Jesse Stewart
Below is my interview with Jesse Stewart, Percussionist, Composer, Community Activist, Artist, Writer, Instrument-builder.
The podcast and video with show notes are linked.
Leah Roseman:
Jesse Stewart is an award-winning percussionist, scholar, composer, artist, writer, instrument-maker, and community activist. In 2012, he founded We Are All Musicians, founded on his belief that music is a fundamental human right through which he helps create opportunities for people to make music, regardless of age, musical training, socioeconomic circumstance, and ability. During the conversation, he demonstrates how any object can be used to create interesting music. We also get to hear him improvise on a waterphone, as well as with me on my violin, with a unique instrument, which he explains. I do hope you'll find Jesse to be as inspiring and interesting as I do. I've included timestamps in the description for both the video and podcast format. The video is close captioned and the transcript will be published soon at the same link on my podcast website.
Hi, Jesse Stewart.
Jesse Stewart:
Hi, Leah. Nice to see you.
Leah Roseman:
Nice to see you again. I wanted to thank you because I did that little improvisation online workshop with you and Ellen Waterman, who was on season one of this podcast last year-
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, nice.
Leah Roseman:
... and it was really transformative. It really, just the simple ideas that just helped give us a sense of play. We were all classical musicians in this workshop. It was really amazing, and since then, I have continued an improvisation practice.
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, that's wonderful. Well, I certainly enjoyed our time together as well. That's wonderful to hear that you've continued. That's great.
Leah Roseman:
To introduce you to people that don't know you, I was thinking, you're a composer, multi-instrumentalist, community activist, visual artist. I'm sure I've missed a few things. Educator, author.
Jesse Stewart:
Well, I think you've covered the bases there, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah. It's true that I play multiple instruments, but for the most part it's mainly percussion. I started off on drum set, and I play a variety of percussion instruments, but that's really my home base, I would say.
Leah Roseman:
Would you say that all percussionists are multi-instrumentalists and not necessarily struck instruments, right?
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, I think that that's true. Part of me thinks that percussionists are all secretly like collectors because almost every percussionist I know has quite a number of different instruments in their basement, or in their workshop, or what have you, but yeah, I think that's true. Percussionists are often called upon to play a wide variety of instruments. Even something like the drum set, which I still sort of consider my home base, that's what I started out playing was drum set when I was young, even it is a combination of multiple instruments, of course, from different musical and cultural traditions.
You have the bass drum, the snare drum from the European marching band tradition, and you have Turkish cymbals. Originally, the tom-tom in a drum set was a Chinese tom-tom, so it's interesting that we have all these different percussion instruments from various traditions that were all brought together, and little more than 100 years ago or something, and people found a way to play them together. Really, the new things were a foot pedal that allowed people to play the bass drum with their foot. Then also, a foot-operated pair of cymbals, which eventually became the hi-hat cymbals. Anyways, yeah, percussionists, I think, often, you're right, they typically play multiple instruments, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
The waterphone, which I heard you play before, that's a bowed instrument primarily.
Jesse Stewart:
That's true, yeah. In fact, I have one here.
Leah Roseman:
Ooh.
Jesse Stewart:
If people want to see it, and I could even play it if you like. This is a waterphone. It consists of bronze rods that have been welded to this stainless steel, it's almost like two stainless steel trays. Then there's this central cylinder, which is hollow. It's typically played with water inside of it. I don't know if you can hear this, but can you hear the water sloshing around?
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah. Then this is a very odd coincidence, but the man who invented the instrument, his name was Richard Waters.
Leah Roseman:
I was going to mention that, yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah. Between the water inside the instrument and his name being Richard Waters, he called it the waterphone. He, in fact, made this one for me. He made four waterphones for me of different sizes. This is the biggest one. He called this the MegaBass waterphone, and it's probably my favorite. I find it the most expressive. You're right that it can be played in many different ways, but typically it's most often bowed, and so we can bow one of these bronze rods. Now I'm going to bow it again, and this time I'm going to tilt the instrument a little bit and you'll hear the water move across the bottom resonating plate, which shapes the sound in an interesting way. Here we go. Then often, you'll hear this in movie soundtracks.
Yeah, so you get the idea. Of course, I play it in all kinds of ways. Sometimes, I'll play it with my hands. I'll sometimes play it with mallets. Then sometimes, I'll use other kinds of mallets. Richard Waters actually made this for me. It's just a piece of bamboo that he carved down, so it's quite flexible. Then there's a rubber ball, a super ball in the end. If you drag that across the bottom resonating plate, or you could play there too. Get these whale-like sounds. Yeah, that's the waterphone.
Leah Roseman:
That brings to mind a few things. A couple of your projects, the one I really love, I think it's called Pulse when you filmed the dripping of the water on the drum head.
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've done that a few times. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah. I've done that with just a single drum. It was a drum that I had specially made out of clear acrylic, so the drum is transparent and the head is clear, the drum head is clear. Then I actually, what you probably couldn't tell, is that I actually used silicone to caulk the head so that water wouldn't seep inside the drum. Then I had a IV bag positioned above it and experimented with different drip rates. Then eventually, just opened the stop cock on the IV bag all the way so that the water just pooled on the head and then played it, and the water kind of danced and sprayed. I've done that with ... I think the video you've seen is just a snare drum.
I've done an installation along those lines where it was a full drum set, and on every drum, I had an IV bag positioned over and they were all dripping at different rates. It was set up at a Nuit Blanche event, and so they dripped all night. I'd worked out, in advance, the drip rate. Essentially, I wanted, in the morning, the bags to be very close to empty so that I'd have a pool of water. I think at 5:00 a.m., I did a performance on all these water-covered drums and got everybody wet. Yeah, but at any rate, yeah, I've used water quite a bit, as it turns out, in my work. I've also done some things with ice as well.
Leah Roseman:
I was going to bring that up as well, but I have to say, it's so evocative. I think I've seen two videos of you doing, yeah, what? The drip thing thing. At first, I was like, "What is he doing? How is he making this happen?" Then I think you can see it at a certain point or at the end, but it's very evocative. It's just amazingly powerful. It joins your interest in ... Well, you're a visual artist as well. Would you say that it's at that intersection?
