Home » Jazz Articles » Interview » Michael Leonhart: Surfing on an Orchestral Wave
Michael Leonhart: Surfing on an Orchestral Wave
Writing suites is a very structured way of having a containment to which I can then be rebellious. It allows me a framework within which to paint
Michael Leonhart
trumpetb.1974
Take Michael Leonhart, an artist blessed by nature with a superior talent that was nurtured by a musical family. His nature, however, included not only an artistic talent but also the instinct to nurture it further, through meaningful, challenging and rewarding collaborations. It also included the drive to work hard and the generosity of those that choose to lead large ensembles, or to produce or arrange other people's music. That generosity, in turn, was nurtured by the commitment and respect of the musicians he has worked with.
His Orchestra has the ability to shred but elects to build. Going the distance because that is what nature meant it to do. As such, its course mirrors that of the painted lady, a butterfly that follows an annual migration path that spans over six generations and 9,000 miles from Mexico to the Arctic circle and down to Africa. His Orchestra moves forward unencumbered by stylistic confines, like a painted lady flying oblivious of the boundaries it crosses on its path. In the process, Michael Leonhart goes through a metamorphosis of his own, a musician turned sound-painter who then embraces his destiny as story-teller.
All of this is manifest in the grooves of The Painted Lady Suite, which sounds like a love letter to a yesteryear when elegance trumped ostentation, subtlety was more important than force, and the human factor mattered more than technology. Seen from this vantage point The Painted Lady Suite is counter-culture at its purest; a reaction and a challenge to an age prone to gimmicks and mired with a short attention span.
We met Michael Leonhart to talk about his new album, working with
Nels Cline
guitar, electricb.1956
Steely Dan
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1972
To listen to music from The Painted Lady Suite, as well as to excerpts of this interview, play the archived podcast of Mondo Jazz [starting at 36:14].
All About Jazz: Let's start from the beginning. What are your memories of growing up in a musical family like yours?
Michael Leonhart: I remember very clearly waking up early in the morning and—through the walls—hearing the low frequency of my father [
Jay Leonhart
bassb.1940
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
Oscar Peterson
piano1925 - 2007
AAJ: How did you get into playing the trumpet?
ML: I wasn't an extrovert in terms of singing and finding the right instrument was far from easy. One day my mom, could not find a babysitter, so she had to take me with her to my sister's piano teacher. I instantly liked the sound of the piano. So I sat down at the piano but teacher immediately said, "no, no, no, no, no, you have to use your fingers like this...." In my mind I went "Screw this. I don't want to be told what to do. Forget piano!" About a year later, when I was nine or nine and a half, I tried the violin and I was able to create a good sound. The teacher said that I had a natural talent, but I didn't want to pursue it because I didn't like having to stand while playing. And then I got interested in playing drums. There was a great drummer in our building, Bobby Shanken. Since he couldn't have a drum set in the apartment building, we had a snare pad and told me that if I liked it I could use it and learn how to do paradiddles and all these different patterns... but I wanted to play a real drum kit. I wanted to be making music, not just playing on a soft pad. Once again, my parents accepted my decision.
I don't know why, but at some point I said "I'd like to play a horn. A saxophone would be excellent but is going to be too loud. I'll play trumpet!" The logic behind that still escapes me... My mother used to listen to Miles Davis all the time. So maybe my reasoning was based on hearing Miles playing with a mute, and Miles was not particularly loud on those albums with
Gil Evans
composer / conductor1912 - 1988
I'm realizing this as we speak, but perhaps I thought that way because that was around 1984, when the saxophone was all over pop music playing extremely loud. So in my mind the saxophone was very loud and trumpet was like Miles. Once again my parents were supportive. They said "If you still want to play trumpet in two days, we'll get you one. Sleep on it..." Two days later I said "I still want to play trumpet."
My dad took me down to Manny's Music on 48th street. He left the car double parked outside the store. He knew everybody there. He didn't pick the most expensive trumpet. He chose a nice functioning trumpet. We tried it out and we bought it, and I still have it. We got in the car and he said "Okay, do you want to play it? I said, yeah, I want to play it. While driving back home when we had to stop at red lights, he would say, okay, now you can play. And I would go and I would play and immediately I could make a good sound on it, which happens for some people, but it was not a given. But what's interesting is that I could actually play soon thereafter. I had a pretty good range for just picking up the horn and immediately in school I got all the solos which kind of pissed off some of my fellow students.
