Play: John Hollenbeck Speaks

Clockwise from top left: John Hollenbeck, Aurora Nealand, Anna Webber, Chiquita Magic. Photos courtesy of the artists.

by Henry Mermer

Finishing off their first ever tour, John Hollenbeck’s new group GEORGE will be performing on The Jazz Gallery stage this Friday, April 1. The band—featuring Anna Webber, Aurora Nealand, and Chiquita Magic—will play music from their upcoming release Letters to George, a collection of music developed throughout the course of the pandemic. Recently, we caught up with John to discuss the process of putting together this group and its relation to his broader musical practice.

The Jazz Gallery: I hear something that is so playful in your music—in your drumming, your composing, even in your choice to feature popular music repertoire in your large ensemble. Is this a priority of yours when it comes to music-making?

John Hollenbeck: The ability to have these moments of play—where you can kind of let go for a while, just like when you were a child, and just play—[is] a beautiful thing to be able to do, and also, to watch others do. It’s not something I’m conscious about, but I would say that the concept of play is really important, even when you have to do certain things, when you’re composing and all that, that maybe go in the category of “work,” [or] for some people, into the category of “extremely not-fun things to do.” Even when there’s that possibility, for me, music is still fun. Just like a really great way to explore life. It’s just the basic idea that that word… that’s the word we use. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, that children play and that musicians play. So, it’s all the same. When I’m playing with a group, I can’t really tell the others what to do, but the idea would be that the music is fun to play and fun to listen to. I think play and fun also often go together.

Exploration, improvisation, just this constantly renewing the idea of “what if? It could be this, but what if it’s something else?” When you first started talking of this, that's what I thought of. The idea of not just saying “this is what music is; this is what a piece is; this is what a form is,”[but] instead of that, always being willing to explore what else it could be.

TJG: How do you negotiate this sense of “play” while also often performing in contexts that require you to precisely execute such difficult music?

JH: I think that can be fun too.  I was recently having this talk with a composer; his talk was about work—like, composition as work—and what I was thinking when he was talking was that Keith Jarrett, [on] one of his first tours, he gave it a name, and it was “Serious Beer Drinking.” So, something can be challenging and take a lot of concentration and can still be fun. There still can be this idea of fun involved, and it doesn’t have to be all serious because you have to concentrate and you have to do something in a certain precise way.

TJG: Does this sense of play also find its way into your composition process?

JH: Exactly. The compositional process for me is very exploratory, very experimental. I try to be sensitive to like “oh, I think I’ve done something like that before.” I’m not going to do that, even if I thought it was cool. I’m going to let that go and try to be on the road less travelled all the time. I’m not so excited about music when I know what’s going to happen ahead of time. Then, you know, maybe I’m not listening 100%. But when I don’t know what’s going to happen, or even when I don’t know what’s happening or what I am listening to, I’m very excited and interested in that.

TJG: I’d love to hear about how this may relate to your practice as a drummer and percussionist. Or, is your composition practice separate from that of your drumming?

JH: No, I don’t think they can be separate. I mean, they’re both in my head. If I’m practicing a certain rhythm and then I go walk down the street, that’s the rhythm that’s going to be in my head. So, if I have to write a tune that night, there’s a good chance that’s the rhythm that’s going to come in, so you know, if I’m using what’s in my head—[and] I’m trying not to use what’s in my head most of the time—I would say they feed each other in a nice way.

When you’re composing, it can seem very much in your head and not visceral, and then you go to the drums and that’s very tactile, engaging physically and all that. I wrote a drum solo about a year ago, and I did it away from the drum set. Many months later, when I got to a drum set to play it, then I was like “oh, this is terrible, I have to re-do it.” I just re-did it, and I think it's much better now that I actually got to the drum set and could really feel those rhythms and those phrases in my body and see what it’s like to actually play them.

TJG: You mentioned usually trying not to write or use what’s in your head. Can you tell me more about that?

JH: I think if you’re writing what’s in your head, you’re kind-of writing from memory. So, you’re often writing something you’ve played or heard or wrote [already]. In order to be in a place where I don’t know what’s going on and I haven’t heard it before, I need to not use my ear, [but] just use my intuition or some other form of logic—some other way to get to the music. Once I get to a certain spot where I’m like “that’s pretty interesting, I don’t think I’ve heard that before,” then I could start using my ear again, still being sensitive that you can think you’re in a new place and then just go right back to where you always are. And a lot of that is because of process, so that’s the other part—I try to write each piece with a different process. I start different, I work on it differently in the middle, [and] at the end I use different tools. I try to think of each [piece] differently, especially if I’m writing a couple of pieces at the same time; they can start to seep into one another if I’m not careful with the process of each one.

TJG: Who were the drummers and musicians that inspired your distinctive timbral exploration and approach to the drum set?

