jazz composers I enjoy listening to and playing are Benny Golson, Wayne Shorter, and Cedar Walton. 

 -Three unsung heroes

 MF: Our music world is so insular that we think of so many of our musical heroes as being highly recognized for their accomplishments, but the fact is that in the big picture of our society most of our heroes are unsung. A sub-grouping of those who are particularly unsung, in my opinion are Herbie Nichols, Andrew Hill, and Jaki Byard. I’m not sure why I chose three pianists, but likely has something to do with playing an instrument that is commonly viewed as an accompaniment instrument. With the exception of Jaki, who had an incredible over the top kind of technique they were pianist/composers who always played in service of their musical ideas. I’m not saying that Jaki did not, but only that part of his own creativity was to take bits and pieces from all periods of Jazz history, i.e. stride, ragtime, bebop, free jazz, then deconstruct and reassemble it in super creative and original ways. Like the others he was unpredictable which isn’t always a great way of achieving mass popularity. There are so many artists that a completely unrecognized by anyone, including their peers, so this is kind of big question. 

 -Your greatest artistic triumph

 MF: I guess I’d have to say that the Ensemble Kolossus music for The Distance, and having it recorded by that band, is at least up near the top. Not just because of the size of the band or anything like that, but because of the way the music came together for me in a very clear and natural way, and the way that musicians have been able to perform it successfully in different situations. The original band is obviously amazing, but I’ve have several different ensembles play it and have been really surprised about how well it has worked. I’ve performed it in colleges and conservatories, and with other professional big bands, and the results have been pretty consistent across the board. I think that much of my music can succeed or fail depending on the approach of the  improvisers involved, which I wholeheartedly embrace, but this was a different experience for me. I have written some music recently built on palindromic forms that I’m very excited about. That music is fairly high on the list as well. 

 -Overrated….. could be a thing or an idea… or a person… even a musician if you want to be controversial… ha!

 MF: This is an easy one to get drawn down into. There are many things, ideas, concepts, musicians, recordings, movies, etc., that I could describe as overrated. I think the idea that we need to rate everything is highly overrated.  

 -You are prolific both as an improviser and a composer. Your thoughts on the role of composition and the role of improvisation in your work. What is the nature and strengths of each?

 MF: Well, I appreciate that. I don’t feel that I’m particularly prolific in either area. I feel that I have done, and continue to do, some good work on both sides of that coin. Neither is something that I do all the time, as in every waking hour. I get a decent amount of sleep. I mostly work, compose, during the day. I play, improvise, at many different times of day and night depending on what’s happening then, if I’m touring, playing  gigs, sessions, or practicing. I have a fair amount to show for all that, mostly in the form of recordings. Most of my recordings are made up of my own compositions. That’s just how I’ve chosen to do things. Improvising and composing are very connected disciplines for me. I use improvisation in my compositional processes, and I try to use compositional approaches in my improvisation. I like the immediacy of improvisation and tend to carry that idea more into my composing than the other way around. I’m not big of revising existing pieces although I wish I was more into that. I tend to want to just move onto something new once the freshness of something has begun to wear off. What I like most in composing is the process of finding an idea and creating relationships between that idea and other things in music that I find interesting, whether rhythms, harmonies, structures, or shapes. After that I like to hear what other musicians do with it, since I mostly compose for improvisers. 

 -The meaning of tradition

 MF: No idea. I guess I’m more into small “t” traditions, like common practice, shared language and experience, and a general agreement about how to go about doing things. I’m less interested in big “T” traditions that have a lot of rules and norms attached to them. Especially when it comes to making music with other people. 

 - "A thing that irritates me….”

 MF: When I, or other people, put things where I can’t find them. 

 -If you could, whom would you choose to have dinner with from “the other side”…

 MF: Can’t think of anyone. Maybe Olivier Messiaen. I don’t speak French so it would probably be a very quiet dinner, which I like. 

 -“If I could do it all over again, one thing I would do differently…”

 MF: Believe or not I wouldn’t change much; except start formally studying piano, music theory and composition much earlier in life. I would have liked to learn it all at a younger age and developed facility that I could just forget about until I needed to it. Besides that, I may have wanted to be a tenor saxophonist but there are way too many of them already. 

ZOOM INTERVIEW WITH FOLLOW-UP CONVERSATION TRIGGERED BY THE WRITTEN RESPONSES

FC: When I view your career, it seems to me that early on you set yourself up to be a sideman that plays with living legends such as Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams etc and you really established yourself in that regard quite early on. Somewhere along the way there was a shift and your own work moved towards what some might term avant-garde or experimental music (although I’m not crazy about these terms…). When, how and why did that happen?

 MF: It’s a really good question. The thing is, initially I was just into everything. I wanted to play everything, I loved everything related to jazz once I was exposed to it, and I didn’t really limit the styles. I knew the pillars and the important people, but as far as style and approach and all that, it was pretty wide open to me.

