The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with multi-Grammy-winning trumpeter and composer Brian Lynch. His new album, 7x7by7 – featuring tenor saxophonist Craig Handy, guitarist Alex Wintz, pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Boris Kozlov, drummer Kyle Swan, and percussionist Murph Aucamp – was released 25 October via Hollistic MusicWorks. Links to purchase the album, and to Lynch’s website, can be found at the end of this article.
By its heady concept, 7x7by7 seems like it should be a tough nut to crack. In its press release, Brian Lynch describes a longtime connection to this number of power, which tracks with music’s essential, mathematical undergirding.
As such, the album features seven pieces, by seven musicians, each seven minutes long – and even the track titles have times-table significance. “Sevens have been something that I have put a lot of time into over the years,” he said, “both in my music and in organising my time and thought.”
Yet what has resulted isn’t a cerebral slog; just exceptional jazz, by a trusted veteran, still pushing himself to new conceptual horizons. Below, Lynch explains how this unique album came to fruition.
UK Jazz News: Is there any analog in the jazz canon for this kind of album?
Brian Lynch: I’m sure there is. The numerical part of it. Benny Golson’s [1961 album] Take a Number from 1 to 10. He started, on the first track, playing solo saxophone, and added an instrument with each successive track until it [added up to] a 10-piece group.
UKJN: How’d you take the news of Benny’s death? He’s one of my idols, personally.
BL: Mine too. I had a lot of great experiences playing with him. I was with him when he was on a couple of tours with Art Blakey, and then after Art passed, we did a number of tribute things together, and I played with his group off and on in the ‘90s.
I had some great experiences with him. He was a beautiful guy – such an elegant and erudite person.
UKJN: When did you hatch the conceptual angle of sevens?
BL: It started as an armature for making a funding proposal, then different things got added to it.
The technological part came first, in terms of it being seven minutes, seven musicians, with all of the tracks on the record being seven minutes long, and then the idea of it being interchangeable. I originally had the notion that it could be a mosaic that could be put on some sort of interface, and the user could work with that: all the music can be lined up with each other throughout the positions.
It would sound cacophonous in some instances; in others, it’d sound very interesting and avant garde, depending on what you match up with something else.
I haven’t quite been able to find the technology available, and I try to make that work as of now. But I think that if I can ever figure that out, it could turn into an amazing little gizmo for somebody to play around with.
UKJN: How’d you get all the tracks to be exactly seven minutes long?
BL: I wrote them all to have tempo relationships that match together. In other words, every measure is the same length, no matter what the tempo is. It was all recorded to a click, so everything lined up.
UKJN: What made this particular band ideal for this specific concept?
BL: They’re great researchers. I’ve worked with them a lot, and feel comfortable with them in all sorts of different situations. They’re patient with the kind of stuff that I churn out, which can sometimes be a little bit tricky.
They can play hard music, much harder than mine. So, my music isn’t daunting to them. They’re able to adapt to the needed circumstances.
UKJN: What always attracted me to your music is its sense of approachability, even when you’re dealing in esoteric concepts such as this.
BL: I try to be really aware of everything that’s going on now, and what’s around me in general, in life and in music. Whether it’s pop music, or what’s going on in the music that we call jazz today.
Players in the generations that have come after me are going to have a different set of references, or way of processing the references that we might share in common. They’re picking up the journey in a different place.
In a way, I’m still trying to work out the implications of the music that I came up under. I think there’s still a lot to be mined from that. Younger musicians may come back to the music of the 1970s in a discovery kind of mode.
I see this with my students, of the music of the ‘70s, ‘80s, or even ‘90s. One example would be playing the music of [pianist] Donald Brown for my students. He’s a significant composer; he came to attention through his work with Art Blakey, and then people like Wynton played his music.
[Saxophonist] Bobby Watson is another example of this. He came up in the 1970s, and he’s not only channelling Woody Shaw and Wayne Shorter – all the classics – he’s also channelling [saxophonist] Ronnie Laws; Earth, Wind & Fire; things like that. Keeping hard bop contemporary.
That’s the thing: keeping the style that you started out with as your sort of mission, as it relates to the present day, and absorbing influences without trying to just jump on a bandwagon.
UKJN: I love your Songbook series. Are more volumes coming?
BL: There’s still a lot more to come. I’m writing some new things, and something I’m working on now will be announced very soon, because I’m doing a funding project for it. It’s with one of my most significant mentors, Charles McPherson.
UKJN: Charles is the best. What does he mean to you?
BL: I started playing with him more than 40 years ago, when I was living in San Diego, before I moved to New York. He was already living there, since the late 1970s, so I had the opportunity to start playing with him.
Myself and Rob Schneiderman – a mathematics professor at college, and a great, great pianist – worked with him at very early stages in our careers, in San Diego in the early 1980s. Not only playing with him, but hanging out with him, and getting lessons in some of the fine points and deeper truths of the music.
