This week’s edition of Mondays with Morgan is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and the exemplary trombonist and composer Marshall Gilkes. On 26 January, Gilkes released a new album, LifeSongs, featuring Germany’s WDR Big Band.
Marshall Gilkes had just tracked LifeSongs. He was about to get a life experience.
After the leading trombonist and composer recorded said album with the WDR Big Band, he ventured to another corner of the WDR domain: their television studio. He posted up in their hole-in-the-wall set, with a cast of bartenders, and other denizens of the dive.
Gilkes is still bowled over by this unusual, immersive experience. “They have these incredible facilities,” he says over Zoom from his home in Beacon, New York. “The production values are unbelievable. As I was conducting, there were cameras going over my head … It’s just a really unique situation and experience in the world.”
LifeSongs itself is the product of quietly profound moments. As Gilkes explains, the pieces are largely inspired by his experiences with his kids and family, which lends the grooves a certain companionability and accessibility.
“I sometimes think that in a lot of modern big bands, stuff can get almost too cerebral,” Gilkes says. “Some of it can be very interesting music, but maybe not the most accessible to a lot of people.”
Read on for an interview with Gilkes about LifeSongs, his history with the WDR Big Band, writing from a familiar vantage, and more.
UKJazz News: How did your convergence with the WDR Big Band come to be?
Marshall Gilkes: I was actually in the band from 2010 till the end of 2013. Right before I left, I think it was the first time I did a project with my writing, with the band, and then the manager asked me to come back a month later and do a full concert and recording.
So, we recorded the first I record I did with them, in 2014 [the following year’s Köln]. It got nominated for two GRAMMYs. He asked me to come back and do a new project; that was a [2018] record called Always Forward. I actually thought it was a better record, but I don’t know if it got as many accolades.
There’s another manager now. About a year ago, he asked me to come, and that’s when we recorded this project.
UKJN: Can you talk about your connection with some of the musicians in the WDR Big Band?
MG: The WDR Big Band is a fixed band; those guys are in it. Having been in it, I know all the members pretty well, so I feel whenever I’m writing for them, I can allocate solos accordingly.
Johan Hörlén is the lead alto. He also has a great soprano sound; there’s a vocal track on there (“All the Pretty Little Horses”) that also has a soprano solo, so I gave that to him.
There’s another track on it called “Sugar Rush,” and the way the second tenor plays… his name’s Paul Heller; he’s just a really incredible and fiery kind of soloist. And that’s what that chart needed, you know?
And the brass section is pretty incredible. Quite a few of these tunes kind of have a chorale built into them. There are two lead trumpet players. One of them, a guy named Andy Haderer, has that somewhat classical sense as well. He plays really beautifully, all of that stuff, playing the tough parts. He’s also a fantastic flugelhorn player and soloist. So, there’s a ballad feature I wrote for him on this record: the arrangement of “This Nearly Was Mine.”
There are a few new faces since the last time I was there. One of the people was Billy Test, but I knew him from New York. I played a couple of times with him in town a while back – a great piano soloist.
UKJN: He plays a great solo on “Back in the Groove.”
MG: It goes into a section that’s kind of inspired by Brad Mehldau’s trio, particularly [his rendition of Paul Simon’s] “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” from [2005’s] Day is Done. The way Jeff Ballard and those guys play seven – I really love that kind of groove. I showed it to Billy and the rhythm section and said, “Guy, this is the direction I want you to go with this.”
It’s a great, great band, and I feel lucky that I had the opportunity to go write for them, to do these concerts.
UKJN: What was your methodology for uniting the material with the soloists?
MG: There are obviously a few charts that feature me, so those are kind of trombone-specific feature charts.
On the piece “My Unanswered Prayer,” I was actually going to play the improvised solo. But once we started rehearsing it, and I started hearing it, I said, “You know, I think this would be better on piano.” So I just played the melody on it, and then the way Billy was playing the ending of it was so unique.
And then, “All the Pretty Little Horses” was a chart that originally one of the Air Force bands here asked me to write. I was going to play with them, and they said “We want you to arrange a children’s tune.” I said, “Can you be more specific?” And then I started thinking, Well, there’s this lullaby I hear my mom singing to my kids that I always really loved.
I started messing with it at the piano, and came up with this arrangement of it. We didn’t perform enough concerts here, because we didn’t have a singer with us. So, I just recorded the body of the chart there, and then I had Sabeth Pérez lay her part down here in New York. Then, I sent it back to the engineers at WDR, and they mixed it all together.
UKJN: What is it about Sabeth that makes her perfect for this material?
MG: Well, I think she has a beautiful timbre to her voice, a beautiful sound. She’s awesome. It’s a technical thing, but amazing pitch – it just sounds perfect.
She improvises a little bit on it, too. I feel like her ideas are really clear and concise, both melodically and harmonically. It really corresponds to what the other soloist is doing. She’s got the end of the tune, and she’s kind of trading off with the soprano. And everything she sings makes sense relative to what Johan played on soprano.
UKJN: What makes these compositions spiritually harmonise with each other?
MG: There’s a record I did [in 2022], called Cyclic Journey, which is a record with me and the rhythm section of Aaron Parks, Johnathan Blake, and Linda Oh. It was basically a nine-movement suite, [a trip through] my average day, is what I was going for.
So, I think I had it already in my mind, somewhat, that I was writing these kinds of pieces that were largely inspired by my kids and family. I probably took that same thread through this. So, I gave it the title LifeSongs.
UKJN: Which school of the trombone, big band arrangement, or any other applicable practice would you say you belong to?
MG: I don’t know if I would say that I come out of one particular school with big band playing, or big band writing. I can say that one of the things I love about WDR – it’s such a versatile band.
Like, this chart, “Sin Filtro”, there are not many bands in the world that could play that. It’s really technically hard for the brass players, for the whole band. I can write something like that, but also write a really fragile ballad, like the arrangement of “This Nearly Was Mine.”
As a trombone player, I grew up listening to a lot of the greats and stuff. But I was also really interested in other instrumentalists; saxophone players, trumpet players.
I transcribed people. I love JJ Johnson, Slide Hampton. I love Conrad Herwig. Eddie Harris, on saxophone. Ralph Moore, a tenor player. But also, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Michael Brecker, Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw.
There are some people who are kind of conservative, thinking, Oh, you’re only supposed to play the trombone this specific way. I’ve always kind of looked at that as: music is limitless. I’m just trying to do what I want.
One Response
MG is perhaps the foremost jazz trombonist of this era. He is a disciplined player, and has incredible skills that were developed via carefully planned and regimented practice sessions. Yes, he has the natural physical balances that we all attempt to develop, but Marshal has actually spent hours per day developing his techniques. It’s what the greatest players do, after all.