There was a public library in the town I lived in in California, where I grew up. There were two branches, but in this one branch, whoever the record buyer was there had really good taste, so when I got interested in jazz in my early teens I’d go there and I’d just go through the rack, and it would be lots of Coltrane and Miles, some of it that was sort of contemporaneous with this, but maybe not quite - because this might have been 1972, 3, 4 - so the latest Miles was all there - like Live Evil and On the Corner. The last of the Coltrane records -they  were still releasing stuff, obviously, but expressions and meditations and all that was all there. It was also intermingled with John Handy, who lived in the Bay Area - there were a lot of his records, and he was kind of big in the Monterey Jazz Festival and such. There was so much different stuff - there was Count Basie, and Charlie Parker compilations, so it was a real mix of stuff and I just started checking it all out and I really loved all of it. Obviously I had been coming from rock and roll and blues and all that, so I related to some of that on that level - but that was also right at the beginning of the first fusion stuff. Chick Corea’s first Return to Forever, including the Light as a Feather-type acoustic stuff to him in Beyond the Seventh Galaxy and all of those records, so all of those things were sort of percolating, and fortunately, in San Francisco there were just a lot of different things going on, it was all over. It had been really big, obviously, in the rock scene in the early 60s and late 70s - so you know about bands like Santana and Tower Power a lot of those kinds of bands. But connected to those bands, there were tons of other musicians that were just on the scene there, and they did everything. And that was kind of the thing there. If you could play, you’d get called to do everything. I looked at everything like an experience that I should have, that I should do. I connected with certain people, like the drummer Mike Clark. In my one year of college there, Eddie Henderson, who I knew a little bit before that, had called me to do a concert, and Mike was the drummer and we really hit it off. At one point I was gonna live in Mike’s house in this boiler room where the heater was - fortunately that didn’t end up happening. You might know the pianist Neal Kirkwood, and Neal was my first roommate in San Francisco. I was going around playing every kind of gig; I played a little with Eddie Henderson, but also with this saxophone player Bishop Norman Williams, all these different people. Baikida Carrol moved to town and I ended up playing in a band that Baikida had called Savage Lust that Mike Clark originally played in, and a great metal guitar player called Randy Selgrin. There were all of these people who were just around. That was some of my early exposure to not just listening to but playing music that had come from BAG (Black Artists Group) and AACM and all of that. But again, I was checking out all of it. I loved Ornette Coleman, I loved the early Cecil Taylor records, and all of that. So, this was all happening, and then I moved to New York. At that time I was actually playing Brazilian music - I had gotten really into some Brazilian music and that was my way to get to New York, because this guy I knew was going to do a gig upstate, and I went to New York and that was one little focus of what I was doing then. 

I knew Dave Liebman from San Francisco, I ended up playing with him in New York, and that let me in some different ways - but it was kind of all over the place. That’s the point I’m getting at. Up to that point - 1983 or 4, for me, I was just doing a lot of stuff and I never felt like I was focusing on one thing. At one point I just kind of said - “you know, acoustic bass, Jazz, I really want to get my shit together on all this stuff and be able to do it competently”. And as I did it, I started to get these calls to play with people. I had already  done certain things when I was younger, but I started getting more real things - I played with Stan Getz, for example - those were some of my first big gigs, going out and playing for audiences and getting paid decently, and whatever that was. It demanded a certain level of consistency, and that’s the thing I always appreciated about it. I appreciated that you couldn’t know everything, but what you needed to know was how to learn to be able to deal in any situation. You had to be quick to be able to figure things out. This guy’s got charts, the charts are screwed up, you have to figure it out. This bandleader calls a tune that you don’t usually play, and you have to figure it out. I took a lot of pride and got a lot of satisfaction out of being able to get thrown into those situations and figure it out. 