JH: I played a lot of percussion growing up, so there’s that whole world. I think I even owned a lot of percussion, because my dad was an antique dealer [and] he would go to flea markets and buy things that were not expensive, so I had a lot of instruments. It was a big moment for me when I took little instruments and incorporated them into the drum set, in other words, what I would call “prepared drum set.” Immediately, you can think of John Cage or people that were preparing the piano. In the percussion world, Steve Schick is someone that I’ve always loved. On the drum set, I feel like the start would have been Joey Baron, and then Tony Oxley. And as far as people in my own generation, I would say Jim Black, Gerry Hemingway… that covers a lot right there.

Also, I did a lot of duo playing with Theo Bleckmann, and we had a love for using “toys.” Playing with him helped me figure out how you can use an instrument like that or things that are not actually “instruments.” It helped to have somebody who thought in the same way that I did, but didn’t play the same instrument.

TJG: This is reminding me of a solo that you took—mostly using toys, if I remember correctly—during Anna Webber’s recent concert at Roulette! Speaking of which, can you tell me about Anna’s contribution to your group that will be performing at The Jazz Gallery?

JH: I remember meeting Anna when she was a student at Manhattan School of Music, and then she came to Berlin and studied with me there. We’ve always been in touch; at some point she re-copied all of my big band music, so we were in touch a lot on that front. And then she asked me to play in her trio with Matt Mitchell, so that was a different way to interact with her—now playing her music—which I enjoy a lot. She’s also played in my large ensemble. So when I was putting this group [GEORGE] together, I would say she was the first person that I thought of, because she’s completely open, [and] she can pretty much play anything. I think we’re thinking about music in a similar way, and at this point we’ve played a lot together, so bringing that relationship into a group is good because there’s already a strong thing going on.

What happened with GEORGE is that I put this together over the pandemic. I had met Aurora [Nealand] once and maybe played with her once and I knew who she was, and Chiquita [Magic] I think I had only had an email relationship with her and maybe met her once when she was in Montreal. Anna also knew Chiquita a little bit from her time in Montreal, and I think Anna met Aurora on that gig you were mentioning. Aurora and Chiquita met at the recording session that we had in January. I put this group together with three people that I really wanted to play with, who mostly didn’t really know each other. I think it’s three really interesting musicians, and from the recording, which we’re mixing right now, I can tell that it’s going to be a great group. It’s really fun to play with, and it’s just the very beginning of what we can do. There are a lot of possibilities.

TJG: What do the compositions for this group look like? I know that you recorded one piece remotely during the pandemic.

JH: I decided that with this group, I really wanted to play without [written] music. That ends up not being so important in the end, so long as the vibe is there, but the idea when I was writing was that [the compositions] could be taught without needing any notation, which greatly effects all different parts of the pieces. I know some people in the band don’t really even know what time signature [each piece] is written in. They have their own relationship to the music. So, that’s kinda cool. I love that. 

I had tried this once with the Claudia Quintet for one of our records, and when I play with Meredith Monk it’s usually without [written] music, so I had some experience with it. Of course, with some types of music, it’s not really a big deal because the actual music is pretty simple to learn and to remember. But when you see bands playing music that’s not that easy to remember and to play [without written music], that’s pretty amazing to me. It’s just so interesting when you’re not looking at the music. Where does the music reside? How do you get it back when you have to play it again?

TJG: How does not reading any notated music effect the outcome of the music itself?

JH: Well, I think you can just get out of yourself a lot easier, and you can physically look at other people since you’re not looking at the music, and you can get a lot from just looking at the band, from what they’re saying with their body. I think as an audience member it’s a big difference also. It feels different when you just see a bunch of musicians and they’re just buried in the music. There are a lot of other possibilities for communication and interaction, both physical and visual. It just seems to make sense to me, to try to do that as much as possible. 

The music becomes less of a static thing, because you may not remember it or you don’t really remember how it was written, and so you can do other things with it. In some cases, you can have different tempos going on at the same time, something that would be very awkward to write out. But without music, it’s much easier. So, there are some pretty complex things that you can do easier without writing it out.

TJG: It requires the group to operate according to some kind of “band” model, in other words, to communicate in some way that traditional notation doesn’t necessarily demand.

JH: Yeah. The people playing the part become a little bit more important because everyone’s not looking at music, so you can’t even say “that wasn’t really right, it’s this.” There’s nothing to point towards. It is what it is, you know. You just play it as well as you are feeling it in that moment. We haven’t played any gigs yet, but what I’m anticipating are a lot of “mistakes” that will lead to interesting variations from the official versions of the pieces. We’ve recorded it already, so in effect we’ve played them. So, they don’t really ever have to do that anymore, they can always kind of, as much as possible, go into certain other places. Some of the music is more solidly written, so there are not going to be huge variations to certain pieces, but other pieces I think can go in other directions once we play it a little bit and see what happens live.

GEORGE plays The Jazz Gallery on Friday, April 1, 2022. The group features John Hollenbeck on drums, Anna Webber on tenor saxophone & flute, Aurora Nealand on soprano saxophone & vocals, and Chiquita Magic on keyboards. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 P.M. E.D.T. $25 general admission ($10 for members), $35 reserved table seating ($20 for members), $20 for livestream access ($5 for members) for each set. Purchase tickets here.