Listening to the Crosstalk: More Better Speaks
Miles Keingstein, Samantha Reiss, Declan Sheehy-Moss, and Alex Yoo. Photo courtesy of the artist.
by David Austin
The members of the quartet More Better—Miles Keingstein, Samantha Reiss, Declan Sheehy-Moss, and Alex Yoo—hail from New York City and first met at LaGuardia High School. They continued their musical studies at NEC, honing their interplay both in and out of the classroom. Last summer, they gathered at a cabin in the Catskills to record their first album, which they just self-released.
This Thursday, the band makes their Jazz Gallery in celebration of their album release. Before the show, the band sat down with Jazz Speaks to discuss their music, grounded in their shared school experiences, weekly gigs at Wally’s, and their love of Ornette Coleman.
The Jazz Gallery: How did this band come to fruition?
Miles Keingstein: We first did a gig at Chez Moi. We had two or three hits there. We needed a small group to play some standards.
Declan Sheehy-Moss: Originally, we all met at LaGuardia High School. We went there together.
TJG: Can you tell me a little about your experiences at LaGuardia? When I was looking up the band, I found a video of you, Declan, playing EWI on this prog metal / jazz track and you were jumping all over the stage. Is that a common occurrence at the school?
DSM: Everyone's done some weird shit at LaGuardia—musically or just not musically. But yeah, I was somehow lucky enough that the school bought an EWI for the class. That was for the Class of New Music.
TJG: Did everyone feel that same opportunity there? Was the level of engagement too much for that age?
MK: I felt engaged because I was having fun. LaGuardia is its own little universe. Everything you can possibly imagine is happening on any given floor. You can just run around and be engaged by everything that's happening.
That said, one of the big lessons I learned there was that you make the best music when you're playing with your friends—playing with people that you really engage with on a personal level. LaGuardia just brings those people together in some kind of magical way.
Samantha Reiss: I would also say that in that environment, you really want to get yourself out there; you want to get your name on the map. Once you do that, there’re just so many opportunities that will come to you, and you will be higher in demand. In high school, that can be stressful. I don't think high school students are necessarily ready for that kind of commitment to all of these opportunities. That was definitely a challenge for me, and it showed me how important it is to be reliable, which was a good preview of the professional music world.
I also think it was hard, as high school students, to set boundaries. Students had to give up their ability to set their own personal boundaries in order to surrender to a bigger purpose, and that’s a mixed blessing. On one hand, students who may have challenging family dynamics at home are spending at least 12 hours a day at school for musicals and other performances and then have to return home to a difficult environment. But at the same time, it's beautiful when you are able to give up so much of yourself to a greater good.
I also wanted to mention the Class of New Music, where students could bring in original music that didn't necessarily fit into any specific genre. That was one of the most valuable music opportunities I've had my entire life.
Alex Yoo: Yeah, the New Music Ensemble was a songwriting performance-based class. We were able to bring in original music, and it was pretty big class as well. There were a ton of musicians, and a lot of different configurations band-wise and genre-wise. LaGuardia was a mixed bag of different moments and opportunities. I remember enjoying having that experience of community in my transition from middle school to high school, and the musical awakening it allowed me to have.
DSM: And somehow our group was the group that got called for this gig—I don’t really know why. I remember one of the first times we played together as a band was in senior jazz, and we recorded Robin’s Nest on a Zoom recorder. I remember that as one of our first times playing, and then after that, we played gigs.
TJG: On your upcoming release, I know Dr. Jackle’s a standard—are the other tunes originals?
MK: Yeah, everything except for Dr. Jackle is original. Over the years, we went from playing standards to arranging standards to suit our group. And from there we expanded into writing our own music. Each of us has an original style of writing, so we brought together tunes from everybody where we felt like it matched what we were doing before with our arrangements.
TJG: I was a bit struck hearing your music, after hearing your last band at the Gallery, Declan. I thought More Better was going to be a fusion/electronic group, but when I listened I got senses of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and some Stan Getz trio when it was just sax and rhythm section. I also noticed there’s no piano or guitar. How does not having a chord instrument affect everyone's playing?
MK: In any given context, when you remove someone that you're used to hearing and responding to, your playing is going to change. For me personally, I'm now drawing upon all of my harmonic sensibility and foundation off of Samantha. I'm not taking any anything from anywhere else. That gives me a lot more freedom to listen to her and then elaborate. It also puts more pressure on me to actually outline harmony.
We wanted to build our ensemble’s sound off of chordless groups that have existed in the past, especially when we started playing our own tunes. Ornette Coleman’s chord-less quartet and Don Cherry, who’s such an amazing trumpet player, composer, and bandleader were both big influences on the way I play trumpet in a cordless situation.
TJG: Was playing without a chordal instrument a challenge that everyone wanted to take on as an exercise? Or was it the nature of the first gig that prevented a guitar player or piano player?
DSM: I guess it wasn't the nature of the gig, right? Because there was a piano at Chez Moi. We just decided not to have one.
MK: I think we realized pretty early on that we had created something that was unique to us as musical experience. We have added people in the past. Most recently, I added voice to one piece, and we had a singer sing, Ariel Vera, which was great. That said, adding those pieces did change the dynamic of the group a little bit.
DSM: I feel like also because there's no chords, it makes the band feel like one cohesive unit, rather than a sax or trumpet playing a solo over rhythm section. It feels more like we're all playing together. For example, while Miles is playing a solo, it might be my job to maybe play some backgrounds or give some undertones—I really have to be listening for when he's doing since there usually is no solo section.
TJG: The word that comes to mind for me is orchestral.