I have a little story along that line - this was about 1982. Lew Tabackin and Toshiko Akiyoshi had moved to New York from LA. Coincidentally, Joey Baron moved to New York around the same time. He had been playing with them in California, so he was playing in the band when they came to New York - but otherwise it was all New York guys. It was Jim Snidero and Brian Lynch and Walt Weiskoph (but actually Frank West was playing lead alto) - it was a good band, but at that point I really didn’t care much about playing in big bands; I wasn’t that interested in it. But it was another skill, I thought ‘I need to be able to do this “. So, we had a few rehearsals and there was a gig, and the gig was at Sandy’s Jazz Revival on the North Shore, outside of Boston. So you know, they pack everything up and we all get in different cars, go to Boston. They get there and Toshiko walks over and goes “I’m very sorry but the bass book was forgotten”, and I had made two or three rehearsals at this point, and she’s got this massive book of music. And I said ‘it’s alright, we’ll be fine”. I was cocky too! So, we get up there, she starts counting off the tunes, and I just start playing - and I’m remembering what I can remember, and I’m listening, and I’m trying to listen to all the bass trombone parts, and it was kind of like “this is what I do”. I come into situations and I’m able to basically save someone’s ass and do it confidently. So, a lot of the things I did were based on that. Getting the gig with Freddie was a lot like that - because he had just fired his whole band, also in Boston - so I ended up playing on a nights noticefour nights at the Regattabar with him. But it was the same thing - like “OK, fine, what do you got? Intrepid Fox - yeah, I think I remember, I played that when I was fourteen.” And just dealing - being confident. And so, that carried me through most of the 80s. At that point it wasn’t so much about style - I just wanted to work, and I found a niche for me. It really involved this flexibility and strength and being able to just come in and make things work, even if I didn’t know 100% what was happening. So that was a big part of it. In the process, other things happened. I started working a lot with Fred Hersch in the mid/late 80s, and with Fred I played with Toots Thielemans and Eddie Daniels, a lot of different people, and that was something that really helped me develop a little more finesse, a little more clarity and deliberateness that I had been missing. I could just get raucous, but being really really precise about attacks and releases I needed to develop. The thing about Fred - if you play something he doesn’t like, he’ll look up at you and wince at you, like “what did you play?” , so I got very careful about that. If I hit this note, I gotta hit it right on the beat and get it really in tune. So that was that whole time period. 

Getting into the later 80s, I played with all these guys - it was amazing the range of people I was able to play with. I got to a point where I started to feel like I almost knew what I was going to do before I went to the gig. I almost knew what I was going to play. Because if I really tried something radical or different that I wanted to try, it probably wasn’t going to be appropriate for that gig. And I didn’t have the cred at that point to be able to say “Yeah, that’s what I played, what are you going to do about it?”. I knew why I was there: to hinge these things together; to make them work regardless. So, I started to feel like I had these skills, this craft, but I wasn’t using any creativity at all. So, I started looking towards other things. I was starting to compose a little big - composing was difficult at first because I had a lot of the same mindsets and things, but little by little, I started to use that to move me towards checking out different kinds of music, trying to find different things, and it led me to groups of musicians who were not bound as much by these conventions and structures. For me it was a more organic process; not suddenly “I’m going to become an avant-garde musician”, it was more like “well, I met Marty Erlich and played this with him and I really like that I can improvise this line that led to this” or, I started a band and Tim Berne ended up being in my band and I started playing with him. So, the people and what they were doing interested me more and it gave me more to think about when I was writing music. Not just “Oh, I wrote this tune, and when I bring it in, everyone’s just going to play the tune and say ‘yeah, that’s a great tune’” - that didn’t really mean anything to me. At first, I couldn’t really make that work, but when I got to a point when I sort of could, it was like “OK, now I have something that people can read right away and look over at me and go ‘oh, what  did you mean by that? Is that the chord you wanted there?” So, it got to be more like “oh yeah, I can put something on the page and people can play it” but it didn’t feel like composing to me - though I have a lot of respect for tune-writers, not to diminish that - but for me, I felt like I was looking for something else. So, the playing and the composing thing sort of went hand-in-hand and led me into that world. 

 FC: When you put out your own first record you would have been in your 30’s?

 MF - I think so . It would have been early 30s -  I think I recorded it when I was around 32 or 33.. 

 FC-  So it seems like you took your time a bit and let an organic or evolutionary process take place and you could have just continued to do these high visibility sideman gigs but you just followed your instincts instead, is that fair to say?

MF: I guess so - on some level, somebody would have looked at that as the smarter thing to do! In fact - I have  had specific people (I’m not going to mention any names) who when they heard some of the stuff I did on my own were like “Yeah, nice career move”, like “What are you thinking about?” - but that’s another issue. But it really did change the circle of people I was playing with and was associated with. 

 FC: Would you say that the first extended association that you had with cutting edge music was you being part of Tim Berne’s Bloodcount?

