Anna Webber

Composer, saxophonist, flautist (interview conducted through e-mail)

-Vancouver;  musicians in the family, early inspirations

I was born in Vancouver, but actually spent the majority of my childhood in another town in British Columbia called Kelowna. Most people have never heard of this place, but it's the biggest city in BC outside of the lower mainland (the area surrounding Vancouver). That being said, it still - at least at the time - had a sleepy suburban feel to it. It's a holiday town for a lot of Western Canada as it's on a huge lake and is also close to a couple of large ski hills.

My mom is a decent amateur pianist, and I remember being a kid listening to her practice and thinking "I want to do that", so when I was around 5, I started taking piano lessons. My parents were overall very supportive of extracurricular music lessons, and my brother and I both cycled through several different instruments over the course of our childhoods. I played piano, then cello, then flute, and finally saxophone (which I didn't start until I was in 12th grade). Though there wasn't much in the way of a creative music scene in Kelowna, there were a couple of excellent musicians in the area. I started studying in highschool with Larry Crawford, a local jazz hero, who lived in the next town over. He was a saxophonist as well as a flutist, and was really important to my early development!

 -Montreal; McGill years

I was a jazz flute major at McGill, at probably the height of the most uncool time to play jazz flute: right around the releases of American Pie and Anchorman. I sort of decided that because I was both a flute major and a woman, I'd work at least twice as hard as everyone else. So my time at McGill was more or less filled with an intense practice schedule, I'd be in the practice rooms for 8 to 12 hours every day. I'm not really sure how I managed that in retrospect; I also had classes and did sessions and went to concerts most nights and presumably had homework? But I came out of that time a much stronger musician. I had started leading my own bands playing my own music, and had created a lot of musical relationships that are still important to me to this day.

After I graduated from McGill, I stuck around Montreal for a couple years and freelanced. It was, at the time, incredibly inexpensive to live in Montreal, and the quality of life was pretty high, all things considered. But I'd had it in my head forever that the goal was to eventually move to New York, and so in 2008 I applied for grad school at Manhattan School of Music, was accepted, and moved that summer.

 -Berlin years

I was in and around Berlin for a handful of years, but I actually only lived there officially for one year. This was after I'd graduated from MSM and spent a year doing what is called "Optional Practical Training" or OPT - basically a way for foreign students to get a job in their fields after they graduate from a college program in the US. Anyway, my OPT year was spent doing a pretty soul-sucking job that was technically music work, but made me question why I was staying in NYC at all. So I moved to Berlin! I had gone to MSM with a number of Germans, and my best friend was moving home to Berlin. I figured I'd give Berlin a shot, and applied to do a second master's degree at the Jazz Institute Berlin, which was a one-year program that was essentially free. I generally credit this move as one of the best decisions I've ever made, with another one of the best decisions I've ever made being moving back to NYC afterwards! 

Anyway, this program was very much a "find your own way" kind of degree, and I mostly just took composition lessons with John Hollenbeck, who was teaching there at the time, practiced, wrote music, and enjoyed living in Berlin. It was at this time that I 1) started taking composition seriously (I'd always written music, but I'd never considered myself a "composer") and 2) started exploring the extended technique language of the saxophone and flute. I think it was in Berlin that I really figured out who I was and wanted to be as a musician.

 The only real requirement for the degree was to present a concert of original music, and subsequently record that music. This is where my band Percussive Mechanics came from - the album we recorded ended up getting picked up by a good German label, Pirouet Records, which facilitated me coming back and forth to Berlin to tour with that band over the next few years.

 -New York.... the current music scene and cultural climate

I'm going to approach this from a "pre-pandemic" perspective, as my relationship with the city's current music scene and cultural climate have shifted after not having performed much in the past year and a half! But, first and foremost, I love New York City, and what I most love about it is the number of musicians who call the city home, that you can go out any night of the week and see any number of incredible shows, that there are always people fighting to push the music farther forward than you'd imagined. Something I particularly love currently is the amount of cross-collaboration between people in my corner of the jazz scene and people in the new music scene. There's a lot of really fruitful exchange of thought and ideas, lots of new music players who are also incredible improvisors, and lots of jazz-trained artists who are down to read new music-type notation.