AAJ: How were your first months playing the trumpet?
ML: As I mentioned, I could play the trumpet right off. But then six months into a year I kind of plateaued. 30 years later I can understand that much better. Even though I had a natural ability to make a sound, developing endurance and playing with a focused and proper technique were a completely different thing. Some days I could hit a high C and the next two days I couldn't. Then three days later I could hit a high D etc. There was a lot of inconsistency. Also, at the time, very large trumpet mouthpieces were in vogue, which means you have to work harder to play consistently, especially if you are a 10 and a half years old kid. So I started taking lessons.
What matters is that I wanted to be playing all day long at home. After 10 minutes of trumpet, my lips would be shaking. I just couldn't continue. It's like trying to do 100 pushups. If your body won't do it, there's nothing you can do about it. So I would go over to the piano and I would study scores and I would put on albums and I would sit and play along. I would do 10 minutes on a trumpet, 40 minutes on piano, seven minutes on trumpet, 20 minutes on piano. I would go back to the trumpet and try and do another 10, but I couldn't, so I would do an hour and a half on piano and try and figure out all these different chords I heard from
Gil Evans
composer / conductor1912 - 1988
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Duke Ellington
piano1899 - 1974
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
AAJ: What was that drew you towards jazz in particular?
ML: Jazz and the American songbook were around the house the most. I grew up in a family of jazz musicians. Regardless of whether my mother was professional or not, jazz is the language that she loved.
Ella Fitzgerald
vocals1917 - 1996
Sarah Vaughan
vocals1924 - 1990
Peggy Lee
vocals1920 - 2002
Dinah Washington
vocals1924 - 1963
Billie Holiday
vocals1915 - 1959
Joe Williams
vocals1918 - 1999
Thad Jones
trumpet1923 - 1986
Mel Lewis
drums1929 - 1990
Steely Dan
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1972
James Brown
vocals1933 - 2006
I also grew up in New York where you couldn't walk down the street without hearing nine kinds of different music. So it was all there and I never saw the difference between all those genres, especially taking into account how Stravinsky kept breaking the rules all the time, and the sam did Ellington,
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
Billy Strayhorn
piano1915 - 1967
Gil Evans
composer / conductor1912 - 1988
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
Albert Ayler
saxophone, tenor1936 - 1970
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
Jaki Byard
piano1922 - 1999
AAJ: This integration of different elements, different instruments, was part of an organic continuum. So it is no surprise that you have spent a considerable amount of time working in other genres. Coming from a jazz perspective what do you bring to those projects and what do you bring back to jazz after having worked on them?
ML: There's no cookie cutter answer. Depends on what artist you are working with. I agree with
Björk
vocalsTo be honest, however, I never think of how those experiences influence me as a jazz musician, because I've had a complicated relationship with jazz. I've often felt that maybe I don't fit in with "what a true jazz musician is supposed to be." I've operated beyond that realm for a long time. But I adore jazz music. Its spirit is the same as rock to me. They both share a strong fearlessness.
So to answer your question, I don't think within that framework of "how did doing x influenced me as a jazz musician." I just never thought about it in those terms. But if I look back at certain projects, I could tell you how certain artists have influenced me.
A clear example is Sunken Condos, the
Donald Fagen
piano and vocalsb.1948
AAJ: How did this vision evolve? How did it develop from an idea to a reality?
ML: I consider myself fortunate enough to have had many requests to arrange or play, orchestrate or produce. It keeps me busy, sometimes at the cost of not making time for my own stuff. This is a conscious choice and I can't blame anyone else. I also realize that sometimes, when faced with the internal struggles that making a project as a leader bring, it's easier to say "I'm going to produce this person's album or write songs for that other person, I'll do that film score...."