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, very much so. Yeah, so I majored in both visual art and in music as an undergrad student. I found that the visual arts and sonic arts illuminated one another, for me, in interesting and productive ways. I also found that a lot of my teachers on the visual arts side were really incredibly supportive of some of the things that I was interested in musically. Actually, maybe more so than some of the teachers on the music side, who were less interested in, let's say, experimental music than they were classical music and other things. On the visual arts side, I had a number of teachers that were really supportive and engaged. That includes a sculptor named Reinhard Reitzenstein with whom I'm still friends. He introduced me to his partner, Gayle Young, who is an instrument inventor and builder, and is incredibly knowledgeable about experimental music, contemporary music. While I was still a student, I was very fortunate to meet both of them.
Actually, I think maybe the very first recording I ever made was with Gayle and with Reinhard, and also with Jacques Israelievitch, whom you may know of. He was the former concert master of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. We did some performances together as a quartet, and that was recorded and released. I think that was the first commercially released recording I made, actually. I was still a student at the time. At any rate, Reinhard was very supportive. Also, I studied with a photographer and performance artist named Suzy Lake, who was also tremendously supportive of my interest in music and very knowledgeable about contemporary music, experimental music. Yeah, so I found that there was a lot of support there, but certainly, I would say that that background, my dual background in music and composition, but then also in visual art.
In visual art, I studied sculpture, but also, I got increasingly interested in what many people describe as sound art, but also media-based art, installation art, and performance art, actually. I think a piece like the one that you're mentioning with the water, it's somewhere in-between music and performance art, I think. I've tried to make a career out of making work that straddles some of those disciplinary boundaries, I guess, or explores the spaces between them.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Back when you were a teenager and you were really into jazz, you built a vibraphone in order to play a tune by Chick Corea. Is that right?
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I did, actually. That was one of the first ... I guess, it wasn't the first but one of the first instruments that I built. That was because, at my high school, the music department, their vibraphone was broken. I really loved that, a duo record that Chick Corea and Gary Burton made called Crystal Silence. That tune, Crystal Silence, I thought was so beautiful. I thought, "Ah, I'd love to learn this on vibes," which I didn't know. I had never played piano or anything, so I thought, "How am I going to do this? I don't have access to a vibraphone"
Yeah, I ended up in my grandfather's wood shop. I made a vibraphone. Actually, I wish I still had it, actually, because I made a dampener pedal out of what was like a TV tray kind of thing. That was the pedal, and I hooked up springs to it, and so that I could dampen the bars. Anyways, it actually worked okay, so I used that, but making the frame out of wood wasn't the best decision because it didn't hold up very well in the long-run. At any rate, that was one of the ... It wasn't the first instrument I made, but it was more complicated than any other instrument that I had made to that point, and it was a useful experience even though, as I say, it didn't survive very long.
It allowed me to learn that tune and start thinking about pitch, and getting a little bit, a tiny bit of familiarity with mallet percussion, which has never been a major focus for me, but you start thinking melodically. That was useful at that time for me. Also, just realizing, "Oh, I can build a vibraphone," so that was encouraging as well. Certainly, during, as an undergraduate student and then beyond, I made lots of instruments out of all kinds of different things, so those experiences, early experiences with instrument building, yeah, it was time well spent, I think. I learned from those things.
Leah Roseman:
Your project Glacialis, which was the ice ... You had it in Ottawa. I think you were commissioned to do it for Winterlude.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, that's right.
Leah Roseman:
Then you brought it to Toronto?
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Difficult to transport.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah. That was a very funny thing how that came about that. It would have been, I guess, in 2009. A friend of mine named Rich Marsella, he's now the executive director of the Regent Park School of Music in Toronto. He does a lot in the area of community music and he's a real force for good in the world. At that time, Rich did a one-year contract for the NCC in Ottawa, and so he relocated to Ottawa for one year. He invited me to do a bunch of stuff on Canada Day that year. At that time, the National Capital ... NCC is the National Capital Commission in Ottawa, Canada's capital. Anyways, at that time, they programmed all of the festivities for Canada Day as well as Winterlude. Anyways, he got me to do some stuff on Canada Day.
I used a bunch of recycled materials to make an interactive ... I think I called it the Junk Funk Sound Cube, or something. It was all recycled materials that kids could play on, and that was a lot of fun. Anyways, at the end of the day, we sat down and I said, "Congratulations. I know this was a lot of work to pull this off." He said, "Yeah." I said, "Thanks." He said, "I got to start planning for Winterlude immediately." I just floated the idea, I said, "You know what would be kind of cool? Would be to have ice music at Winterlude." He said, "You know what? That sounds great. You're hired. You do it," so that was how that project ... I didn't even know if it was possible to make music with ice at that point. I later learned that there are other people who do that. I didn't know about their work yet.
There's a fellow, oh, he's in one of the Scandinavian countries. Terje Isungset, I think, is his name. I'm not sure. He may be Norwegian. I'm not sure about that. I didn't know. I had never heard his work. I didn't know about him, and so I thought, "I hope this works out okay," but that was how that came about. Anyway, so I started experimenting with things and developed some marimba-type instruments out of ice, but I made some other things. There's a type of drum called an udu drum that's typically made out of clay, and I made one. Well, I made a few out of ice and other things, and I wrote music for those things.
Then the way it went to Toronto was similarly bizarre. I was playing not in Toronto, but at a festival in London, Ontario. A festival which stopped a long time ago. It was called London Ontario Live Arts. They were screening a video work of mine and I was also playing music there with Michael Snow, actually. Michael Snow, who's a well-known visual artist, and filmmaker, and also improvising pianist. Michael had an exhibition in town and I really wanted to see it, so somehow I got a ride with somebody I didn't know. Anyways, she was asking me, she says, "Oh, what are you working on these days?" She was asking me, like, "What do you do? What projects are you working on?" I said, "Well, I started working on this ice music project." She said, "Oh, really?" She said, "That sounds very interesting."
Anyways, it turned out that she worked for the City of Toronto, which at that time, had a winter festival. I think it was called the Winter City. She said, "You know what? Can we also commission you? Can it be a joint commission between the NCC and the City of Toronto for this ice music thing?" I ended up performing it at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto as well. The two, both of them were like total kind of happenstance. That's how that came about. It was really remarkable. In Toronto, it was at Nathan Phillips Square, outside. We performed it a few times there. Then what was nice about that was they took a live feed of the ice music that we played and they broadcast it in this outdoor skating rink at Nathan Phillips Square, so people were skating to the sound of, their soundtrack of ice music being performed live, so that was cool. Then I think that was first, and then a week or so later, we performed it in Ottawa at Winterlude. That was a really fun project.
