An Open Concept article @ All About Jazz

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Carla Bley‘s “Olhos de Gato.”

John Hadfield: Sure.

AAJ:  So you released it on the anniversary of Bley’s death. How sweet to do that.

JH: Yeah, that’s kind of the idea we had. I thought it was sweet as well. I love that piece.

AAJ: It’s beautiful.

JH: Yeah, I think I got the chart from her website. It’s not laid out normally. You have to wander around, but there are a bunch of PDFs. That tune is there, but it’s called “Sad Song.” Yeah, a beautiful piece. We recorded it in Greece. We had an extra day in Athens and there was an amazing studio there that

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Petros Klampanis had recommended. I had worked with him there before. So we, the trio, recorded that piece and about five other pieces that were free. Just free improvisation. It was fun.

AAJ: Bley’s website is incredible, and your single is just gorgeous (read review).

Social media, the pressure to constantly produce content

AAJ: That brings us to a couple things I wanted to ask about. Let’s start with the singles idea, as a marketing strategy. You have quite a few three-minute tunes and singles in your discography. Is that motivated by social media? You want to talk about it a little bit?

JH: I don’t know if that’s still the strategy but for some people for a while it was the strategy. Yeah, you could say it’s social media. Everyone feels the pressure to constantly produce content. So singles are a way to do that. And “Olhos de Gato,” very fortunately, has been number one in Apple Music’s Jazz Currents for weeks. You’re allowed to pitch singles. But if you pitch a record, most of the time you can only pitch one or two tunes from it. So as far as exposure goes, it’s advantageous to do singles because the playlist algorithm is so responsible for what a majority of people will hear these days. Most people will just plug in ‘jazz’ and go to Apple and see what the Current says.

AAJ:  So I see that it’s on Adhyaropa Records. So they’re buying into this too, apparently?

JH: Yeah, so

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Joe Brent runs that. I cannot say enough good things about him. That label is really an artist collective. What they take is a fraction of what other labels take. He helps with distribution. Also, for one of our singles, BBC reached out to us to do a licensing thing. The label doesn’t take anything for that, but he was happy to facilitate it. They’re just into supporting arts, into supporting jazz. Even if you get a playlist, it’s really hard to generate enough money to cover the cost of the record on Spotify, as you know. That’s just the reality.

AAJ: It’s true. But some of us lament the lack of physical product, which I really prefer. I really like to have something in my hand.

JH: I like it too. I love LPs. You can still sell CDs in Europe. There, it’s still a thing, I feel. But in the United States it just becomes harder and harder. I think it’s LP or that’s it, honestly.

AAJ: For this moment but, who knows, it could change…

Remote Recording, Live Improvisation, Video

AAJ: Which brings me to another thing I wanted to ask you about. You have so many different threads/streams going, with remote recording, which is the antithesis of live improvisation, and then you also have quite a bit of that. So, for example, I picked out a few things. Like your live studio video of “Speaking in Tongues” with Rachel (Eckroth), which I adore (read review). It’s such an engaging performance and the set is so wonderful, with large illuminated globes arranged everywhere.

JH: Thanks. We did that in Phoenix, actually. It was just a take: one person with a camera and we just hit it. I think we did maybe three, and that was the one that everyone agreed on. We did it at The Nash in downtown Phoenix when we were there. I don’t know if you know that club. It’s

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Lewis Nash‘s place. It’s a wonderful club.

Yeah, I feel like that really helps, especially these days. We just applied to play at Ottawa Jazz Festival, and of course you have to send a description, and the next thing you have to provide are links to videos. They want to see it. That’s how you get gigs these days.

AAJ: Well that’s always been part of it, but the videos are more and more creative and polished than they have been in the past. You know: bad live takes from the audience, with poles in front of the stage…

JH: Yeah.

AAJ: So that’s a beautiful one. Also “Endless Train” is a nice little video. It’s so live, hyper live. You’re under the tracks and you can hear the trains along with the trombone. What was that into? What were you thinking there?

JH: So that’s a piece I wrote for my friend ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Emily Brausa, who is a cellist. She commissioned it for her chamber music festival in Far Rockaway. That piece was heavily influence by

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Terry Riley and the score is kind of laid out like “In C,” where it’s for a variable number of instruments, although I made sure it works well for cello and electronics.  It’s a set amount of time, and it sort of blurs the line between classical and improvised music.

