Transcript 0:01 From New York jazz clubs to Minnesota art houses, Ted Nash and Jeremy Walker have been friends and collaborators for more than two decades. 0:09 Nash is a two-time Grammy Award-winning saxophonist and a longtime member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. 0:17 Walker is a pianist and composer who has been featured on NPR's Composer's Datebook, and just last year moved to Asheville. 0:24 Nash and Walker are reuniting this Saturday for a one-night only performance at Mars Landing Arts Center in Mars Hill. I'm Matt Peiken, the founding journalist of the new arts publication See Hear. 0:36 I spoke with Nash and Walker about their shared history and musical connections, their creative arcs as composers, and the program they're cooking up for Mars Landing. 0:46 Why don't we talk about your beginnings together, how you two met, and f- the environment around how you first started performing or collaborating together. Ted, you wanna go ahead? 0:58 [laughs] It's actually a great question. I think, Jeremy, you should tell him about how we met. [laughs] Okay. Well, it was Iowa City. Um, 1:06 I had gone down there with some friends of mine in a band to hear Jazz at Lincoln Center, and we were at this coffee shop, and Ted walked in, 1:17 and I'm fairly introverted person, and the drummer said, "Hey, that's Ted Nash. Let's invite him to join us for coffee." I said, "Yeah, great," and I thought he would do it, and he said, "You go do it." 1:29 I was like, "Oh, no, I can't do that." And he said, "I'll buy the table coffee, but you have to go do it." So I went up and I introduced myself, and Ted joined us, and that's how we first met. 1:39 I was a saxophonist at the time. That's something I didn't know about you, so you were a sax player. Yeah. You knew who Ted was. What year was this? Oh, man. 20-something years ago, no? Yeah, at least. 1:54 I have, I've played piano now for 21 years, so I was in my 20s. Probably early, early aughts is my guess. Very early aughts. Yeah, maybe late '90s even. Could be. I joined Jazz at Lincoln Center in '98. Okay. 2:07 So probably in those first couple years. Yeah. Definitely. 2:09 It's so interesting when someone comes up to you randomly in a coffee shop and introduces themselves, and you have no idea the depth of friendship and musical collaboration that, that comes from that, and it... 2:21 That's what I love about life, is that you just don't know in the next 10 minutes what's gonna be happening- Mm-hmm... and where that's gonna lead you, so here we are. 2:28 Obviously you meet a lot of people, and especially you, Ted, you're out performing a lot, and I'm wondering, it's one thing to meet somebody who, Jeremy, you recognized him. It's another to find a musical kinship. 2:41 What was that seed of musical foundation that you both found you landed on together? Well, I think Jeremy and I, we had the same interest in music. Like, what I mean is 2:54 the history of the music, what has led us both to being the players and composers that we are, I think we've been influenced by so many of the same kinds of, you know, types of jazz music and classical music and players that we love so much. 3:07 And when I first heard Jeremy play, I heard your band. It was a nonet. Yeah. Yeah. At, uh, at Lowell's place, I think it was. Yeah, at The Dakota. I believe so. 3:19 Yeah, at The Dakota, and I went, and, and you were playing all sorts of arrangements that you did, and the band was fantastic, and I was like, "Okay, here's somebody who really has a passion for music and a deep understanding of music and has figured out a way to, to express that." 3:34 But then you've had... You had some pretty interesting things happen in those first few years that I knew you, that changed a lot of what you did. Yeah. 3:41 Jeremy, you said initially you were a sax player when you first met Ted. Yeah. You, you've since migrated over to piano. 3:48 Ted, when you went to The Dakota in Minneapolis to see Jeremy, was he already on the piano at that point? No, he was leading the band, but he was also the sa- the saxophonist. Oh. 3:59 So soloing, soloing on the saxophone and playing his arrangements, and I think the first time since I had met you, you came to New York. Yeah. Came over to my apartment, and we had a sax hang, a lesson, whatever. Yeah. 4:13 And, uh, so I got to hear him stretch out, and he knew so much about playing the saxophone that, um, I've always felt that with the gain of him playing the piano and being able to get that instrument together and use it creatively, I feel like it was also a loss because he... 4:28 Jeremy loves the saxophone so much and- Mm-hmm... is so passionate about it. You said you had a sax hang. I think that's interesting- Yeah. [laughs]... that there are sax hangs. 4:38 But in your shared music making, Jeremy, when you came over to the piano, what did that open up for both of you? 4:46 What k- kind of possibilities did that open for collaboration that maybe when you were playing the sax weren't as open or just were different? Well, with the piano, the switch was a health thing. 