I'd love to give a shout-out to my co-performers on that one, one of whom was my wife, Michele McMillan, who's wonderful to go along with these crazy projects of mine. Also, at that time, two Carleton's music students joined me, one of whom was named Jamie Holmes, who's a wonderful drummer. Now, I think he's on tour with JW-Jones right now doing a cross-Canada tour. He's a really exceptional musician. He was an exceptional musician then and he still is. He sounds really great. Wonderful drummer.
Also, another wonderful musician named Fraser Holmes. Fraser was a wonderful musician, wonderful person. One of the funniest people I've ever met. Anyways, drums weren't his main instrument, percussion wasn't his main instrument. He was a guitarist, a wonderful guitarist and singer-songwriter, but he was also quite a good drummer. Anyway, so we had a lot of fun together. Fraser passed several years ago now. He had leukemia, but he was a wonderful, wonderful guy. I did want to mention him. I think about him very often, and think about our time together on that project in particular. I have very fond memories.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
With some of your students, over the years, you've created music from boxes. You've shown the world that anything is viable for music, right? Any object, pretty much.
Jesse Stewart:
Well, that's my philosophy of music-making. I did teach. For a number of years, I taught an instrumentation class at Carleton, instrumentation orchestra. We focused primarily, for the most part, it was a traditional approach to instrumentation orchestration. We used the Samuel Adler textbook that everybody's used for whatever, 50 years or something. One of the points that I wanted to make in that class was, look, yes, we should study that and know how to write music for the instruments in the Western Symphony Orchestra, but it's a very big world of sound. In addition to focusing on that stuff, there were two other components to that course, one of which was I asked all the students to research and do a presentation about another instrument that doesn't come from the Western art, music tradition, so that could be an experimental instrument. It could be an instrument from a non-Western musical and cultural tradition.
A lot of students would write about and do a presentation about instruments from their own cultural background, which was wonderful. I said, "Listen, I want everybody to develop a handout, but a fairly detailed handout. What's the range of this instrument? How do you write for it? What are common practice techniques? Well, what are some extended techniques?" All of this kind of thing. I did that for a number of years and I kept all of those handouts. Eventually, that became kind of like a second textbook in the course that people could refer to if they wanted to work with a daxophone, which is a little-known, experimental musical instrument invented by a German fellow named Hans Reichel. Or a fujara, a Slovakian shepherd's flute, or something, both of which we actually had information on those in that complementary textbook.
The other part of that course was a group project that asked the students in the class to come up with an ensemble that would include every member of the class but would basically, take an innovative approach to instrumentation. If we accept the idea, as I do, that really, we're living in an era when any sound can be a viable sonic resource in our creative practices, composers and performers, if we accept that idea, what are the implications of that for instrumentation orchestration? So, "Think outside the box. Come up with an ensemble," and so the responses ... Basically, the students would all pitch ideas, and then they would collectively decide which project they wanted to pursue. The first year, Curtis Perry is his name, a fine composer. He's now also a teacher and a photographer, still lives in Ottawa. He suggested that we explore latex balloons as musical instruments.
It so happened that I had worked with a musician just once, I think, named Judy Dunaway, whose main instrument is balloons. In fact, she wrote her master's thesis on the history of balloon music and experimental music, basically. We looked at her master's thesis. We listened to her music, and we started making all kinds of instruments out of balloons, and coming up with different notational methods for, "How do we write down balloon music?" and different playing techniques, and so on. Anyways, before long, word got out about this and we were on CBC twice, one of which was a national broadcast, if you can believe that. We did a performance together, and it was packed, I think, because of all of the CBC coverage. I mean, it was jam-packed.
Then we got invitations to perform at festivals. We performed at, I think, the jazz festival, the Ottawa Jazz Festival, and the Ottawa Folk Festival. I think we did something at the Chamber Music Festival even. It was a really remarkable experience because it continued long after the semester ended. For another year or something, we still got quite a bit of work, and so we kept developing new ideas for balloons as musical instruments. Also, some of those students had never played at a musical festival before, so they had experience, what's that like, or going on a radio broadcast. Doing a live radio broadcast on CBC, that kind of stuff, so it was actually a good learning experience.
Yeah, so in subsequent years, the students did all kinds of things. One year, we made a bunch of instruments out of paper and cardboard. One year, the students decided they wanted to explore water, so actually, we made a lot of water instruments, or instruments that incorporated water in one capacity or another. Yeah, I did a few things like that with students at Carleton. I actually don't teach the instrumentation course anymore, but I do still have the good fortune of collaborating with quite a number of Carleton students in various things from time to time. You know?
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
When you went to do, you did a two master's concurrently, is my understanding. Both composition and ethnomusicology?
Jesse Stewart:
That's right. Wow. You've done your homework. Where are you finding all this information? Yeah, I did do that, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
How was the workload? That sounds huge to me.
Jesse Stewart:
Well, yeah it was intense. It was a busy time, that's for sure, but I really enjoyed it a lot. My two composition teachers were James Tenney, who has since passed, who was a close associate of John Cage. Jim was also a really fine pianist in addition to being an extraordinary composer. He had performed in Steve Reich's ensemble. He had also performed in Philip Glass' ensemble, so I think of Jim as sort of like the ... Well, I was going to say the missing link in terms of American experimental music. He had studied with Edgard Varèse, for example, so I learned a lot from him.
Then the other person that I studied with on the composition side was David Mott. Baritone saxophonist and composer, David Mott, with whom ... I mean, David is probably my closest musical colleague and collaborator on earth. David and I play together a lot. We've been playing together now for over 20 years. At that time, I was a student of his, and really benefited from my studies with him as well as with Jim. That was on the composition side, and I just really enjoyed ... That was a tremendous, a really wonderful period in my life. It was busy, yes, but I was learning a ton and really enjoying that. Then I also enjoyed taking musicology classes, ethnomusicology classes as well. That was time well spent. My teachers on that side included Beverley Diamond, a very important figure in ethnomusicology, and the history of ethnomusicology in Canada.