SR: Yes, I felt that when we were playing with Ariel, who I really enjoyed working with a lot. Our arrangement with her almost felt like it had an orchestra and accompanist kind of energy, which I really like. Features are really fun. But I do agree that it becomes obvious that because of how we've developed our sound, when we add other people, it’s a different sound for the band. I also wanted to mention another band that’s been very influential: Hush Point, John McNeil's group.
TJG: Samantha, I found your bass playing to be extremely clear on the album. I imagine that has to do with the chord-less element as well?
SR: Yes, also Theo Rogers and Joe Pulido on sound!
TJG: Can you comment on how your playing differs in this type of setting? I think it was the second where I heard a lot of synchronicity between you and Alex. It does seem that without a chord instrument present, there's a cleanness that needs to be presented.
SR: Playing in the chord-less group really opened things up for me, both harmonically and rhythmically. I remember that feeling from our very first gig. It was like a wave of euphoria, understanding how much power I have in this group. It felt really good in the moment.
Later, I listened back and realized that I was taking lots of liberties on my instrument, which generally is a good thing. It suited the role of my instrument in the setting. But it also sounded like I was fighting with Alex at times. Really, I was forcing Alex into the role of playing with a strong downbeat, like Scott LaFaro or a Bill Evans trio kind of sound.
So I had to figure that out on in my own time. Cecil McBee, my bass teacher, really helped me work through that. I had to figure out where I wanted to be in relation to the coordinate—if I wanted to be on top of the coordinate, pushing the beat, or behind it a little bit—more relaxed. These are all options that are worth exploring. Once you spend time with each of those possibilities, then you begin to find your own way of doing it with just a stronger, more personal intent. Yeah, so thanks, Alex.
MK: Being in this band forced me to focus on sort of a cleanliness of presentation. And because of the intense amount of listening that playing in this group takes, you’re pushed towards not playing as much. I love playing with Alex because he's so clean in what he's what he's doing and setting up for the future. If I'm really listening and paying attention to his playing, his clarity, we can lock in, and that's when you get: amazing improvisational moments. Because of the cleanliness of the ideas being presented, everyone’s able to pick up on everything being played. This allows for a kind of open array of ideas to choose from as people are throwing things out, and from there they either get picked up or they get dissipated. There's free movement of energy through a clean channel.
AY: When Samantha, Declan, and I were sophomores, and Samantha had just jumped onto the NEC wagon, we got a slot to play Wally's Cafe in Boston. I found playing there to be such a perfect opportunity. Playing standards and more modern, experimental Ornette Coleman-type of work in a chord-less setting is a perfect challenge, and it was just so fun when things locked in.
TJG: I wanted to ask next about the sound and the recording of the record itself. It didn't sound like you guys were trying to win any loudness wars. It sounded like a classic record, albeit with modern lines. Was that the intent?
DSM: The recording of the album actually came about really suddenly. My friend Joe Pulido, along with Theo Rogers, both our friends who are audio engineers and musicians—both guitarists actually—they wanted to work on the record. Joe was literally hounding me. He’s a metal guitarist, so he usually records crazy metal and more hardcore music—he’s totally in that world.
So he was like, “I want to record this jazz record. I want to record you guys.” And so one day in the middle of July, we put a date on the calendar. We ended up going to a house I have upstate, about two and a half hours upstate of Manhattan. The house is like a post and beam cabin from 70s or so—I’m not actually sure when it was built. We did the session over a long weekend and recorded in the house with the windows open, so birds chirping and sounds of summer are part of record. This was all done completely live. We knew that we wanted to have a very honest, live recording of the room, the scenario, and the music.
MK: My concept for the album was to take what we did every week at Wally's and just make it like an album experience. We recorded it almost the way that we would have set up on stage, with very minimal isolation. We wanted it to sound raw like a live performance.
DSM: We spoke a lot with Joe and Theo about what records we wanted to it to sound like. As you said, the idea was that this would sound like a classic record, but with some differences. There's some distortion and some other effects that we got with mic placement and using tape. Also, every instrument had multiple mics on it—a really good mic and a really shitty mic. So Miles and I both had like a giant, expensive mic and a tiny trash mic. The trash mic would pick up some crazy shit and then the good mic would pick it up so we could sort of bleed that in and feed that in wherever we wanted. And that's what you're hearing sometimes when there's like a ton of distortion.
TJG: I listened to your clean version and listened to the distorted (single) version of Dr. Jackle a few times before speaking to you, and what a difference a little bit of editing can make. I don't want to say one is objectively better than the other, but there's certainly more punch to the distorted version. How do you feel about integrating electronic music into a more classic sound? Are electronics now inextricably linked to all music?
MK: That was kind of our vibe. We recorded everything with distortion, but we weren't going to put it on every tune. I think our distorted version of Dr. Jackle lives somewhere in between being ironic and not ironic. We just made it crunchy—super crunchy. That brought it to a new place, and you can listen to it almost not as a classic jazz track—it's transcended that. It's become a different listening experience. And I think that's where music is going anyway. Genre has become so irrelevant that every time you listen to something new it's like a blank slate. And so in acoustic music, once you've gotten to the point where you've exhausted every acoustical like tool that you have to create a sound, you turn to electronic.
SR: It's like with anything in music: you have to try stuff on. You can't try something straight in the middle; you have to try it on either side. So like, for this that would mean without any kind of effects, and then with a ton of effects. I think we may be bound to do stuff in our ensemble that might push the direction of our music too far on either side, and we'll have to reflect on it later. It's always a learning process for us.
More Better plays The Jazz Gallery on Thursday, July 14, 2022. The group features Declan Sheehy-Moss on tenor saxophone, Miles Keingstein on trumpet, Samantha Reiss on bass, and Alex Yoo on drums. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 P.M. E.D.T. $15 general admission ($10 for members, FREE for SUMMERPASS holders), $25 reserved cabaret seating ($20 for members, $10 for SUMMERPASS holders). Purchase tickets here.