 MF: That was the thing that opened the door to a point where it wasn’t going to close anymore. I could not step back after that because we just went too far and it was too great a musical experience for me to actually say like “Well that was cool, but now I want to go back”, because I still did other things.  The funny thing in a way is that when Bloodcount started I was very involved in all the Mingus projects - I had done the Mingus Epitaph tour (the big European tour in 1991), and in that period when the big band started in 1991 at the Time Cafe I was in the band and I was very involved in it at that point. I did it all the time and Sue Mingus at the time was always trying to get me to be more like a leader in the band and all this. I was kind of grappling with all this because I love Mingus and I love his music. But when it came down to it, we were doing them at the same time and Bloodcount was starting to get tours... while the Mingus band was working a lot, but I was so much more into what Bloodcount meant, like “What is this going to be?” and “This is exciting, this is new”. And the other thing was like “This is great, I love this music, it kind of keeps me a little bit connected to my former life but in a way that sort of is much more open and has more expressive potential”. And it’s not like I sat there and grappled over it - to me there was no question that I was going to do the Blood Count. And so, probably around 1994, 1995, Bloodcount started to get pretty busy and I was never available for the big band and that all ended (or maybe even earlier - ‘93,’94, whatever). But yeah, it had such a life of its own and it was the first time that I’d been in a musical situation where I literally could play whatever I wanted for as long as I wanted and it was not inappropriate. And I absolutely pushed the boundaries of good taste on so many levels, at that - you know, the people who were there were like “Really, you’re going to keep doing that for another ten minutes before you play the cue? OK, well, whatever!”. But that was that experience, and it had a really big impact on what I was able to do after that. I still could make a Ted Rosenthal record, or something like that, and actually really enjoy it, because I’m in and out of the studio and that’s it - like “It’s not my world right now but I still love that music” - and I’ve dealt with that kind of thing for years after this. But that - getting to that level of risk and allowing these different things to happen, in all the different realms that we were able to deal with - that was really important to me. 

 FC: A game changer?

 MF: Yes!

 FC: And you have been eating canned soup ever since! (laughter)

 FC: I’m curious about Ensemble Kolossus. What made you go in that direction? 

 MF: As usual, there's been very seldom a direct path for me - usually thing one leads to another and that’s the way it tends to go. I had played in Big Bands, as we talked about a little earlier   - Toshiko, and others. Obviously, the Mingus Big Band, I did a couple records of Bob Mintzer, played some with him.. So, I mean, I was familiar with that music. Most of the time I wasn't the most respectful of the music itself; for me it was just playing. So that whole thing with, like Toshiko's band - so I'd play arrangers' music and ignore 80% of what was on the page and try to just catch the important stuff - kind of as modern sidemen do. So, there was that whole part of it and I felt like "I like this but I'm not that interested." So, I started at Peabody - I was there, and one of the things I was originally going to do when I went full-time was to do like a Mingus ensemble - play a lot of Mingus music and music like that, so I did that for a while, it was the Jazz Orchestra, we had like four concerts a year - so I just had to build a library and build up a lot of stuff. I just started, like, ordering lots of music from different people. I knew Jim McNeely well, so I ordered a bunch of Jim's music, I had gotten some of Maria Schneider's music as well, and I got a good amount of Ellington and Mingus and Brookmeyer; I got some pretty challenging stuff and I got some things that were like, you know, stocky kinds of arrangements that people could just learn to play in a section. So, I sort of built that up. But I was always more interested in the composers who - like yourself - try to do something with the music. Either recomposing or reimagining old pieces from different kinds of structural places, and using different types of arranging techniques beyond scoring for a big band in a traditional way. I was into that, I did some research and got some grants from Peabody at the time, and spent some time working with McNeely, I spent some time with Bill Dobbins. And we would look at some scores and I would pick their brains and we'd talk and sometimes I'd have some kind of arrangement I was working on that we'd talk about. But it was mostly at that point, from the place of like "I'm conducting this music, I'm teaching this music, I need to know more about how these things are put together so I can come up with informed versions of these pieces". I did that for a certain period of time. And in the meantime, I was writing some for big band - and I won't say I do this with everything, but with certain things I know the things I don't wanna do before the things I want to do - just certain things in bass playing, etc. And I knew I didn't want to write following in any kind of formulaic ideas. So it was just something I was working on - I was arranging, and sometimes I was a little tentative about how much I wanted to bring in for the students to play. My music, a lot of times, is hard for really experienced players. It was kind of something I grappled with, and grappled with, and then I'd write a little program of music, and we'd play it and I'd feel like "OK, this sounded pretty good but I still feel like I'm writing to a bit of an idiom". And then I think it was a series of things that started to happen in the mid-2000s or maybe in 2007, 2008, 2009, and I started to get more interested in doing my things again, and then I had done those quartet records and they ended up coming out of ECM, and that all happened. And I'll say one other thing- I did write a piece for orchestra with soloists, with improvising soloists, for Peabody, for a concert - it was a commission in 2007. I kind of had this idea about writing for large groups almost more from an orchestral standpoint. That piece had a lot of really good things and a lot of things I was not so crazy about, and I would always get excited about certain types of things in the orchestration, and hearing certain things.  So this is all percolating in my head. I had a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Artists in 2012, 2013, somewhere in there. It was a two-week residency and I just decided "I'm going to write a book of large ensemble music and that's all I'm gonna really work on" And the residency was set about six months before - so I just had notebooks, and when I'd be at school and I'd be between classes and things I'd just spend a little time. And I was just sketching - I wasn't really writing. For me there's a lot of just little scribbles of short ideas. I just kind of did thatand threw it in my notebook and brought it all down to Virginia for this thing. And I just started writing this music and it kind of became clear really quickly. I wrote it fast - I really wrote it, for me, very quickly - in a couple weeks. I had also set up a gig at Shapeshifter Lab shortly after that, so I kind of had to finish this music.It was like that - and I realized this more and more, maybe during this period, that I probably compose as much when I sleep as when I'm actually working. I wake up a lot of times singing through phrases, and sometimes it's like learning to play them in my head. I think there's stuff going on- I don't dream a lot, but often times I do wake up with a musical problem to solve. Some of that stuff's just going on. In this case, when I went to write it, it actually just went pretty quickly. Oh, and the other thing - I saw the connectivity of it all. It all because really clear; I wasn't sure the order it was going to happen in, but it felt very connected to me, so I just started to use it that way, creating a kind of a suite. 