Also, I took courses with Rob Bowman, who's a popular musicologist. I learned a ton from Rob, so it was actually nice to have that balance. I also took some classes in visual art too at the master's level, so I think people thought it was a little strange that I was doing all these things, but I learned a lot from each of those contexts. Yeah, it was a busy time in my life, but it was a good time. I look back at that time. The other thing I should say, and I talked about my mentors, but of course, we don't learn in a vacuum. It was also wonderful to have a community of peers to learn from and with as well.
I'm still in touch with many of those folks, and in fact, I teach with some of those folks. My colleagues at Carleton, William Echard, and Anna Hoefnagels are both alumni of York University from the time that I was there too, and on the composition side, I learned a lot from some of the other folks that were in my cohort, let's say. I think I was the first person, actually, to graduate from that, the master's program in composition, I think. It was quite new. It was quite a new program, that MA program, but at any rate, yeah, it was a good time.
The other thing, the one thing that's funny about that, so I ended up doing these two things at the same time. Again, it was sort of like as an undergraduate student, having one foot in the visual art program and another foot in the music program, I'm majoring in both, and I felt like they were so ... It was really illuminating for me to have both kinds of experiences. I felt the same way at the graduate level, having my experiences in the ethnomusicology, musicology courses, but then also the composition classes. The were really, they reinforced one another and sometimes contradicted one another in interesting ways that were actually intellectually productive for me.
Anyways, I got to the end of that and the University gave me one degree. I said, "Look, I did all the requirements for both of these degrees." They said, "You only paid for one." On my transcript, it still shows I did both things, but they said, "No. You get one master of arts degree because you only paid for one degree," so fair enough. I guess, that's the way these things work. At any rate, I don't have any regrets, really, about that. As I say, it was intellectually productive for me at that time, certainly.
Leah Roseman:
At the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all locked down, I believe that's when you put out a bunch of videos that you put on Facebook, just with found instruments. Is that, at that time, like that the canoe paddles, I think that one went viral.
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. Like everybody ... Well, I should back up a little bit. Just prior to the pandemic, I actually had brain surgery.
Leah Roseman:
Oh my goodness.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah. I had a brain tumor that I found out about late in, I guess, that was 2019. I just got in under the wire. Just before the pandemic started, I had the four-hour brain surgery, which was successful. I was quite sick for at least six months prior to that, and so I had to stop playing music. I couldn't sit up, let alone hold drumsticks or hold an instrument. I got pretty weak there for a while, so my chops were not what they had been. Then I had the surgery and there's a little bit of recovery period there, a few weeks. My surgery was, I believe, on February 19th in 2020. Yeah, so then about three weeks, I thought, "Okay. I'm starting to feel like my old self again. Now I can get out in the world and start doing stuff." Then March, what is it, 16th or 17th? Something like that, the whole world shut down, so I thought, "Oh, okay. Well, I guess, I'll be stuck at home for a while, for another few weeks. It's been six months. What's another few weeks?"
I was one of those that thought, "Oh, well, a few weeks, then we'll all go back to our lives." I thought, also, the pandemic, there was so much anxiety and I thought, "Man, what can I do? There's not much I can do." I thought, "Well, maybe I'll post a little video on Facebook. Also, and I'll play a different instrument every day, for whatever, a couple weeks until the world returns to normal," naively. Anyways, and also I thought, "Well, this will be a way for me to get my chops back up," and so on. Anyway, so I started doing that, and then, so I did it for, I think, for 40 days. Every day, I'd post a different video, a different instrument. One day, I might play waterphone. Another day, whatever, some other thing.
Yeah, then i started thinking, "Okay. Well, I'm running out of instruments here. Maybe I'll start playing found objects," which is something I've done for a long time anyways. Yeah, those ones, those videos people really responded to, actually. You mentioned, I did one where I set of canoe paddles that I played and so, essentially, a kind of marimba-like instrument or a xylophone-like instrument with canoe paddles. They're sonically interesting because I play up and down the shaft of the paddle, so I started playing, essentially, the place where you would hold it, the handle of it, but then I play up and down the length of the shaft. That creates a pretty interesting kind of timbrel shift. It actually sounds like, I've placed this live on a number of occasions too, and every time, somebody says, "Well, so what kind of effects pedal were you running that through?" It really sounds like it's electronically processed, and it's just the acoustics of canoe paddles, the way I was playing them.
Anyways, that one, you're right. That particular video, and then a few other ones was shared quite several thousand times, and was viewed quite widely. Yeah, but the other thing that was nice about that was I heard from parents and also teachers because music teachers were like, "What on earth are we going to ... How are we going to teach?" Zoom and similar platforms hadn't ... I mean, people were doing stuff on them, but there were still some bugs to be worked out there, particularly when it came to music, trying to do music online.
Teachers just, I think, so many teachers, and music teachers in particular were having a hard time. They really responded to those videos in particular, and would ... I heard from teachers all over the world who said, "Oh, this is great. I've started doing some found object improvise ... Getting kids to do found object improvisations in their own home using whatever they have in their own home." Going on almost like a kind of scavenger hunt and trying to find things that they can make sound with, make music with, so that was nice too. Through that, I actually heard from, as I say, many, many parents and teachers all over the world.
In some cases, they actually sent me videos of their students or their kids playing found objects, which was really lovely to see, so that ended up being a nice experience. I did, I think, 40 of those videos. Then I thought, "Okay. I can't keep doing this every day," so then I did them weekly for a while. Now it's more sporadic, yeah. I still post videos from time to time, but I've also gotten busier in the two years since so now, yeah, if I post a video a month of something that's about par for the course these days.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That must have been so gratifying to get that feedback about the kids. I want to talk about your work as a community activist in inclusivity, but I was wondering if we could have ... Do you have your handpan there maybe or something?
Jesse Stewart:
I don't have a handpan, but I do have some other things that I can show you. We did, I showed you the waterphone. Maybe because we've been talking about found object improvisations or composition for that matter, I can maybe talk a little bit about my approach in that area. I would say, again, taking this idea as a starting point, that any sound can be a viable musical resource. When I find a sound, let's say, so I have two stones here. These are just stones that I've picked up on the shoreline of Lake Ontario. We can tap them together. Okay, we get a sound. That's okay. Then, so I always think, "Well, what can I do with that sound? How can I vary it?" Thinking about sonic variation, and thinking about variation in different musical parameters.
