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A Conversation with Joe Henry (continued)
JH: There were two things that--I don't know how to say it. There were a couple of, like, spiritual presences that were very influential to that record. One of them was Ornette, because we were all just imagining the fact that he--nobody could believe that he was going to be willing to be involved.
PM: No kidding.
JH: Even his own people said he never had done that before, never had been a sideman to anybody.
PM: Wow.
JH: So this idea that he was going to, at some point, materialize and contribute, it was just this wild idea that everybody was kind of giddy about.
The other was the idea of Richard Pryor, about whom I'd written this song [the album's opening track, "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation"], which was the whole thing that took me to the idea of Ornette in the first place.
PM: Right.
JH: I found myself writing this song, in which I felt I was, in my own mind, representing Richard Pryor--it was my idea of Richard Pryor in a song. Where I thought he was and how I thought he got there.
PM: That whole thing is so amazing.
JH: Well, it was a very simple idea when it was happening, before I knew what was happening. But I found out that everybody--and I mean this literally--everybody there turned out to be not just casual Richard Pryor fans, but kind of big ones. People who just really, without any convincing, recognized immediately--not that he was just a very funny man, but that he had an incredibly significant influence on a period of American culture, and that his kind of tragic life didn't exist despite his gift. It was all part of it. Like, Me'shell loves Richard. Brian Blade loves Richard. Everybody had a real connection to Richard from the first time it came up, when people saw it as a song title on the demo. And you got to understand that I talked Brad Mehldau into being involved just with the idea that he was going to play on that one song.
PM: [laughs]
JH: But in the back of my mind I'm thinking, "Well, if he shows up for this song and things go well, maybe he'll play another song." But he just stayed. He just came back every day for four days, because he kind of found himself intrigued by this group of people and what was happening. I think Brad was really enamored with what was happening on this record, and I think he realized very quickly that he was a significant part of what was happening.
PM: He was huge on that record.
JH: And bigger than I imagined him to be before we started.
But there was just this presence of Richard. And like a lot of studios now, everybody's headphone mix is a little Mackie eight-channel board. You have your headphones, and you can, at your station, dial up your own mix.
PM: Right, the mo-me thing.
JH: You can push your own thing up. So we don't spend the whole day with people saying what they want more or less of. You sit there and you just give yourself what you need. And, like, on track eight, we just had a live Richard Pryor performance running perpetually.
PM: You're kidding me.
JH: Anybody could just reach over and push up a fader and get a blast of whatever Richard was going on about at that particular moment.
PM: [laughs] That's amazing.
JH: So through the whole record, even, no matter what the song, there he was.
PM: Unbelievable.
JH: He was a really influential component, even though in a completely abstract way, I suppose.
It was definitely--I mean, to that moment, that was most fun I ever had working. I mean, literally. I was anxious to take a dinner break. I hated to stop, because I'd look around the room at who's there, and I'm thinking, "We should just keep going."
PM: Right. "I'm experiencing a high point in my life right now."
JH: "This could go south at a certain moment, and we've got a lot of work to do. I don't want it to stop. There's too much happening here, there's too much to do."
And I found it just incredibly exciting. Maybe everybody thinks that way when they're in the middle of something, but even the other musicians, who were involved, collectively, in hundreds of really unusual and great projects, everybody seemed to think that something very unique was happening. And it was really a revelation to me. Those four days of working rebuilt, for like maybe the third time, my idea of who I was and how I was going operate from that point on.
PM: And if you'll come full circle with me, then, there was another transition to make, bringing you to the atmosphere of Tiny Voices.
JH: Well, the way that I described making Trampoline, I was feeling my way in the dark, and by the time I got to Fuse, I felt like I was hitting the ground running. I understood my method at that point. I made Scar not really knowing how I was going to use a jazz tonality in a way that was authentic for me. I never want it to sound like, "Oh, I'm really into jazz. I'm going to try to write something that sounds like jazz music," but rather, I'm going to think the other way and invite those people into my world and see what it does to my thing, as opposed to me trying to sneak into their world.
PM: Right.
JH: So I made Scar not really knowing how that was going to work, and not really knowing if it would work in a way that felt authentic for me. But by the time I got to Tiny Voices, I believe that I had figured something out for myself that was uniquely my own, in regard to a musical vocabulary, a musical stance, if you will. I started writing songs for Tiny Voices and imagining a much broader, much more chaotic thing--where Scar had been very mannered, ultimately. The playing was immaculate, I think appropriately so. But I knew that when I started realizing the songs that were presenting themselves as the ones that were going to make up Tiny Voices, that it couldn't possibly be mannered and austere in a certain way that much of Scar is. In my mind, there's a certain austerity to the playing. But Tiny Voices needed to have a lot more chaos at its core.
And as a result, I decided that any orchestration that was going to happen--well, with Scar, I gave the songs to an arranger, and I went to New York and spent three days with various small ensembles to create the orchestration that's very controlled and very careful. And I thought that any of that orchestrated element that was going to come into play here, I didn't want to drop it behind the music after the fact like a velvet curtain, just to kind of add texture and give it a bit more of a grand feeling, like I think we did with Scar. This time I wanted those elements to be inherently part of the driving wheel of the song.
PM: Got it.
JH: I wanted that orchestration to be part of that exciting, live discovery, because I know that people play really differently--a guitar player is going to play really differently if he's imagining, "Oh, yeah, he's going to put some strings on this after."
PM: Right. "I'd better leave room."
JH: When there's an orchestral idea happening right next to him in the moment, he's got to get out of its way because maybe it's going to take precedence, it's going to take over.
I'd worked with Don Byron when I was touring with Scar. I was going on The David Letterman Show, and I wanted to take a buddy--additionally add to the band and make it a little bit more exciting. Just as a one-off in New York, I thought it would be fun to add something to the mix. And I met Don through a good friend of mine who's the head of A & R at Blue Note. And we hooked up with Don, and I was completely enamored with his whole approach, and how wide open his musical scope is.
PM: Did he play bass clarinet on Letterman? What did he play?
JH: He played clarinet, I think. And then we parted company at the end of that moment. And I told myself, "I don't know what my next record is going to be, but I know that it will involve him in some way."
PM: [laughs]
JH: So I knew that when I was started writing for what became Tiny Voices. I already had this idea that Don was going to be involved somehow. continue