FC: Do you have two or three main inspirations for large jazz orchestra music? Who would they be?

 MF: It's hard not to put Ellington first, for me. But there's probably a range - I love Sam Rivers' writing. I don't write anything like he does, but it still kind of fascinates me. I've also conducted some, and played some, and it's really amazing to me. There's a lot I love about Gil Evans, more as an arranger and sort of a sonic conceptualist. They're really important - but then, there are bits and pieces of, like I mentioned, McNeely - I think he's a brilliant writer, and very clever in the way he has so much knowledge, and I think really creative in what he does. I just recorded a piece of Muhal's a couple of years ago in Philadelphia that was just released and he was on to some amazing - I'd heard some of his big band music, but I'd never played any of his large ensemble music - and that's just fascinating, the things that he was able to do that really transcended all jazz idiom, or any kind of idiom, but still sounded like a jazz big band piece. They're definitely all out there. 

 FC: Is there a new Ensemble Kolossus project in the works?

 MF: It was starting to go that way at this point. That band and social distancing, they're hard to imagine together. Basically, I had already decided to do that. One of the things that happened with Ensemble Kolossus was after The Distance was released, I fought really hard to book some gigs with that band, it was really difficult. We did a great festival in Poland we did some nice gigs with ECM stuff at WinterJazzFest, we had some great gigs in Baltimore, DC. But it was - as you know - kind of impossible. You do one of these things and you spend so much of your life trying to come up with a situation and create this thing where you can actually underpay all of your favorite musicians for putting in a lot of time, because no matter what you do, you're underpaying everybody. It's hard! I grappled with that. So what happened was, rather than getting gigs I was getting different residencies and getting invited to bring music to these different schools. The last one I did was with the Frankfurt Radio Band, which Jim McNeely is the director of. I had written a new piece for that, which they commissioned. Somewhere in there, in that period, we had been invited to play in this big band festival at the SFJazz Center, which was I was really excited about. Probably it was on the books for over a year; I think the date got changed once, so it might have been a year and a half since they originally started talking. And then the gig was supposed to be in April 2020, and of course everything got cancelled in April 2020 but I'd also booked two nights at the Jazz Gallery. All that was supposed to happen in April. Besides the piece I had written for the German band, I had written two new pieces for that and so I was kind of moving towards that. And then all of this happened (the pandemic) - and now, the thought of anything big../ I know that life will change and we'll get back to a point where we can do this.. But you have all the other reasons why it's impossible to do a group that size, and then adding to it - "Oh, well on top of that, there are no more venues and you can't all be in the same room at the same time! How's that?". So, the short answer is: I will, it just might take some time. 

 FC: I wanted to ask you about something that you kind of alluded to in your written responses to my questions. What was your relationship to Red Mitchell?