An obvious one is rhythm, so instead of just a constant pulse, if we play something a little more syncopated ... That's more interesting, okay, but it's still the same sound over and over again, so if I wanted to add a little timbrel variation, how might I do that? Well, one way would be to use my mouth as a resonator, so thinking about resonance. If I change the shape of my mouth, I'm going to change the resonance of the stones and so it will get a little bit of timbrel variation. Hopefully, that will translate here. I'll give it a try. You get the idea.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
That's my approach. That's really just fueled by curiosity, and just as a process of experimentation, and trying to find different sounds. I brought a steel mixing bowl I took from our kitchen, and there's lots of sounds. I actually use these all the time. If I just strike it, if I hold it like this it has a nice bell-like tone, so that's nice. Well, and here I have, this is just a piece of steel electrical conduit, so if I ... Can you hear that? That's pretty quiet.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
We can get lots of different sounds out of it, and if we add a little bit of water ... This was my drinking water, but we can use it, put it to musical ends. We were talking about water earlier. Just pour a little bit of water in there. Maybe we'll put that away from the computer. Then if I use a mallet ... Not unlike the waterphone, earlier. That's my approach. "Okay, that's an interesting sound. What can I do with it?" Essentially, that's the driving question. Now, another ... Now, I play regular instruments too. Regular, more traditional, let's say, instruments, so I have a snare drum here. I've just finished working ... You can't see that at all, can you? But if I do this, maybe you'll see it. Okay?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
Yes, there we go. You don't see me, but that's okay. You see the drum. I've just been working on a set of 32 studies for solo snare drum, and some of which are for prepared snare drums. These aren't really like traditional rhythmic studies. They're more about sonic exploration, so some of the things like these rubber ball mallets. We can get all kinds of different sounds. This is a smaller rubber ball here. Even just with my hands, or I have drumsticks here but instead of playing it in a more traditional way, what if I do this?
Anyway, so I've been working on these 32 studies, which experiment. I basically try to get as many different types of sounds out of the snare drum as possible, but sometimes I'll combine different things, so the snare drum with found objects. I just put two shoelaces across the snare drum and I have some wrenches here. This was a lovely discovery, and a recent one at that. I'll show you what I do with these. Okay? If I put the shoelaces on the snare drum, and then I put these metal, just regular metal wrenches on there, the drum basically amplifies and acts as a resonator for the sound of the wrenches.
I'll play them, you can hear. Of course, I can still play the drum too. Anyways, you get the idea. In a way, it's almost a similar approach to the one I described earlier about a process of experimentation and then finding a sound and then thinking, "Okay. What can I do with this? How can I vary this? How can I work with this and, hopefully, sustain interest in this sound world that I'm working with here?" That's, in a nutshell, is my approach to these sorts of things.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. I love that. Actually, the wrenches was really magical. That was very, very cool, the combination.
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, good. I'm glad.
Leah Roseman:
You've been involved in a lot of outreach in different formats for more accessibility in the community.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, so I started an organization called We Are All Musicians, and the name of it really summarizes the philosophy behind it, the idea that everybody is a musician. Everybody should have opportunities to play music, if they want it, but the reality is that not everybody had that experience and have opportunities to do so for a wide variety of reasons. To a considerable extent, music education in Canada, and I think this is true in a lot of other places, has tended to be a function of class privilege. That's one thing that I've been thinking about, and that the We Are All Musicians project, the intention is to make sure that everybody, including people who maybe, whose parents didn't have the means to put them in piano lessons, or violin lessons, or whatever, making sure that they have opportunities to play music as well.
Part of that work has also been around playing music with people with disabilities of various kinds. Of course, there've been many wonderful musicians who have disabilities. In fact, some of the greatest musicians have had disabilities. I think of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, for example, who, I think the story, I think he was involved in a fire, and so on his chording hand, he really only had the use of two fingers and became one of the great, I would say universally acknowledged as one of the great jazz guitarist of all time.
I think the traditional narrative was like, "Oh, isn't that amazing that he became such a great musician despite his disability?" I think maybe we need to reframe that and think, "Well, maybe it was because of that that he played the way he played." Maybe we need to not think of it as, "Oh, wow. What a problem that he overcame," but maybe it actually led to him becoming that incredible musician that he was.
At any rate, there have been people, historically, who maybe have limited motor control, for example, and can't hold or pickup traditional musical instruments, that can't pick up a drumstick, or hold a saxophone, or violin, or something. Now, I think we have a real opportunity because there are all kinds of technologies, adaptive and assistive technologies that can be harnessed to make sure that everybody, including people with limited motor control, have opportunities to make music. That's some of what I've done, what I've been interested in, and I've tried to do with We Are All Musicians, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I know you have your cymbals, or what are those? Gongs behind you.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, yeah. Plate gongs, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, so they're, I talked briefly with-
Jesse Stewart:
I can move.
Leah Roseman:
No, if people heard the episode with Ellen Waterman, we talked a little bit about Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument-
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, great.
Leah Roseman:
... which you were also very ... Not everyone's heard that episode, and they may not know what I'm talking about.
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, I can give a very brief description of that. Pauline Oliveros was a wonderful composer, and improvisor, and theorist, and humanitarian, and a dear friend of mine and Ellen's, and someone who I had the good fortune of playing music with on a number of occasions. Anyways, about, I'm going to say 15 years ago or something now, she had the idea, she said, "You know what? We should try to come up with an instrument that can adapt to anybody's range of motion. If someone can only move their eyelid, or they can only move a few fingers, how can we make an instrument that they can use and they can play?" That was the start of what became the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument, or AUMI, which is pronounced variously. I say AUMI. I think Ellen says AUMI, but whatever. AUMI is the acronym.
Basically, it's a kind of movement to music type technology. You can can use a built-in webcam on an iPad and track movement, even very small movement, so you can zoom in. I've used this in a variety of contexts. For a while, prior to the pandemic and prior to me getting sick, I was making music every week at St. Vincent Hospital in Ottawa, which is a complex care facility. Many of the patients there have limited mobility, and so this young woman who had a spinal injury, who really could only move a couple fingers and her eyes. We could track that movement and she could play music. I would bring a handpan or something, a drum, or whatever, and we would play music together and have fun, so that kind of thing. The Adaptive Musical Instruments have been used a lot in those kind of settings, in therapeutic settings, hospital settings. Music therapists have used it, but often, I use it in community settings as well.
