The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and guitarist and composer Miles Okazaki. His new album, Miniature America, released July 19 via Cygnus Recordings, features vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, pianist Matt Mitchell, alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, tenor saxophonist/flautist Anna Webber, multi-saxophonist Jon Irabagon, trombonist Jacob Garchik, and vocalists Ganavya, Jen Shyu, and Fay Victor. Links to purchase the album, and to Okazaki’s website, can be found at the bottom of this article.
“They’re very distinctive in their individual voices,” Miles Okazaki says of the Miniature America ensemble. “I wasn’t trying to make a record where everyone blends together.”
At first blush, this would seem antithetical to music making with more than one talent involved: why wouldn’t you want them to blend together?
Okazaki has a very good reason. For Miniature America, he recognised he could “write some instruction pieces to create the raw materials,” as he explains in the press release (he calls them ‘slabs’), “and then excavate them, sanding and polishing to find hidden musical artefacts.”
Read on for more on how the innovative guitarist pulled that off, alongside this formidable crew of jazz practitioners.
UK Jazz News: This is quite an ensemble. How’d it come together?
Miles Okazaki: It’s a combination of people I’ve played with who I’ve known for a long time, and then people I’ve known for a long time, that I wanted to play with.
For example, Jen [Shyu] I’ve known and played with for a long time. Same with Jacob Garchik, Caroline Davis, others. Anna Webber, I hadn’t played with much before, but I’d been checking her out. Patricia Brennan, I’d played with a fair amount; Ganavya, I’d played with in different contexts.
UKJN: What attracted you to the folks you hadn’t played with before?
MO: They just have an open mind; I know that about them.
There’s the sensibility of, OK, we can’t tell what’s going on right now, but we have some faith that it will eventually become something that we’re not too embarrassed about.
UKJN: In the press release, you said the session consisted of “dozens of different little episodes. Dense blocks of sound. I took them home and carved away at them until just the minimum remained, learned that, and then played along.” Can you elaborate?
MO: For example, there’s one called “Lookout Below” that I put online as a video with the score. For that one, the instructions were to just play wild, melodic lines, and to take breaths in between.
What I came away with was this crazy, dense, layered thing of nine people all playing at the same time, wildly. You can imagine what that sounds like.
For that particular track, I just started with one instrument that I liked. I think it was the vibes, but I’m not sure. [The idea was to] follow that line to the end of that phrase, and then go to a different instrument.
When that phrase ended, I thought of a different instrument that would go well, continuing along. And then, I just leapt from phrase to phrase, making one continuous line all the way through, and erasing everything else. Then, I learned and transcribed that thing, and played along with it on guitar.
Some sessions are like, “Let’s do another take ‘til we get it right.” In this session, everything was right. All I was doing in the session was collecting raw materials: I went to the lumberyard this morning, and I got a bunch of lumber to build some stuff here.
UKJN: It takes a fair amount of trust for that to work out.
MO: At the beginning, it doesn’t sound like anything really. It sounds like a big mess. So, you have to say, “Trust me, I’m going to work with this. We’re just getting the materials and ingredients here, and I’m going to go home and work on it.”