 MF: The deal with that was: my second apartment apartment in New York (the first one was on Delancey St., right by the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge), I had just moved in with a woman friend of mine at the time, and she lived on 87th St between Central Park West and Columbus. In that building, at various points while I was there Ron McClure lived there and then, George Mraz moved into the building. So, in the building at that time there was Ron McClure and Mraz and I was in heaven just being able to hang with these guys and talk shit and whatever, get information. And when Ron would go on tour Red Mitchell would often sublet his apartment because Red would come and do these extended residencies at Bradley's. He'd been in Stockholm, probably since the late sixties, but he would come and the only way he would really make it work is to put together all this stuff. Usually Bradley would give him like a month with different pianists and he'd do some records and stuff like that. I didn't know that much about Red at the time. I knew him a little bit from some of the Hampton Hawes records, which I really liked, but I didn't even know them that well - and I knew he was the guy that played tuned in fifths, but beyond that I didn't know that much. But he moved in and we started talking. A couple times he asked me "Hey, would you mind helping me?" He had a big bass and he had a stool that he used, and I think he had two or three speaker cabinets, because he had all these pickups - like five pickups, on his bass. I didn't love the sound of those, but that's what he carried around. He'd ask me to go down, like on his first day at Bradley's, so I got into helping him out. And then one day - this was pretty early on - he said, "Oh, will you come down with me to Sue Mingus' apartment," (this was shortly after Mingus died, like within a year) "because I inherited a bass and I set it up with my strings and fifths and all that, and then Sue Mingus realized she made a mistake and that bass was supposed to go to Red Calender, not to Red Mitchell". And he was cool, he was very gracious about it, but he said "Yeah, I gotta go take the tuning strings off and put the regular strings back on and try to get the bass ready for Red" (that he was already friendly with from his California days). I went down, he took the bass - we hung out, played some of the other basses down there that were being willed to other people. We went back to his apartment - he was going to change the strings there, in McClure's apartment - so we were in his apartment and he unpacks his bass and it was still tuned in fifths. It sounded beautiful, it really sounded beautiful. He said "I gotta do something, I'm going to call Red Callender", so he calls Red Callender and goes "This is Red Mitchell, I want you to hear something", he puts the phone down and he plays Body and Soul on Mingus' bass tuned in fifths to Red Callander over the phone. And it was just this amazing moment, of really being in the room with royalty and all this lineage and history and stuff. I don't always feel connected to that old thing, but that was an amazing moment. I just started hanging out with him, I started coming over. When he did Bradley's he hung very late, as everyone did, and basically he slept all day. He'd get back from the gig at eight in the morning and he'd go to bed, and he'd be in bed 'till five. So sometimes I'd go over at five and he'd play piano, I'd bring my bass because I couldn't play in fifths, and I'd play and hang with him, it was really nice. It was that sort of relationship, more personal, in a way, than musical. And later, after he'd passed and all that, I took a deeper dive into some of his recordings, and I realized how much certain aspects of his playing really affected me and had affected me early on. The whole fifth thing had a certain character to it; there were things I liked about it, things I didn't like about it. But his innate melodic sense, how he played melody on the bass - and there a few other bass players who were super melodic; Michael Moore was kind of like that - melodic in a more traditional sense, maybe, but Red, for me, was the king of all that. What he passed on to a lot of those younger LA guys, like LaFaro and Albert Stinsen and Charlie, he was already holding court out there, when that was happening. He had a big impact on me, and I realized over time how connected it was to the larger world that I was interested in. 

 FC: I remember hearing him quite a bit when I was still still a kid in Helsinki. He would play with a local pianist that he liked (Esko Linnavalli) or Kenny Drew or Horace Parlan, and his playing was always so lyrical.

 MF: There are some solos that he played on those Hampton Hawes records that are so perfect, little gems. In a way, he played bass more like Lester Young than like a bass player. For me, it's that understated melodicism - not over-the-top, with a lot of bravado - more easy, breathing, natural kind of playing. Like Konitz, Warne Marsh. 

 FC: There are aspects of Scott LaFaro that seem to come out of Red Mitchell.

 MF: He definitely drank at that well. [Scott] had been a saxophone player, you know, and he was hearing all those things. History hasn't always judged him so nicely, in a lot of different ways, but he was going for something that I think was really amazing, the things he accomplished. Unfortunately, I think he was still in process trying to work it out, figure it out, when he died. But he also kind of messed up a lot of players that followed him because of the certain things that became the norms in jazz bass solos afterward, and I think it's taken a long time for those things to work themselves out. Like the thing about "all accompaniment is in the lower register, all solos are in the upper register" - it's like Bird or anything else; you pick things about their playing and say "I can copy these, I can use these ideas", but they're just using their creativity in the way they hear. 

 FC: And of course it is not LaFaro’s fault that many people turned his way of playing in to some kind of dogma.

 MF: Exactly! It's pretty interesting. I always loved those moments when he plays a phrase and lets it sit in the air for a minute before he continues, so those kinds of things. But that was Red's thing - he was singing, like almost nobody else on the instrument - maybe in some ways Charlie is the closest to that - but it's pretty unique, very special. 

 FC: In your written answers you mentioned that you have been writing some palindromic music. Is it for a specific instrumentation? Can you talk a little about this.