Traditionally, the way most people use it, everybody except for me, as far as I know to date anyways, have used it to trigger digital samples. It comes with all kinds of samples, and you can change the tuning, and you can change the sample, the type of digital instrument that you're hearing. You could load your own samples, but what I have started doing with it ... This started when I was at St. Vincent Hospital. I would bring it in, and I would set it up, and then but instead of triggering a digital sample, I would use the Adaptive Use Musical instrument to send MIDI signals. MIDI stands for ... What does it stand for? Musical Interface ... No, no, no. Musical Instrument Digital Interface, yeah. I would use it to send MIDI signals to little strikers, little mechanical strikers that I would build, and attached to acoustic percussion.
With a person who could only move a couple of fingers, or their eyes, or whatever, we'd track that and they would move and a cymbal would play, or a gong, or a cowbell, or a drum, or whatever. That was, I think, a little more exciting for people, and it was maybe also, I think, a clear sense of causality in a way. Like you do this and very quickly, it's almost instantaneous, you hear a sound. Anyway, so I was working on that and then I got sick, and it got hard for me to move my equipment around. Then we were in the pandemic and I thought, "Well, what am I going to do now? I'd really love to still be able to make music with people online," and so I started making these gongs. They're just made out of aluminum, so they're kind of plate gongs.
I made quite a few. This is only a small number. I made about 70 of them so far, and of different diameters and also different ... These ones are all circular, but I made some that are in different shapes too, polygonal shapes. They have a different timbrel quality, actually. Anyways, so there I have some. I don't know how well you can see that, but I have a few strikers attached to the frames in which the gongs are mounted. Then what I do is I track movement over Zoom or the platform that we're on today, Riverside. I've never tried it with Riverside, but we could try it if you like and just see if it works. Then that way, your movements could actually activate the gongs and I could play waterphone, or something else.
At any rate, what this does is it allows me to still play music with people, actually, all over the world. Next week, I think, or maybe in two weeks time, I'll be playing music with some people in Malta. It's through an organization there called Opening Doors that helps people with intellectual disabilities. We're going to have a jam session through Zoom in a couple of weeks. I've used this with people all over the place, so that's been nice, actually, to be able to do that. Sometimes, the people I'm playing music with have instruments.
For example, if you wanted to break out your fiddle, we could do something together, but they don't have to. All they need to do is move, and if somebody, again, if somebody, maybe they have limited mobility, if they can position their hand very close to their webcam on their phone or whatever they're using, they can actually play the gongs, and then I can play other things. That's how that's been working. Do you want to give it a try?
Leah Roseman:
Sure, Jesse. I'm happy to get out my fiddle, but it might be interesting if I can just try with my fingers, yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
For sure, for sure.
Leah Roseman:
Will it react to me moving?
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, so I-
Jesse Stewart:
It should.
Leah Roseman:
Do I need to go near my webcam?
Jesse Stewart:
You're good.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah?
Jesse Stewart:
I would say slower and lateral back and forth movements will work good, will work best.
Leah Roseman:
If I play my violin, that will be a type of movement. It will be a reaction too.
Jesse Stewart:
Exactly.
Leah Roseman:
Then, what are you going to play? Because some people are listening to the podcast and they won't see everything that's going on.
Jesse Stewart:
I'll play the waterphone.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Jesse Stewart:
I'll back up so people could see the gongs a bit better.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I'll use some, what we call extended techniques on my violin, as well as some more traditional sounds for people.
Jesse Stewart:
Great.
Nice. Now when I go and move to turn it off, it'll maybe start up again here. Oh, actually, no, we're okay. Oh. Nice. Nice playing with you again.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it was fun.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, lovely.
Leah Roseman:
You have written a book with Ajay Heble about teaching improv pedagogy.
Jesse Stewart:
Yes. Well, yeah, so we finished the manuscript and it's with the publisher currently. It's about to go out for peer review, so yeah, the world of academic publishing is notoriously slow, but yes, that's in the works, yeah. The book is really about, yeah, it's about ... Well, the tentative title is Jam in the Classroom, but it's really a book about the pedagogy of improvisation, teaching and learning improvisation.
Leah Roseman:
Not just music improvisation, but-
Jesse Stewart:
We focus primarily on music, yeah, but that's a good point though. When we talk about improvisation, everybody improvises every day. We're all improvisors. We're focusing primarily on music, yeah, in the context of that book.
Leah Roseman:
I realize it's an academic book but in laypeople's terms, what kind of things do you write about?
Jesse Stewart:
Well, the way the book is structured is we look at different sites and different ways in which we learn to improvise. We start with the individual improvisor and then get progressively larger in scope. Various forms of self-study and self-learning are important to the development of most improvising musicians. We spend time working on our craft, and listening to recordings, these kinds of things. We talk about, yeah, self-study, self-learning, but we also talk ... Then the next chapter goes, looks at various forms of mentorship and also co-learning, broadly construed, because at some level, we learn really from every other musician we ever make music with. I learned from what we just did with the gongs. We're always learning from one another every time we enter into a musical conversation, so the next chapter focuses on that. Mentorship but then also, various forms of co-learning, learning from and with one another.
Then we keep expanding the circle out of it, and so we have a chapter where we talk about the importance of music festivals and concert series. Both Ajay and I have a background in arts presentation. He founded the Guelph Jazz Festival. More recently, during the pandemic actually, he founded an online music festival called IF, which stands for Improvisation Festival, and we just had two iterations thus far. In a previous life, I was the artistic director, presenter and producer of new music based in, it's in Waterloo. It's called Numus. We talk about arts presentation, going to festivals as an opportunity to learn and grow as musicians. Then we just talk about learning in community environments as well. Some of the things that we talked about earlier, and some of the community music work that I do through We Are All Musicians. We have a chapter that talks about that, learning in community, learning with and from community. That's the structure of the book.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). What's his background? What kind of stuff does he do, Ajay?
Jesse Stewart:
Well, so Ajay, he's an English professor, actually, at the University of Guelph in the School of English and Theater Studies at the University of Guelph. He was also my PhD advisor. I did my doctorate in that program. In name, it's a school of English and theater studies. Although, it used to be called ... It had a funny name. It was the School of Literature and Performance Studies in English. The acronym was SLAPSE, which it often elicited laughter, so they shortened it to School of English and Theater Studies, which I think was probably a good move, but really, it was the performance studies part of it that was of greatest interest to me, and most relevance to my doctoral research.