I just improvise the entire time; I don’t have a part that I read. But for the other instrumentalists, there are cells that they can use and then move on. But actually, in part of it, I do say that a particular set of 10 cells is for minutes one through two, and then for minutes two to four, there are these other cells. Emily is amazing, but she’s not primarily an improviser. She went to Juilliard as a classical cello major. In music that I create, I still really value that spontaneity of improvisation, and I wanted to be able to create that even if people were not super comfortable just freely improvising.  

AAJ: Right. Another album that seems very live, with a lot of group improvisation, is John Hadfield’s Paris Quartet (Outnote Music, 2022), with

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Sylvain Rifflet on saxophone and clarinet, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Jozef Dumoulin on Fender Rhodes,

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Chris Jennings on bass, and

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Nguyen Le sitting in on guitar. I’m thinking of “The River.” Talk about that a little bit?

JH: I wrote that a while ago. That was kind of the start of getting my own trajectory together, that Paris Quartet album on OutNote, which is a Belgian label. It started when I had my first long stretch living in Paris. And that piece, now when I hear it, is sort of a reflection of that. I took one of the rhythmic puzzles that Kinan uses in one of his pieces and changed it to make it my own and we played a couple of games with it. I was living in Normandy and there was a river behind the house, which is why I called it that. And Sylvain also played the harmonium at the start of that. I saw him do that at Centre Pompidou, at the art museum in Paris, right before we recorded it, and I said, “You have to do that.” So he’s a lovely musician. And Jozef, he’s really great.

And so the other tune on that, “Catacombs,” that’s just him and me playing duo. There’s a video of that on YouTube, and that video is the actual take of the song. So it’s kind of our last day, when we recorded it, and we were really in a hurry, and I was really happy with the way those two turned out, “Catacombs” and “The River.” I feel really good about the others, too, but those two I feel are really strong.

AAJ: Yes. Also there was some improvisation, I understand, on your composition “Jungle Room.” How was that piece constructed?

JH: Yeah, that one is more fun live. The audio recording was set. But when it’s live, there’s a bass line that goes over the form, and then I trigger that from a sampling drum pad, and the tempos are varied. Slow, medium, fast and super-fast are the options. There’s a relationship that has “quarter note equals quarter note triplet” or whatever. Yeah, it’s a sort of game that I like to play.  It kind of puts me in control with the soloist, but it works really well. I’ve done it with

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Ron Blake, who is a saxophonist I collaborate a lot with live, and also with Rachel.

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Lenny Pickett and I have never actually played the piece live, but we did do it on a record together (Heard by Others II, Adhyâropa, 2025).

AAJ: Pickett has spoken of improvising on that. But some of the other stuff on that recording seems so finely calibrated, from what you’re saying, and remote to boot, that it sounds difficult to align everything, to have it all be perfect.

JH: Oh, yeah. There was some stuff. Some of the tracks were pretty old, before the days of the grid actually, and so he made a metronome by using an oscillator with a synthesizer so there was a little bit of drift from the digital audio works, the DAW that I use…

AAJ: That sounds like a nightmare.

JH: It’s fine. We made it work. You know, it’s funny that you mention the remote versus live thing. I don’t know, I don’t mind doing remote sessions.

AAJ: You say you love it on your website.

JH: I do love it. Even though I think I’m not a control freak, maybe I am a control freak. I like to get good sounds. I like to take my time. As musicians, we’ve all been in that situation where we say, “OK, we have one day. We need to record this record. I’m dumping all of my money into it. Go.” And you just do it. But to have the time to do it and then redo the tracks if I want to? It’s a pleasure.

AAJ: Yes. And it seems that this is the part of you who’s the composer. And there’s another part who’s the improviser.

JH: Yes.

Jamey Haddad, The New School, New York University

AAJ: Let’s talk a little bit about that beautiful drum kit of yours, that you have such gorgeous overhead shots of in your studio. And that ocean drum that now I have a name for… So Jamey Haddad, he was your entrée to New School or was it NYU?

JH: So I moved to New York and I knew nobody. I knew one person. So I eventually got this opportunity to play with ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Dave Schroeder, who is now chair of the music department at NYU, but he was not at the time. He was a saxophone instructor, and he had been on the academic scene in New York. So I started playing with him. It was a lovely band.

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Mike Richmond, the bassist who played with

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Jack DeJohnette and New Directions, who, as we know, just passed today, sadly.