4:59 I couldn't play the horn anymore from Lyme disease, chronic Lyme disease, and so I... When I switched to piano, I didn't expect to perform ever again. I did it to compose. 5:13 Uh, so I was composing for that nonet and some other ensembles, and my first gig on piano happened because the pianist in the band had some personal problems and didn't show up to the gig. 5:27 And I knew the music, but I couldn't play the piano very well. But that was that, and I kinda hacked my way through the gig and went from there. 5:37 So as far as collaboration with someone, like any musician, but someone of Ted's caliber, it's not something I hung my hat on. It, it just kept 5:47 going along, and I think we played a duo six, eight years ago in Minneapolis, and I kinda sweated my way through that one, and, you know, we keep going. 5:57 And Ted's always been so supportive w- with advice, with encouragement, his willingness to come out and do these gigs now up here in Asheville, and so that's the nature of it for me. What is it for you, Ted? 6:10 You met Jeremy when he was playing the sax. Jeremy went over to piano by necessity rather than by choice. From your vantage, what do you think that opened up within Jeremy as a musician and as a composer that maybe 6:26 wasn't quite the same for him as a sax player? Not a qualitative consideration, but so much in terms of just stylistically and authorship. What do you think that did for him? 6:38 Well, besides all that, it's also a practical thing. 6:41 And I think Jeremy and I both come from a place of being able to get around a little on the piano and use it as a tool for composing, and I've always wanted to be a better pianist, so I'm a little jealous that Jeremy's focused in on that and has become a great pianist. 6:55 When you play the piano, you have so many colors. With the saxophone, you're, you're sort of limited to one note basically, and at a time. 7:03 And I feel like with the piano, you can cover so much range and different types of feels and chords and stuff like that. And it gives us, Jeremy and me, the opportunity to be able to play together. 7:13 I mean, two saxophones together, yeah, okay. But piano and saxophone, now you've got everything. You've got harmony, rhythm, melody. 7:21 That's what we did when we did the gig a few years ago, and why we wanted to re-up and be able to do that again now is just even within these few years we've both developed and grown in different ways, but particularly Jeremy has grown so much as a pianist. 7:34 So it's gonna be fun to see that difference. You just said something, Ted, that I had never really considered much before, that just the differences in the instrument. You said the sax is one note. 7:46 I know not literally, but then I started thinking about it as you were talking. There's soprano sax, tenor sax, alto sax, bass sax, baritone saxophone. Piano, there's one piano. [laughs] I know there are different... 7:59 What's that other instrument in classical orchestras sometimes? Harpsichord? Yeah, it's not a harpsichord. What is it called? There's a lot. Yeah, I know. 8:08 Anyway, so talk about the music that you're going to be performing here in Mars Hill, and what your conversations were like, 'cause you haven't been in the same room to play together, at least not recently. 8:21 So talk about your conversations about how you're programming this concert- [laughs]... and what you're wanting to hear and see together. Well, I'll let Jeremy describe the music because he's putting all that together. 8:34 But I just know for us it's like he knows that I'll be cool with whatever, and we don't have to work on it that much because a lot of it's improvised and it's a lot about trust, which we have. 8:43 Our conversation has been fairly limited with, "You wanna come and do this?" "Yeah." "How about the music?" "You got it." "Great. Done." 8:50 But in the meantime, I know Jeremy's been preparing some stuff, and so when I get there tomorrow, we're gonna have a day and a half to hang and look at the music and practice some. 8:58 So I don't know, Jeremy, what do we got going? [laughs] I just went through some new stuff. 9:05 Mostly I had to go through the charts and see if they were correct, and most of them weren't, [laughs] so I had to kinda clean them up. I just started playing tunes and thought, "Well, this might work." And 9:16 for me, a lot of times I'm thinking about other collaborations that... Like lately I've really been inspired by Mel Waldron and Steve Lacy, uh, that have a great duo record. 9:29 I think it's called Semper Amore or, or something like that. And so that'll just kinda color what tunes I choose. And a lot of it's my stuff. Some of it'll be standards. 9:38 It'll develop by Saturday night [laughs] to what we want it to be. 9:41 So I know you're both active composers, so you're not feeling like in this program that you want to give light to your own music or Ted's music necessarily, but just some other music that you're interested in right now. 9:55 A lot of it's gonna be mine, but because jazz is so dialogue based, it's co-composition any time you perform. So these are all tunes I've played solo and trio, and I think Ted and I even done some of them. 10:12 But the final act of composition is in performance, so it's always accurate to the moment. 