Begin Again: Camila Meza Speaks

Photo by Vincent Soyez

by Sarah Thomas

Guitarist Camila Meza plays back-to-back nights at The Jazz Gallery this weekend. On Friday, she presents new music with her trio as a result of a Jazz Gallery Commission in 2019. Saturday, she returns with The Nectar Orchestra, who will present music from their debut album as well as new works inspired by Chilean poetry. We caught up with Camila to talk about these two projects, her compositional process, and what it’s like bringing this new music to the stage for the first time.

The Jazz Gallery: You have two shows coming up at The Jazz Gallery this weekend. On Friday, you’re playing with your new trio project, and Saturday features The Nectar Orchestra. Let’s start by chatting about your Saturday show. You put out an album with The Nectar Orchestra in 2019. What have you been up to with them since then, and what will you be sharing at the Gallery?

Camila Meza: The record came out in 2019 and we were able to tour and perform it for about a year. Then the world shut down and we were left with an incomplete life for that record, in a way. So last year around this time, we reunited at The Jazz Gallery to perform music from that album.

It feels like that music is naturally starting to redeem its cycle of life, so now we are working on a new project with the same instrumentation. At this point, The Nectar Orchestra feels like more than just a project. It's starting to feel more like a band—a group of people you want to do a bunch of records with.

For this next project, the idea is to write music to Chilean poetry. There will be a few of these new experiments being premiered this weekend. I'm really excited about that, because the poetry has made the composition process quite different than starting from the void. That's been really interesting. Also, in my own personal research time, it has been great getting to know so many different poets from Chile that I didn't know about, and to reread things that I loved and had forgotten. It's a really fun new journey with The Nectar Orchestra.

TJG: What led you to work with poetry this time around?

CM: The music for my upcoming trio record, which I’ll be playing on Friday, is so personal and involved in my own visions and feelings and stories. So for The Nectar Orchestra music, I felt a need to start from somewhere else. Right now, I would like to be inspired by somebody else's words. I'm picking poems that I connect with, but working with the poetry is a little bit of a departure from where I've been with the trio album. It's a natural need for contrast. 

So with that said, personally I've always wanted to study more poetry and to deepen my own language. It’s almost like a workshop for myself—the work will enlighten me and make my own vision more vast. So it's kind of a selfish project in that way.

TJG: For these two shows, what is it like exploring your music from five years ago at the same time as these new projects?

CM: It's fun, because I can still find the spark in the old songs. Since we ended up having to leave the project in a very stand-by situation when the pandemic started, I still have probably a hundred concerts in me that we didn't get to do. Playing that music still feels very relevant. I'm enjoying it, especially with this band. It feels like a great connection we have between us. Although the music is very much arranged, it feels new every time. So I'm very much still excited to play this music.

With that being said, there's nothing more exciting than new material and trying out new sounds with your band. A couple of days ago, we were finishing some of the last bits of the arrangements and structures with Noam Wiesenberg, and I was bursting with excitement. So that’s the best feeling. 

TJG: Let’s talk about your Friday concert with the trio. This is a pre-album release show, right?

CM: I consider it almost like warming up the house, because the album will come out in the fall. It's very interesting, because this album was created in a very unorthodox way for me. We started recording it long-distance during the pandemic, and it became a total production with a lot of layers. There are songs that have like 150 tracks. It's so different and new in relation to what I've done before. 

Then the world continued its course. At the moment that I was recording the album, I wasn't even thinking of translating it to a live tour. I recorded it the way that I wanted, and regardless of whether I would be able to reproduce the songs. But now we are here in this precise moment, and I'm releasing it at a time where I can actually play the music live. So it's going to be a really fun challenge to bring those ideas into a format that can fit the Gallery stage. 

We're playing only the music from the album. The instrumentation is going to be a trio, but there will be a harpist and two other singers as well. Also, this music came to life thanks to a Jazz Gallery Commission in 2019. It wasn't for trio at that time. When it started, I had drums, bass, piano, two singers, and a harpist. Now I'm reducing it to a bass-less format. I would consider this show to be a sort of pre-release—warming up the music to check out how it will be experienced live.