 MF: Well, it was kind of like this: It wasn't like I had set out to write palindromic music. It started with this idea that sometimes I like music to move forwards and backwards in time in small fragments. So not necessarily complete retrograde, but like music that doubles back on itself sometimes, moves forward five steps, goes back two, moves forward four, goes back one - those kinds of ideas. And it wasn't like "I love this idea", I just like the sound of it. I had a bunch of stuff in Sibelius that I'd written and I'd started to kind of do that, where I'd move step by step through parts of it, I'd move forward several steps, and then back, and then forward, and I'd create these little internal loops. It was something I just really like the sound of, and somehow I think it really related to the way I was feeling during the lockdown. A lot of people talk about the Groundhog Day and all that, which I've definitely experienced, but also there's another point for me where I feel like I'm going through my day and I get caught up in this little bit of a loop. I don't really have to be anywhere. I don't really have to finish anything. I feel kind of like my life has always been relatively linear, moving in one direction, and now it's like "I'm gonna go, but I like this so I'm just going to stay here for a little bit and then I'm gonna move". I just started to think that way and hear that way, so that's sort of where it started. And I'd written a couple of things. And if there's one real blessing that's come of this whole period with me, it's that in the warmer weather, probably starting around May, I started playing sessions in my backyard, mostly with Chet Doxas (great saxophonist) and Vinnie Sperrazza. I had a few other nice sessions with Martha Sanchez and Caleb Curtis, but mostly it was these guys because they would come out almost every week and we would just play in my backyard. I had written a couple things that started to use this forward and backward sort of movement, but we were also playing standards, and free music - we did a lot of different things. But in August, I had gotten this Jazz Coalition grant (this organization in New York) and it was a nice little grant to write a new piece. I thought "Great, I'm going to start working on this" and something drew me to this - on my iPad I made some music staves that moved in a direction. Now these are not pretty - this is not me trying to be a graphic artist. Really loosely - I made these things and they moved in almost a horseshoe shape, they moved from the upper left down and then they'd kind of come back there, and they had five lines, this big amorphous sort of thing. And there were arrows on either side saying it can be played forwards and backwards. One cycle of one of those is forward, and the other cycle is backwards so it's always palindromic in that way. That if you write it that way it can be played in either direction. It was just a thought I had, and I had just started writing these things, I was sitting mostly at my back table in my backyard, and I had just started writing these things. And then I would sketch other parts, like that would be the main line and then I would indicate bass movement.. I did another one with two different colors, and blue was treble and red was bass, I don't remember which. So any notes that were on those steps - if it was a red note it was that note on the treble clef.. I had a couple of different things and I was using these, and they were always intended to be able to move forwards or backwards at any point. Or complete the cycle and go back. I wrote a bunch of these, and when I had a few I started to go through and put them into conventional notation. I had certain latitude, how much time I could use between beats - it was more like the music was there and they were spaced out.. And like this, so I was able to interpret that graphic score kind of differently, I would come up with a version of it that I liked. And I would also try to think about certain things like the release - if you're moving forward, how long the note is might not affect that much going forward, but going back, it's the attack. I just started to think more that way. Like, "I'm going to have this note go for five beats, so when it comes back it's on beat four of the previous measure". It just got to be like a mild obsession for this period of time. Oh - the melody parts were fairly high, so I was thinking about it and thought "This would be great - I never deal with soprano saxophone because it's one of those instruments that's been tainted so much in jazz in a lot of ways. I actually love the soprano played really well, and in tune - which is a thing, as we all know. I asked Chet, "Do you want to try some of this - I wrote it and I think it'd be perfect in a soprano, could we do it?". Oh, and another thing - the drum parts and the bass parts are completely written out. So after the initial graphic, that I completely wrote out a bass part and they are also palindromic - so those things, if they are played literally, are complete mirrors of the other part. But they're not long - they end up being twelve or twenty bars the whole thing. And we started playing these and it really felt good, it felt like there was something there, it gave everybody something to focus on and practice. I've more recently started writing stuff out for drummers- writing out real parts, you know. And it's like - why not, people give me bass parts and don't expect me to play half of it, sometimes, so why shouldn't there be a drum part? "Oh, just give'em a piano part, he'll come up with something better anyway" - which is often true. But why not force yourself to compose for the drums? It also became that project. So the short answer is that yes, I wrote some palindromic music and we actually recorded it. We rehearsed parts of it in the backyard and then we went into Sound on Sound in Montclair in the beginning of December and recorded it. We're just going through it now, but there's some really cool stuff there. So that's kind of my 2020 project of things that are done now. 

 FC: That’s interesting. With my son I was actually recently checking out some Schillinger things and a lot of his rhythmic cycles concepts end up being palindromes; something that I didn’t realize until I actually worked on a couple things using his ideas. And yes, maybe there is something in a pandemic that makes us loop.

 MF: I feel that it is related to that, I tend to just get into something for whatever reason, and I don't question it, I just get into it. But yeah, it feels really connected to what I was feeling in the day-to-day thing. Bartok - there are a lot of composers who used or wrote palindromic music. For me, often times what gets me interested in it is just whatever gets me interested in it. I think it's something I want to pursue further. The thing about it is the improvisations are obviously not palindromic, some of the big structures are, to an extent - things happen in the beginning, then these other things happen, then they happen at the end. But, even literally, Chet and I talked some about improvisational language they can actually use, where you deliberately play something in a sequence and then play it in that way. But that would take an incredible amount of work that I don't know it it's worth it. But sometimes as your mind is really thinking about something like that, it starts to happen to some degree, almost intuitively, anyway. 