10:19 Before Jeremy jumped on the call, I was just starting to talk to you about the broad spectrum of recorded music you've had, and some of the highlights for me as I was going through. 10:31 First of all, talk about your collaboration you have with the actress Glenn Close in, and also many guest performers, Wayne Brady and others, in 2021. It's called Transformation. How did that come about? 10:45 Glenn Close, she was on my recording called Presidential Suite. 10:49 She read an excerpt of a speech by Aung San Suu Kyi that was part of a suite of music that dealt with political speeches that had to do with civil rights, freedom, things like that. 10:59 She had done something with Jazz at Lincoln Center a few years before that where she read a piece and was part of a musical program, and I really liked her vibe, and she was really nice. 11:08 And I got to know her a little bit. Wynton Marsalis, who was my boss for 26 years, loved Glenn and said, "Hey, if you ever have an idea for something that you wanna bring to us, please." 11:20 And so she and I started talking, and we decided we would collaborate on something, that she would come up with the concept for it, um, and invite guests, and I would write the music. 11:29 And that's exactly what we did, and we worked on it for a couple years off and on. And we came up with the idea of transformation because we just thought that 11:38 there were so many different ways to represent transformation in our world and in our personal experiences. I mean, I could go on and on about it, but so many really wonderful people had things to say about that. 11:49 One of the people that I invited was my son Eli, who's transgender, and so was able to read a letter, the original letter that he wrote me when he came out. 11:59 Writing music for that was really inspired by these personal stories. It's such a big conceptual thing. I'm not saying that people aren't willing to investigate large ideas, but it's tough sometimes. 12:10 People want to be hit over the head or have 15 seconds of a video to watch or whatever. Even in jazz you find that this, that the devolving attention span is hitting audiences there? Yeah, I think so. Wow. 12:23 I think Jeremy would agree. Mm-hmm. There are people who are throwing up videos, technical things. There's those people who get millions of hits on something where they do something. 12:32 And then I've heard stories where you play with them, and they have no time feel, and they can't play with other people. 12:36 So it's sort of an interesting time right now, where people are seeming to get more attention from these short excerpts of little things that they can do. But the bigger- Yeah... 12:45 stories are, I don't know, I think hard, harder for young people especially. Jeremy and I don't feel that way, obviously. That's really disappointing to hear, actually. 12:54 [laughs] Because I thought in some ways, maybe I just presumed or assumed this, that jazz would be immune to that because the people who come to jazz are inherently looking for more experimental, longer takes on theme and mood and texture. 13:13 I just had thought that maybe, maybe that's not where younger audiences are coming from, even those who do come to jazz. I don't know. I think you're right about that. 13:20 I think jazz survives because there, there are enough people who are interested in something that's a little deeper. Um, so we'll always have that audience. But jazz is not a huge audience because of that. 13:31 I think it's never been the hugest audience, but I think there are enough people at all ages who appreciate what it is. I don't know. Jeremy, what do you think about that? Yeah. Of course, it's affected. 13:42 You can put up a video of playing along with Coltrane's solo on just your left hand on the piano or something like that, and- Right... you see all kinds of things of ways to get over and get a viral thing. But 13:56 it's a music that doesn't submit to bullshitting very much. Eventually- Yeah... it's gonna find you out. Do you think that you both as composers, and Jeremy, I guess I will start with you, with the music you're writing, 14:09 are you sealed off from those changing listening habits as you compose? How have current times and what's happening out in the world, how have they seeped into your m- more recent compositions? 14:25 I know you're writing music all the time. Mm-hmm. How do you think your music is affected by what's just happening out in the world at large? 14:33 For me, I'm kinda lucky because some of the hell stuff, actually, I don't pay that much attention. 