The last solo album I released was The Seahorse and the Storyteller in 2010. It was an afrobeat funk, rather than jazz, album. And after that we did a bunch of shows and then I was doing more producing and arranging and orchestrating... Around 2012, I was finishing Donald Fagen's Sunken Condos. While I was on the road with some group,
Nels Cline
guitar, electricb.1956
He showed me this great list of material. "The Search for Cat" by Henry Mancini was on his list. I said "What the hell is that?" He said "It's a cue." I said "I know what it is, but you're one of only three people I've ever met who knows that composition!" "The Search for Cat" is this gorgeous cue from the very end of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" that Henry Mancini wrote for when Audrey Hepburn is getting out of the cab in the rain. She is looking for the cat and she's fighting with George Peppard... It's not on any soundtracks. It was released only recently on Cherry Red Records, but it wasn't on the original LP or on the first CD releases of it. You had to search it out! I remember rewinding the movie on our VHS and play it over and over again, with my sister, because it was just so incredible! Mancini composed it adapting the melody of "Moon River." For a large part it is in an odd meter, it's got all this string counterpoint and it's kind of planing with these minor chords. It's very sophisticated. It almost sounds like something that Q-Tip would have sampled and manipulated for a Tribe Called Quest.
So here is Nels talking about this obscure cue that he wanted to do for orchestra to me. A light bulb went off for both of us and we realized that we were on the same page. And he asked again and I said "I'd love to do it. I got to transcribe that cue though. It doesn't really exist. I know Henry Mancini's daughters and his widow. I could try to chase down the manuscript if there still was one. But it would be in a vault somewhere in California. So it has to be transcribed and then we'll go from there." We started getting deeper into six or seven compositions, but seven or eight pieces became 10 or 11. And eventually I did the whole album... It was a lot of work. It was a joy working with Nels. Lin-Manuel Miranda said that he felt like a mosquito that had struck a vein for blood when he was writing the musical "Hamilton." And I was feeling the same. I was loving it. As I was working my way through all those songs it reminded me of sitting at the piano when I was younger, as I mentioned before. Ideas kept flowing...
Then we went into the studio and I conducted the orchestra. Afterwards, lots of musicians would come out to me and say "You know, it has been such a pleasure having you conducting us. When are you going to do more?" It's a lot of work to sit down and write that much material, whether composing or arranging. And then it's a lot of work to get the musicians together. I also knew that getting 50 musicians together wasn't going exactly to make money. But something had been awakened in me and at that point it didn't matter. This was something I had to do. And so after we finished recording Lovers with Nels and we knew that the album was going to come out, even though we didn't know exactly when, tons of ideas for arrangements started coming out. I thought of a "Wu-Tang Suite" inspired by the work I'd done with the Wu-Tang Clan & El Michels Affair. I thought about arrangements of music by
Milton Nascimento
guitar and vocalsb.1942
Serge Gainsbourg
b.1928
Frank Zappa
guitar, electric1940 - 1993
AAJ: How does your "faucet" work? What draws you towards certain compositions, especially if they were written by other composers, and makes you think they'll work for the Orchestra?
ML: On a rare occasion I'll listen to a song and know immediately that it'll work. I can hear it. I can envision how good it's going to be live. But for the most part it's a two or three step process. I have a list of songs that I keep in a note book. I may come up with a new composition to add to that list while I am walking the dog or I am out in the nature. Then I will go through those compositions in my head. I might conclude they might not work because they would fall flat or are too long. When I think the composition is going to work it's then a matter of sitting down for about a day or so and orchestrating it. When I stared working on "Big Bottom" from "Spinal Tap" I sensed that it would be cool to play it but it took a day or two of walking around and asking myself "How do I not make this cheesy?." The same happened with a Prince song we did , "Computer Blue," which was fun and ended up as a mash-up of
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
I can hear a lot of things in my head. Being very comfortable with studio work I have a better sense for recording my music. As far as live performances are concerned, when I want to let the musicians breathe life into my music, I may have to guess more. In the end it's a matter of trial and error, as it should be. But that also depends on the material. For instance, my arrangement of "Miracle of the Fishes" by Milton Nascimento did not leave the band much space to adapt things, because it had taken me a while to "reverse engineer" it and transcribe it. It contains specific sections from which I didn't want to edit anything out. The
Fela Kuti
saxophone1938 - 1997
James Brown
vocals1933 - 2006
Antibalas
b.1998
Tony Allen
drums1938 - 2020
AAJ: While you were developing this repertoire, how did you build the Orchestra, how did you select its members?
ML: There were a couple of musicians who I just knew had to be involved.
