Decoding Messages: Patrick Zimmerli Speaks
Photo courtesy of the artist.
by Kevin Laskey
While a student in New York in the 1990s, saxophonist Patrick Zimmerli studied the compostions of high modernists Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter while playing jazz clubs with the likes of Kevin Hays and Larry Grenadier. Since then, Zimmerli has kept grounded in both worlds, writing and arranging music for everyone from Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman to opera singer Anne Sophie von Otter and string quartet Brooklyn Rider.
This week, Zimmerli returns to The Jazz Gallery with his project Messages, a suite of music for saxophone quartet and rhythm section written to feature French pianist Thomas Enhco. Originally premiered by the classical ensemble Quartet Morphing in 2019, Zimmerli has adapted the work to feature top improvisers like Steve Wilson and Chris Potter. We caught up with Zimmerli last week to hear about the music’s evolution and how he deals with the challenge of creating coherence in a long-form piece.
The Jazz Gallery: I’d love to start with hearing about the origins of this project. What drew you to working with these musicians like Quatuor Morphing and Thomas Enhco, and what was the original intention behind the project?
Patrick Zimmerli: My wife is French and we split our time between Paris and New York. She was listening to the radio in Paris and heard this amazing classical saxophone quartet. I feel jazz saxophonists are universally fascinated by the classical saxophone. There are some technical things that those kinds of players can do that we can only dream of. It’s a different sound and approach, but if you’re a saxophone geek like me, it’s easy to be engrossed by all those technical things.
So I went to see this quartet, Quatuor Morphing, and they were great. They were playing classical transcriptions for saxophone quartet, like Mendelssohn, Ravel, Debussy. They were amazing and I really wanted to work with them. From there, I had an idea for a piece with my friend Thomas Enhco, who’s a well-known pianist in France. When I told him about classical saxophones and jazz rhythm section, he was like, “Don’t you want to use string quartet? Why saxophones? That’s crazy!”
We ended up doing the piece and it went really well. The only thing is that these classical saxophonists don’t have as much of a culture working with a rhythm section, so some things weren’t as natural. Since I’m a saxophone player, there were some parts where I was imagining something specific sound- or groove-wise that didn’t quite work. I was a bit frustrated.
After the first year of pandemic, I thought about what it could be like to do it again, but in New York with some people that I’ve worked with on the jazz side. I’d sacrifice some technical things and intonation, but I thought it would be more grooving as an experience, and more in tune with the rhythm section.
TJG: With the original classical saxophone quartet, how did you go about imagining music for that pure classical sax sound?
PZ: I don’t think color was exactly at the front of my mind when I was writing the piece. I mean, I think of my music as colorful and it involves lots of dynamics and different kinds of sounds. One of the things that classical players can do so well is play with wide dynamic range. That’s less the case with jazz saxophonists. I was doing a project with Joshua Redman and the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, and he said, “In jazz, we don’t really use dynamics.” He was being funny, but it’s true in a way. Jazz players can get a similar kind of effect by playing fewer notes, rather than playing softer.
As a composer, I don’t usually think in terms of orchestral color first. I usually think first in terms of musical idea, and for this piece, one of the big ideas I thought about was the idea of canon. All of the quartet players are playing overlapping lines, and those classical guys were really good at differentiating them. That’s more of a challenge with jazz players.
TJG: Yeah. I was definitely thinking about how classical sax quartets are frequently vehicles for counterpoint, compared to say a classic big band section where it’s more about the massed, rich color of multiple instruments playing in rhythmic unison—a superinstrument.
PZ: You might be a little too young to know what Supersax was. It was like a saxophone section from a big band and they’d do these harmonized versions of Charlie Parker solos. But that’s definitely how jazz saxophonists learn to play, and so having as many independent voices as this piece does can present an adjustment. But I think that it’s a challenge that’s fun for these guys to play.
I mean, all of these guys are great players and are really game. Like Ron Blake the bari player has a classical saxophone degree from Michigan, and Steve Wilson has a classical sax geek side too. I think we’re all enjoying doing something a little different.
TJG: As opposed to these players adjusting to less familiar kinds of relationships, how did you adjust what you wrote to incorporate what Chris, Steve, and Ron do well? How did you activate improvisation in what were originally fully-notated parts?
PZ: I’ve been working with classical musicians for years, and one thing I used to do a lot is write out improvisations. I would write out my own improvisations as a saxophone player on the theory that there was an ideal version of a particular improvised solo and writing it out could help me get to it.
It boils down to a Platonic versus Aristotelean way of looking at the world. Is there one best possible solo, or a million possible solos that are equally good? For a while, I was coming from a more Platonic sense and I wanted to find that ideal version. I’ve heard that back in the day musicians like Louis Armstrong would repeat the same solos note for note every night, so I would say he took a Platonic approach.
But in this piece now, I’m working with a great Aristotelean like Chris Potter, I thought it was important to make way for that. There were some soloistic parts that I had written originally that I turned into slashes to let them solo. With players like these, you have to allow for their creativity. It would be silly not to.