Dave introduced me to Jamey, and I said, “I’m a percussionist and I really want to play.” He said, “Sure, no problem. Come to the New School. You can take my class.” I did not enroll.

AAJ: That’s so wonderful!

JH: Yeah, it’s amazing actually. So I went to the New School, for years actually. Yeah, I went. He was on tour a lot. I met a ton of people. That opportunity and his kindness exposed me to frame drumming, this side of percussion, and how to apply that to improvised music. It also simultaneously provided me with the sort of networking scene that comes with going to a school in a major city, which I did not have up until that point. I had just moved from Kansas City to New York and was just going to jam sessions or whatever. Yeah, it was really invaluable, and he was, and he is, a huge influence on me. So much so that I think it took me a long time to make it my own; to get beyond just copying what he did, to digest it. But yeah, he was such a huge influence. He’s a phenomenal percussionist and musician and a really kind human being for allowing me that opportunity. 

AAJ: Yes. And through that experience you met the ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Saturday Night Live Band crew, is that correct?

JH: That’s at NYU, actually. So I started teaching at NYU a bit later and that’s where I met Lenny initially, because there was a sort of NYU all-star jazz faculty group and we played in Peru and Italy, China, Abu Dhabi, many places. I played with Lenny a lot in that group and he had me sub at Saturday Night Live several times. It’s been a while. I don’t know how many times I’ve done it, like seven or 10 times over the years.

The Drum Kit: An open concept

AAJ: Let’s go back to the set for a minute. So you have Japanese fan drums and…

JH: Right. So this is my concept with it, because I play in so many different groups and I often think about identity politics… Sometimes there are associations with sound, and I really wanted my kit to be—I wouldn’t say ambiguous—but let’s just say I wanted it to be genreless, void of specific ethnicity on some level.

AAJ: I see. And you have a tambourim. Was that something you got from

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Nana Vasconcelos?

JH: No, from him I got a bunch of bells, and I have one of

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Collin Walcott‘s drums, do you know him?

AAJ: Sure, from

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Oregon.

JH: Yeah, I did a whole record about that, Drum of Stories (Circle Records, 2023). A bunch of gear was in a flight case that ended up in Brooklyn, unclaimed, and then kind of auctioned off. A friend of mine knew about it and bought the whole thing. My friend had to move and got rid of a bunch of stuff, and that’s when I went over and saw it.

AAJ: That’s a bit of stardust on the set.

JH: Yeah, that’s a whole thing that makes you feel… It allows you to feel connection, I will say that.

AAJ: And your tiny cymbals? Your 8-inch hi-hat and your 4-inch hi-hat, which you say you don’t play much anymore. But the cymbals and the little things you have on them. Do you want to talk about that?

JH: I guess I always wanted small hi-hats. I like the way they sound. Even though, over the years, I’ve become more of a drum set player than a percussionist, or I play percussion in drumsetty ways, I still hear that hi-hat, and I want it to have shaker elements to it, so I will treat it. I’ll put stuff on it, so it doesn’t necessarily sound like the chick-chick of the two-and-four jazz hi-hat.

A really great drum company, Stack Ring Percussion, built the current cymbals that I’m using. Before that, I just made my own, just out of some random cymbals that I found. They provide a sort of electronic sound that I like. I like making acoustic things sound electronic. And they also allow me to treat them; hang things from them, put a shaker on it, or some jingles, so I can get a different sound. That works really well for Kinan’s band…

AAJ: Right. That’s what we see and hear when you play. It looks, and you treat it, like a set. The only thing you pick up, actually, is the ocean drum, the frame drum.

JH: Yeah, everything else is like a set. It always blows my mind when people think that the drum set can only be one thing. Originally, it was just a set of percussion instruments cobbled together, with wood blocks and China cymbals and Chinese toms. You could almost make the argument that I’m going back to more of what it originally was than doing the set thing.  I have an open concept with it. But also, now, I would say that my setup is pretty codified, and it fits in a very small bag, very portable. That’s the reality of being a touring musician in 2025. 

AAJ: Or in a place like New York. My friend ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Rex Benincasa plays all sorts of gigs with drums of all kinds: Early Music, lots of things, always different. And he manages to strap everything onto a little cart that he can take on the train, the single most important criterion. It’s beautiful.

JH: Yeah, that’s such a thing in New York. It was also a major factor in learning the frame drum. Playing the ocean drum, you could go and play a gig on it, just that…   

Influences and Independent Studies

AAJ: So you’ve mentioned some of your influences, Jack DeJohnette,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Trilok Gurtu, and we talked about Jamey Haddad. And you went to study for six months in Indonesia. You spoke of the one person in New York when you moved there and then apparently there was one person in Indonesia…?