14:40 And when I do, I just kinda get rebellious and angry, and then my response to that is I wanna write something really personal and as beautiful as possible. And its first audience is for me. 14:54 I have to like it, and it has to land for me. Then if Marsha, my wife, likes it, then okay. Then if somebody else wants to play it, and by the time I get to that third layer, as far as the broader social thing, 15:09 I'm kinda like that, what is it, John Prine, Blow Up Your TV. That, that's kinda me. I read the news for five minutes in the morning. I'm not oblivious to what's going on. I, 15:20 I don't really go on Instagram or Facebook or anything like that. In my case, the piano or any instrument, it's gonna let you know. It'll- You- It's gonna keep you where you need to be. 15:29 You're not focus grouping your music with TikTok influencers? No. It would do poorly. [laughs] So- [laughs] Well- I don't know... and, and Ted, your most recent record, if I'm not mistaken, it, it's called Triological. 15:42 It's a collaboration with Ben Allison and Steve Cardenas. And you've made music with them before as well. What are you working on now compositionally w- with your own creative footprint? What's on your plate right now? 15:55 Yeah. That group with Ben Allison and Steve Cardenas is something that I love so much. 16:00 We've been playing together for 12 or 13 years, and this is our fifth album, Triological, which is actually the first album that we've put out that's our own music. 16:09 We've always done tribute records in different ways, music that we love and are inspired by other people's music. So this record is all originals by us, which is nice. And we've just been doing a bunch of touring. 16:20 We'll be at Dizzy's in New York in a couple weeks for three nights. Since I've left Jazz at Lincoln Center a couple years ago after 26 years, that's been one of my focuses, just in terms of a personal project. 16:31 But the other thing that's been taking a lot of my time and passion is more film-oriented. The documentary right now, it's called Resonancia, and it's, it's doing the film circuit. We're in some film festivals. 16:44 We haven't arranged any kind of distribution yet, so it's, we'll be doing that at some point. But it's a documentary- What, what is Resonancia? Yeah. 16:51 It's a Spanish version of the word resonance, but it took place in Cuba when I was down there teaching a workshop with high school kids. And I had done this before in different places. 17:00 I did, did it in China, did it in, um, in the States, and, uh, Kathy Barbash, who's the producer, brought me down there, had a feeling that this would be something worth capturing, so we hired a local film crew to come in and capture it. 17:13 The story just turned out to be so beautiful. These kids, most of them had never composed before, and we used artwork as inspiration. 17:20 So we went, we were in this big museum, and they took paintings, and we talked about how to express those feelings and thoughts that you get from outward influence and how to compose them. 17:30 And so within a period of five, six days, 15 people composed music, and we performed it in an audience in front of, uh, 1,100 people. 17:38 And the transformation that these kids made through discovery and trust in themselves and belief was really inspiring, so we decided to make the documentary something that we could share. 17:49 And I did a lot of the editing too with people and directed it. 17:52 But I think it just tells a wonderful story about people believing in themselves and taking risks, and I hope at some point it'll be widely distributed so people can see it. 'Cause I think it's moving. 18:01 It's a moving story. That sounds beautiful. I could talk to you guys for a lot longer, but I really appreciate the time you've both made this morning. Of course, yeah. 18:09 And I'd love to see if we can get your, y- Ben and you and Steve out here to perform. You said you're touring for Triological. Any plans to come to the southeast at all? Yeah, hopefully. 18:21 And Marsha, who, uh, knows us all for a long time, we've been talking about maybe doing something and her bringing us down there. But we'd have to put together a little tour, so maybe next year at some point. 18:31 Well, in the meantime, I hope audiences this weekend are thrilled to hear both of you perform. Thank you so much, Ted, Jeremy. Thanks, man. And I'll see you both on Saturday. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to it. 18:43 Jeremy, I have to say, this is really a high point of this whole time right now for me to come down and play with you. I think- Oh, man, thanks... I think, no, I think people are gonna really love it. 18:51 They, I'm not even, I don't even know what we're gonna get into, but I know it's gonna be good, so I'm really looking forward to it. Thanks so much to Ted Nash and Jeremy Walker for today's conversation. 19:01 Their concert is 7:00 PM this Saturday, June 27th. You can get tickets at marslandingartscenter.com. 19:09 This podcast is part of the soft launch for See Hear, my new journalism platform for the arts and culture of western North Carolina. You'll find video, podcasts, and written stories. Subscribe for free at seehearwnc.com. 19:24 I'm Matt Peiken. I'll see you here next time