TJG: It’s interesting to me in that regard, because it sounds like when you open that solo space, the musical idea is still the same as before, it’s just now drawn in a different artist’s hand.
PZ: It’s funny that you say that, because I’m about to get together with Chris and go over some things. There’s this one piece with an acapella tenor sax intro that’s completely written out. But with Chris, I can tell Chris to play off that writing—start with these ideas, but depart from it. For me, I really enjoy as a player having some really strong, thought-out material to riff on. With these players, I’m really excited about the opportunities to blend spontaneity with all the precomposed elements.
TJG: For me, all live performance of notated music has a degree of improvisation, but in classical music that improvisation is relegated to only certain parameters like color and phrasing. In this case, you’re just opening up the players’ ability to improvise on additional parameters.
PZ: Well, the converse is true as well. Nothing is truly 100% spontaneous, even if it’s a free context, because you’re going to be drawing on so many things you’ve done before. One thing that I liked to do in my work previously was to make it unclear when the composition stopped and the improvisation started. Once I got the improvisers in on this piece, I definitely thought about how to incorporate that idea again.
TJG: You’ve conceived the pieces in Messages as a set. How have you thought about structuring the larger whole with these individual pieces? Is it a question of developing melodic ideas? Is there a sense of drama, like departure and arrival? Is there improvisation baked into the form itself?
PZ: I’m really interested in large-scale forms as a composer. My thinking on that basically boils down to the longer the form, the more coherence you need. One experience that really confirmed that for me was this time when my wife and I were taken out by some dear friends to a fancy tasting menu dinner in southern France. There were like ten courses, and every dish was interesting. But it was lacking concinnity—coherence—so even though there were some amazing-tasting things, it didn’t add up to a satisfying overall experience. If you hook me up with a great burger and fries, it’s like bam—you have coherence, you have contrast, it’s all self-contained. If you have a meal with lots of courses, you need to put in more work to help create that through-line.
For composing, if you’re writing a tune, something that’s a short length of time already has a lot of internal coherence. I like writing long things because coherence becomes a challenge. Writing a long form isn’t just writing seven or ten tunes and stringing them together, even if the tunes are amazing. I’ve had arguments with people about that, like Luciana Souza. She once said to me, “You composers! Why do the themes always have to come back?”
In this piece, all of the written material is based on a four-note motive. It’s really just a rising scale, do-re-mi-fa. This motive starts the piece. Then there’s a waltz, but the waltz’s melodic motive is also a rising scale, but varied in a completely different way. Other pieces in the suite come back to that rising major scale in changed forms, and then finally it comes back in the original form at the end. I’m glad Luciana is on the West Coast so she won’t be here to hear it and make fun of me.
Creating this coherence within a large form takes a real effort for me. All of those techniques might not be consciously apparent to the audience, but it can help create this sense of satisfaction at the end.
TJG: So is this piece strictly formalist in this way? Is it “about” how a four-note melody goes through changes?
PZ: Well, on the other side of the spectrum, there’s the thematic concern, or the extra-musical idea behind the piece. A piece doesn’t always need that, but I usually have something motivating what I write. In this case, it’s the idea of messages we receive from other people, even if they’re not around. I could just be sitting and thinking, and someone’s voice pops into my head. Even like just now, how I hear Luciana dishing on composers, or Joshua talking about dynamics.
When I’m writing music, that can happen too. I could be writing some kind of harmonic progression, and it might remind me of Coltrane, or Beethoven, or Ben Monder, or whomever else. This piece tries to accentuate those moments when a new kind of message pops in. It’s based on different messages—musical and otherwise—that I’ve experienced in this way. This narrative about messages can create its own coherence, inviting listeners to think about what those literal messages might have been, and who sent them.
TJG: We’ve been talking a lot about form, so how about one last question that’s more about the material of the piece. I saw that you originally conceived the piece as a kind of concerto for Thomas, accompanied by the “orchestra” of the saxophone quartet. Has that soloist-accompaniment relationship between Thomas and the saxophones changed with the addition of improvisers?
PZ: It definitely was a straight concerto at first. Thomas would largely play the main thematic materials and then improvise on them. Now, there’s much more trading back and forth. With the addition of the improvising saxophonists, I thought about sitting Thomas back into the ensemble a bit more, rather than on top. His voice is still in there a lot, but I wanted to make sure Chris and Steve and Ron and Scott and EJ got blowing room. They need to be heard if you put them on the bandstand.
Someone made a comment that this ensemble is 57% saxophone, but I don’t think it really feels that way with how Thomas fits in. It’s not a saxophone fest.
The Jazz Gallery presents Patrick Zimmerli’s Messages on Friday, September 9, 2022. The group features Mr. Zimmerli on soprano saxophone, Steve Wilson on alto saxophone, Chris Potter on tenor saxophone, Ron Blake on baritone saxophone, Thomas Enhco on piano, Scott Colley on bass, and E.J. Strickland on drums. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 P.M. E.D.T. $30 general admission ($10 for members), $40 reserved cabaret seating ($20 for members) for each set. Purchase tickets here.