Dan Freedman
pianob.1965
Joe Martin
bassb.1970
Donny McCaslin
saxophone, tenorb.1966
Philip Dizack
trumpet
Jordan McLean
trumpetRay Mason
tromboneJason W. Marshall
saxophone, baritoneb.1983
Sam Sadigursky
clarinetb.1979
I knew that I didn't want to have a piano because that takes up a lot of space. I decided to have an accordion instead. You can do amazing things with the accordion. It can play single notes with horns, it adds different textures, it can be a solo instrument... A couple people have done it,
Will Holshouser
accordion
Nathan Koci
accordionIn the end, these were all friends that I loved working with. My criterion was that I wanted people that wouldn't show up late, wouldn't cancel. I wanted to work with people that really got off on the music and are able to be "in the moment" with an almost child-like enjoyment, rather than focusing on how much the gig pays. In the end I've managed to put together an amazing crew of people.
AAJ: What are the differences between the work you have done with Nels Cline on Lovers and the experience you have had so far with your Orchestra?
ML: The major difference is that with my Orchestra I knew that it would be very important to have enough arrangements in the book that if—there was a show a week from tonight and we had no time to rehearse—we would be able to make it work. When I saw The Miingus Band play at the Time Cafe, I could see that Mingus was a genius composer but that he also had enough things in the book that he could just play by feel and with his eyes closed. And if you can do that, you can always put on a great show as long as you have great players. If you're a prisoner to things that need to be rehearsed because they are four or five pages long you're stuck if you don't have many rehearsals. So, initially, my mantra was to have arrangements that were only one or two pages long so that you could play them with music stands and no rehearsals.
There are exceptions, of course. At one point I was going through my list and "Miracle of the Fishes" by Milton Nascimento popped up and broke all the rules because that chart needs to be well rehearsed. If you do it in one rehearsal, it doesn't work. It cannot be just good, it has to be great. If you sense the rhythm section, counting the five measures really takes you out of the dream. So it has to be fluid but the payoff is so incredible that I love having it in the book. Another exception was the "Psycho Suite" which we played soon after the 2016 presidential elections. It was based on Bernard Herman's soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." I was amazed that the orchestra didn't need that long to rehearse it. But we certainly needed three hours because you have to really understand how the harmonies come out and what your role is in the chord. It's quite unforgiving.
Another difference with the work I did for Lovers is that while we were rehearsing and then performing for our first shows with my Orchestra at Rockwood Music Hall, I thought that it would be really cool to have no microphones. So other than the bass amp and a microphone for the flute all other players had no microphones. We had trumpets and trombones on the venue's balcony, which is like having wide stereo. The first advantage is that you don't have to wait for sound check. In addition, you're only hearing the musicians in the room and they are "mixing themselves." Of course, if the venue requires it or if you add vocalists, we can introduce a sound system and work with it. But if it's not necessary I like to work acoustically and have the musicians balance themselves.
AAJ: Being both composer, arranger and conductor of the Orchestra how do you manage the tension between trying to stay close to the ideas on your charts and the desire to give sufficient room to the members of the Orchestra?
ML: There is not much of a tension, actually. First of all, it's just me versus 15 or 17 of them, so if there was a battle I would not be the one winning it. More importatly, I consider them like family. I face them in the same way as the audience does. There's an intimacy there as I'm looking at these people that I really care about. I just want to let them speak. It's almost like a play date with my son, Milo, and his friends. I may be in charge of it, I will try to help them stay safe and get to the finishing line, but there's no way I'm going to control all of them. So it's as an exercise, it's going to be what's going to be. There are going to be mistakes. It's not about trying to have it "movie perfect." It's about trying to corral these elements together in a way that takes it to another level. There are times when at the end of a 75 minutes set it's hard to imagine that so much time has gone by. It is like being in an altered state, just like surfing on a wave.
On top of that, these are people that I really respect and trust. Things don't always happen exactly the way I want but they are just as good because their musicianship is so strong. When something starts going in the wrong direction, someone feels it, possibly someone in the rhythm section, and they come in and rescue it. These are all musicians that either come from jazz or some sort of improvisatory music and their instincts are great. We've developed this trust and playfulness that affords us with the safety to experiment. Sometimes I can shout something to them like a football coach or a quarterback and say, "okay, now bang, boom." And they bring it back up...