TJG: How did you start working with the folks on this project? 

CM: On piano and synths, it will be Gadi Lehavi. We have a long history at this point. We've played in all sorts of different settings, including duo shows and the Nectar Orchestra. For me, his presence in my music is one of those musical instances where you know that everything's going to work amazingly. He can read my mind and express my taste in such an easy way that I have no doubt every time I play with him. So he’s one of my number one collaborators. Then with Kush Abadey, we've played together in other settings but he's never played my music. This will be a first, and I’m excited about that. 

For this music, I’m looking for that combination of fearless playing while at the same time serving the melodies and the vocal space. I have been wanting to sing with harmonies for a long time. I feel like that's something that's been ingrained in me since I was very little and singing with my sisters. This music is very much vocally oriented in that way. 

I’ll have two guest vocalists joining me, Alejandra Williams-Maneri and Georgia Heers. I met Alejandra at Oberlin. We played my music and she killed it, so now I want her just to do her thing with my music. Georgia is an amazing singer, too. I met her through Alejandra, so they will really work as a team. I’ll also have the harpist Katy Wong joining us, who I met recently. For a lot of us, this will be the first time that we play with each other. We're going to be experimenting with the music in an exciting way.

TJG: I read a quote on the Gallery website that I’d love to hear you talk more about: “The songs act like a cinematic procession depicting transformation and re-emergence.”

CM: When I wrote this music, the first abnormal scenario that was happening was the fact that I had to write an hour of music in eight months. That’s not necessarily the amount of time I typically take to write a whole album. I usually take like three years or more. So I was very much into the writing process every day—almost every hour—trying to connect with the muse on a daily basis. 

This particular approach was so amazing. I wish we had the time and ability to always write in this way. That process led me to some very obvious connections between the songs. There was a journey being depicted, and the themes were becoming congruent between each song. A lot of what I was experiencing during that time was a need to create music that would acknowledge the darkness—to be able to confront it and not be afraid of it. 

I am, in general, a person and a composer who always searches for light. In a way, that is still the motto of the set. But there are definitely moments of more aggressiveness in a way, or the acknowledgement of what could be wrong. But the story, the music, and the journey are in search of that moment where we can feel resolution and release. 

Lyrically, a lot of the themes that started coming out were archetypes of motherhood. At that point I was not a mother, so it’s fun to see how much power your words can have. I was unconsciously invoking motherhood. But in that particular moment, it was an archetype I was bringing into the music to talk about this expansive spirit—the need to bring into our society and lives that possibility of giving without the need of return. It’s the nurturer archetype. We're at a stage in our civilization that I feel it's really hard not to see that some change or shift in the way we do and think about things needs to happen.

TJG: That’s beautiful. To wrap things up, do you have any other shows coming up you’d like people to know about? 

CM: In early April, I’ll have my last concert in New York for a while. That's going to be at the Uncharted Concert Series on April 4, and it’s my duo with Aaron Goldberg. So if someone is completely a fan of my music, they can literally see three completely different concerts in the span of two weeks. 

Camila Meza plays The Jazz Gallery on Friday, March 22 & Saturday, March 23. On Friday, she plays with her trio, featuring Camila Meza on vocals & guitar, Gadi Lehavi on piano & synth, and Kush Abadey on drums, with guests Alejandra Williams-Maneri and Georgia Heers on vocals, and Katy Wong on harp. On Saturday, she plays with The Nectar Orchestra, featuring Camila Meza on guitar & vocals, Gadi Lehavi on piano, Noam Wiesenberg on bass, Keita Ogawa on drums, Tomoko Omura and Fung Chern Hwei on violins, Benni von Gutzeit on viola, and Aliya Ultan on cello. Sets on both nights are at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. ET. $35 general admission ($20 for members), $45 cabaret seating ($30 for members), $20 Livestream ($5 for members). Purchase tickets here.