 -Jazz; do you consider yourself a jazz musician? What is Jazz for you? Or are these kinds of terms and definitions limiting or outdated?

Yes, I absolutely consider myself a jazz musician. I am a student of jazz music, and my heroes are by and large Black American jazz musicians and Black experimental musicians. I know the word "jazz" is contentious, and that a lot of Black musicians who are doing very-much-not-jazz have fought hard to not have that word attached to their work. It's my view though that as a white person making more abstract music who has the (white) privilege to define for myself and my audience how I want my music to be perceived, that I recognize and honor the legacy of the Black musicians who have most inspired me, and not pretend that I came to doing what I'm doing by any other route except through studying jazz music. 

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

I mean, I'm only 36. Maybe not yet the time for gazing back over on my life and surveying mistakes and triumphs?

 -Greatest personal Influence(s)

The cities of Montreal, Berlin, and New York; fruit from the Okanagan valley; universal health care; long-distance running; lots of books; the teachers who have taken me seriously and mentored me.

 -Greatest compositional influence(es)

The saxophone and flute; simple mathematics; a conversation with Carolyn Brown on an Amtrak train; John Cleese's lecture on creativity; also, obviously, everything I've listened to and absorbed and learned from.

 Who is Carolyn Brown and what in what she shared made an impression on you?

 I was taking the train from NYC to Montreal, and reading this book "Simple Composition" by Charles Wuorinen. This older lady sat beside me on the train and asked me "Are you a composer?". I'd never really been asked that question before, and was a little taken aback. This was right after I moved back to the US from Berlin, and had really just started taking composition seriously. After thinking for a second, I replied that I was. She said "My ex-husband was a composer. He started off with serialism when he was in his 20s, but then he moved on to more advanced concepts." I thought to myself "Wow, ok, let's go, let's get into it." She introduced herself as Carolyn, then started telling me all sorts of stories about her life as a dancer in the West Village in the 50s and 60s. As she left the train when her stop came, she said "My husband's name was Earle Brown, look him up". Having had no idea up until this point who her composer husband could have been, I was floored. Upon further research, realized that she had been the lead dancer in Merce Cunningham's company, had worked extensively with Cage, etc etc. This was a really incredible formative encounter for me, and also the first time I really considered the question "Am I a composer?".

 -Greatest influence(s) on the saxophone 

John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Warne Marsh, Mark Turner, Ben Webster, Lester Young

 - "A thing that irritates me…."

All-male bills in 2021. 

-About your compositional process; what/how/

The most important thing to me is to set aside dedicated composition time and treat it as sacred. That's something that's always been difficult for me, I'm very good at letting other things come in the way of my composition time, but I'm learning more and more that I need to schedule it and be stubborn about not letting anything else come in the way. This usually means that if I'm working on a set of music, I set aside time every day to write, and I do it whether I feel inspired or not. 

On a slightly more technical note, something that's become really important to me is to interview the people I'm writing for as a first step in the compositional process. Sometimes you think you know a person from playing with them, but you've never actually asked them what they like doing/don't like doing. It can be eye-opening, and, I think, makes the music stronger.

-You have developed a strong personal musical expression; what helped you/inspired you to reach this?

Why thank you! I'm not really sure how to answer that, but I'm hard on myself, I edit my music obsessively, and I try to spend time reflecting on whether or not the ideas I have are mine vs someone else's. 

 -The meaning of tradition for you?