AAJ: Besides writing and conducting you're also sometimes taking a trumpet solo. In your arrangements when do you give a solo spot to yourself and how is it to have to quickly shift gears from conducting to soloing?
ML: I think that for the first two concerts at Rockwood Music Hall, in September 2016, I didn't really play a lot of trumpet. That was because I was aware of the fact that I have a tendency to add too much to the pot, and get a bit too intense. With the Orchestra I wanted to go slow and try and have something less manic. That came out of a realization I had had working with Nels on Lovers. It became clear that by conducting I could get all the boxes checked in terms of what I love and it's just me up there waving my arms, so I could try and be a little more restrained in terms of how much I'm trying.
After those shows the band felt so good that I really wanted to play something over it. There's a long heritage—
Dizzy Gillespie
trumpet1917 - 1993
Harry James
trumpet1916 - 1983
Louis Prima
trumpet and vocals1910 - 1978
AAJ: Let's talk about your new album The Painted Lady Suite. Why did you choose to use the form of a suite?
ML: I have always loved Ellington's suites. It's a brilliant and elegant way to present a body of music. Writing suites is a very structured way of having a containment to which I can then be rebellious. It allows me a framework within which to paint. The question was to determine what would be within the suite. Would it be original music? Would it be arrangements of other people's compositions?
One of the things I've done in between all the projects I've been involved with has been film scoring, which I love. It involves a different way of thinking, but it still occupies the same part of my brain, especially when you get into orchestrating and using different sonic solutions, which are hard to use in pop music. If you're working with a great story and with a wonderful director, you can try some incredible things. Think about
Ennio Morricone
composer / conductor1928 - 2020
Nino Rota
composer / conductor1911 - 1979
Quincy Jones
arranger1933 - 2024
So over time I wrote a number of suites, like the "Wu-Tang Suite," which I mentioned earlier, and the "Chess Suite," which was inspired by both my son learning chess and the music on Chess Records, whose releases are a treasure trove of material by people like
Muddy Waters
guitar1915 - 1983
Howlin' Wolf
vocals1910 - 1976
I ended up learning a lot about these butterflies and a lot of little fascinating things. The painted lady butterflies are the longest migrating creatures butterflies on the planet, they go much further than the monarch butterfly, for instance. Scientists could not understand how they could travel along those patterns and why they could not see them until they realized the butterflies were flying so high... And I thought they also lent themselves to a symbolic and political metaphor, considering what was going on and is going on in the country about migration and immigration.
I chose to break the suite into two parts. The first four parts are inspired by the North American path, which the painted lady butterflies start off in Mexico and takes them across the United States into Canada; the following three parts of the suite are inspired by the other migration path which takes them from way up in the Arctic circle down South to Europe and northern Africa. Sights, sounds, textures and colors and all the things that those migration paths evoke just came pouring out as great sources of inspiration for the suite.
Tags
Interviews
Michael Leonhart
Ludovico Granvassu
Nels Cline
steely dan
Jay Leonhart
Miles Davis
John Coltrane
Bill Evans
oscar peterson
Bobby Shanken
Gil Evans
duke ellington
Charles Mingus
Ella Fitzgerald
Sarah Vaughan
Peggy Lee
Dinah Washington
Billie Holiday
Joe Williams
Thad Jones
Mel Lewis
James Brown
Thelonious Monk
Billy Strayhorn)
Eric Dolphy
Cecil Taylor
Albert Ayler
Sun Ra
Jaki Byard
Bjork
Donald Fagen
Milton Nascimento
Serge Gainsbourg
Frank Zappa
Fela Kuti
Antibalas
Tony Allen
Dan Freedman
David Byrne
Joe Martin
Donny McCaslin
Philip Dizack
Carter Yasutake
Jordan McLean
Ray Mason
Sarah Schonebeck
Jason Marshall
Sam Sadigursky
Will Holshouser
Nathan Koci
Dizzy Gillesepie
Harry James
Louis Prima
Ennio Morricone
Nino Rota
Quincy Jones
Muddy Waters
Howlin' Wolf
Comments
PREVIOUS / NEXT
Support All About Jazz
All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.
Buy Now