At any rate, he was my advisor, but we already knew each other and we had already, I think, recorded an album together. He's also a musician, he's also an improvising pianist. I've known Ajay a very long time. I think going on 30 years at this point, or pretty close to it anyways, so yeah, we've worked together a lot in a variety of contexts. Writing things together, playing music together, working together on arts presentation, that kind of thing. Yeah, his background, or at least his academic appointment, his primary appointment is in English and theater studies, but he was involved in actually recently starting what I believe is one of, if not the first graduate program in improvisation studies.
They started a master's program and a PhD program at University of Guelph in improvisation studies. It was Ajay and a number of other people, Daniel Fischlin, also a number of other people are involved there. He's one of these people whose interests and expertise spans multiple disciplines and fields. Certainly, Ajay started an international institute called the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation that's housed at the University of Guelph, but with research affiliates all over the place, including myself, including Ellen Waterman, people at other institutions as well.
In a way, I think Ajay and some of these other people, including Ellen, Daniel Fischlin, and many others have, in a way, laid the groundwork for the field of improvisation studies, which didn't really exist 20 years ago, 25 years ago. It's really a fairly recent thing. I feel as though they have contributed very significantly to, as I say, laying the groundwork for that interdisciplinary field of study.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). In season one, I spoke with the improvising cellist, Peggy Lee. Do you know her or of her?
Jesse Stewart:
I do. I love Peggy's work, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
I think very, very highly of her playing. I don't think we've ever played together, but I love her playing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. She spoke about when she first started improvising. It was with dancers, which I found really interesting, like this whole cross-disciplinary, how you feed off the energy in a different way. It's really interesting to me.
Jesse Stewart:
That is interesting. I came to working with dancers rather late. It's really just over the past seven years that I really started playing quite a bit, working quite a bit with dancers. I just recently premiered a new piece for which I wrote the music, and that was with Propeller Dance, a wonderful, integrated dance company in Ottawa. It's a professional, contemporary dance company that includes some dancers with disabilities, and some without. That's what they mean my integrated dance. That's the term they use. Anyways, I did a piece for them where I was playing a relatively new instrument to me, and a very interesting instrument at that called the euphone, which is sometimes known, referred to as the cristal baschet, that consists of glass crystal rods that one plays with moistened fingertips. Yeah, but it's quite interesting looking because it has these large sound diffusers, some of which are made of fiberglass, and then one is made of stainless steel. They amplify and color the sound in a really interesting way.
Anyways, I was playing that instrument with Propeller. We premiered that piece, I think, maybe two weeks ago. Then I'm also working right now with another dancer, a wonderful dancer, choreographer named Natasha Bakht, who in addition to being an incredible dancer and choreographer, is also a law professor at the University of Ottawa. Quite remarkable. We've been working on a piece together as well, but that's relatively new for me. I hadn't really worked a lot with dancers, but I've learned a lot through that process. Not translating, but thinking about their gestural vocabularies and what kinds of sounds fit, and without always making it about me mimicking them. Sometimes, it's like a counterpoint, point and counterpoint situation. That's been an interesting learning process for me, collaborating with dancers.
Leah Roseman:
Is this composed music, or partly improvised, or all improvised?
Jesse Stewart:
Well, I would say a lot of my work combines elements of composition and improvisation. Certainly, there are some improvised elements, although through the rehearsal process, often what happens is the piece becomes a little more solidified so that the dancer ... One thing I learned, I didn't know this before working with dancers, but dancers rehearse. I've never rehearsed for anything as much as I do with when I work with dancers. It's unbelievable, but the amount of time it takes to really internalize and get the choreography into their bodies, I didn't know that. As a result, I think what starts out maybe a little bit more improvisatory often becomes less so through the rehearsal process, so that they can count on musical landmarks that are going to line up in a somewhat predictable way with the choreography.
Having said that, certainly with Propeller, usually there are unexpected things that happen, including in performance. Many of the dancers with Propeller are also exceptional improvisers, and so sometimes, yeah, something that's never happened before will happen in the course of a performance. I actually like it when that happens, most of the time, because then, often, we enter into new territory. I would say yes, is the short answer to your question. It includes both. Is it improvised or is it composed? Yes. It's both of those things and draws on elements of both.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
That's true for the snare drum studies. I did actually develop scores for all of them. Many of the things that I ask the performer to do, there isn't really a way to notate them, so I had to develop a variety of different notational strategies to communicate the ideas. In some cases, it's traditional Western notation, but in other cases, it's like a set of written instructions augmented by diagrams and things like that. Yeah, I just finished working on those snare drum pieces last week. Yeah, now I'm going to try to learn them myself and make audio and video recordings of them.
Leah Roseman:
Great, yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Just to circle back to when you started as a jazz drummer when you were a teenager, I just love jazz and I've been curious about this. Jazz drummers, you don't really have to memorize the tunes the same way. You don't really need to know the chord progressions, or am I wrong?
Jesse Stewart:
Well, that's interesting. Need to, maybe not, but is it a good idea? Yeah. It is a very good idea. In fact, so typically, when a jazz drummer ... The other thing is, when we say a jazz drummer, that could mean a lot of different things. Even for me, it means something different now than it meant when I was 20.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Jesse Stewart:
At that time, I was pretty narrowly focused on, for lack of a better term, bebop, a sub-genre of jazz and it's derivatives, so hard bop, modern jazz, essentially. That was really what I was focused on. Now I have, I would say, a much broader view of what constitutes jazz drumming than I did at that time. At any rate, if we're playing in a context like that, let's say with a hard bop band or something, it's really important for the drummer to know the tunes so when they solo, it's important that you know the form of the tunes so that your solo reflects the form, and so that extends ... Part of that is knowing the melody of the tune, but also it's really helpful to know the chord progression.
When I was studying, when I was a teenager, my drum teacher would do something where he would put on a blues recording, like a jazz recording, but a tune that was based on 12-bar blues. He would literally drop the needle and he would say, "What measure are we in?" I would have to, within ... I would only have a few seconds to know, "Okay. Well, that's the turnaround, so we're in measure 10." I would have to know ... He really drove this point home that we have to know where we are in the chord progression at all times. Especially in something like a blues form, 12-bar blues, that's essential, but in other song forms as well, that's very helpful to have an understanding.