 FC: You did a recording with Freddie Redd? Didn’t even realize that Freddie was still alive?

 MF: Yeah, and as far as I know he still is, living in New Jersey somewhere. But it was one of those things. When I was in Baltimore, I think originally Brad Linde (saxophonist) had gotten to know Freddie some, and I think he called me to do a gig. And I marginally knew Freddie, I had heard some of the early Blue Note records, I think I saw The Connection when I was a kid, so I was like "this will be interesting". I went and played a gig with him and it was really fun, and we played some of his music, but mostly he just wanted to play the blues and stuff. But he was great and so at one point, I guess Brad arranged it to have these other guys come and record a session at An Die Musik, a club in Baltimore. There was a gig at night, but we spent the whole day - and also Butch Warren was there, and Butch was doing a bunch of this too, which was great, because I got to know him a little bit then, I hadn't really known him before. Very interesting guy, I'm glad I got to hang with him a little before he passed. He was playing. I think a lot of the recording I played, and then Butch would come up and do a little bit. And I think when we did the gig at night, it was kind of Butch until he would get tired of playing and he'd look at me like "come and play", it was this funny kind of thing. But we did a few more gigs with Freddie, with Matt Wilson I know, I think Sarah Hughes maybe.. there were a couple of people that were doing this recording. And my understanding was that there was some sort of a record that was supposed to come out at some point, but I think that after Butch died, the people that were actually doing the recording were more interested in doing the stuff that Butch played on. That was several years ago, so I don't know what the status of that is. But the time, it was supposed to be a record, yes - so we'll see. 

 FC: Can you talk a bit about your project with your son Peter?

 MF: Yeah, so Peter, as you know, has been around the music for a long time. Growing up in our house there were a lot of musicians around and a lot of playing going on, and he started playing very early - as a guitar player at Maine Jazz Camp who was playing Rock n' Roll guitar, metal guitar, and then got into saxophone - but he always improvised, we always improvised together, that was just something that we did. When he was really young, on piano, or we'd both sit at the piano - it's kind of common, I'm sure this is not different from what happened at your house. We had a couple of bands together in his teens. His 18th birthday was a gig at Cornelia St. with Tim Berne and Jacob Sax and Jim Black and I, so he kind of cut his teeth in that sort of world. But then in a year, he went to the University of Michigan, he studied Jazz, and he's been doing a lot of different things, he's still living in Michigan. So last year, I just had that feeling like "If I don't initiate this, it's probably not going to happen", so I said "Peter, I want to book some gigs in November, are you into it?", so we ended up doing a little run of gigs last November in the Midwest and a little in the Northeast and we had finished that, and then he came back to visit for the holidays. I just said, "Hey, I'm going to book a day at the studio (Sound on Sound), do you want to do that?" So he came and was like "Well I'm not really practicing," - he was here for a social visit, but I said "let's just do it". But we went in and recorded a bunch of stuff - some of the stuff we had been playing on tour, and then we just did a bunch of improv. And it came out really nice, there's some really good stuff. And the improvising, for me, is fun to listen to - just how much he's evolved over time and all that. I was thinking of doing something with it - and my friend Adam Hopkins has a label called "Out of Your Head", and he decided to put it out, and so that's going to be coming out at the end of January (2021). Just to document a thing, a period, a relationship, you know. 

 FC: People can find it on Bandcamp? And if people go to Spotify instead, they will be sent straight to hell!

 MF: Yes. The other recent things are: the second of two Thumbscrew records is coming out soon which is called "Never Is Enough". And then I have a solo record that Intakt is putting out, and that's going to be out in March/April (2021). These were all pre-Covid projects that got completed during this last period and that are coming out now. 

 FC: And is the solo record going to be called “Am I Bothering You Part Two?”?

 MF: No, it's not - this one is called "Imperfect Measures" 

Coincidentally, the guy that did the artwork on that was Steve Byram, Steve designed this one for Intact and used my friend, Warren Lin. Actually, the solo record was interesting - I recorded it in Baltimore, and I have this great artist friend, Warren Lin. And Warren, I invited to come into the studio and draw while I was playing, while I was recording. So he made these amazing drawings during the session, and I sat on it for a long time, I didn't really do anything - and he in the meantime had worked on these pieces, and so he's good friends with Steve Byram, also, so we used Warren's art with Steve designing it for the solo records. It's going to be an amazing package. 

 FC: This has been a pleasure. Thanks so much for doing this, Michael!

 MF: Thanks so much for doing this - between the writing and the talking I know there's a lot of words to get through, but that tends to be how it is these days!