As I come from the generation of jazz musicians who learned this music in school, it's hard for me to divorce the word "tradition" from my jazz education, from hearing it repeated over and over again in phrases such as "you have to learn the tradition", ie. Maybe that's not even specific to the jazz school generation, but regardless...What does that even mean? There are lots of musical traditions and they're all valid, and traditions change over time. There's also a difference between what's taught as tradition and what the current performance practice is, and most schools seem to usually be several decades behind what is actually happening in the scene. I play with people who come from all sorts of backgrounds, just because someone can kill it on a standard doesn't mean that they're going to sound good when they play something more abstract, and vice versa. Ultimately who cares, as long as someone sounds good doing what they are doing. I don't think about "tradition" in my day-to-day life. I do think about people whose music I love, who come from all sorts of eras and performance practices.

 -Control vs giving freedom to the other musicians as a composer

Speaking as someone who writes detailed, controlled music, I think it's incredibly important when writing for improvisors to give them space to play! They'll be happier, they'll play the written music better, and it makes the music-making process more democratic/gives everyone a sense of ownership. This can feel tricky if you're writing music for a larger group, where it might be hard to find places to give everyone a feature. But if you broaden the definition of improvisation from "someone takes a solo" to "someone makes a decision", it's possible to create many more opportunities in a given piece of music for people to improvise. "Improvising" vs "Playing Written Music" can be a spectrum, rather than a binary on/off switch. 

 -Big Band writing.... what made you do it? Any particular favorite big band writers?

This is something that I credit entirely to the Jazz Institute Berlin and John Hollenbeck, as I needed to write a big band piece as part of the fulfillment of my degree there. I had been completely uninterested in big band writing until John helped me figure out that I could write "my" music for big band; I didn't have to write whatever I thought at the time that big band music was. Sounds simple, but was really a revelation! Then, after that, I did the BMI Jazz Composer's Workshop in NYC, which was led at the time by Jim McNeely and Mike Holober. That was an incredible program and experience.

 -Underrated

Orchestration

 -Overrated (musical or otherwise)

complexity

-Improvisation vs composition

Why choose?

-I meant this more as how/if you consider improvisation as a structural element in your compositions, or how composition and improvisation interact in your work, or if you consider them having specific roles/purposes.

Yeah, improvisation definitely has a structural element in my work. For whatever reason, I decided early on in my composition career that if I was including improvisation in a piece of music, I needed to know why it was there, and define its role pretty clearly. Otherwise it felt like cheating somehow, or like I hadn't fully thought through all the elements in my piece. Whether that's true or not is up for debate, but whatever the case, I didn't want to default to including improvisation in my music just because it's what I thought "should" happen. Why should it happen? What sort of energy or mood am I trying to create by including improvisation? Is there a narrative purpose to this improvisation? And if so, how can I relay that information to the musicians? None of these questions need to be answered in essay form or anything, and the answer to "why should improv happen" could just be "because I want it to happen". But the important thing for me is that I ask myself those questions.

 -Your greatest artistic triumph

I'm pretty proud of my latest album, Idiom.

 -The saxophone

Is still my second instrument, compared to the flute. It feels good these days though. 

 -Practicing/studying.... routines.... for writing and playing

I like structure, and I tend to structure my day-to-day pretty rigidly. This has especially been the case in pandemic times, where there's been zero outside structure. So I practice at the same time every day, write at the same time every day. This helps keep me sane and balanced. It also helps me make sure that I'm getting in time for non-musical things that are important, ie exercise, reading, etc. I follow this method of organization through into my practice routine. I break up my practice time into 10 minute blocks, because that feels like the amount of time I can focus on a given exercise without just going through the motions, and it also allows me to focus on a bunch of different aspects of my playing over the course of a practice session. I split my practice time evenly between flute and saxophone, and re-assess my practicing goals on a regular basis. This kind of structure definitely doesn't work for everyone, but it's always worked for me!

 -One question that should have been asked but wasn't....

I feel like this covered a lot of bases! It's an honor to be included in this interview series alongside so many heroes, thanks for having me!