I would say, do we always have to? Do we always need to know the chord progressions and harmonic form of the piece? Well, no, but it's a good idea. It's an important part of, I would say anyways, of playing jazz, particularly if we're playing tunes with chord changes. It's important that we know that. Studying piano is a very good idea for aspiring jazz drummers. I think having some grounding in jazz harmony is a very, very good idea.
Leah Roseman:
You hadn't studied piano when you were younger?
Jesse Stewart:
No. Mostly self-study. Actually, that's not entirely true. I did take some piano lessons with a jazz piano player, and that was helpful. That was helpful, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Just to close out, I'm curious. In your pre-pandemic life, were there trips you took where you had amazing musical experiences? Is there anything that stands out to you, or maybe special performing experiences?
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, many, many. Both, actually. Both as a listener and as a performer. Let's see. Well, I could tell you about a few things that made a very deep impression on me. One was, it was in a lot of ways, it was the first jazz concert I ever went to. I was, I think, 15. I started playing drums fairly late. I think I was like 13 or 14, and I was mostly just, I played in a rock band with some friends and things like that, but I wasn't really taking it very seriously. A friend of mine, his name's Dave Powell, a wonderful saxophonist and pianist, he was a little more knowledgeable, especially about jazz than I was at that stage. He said, "Look, there's a really famous jazz drummer coming to Toronto. His name's Elvin Jones. He played with John Coltrane." I don't think I even really knew who John Coltrane was at that point.
He said, "Listen, you need to go and check this guy out. Let's go," so we went to hear Elvin Jones. It was at a club, which is wonderful at that time in Toronto. I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, but we would ... I didn't drive yet, so we took the GO train in. We went to this little club on Bloor Street called the Bermuda Onion, which has been closed for probably over 20 years, I think at this point. At that time, they were bringing in all of these incredible musicians to play there, so I heard Elvin Jones there. That was my first trip, but I heard Max Roach, another legend, jazz drumming legend. Who else? Tony Williams I heard there. All incredible musicians. McCoy Tyner played piano with John Coltrane.
Anyways, I heard a lot of great music that really changed my life at that club. What was really great about going to hear that music in a club setting was that I got to meet these people. I got to meet Max Roach and talk with him. I got to meet Elvin Jones, who was incredibly nice to me and to my friend, Dave. Very, very sweet. Anyways, so even before the music started, Elvin came over to us and was talking to us. I didn't really know who he was, but I thought, "Wow, this guy is so nice." Then the music started. I've had many profound experiences, but that was perhaps the one that left the deepest impact on me was hearing Elvin Jones play drums for the first time. It wasn't just his chops or his musicality, both of which were amazing, but it was also, there was a kind of commitment to the music, to what he was doing that left a very, very deep impression on me.
It was really remarkable to see that, and to hear that, and to then talk with him afterwards. That was one experience that left a very deep impression. I left that concert and I thought, "Okay, all right." This is what I thought. I thought, "Okay. Either I need to get my act together and really focus, and give this my all, and really try to learn music, or I'm never playing again." There was no middle ground there. It was either one or the other for me. I thought, either ... That's what I learned from that. Elvin Jones put everything, everything of himself into every single note that he played, and it was profoundly moving to me.
I just thought, "That's what music asks of us." We have to give it our all, and that doesn't mean that we're going to play like Elvin Jones, but we have to put all of ourselves into what we do, or else maybe music ... Maybe I'll focus on art, or whatever, something else. Anyways, I did, I thought, "Okay, I'm going to really buckle down and try to put all of myself into music." Anyway, so that was one example among many of concerts that were really quite remarkable and left a deep impression on me.
Now, in terms of ones where I've been playing, I have many memorable experiences. I've had many memorable playing experiences. I play in a trio with a guitarist named Kevin Breit, who's an amazing guitarist, and a cellist named Matt Brubeck. We have a lot of fun together, and so I have very, very fond memories of playing with those guys. Again, pre-pandemic, a lot of very wonderful experiences. What I remember most is the music, but also hanging out before and after, and just laughing, and telling stories, and having fun, and I find we just laugh a lot when we're together, which is wonderful.
Then the other person that comes to mind is David Mott. I mentioned David was one of my mentors. I've played with David many times in many different contexts. We've played as a duo. We have multiple trios together, one with a New York bassist named William Parker. Wonderful bassist and multi-instrumentalist, William Parker. That group is called the Sonoluminescence Trio. We've had some wonderful experiences together, but we play in other trios as well. I played in David's quintet, and all kinds of things. I have many very, very fond memories of playing with him in a wide variety of contexts, including once, he was invited to play for the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama was in Toronto, and David, much to my delight, asked me to play with him, and so that was, it was quite an unusual gig, as it were, but it was certainly memorable, that's for sure. We were on stage, and we played right before His Holiness came on stage. There was a large ... It was the opening of the Tibetan Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. I can't quite remember what year that was. Maybe 2010, 2009-2010, something like that. Anyhow, so there was a large sculpture of Buddha behind us, and there were Tibetan monks seated in lotus position on the stage, but like every square inch of the stage was occupied.
We had a very limited amount of space, so I had to be very economical, so I just brought a waterphone. David played baritone saxophone. I played waterphone, but I remember being really concerned that I was going to, as I bowed, elbow the monk in the head, the monk who was seated right beside me, so that was quite memorable as well. Certainly, I've had lots of memorable experiences with the Stretch Orchestra, with Kevin and Matt, and also with David. That's one that came to mind as particularly memorable.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, such a wonderful life of music already, and I'm sure many more great things to come.
Jesse Stewart:
Oh, well, that's kind of you. Thank you, Leah, and thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. I really appreciate it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Super interesting. Thanks, Jesse.
Jesse Stewart:
Yeah, my pleasure. Yeah, thanks so much.
Leah Roseman:
If you enjoyed this episode with Jesse, you will probably be interested in my conversations with cellist improviser, Peggy Lee, and Ellen Waterman, a scholar who's an improvising flute player and vocalist. All episodes are available in video format and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please follow and share. If you consider rating this podcast, it will definitely help new listeners discover it.