JH: That’s true! The one person I knew in Indonesia was Andy McGraw, an ethnomusicologist who was doing a Fulbright at the time. That was crazy. It was in 2001, before 9/11. So there were no cell phones or not like now. My cell phone works globally; I just land and turn it on. But there, I landed and then took a van up into the jungle to this compound that I was staying at. It was a really beautiful space. There were a bunch of small individual houses that were like little studio apartments with toilets that you had to dump water down, really rustic. And at the compound there were dancers, other musicians studying. And I would wake up and study, take lessons.

AAJ: Traditional gamelan?

JH: Exactly. I started initially doing gangsa (metallophones) parts. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just showed up and asked them to teach me. Then I graduated to an instrument called gender wayang, a two-headed mallet instrument, kind of like a vibraphone without a pedal. They’re tuned in a pair, microtonally tuned. You play in a set of two or four, so you get that oscillation shimmer.

AAJ: Yes, the Balinese thing.

JH: Exactly. So I did that, and it was a huge influence on me. I had just finished a master’s degree at that point, and I was kind of over it, learning super-complicated contemporary music. I was a classical percussion major.

AAJ: I see. But then you did a similar thing in Chennai?

JH: Yes, when I studied with Jamey, his teacher is from Chennai, also karnatic music. So when I was at the New School, I got really into that. But when I was an adjunct at NYU, they had this thing called the “adjunct development program,” where you could apply for a little bit of money to go study or to a conference or something. So I used it to study. Also really informative and cool, but it made me realize that specializing in Indian music was really not for me. I was studying kanjeera primarily (a frame drum with jingles, similar to a tambourine), and there are identity politics involved.

I’ll be playing with the Silkroad Ensemble again in December 2025, and I should say that, as

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Yo-Yo Ma has said, “I am a Chinese man born in Europe, playing a European instrument. That’s a beautiful thing. No-one has any issue with that.” So, on some levels, you should choose your own path and do it, and I respect that. But it’s still complicated. I guess it works as long as you’re dedicated to the music and you’re not just charading around.

AAJ: Right. If you devote yourself fully to the music of any given culture, I think you’re going to be respected by more people than if you simply take on superficial aspects of the music.

JH: Yeah, that’s right; if it’s the basis of your concept. Also, the inversion of all that… Like when I moved to France, people there tended to view me as “the New York jazz musician who’s moved here.” And it’s true, my jazz professor was

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Bobby Watson, who played with

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Art Blakey and I think you do absorb a lot of things that maybe you don’t realize you’re absorbing when you’re 18. Then when you go to Europe and play with jazz musicians there who have not be exposed to that, you feel it’s a different thing…

An interweaving of groups

AAJ: There is one more thing I wanted to ask you about. You spoke of how much you love collaborating in duo contexts. I couldn’t find much on the Saints of Paris.  What is that?

JH: OK (laughs). The Saints of Paris is just this: Rachel knows this guy who has a licensing thing, and this is something we did for him; chill electronic tunes that we could make rapidly to see if we could get an advertising placement thing with it. Not supposed to be super heavy. I stand by it, everything that we made. But it’s a different level of music than Speaking in Tongues (Adhyâropa, 2025).

AAJ: That makes sense. Also, I didn’t see anything else right away that you had done with

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Layale Chaker. I did a review of

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data-original-title=”” title=””>Brad Shepik‘s Human Activity: Dream of the Possible, which she and you are both on, and I loved her playing (read review). What else have you done with her?

JH: Yes. I played on one of her records (Layale Chaker & Sarafand, Radio Afloat, In a Circle Records, 2024). The album is great and the band is excellent. It’s a great group. The pianist is

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Phillip Golub. He’s super young. He’s worked on the

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Wayne Shorter opera with

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Esperanza Spalding. He’s amazing and has done a bunch of stuff. And the bassist is

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Sam Minaie, who I play with, with Brad Shepik, in a trio called Believers. So it’s like an interweaving of groups. The Believers group is the core rhythm section for Brad’s group. All on Shifting Paradigm Records…

AAJ: Yes, based in Minneapolis. Very nice stuff. And that brings us to the end of our time. More to talk about next time! Thank you so much for all you’ve shared with our readers today.

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