Jeff Jahn is a renowned contemporary Art and Music critic with over 30 years of experience, recognized for his influence in Portland’s cultural scene. After a long hiatus from music, he returns with “Sjå,” an album that embodies raw human creativity through fully improvised first takes, rejecting AI and digital intervention.
Your background is quite unique, blending a long career in art criticism with serious musicianship. How do these two worlds influence each other in your music?
That requires a complicated answer, but this is prog related so forgive my indulgence… I was a classically trained violist who fell out with the concertmaster who told me the electric guitar was a “degenerate instrument,” even though I liked it far more and found it more versatile. So I left that scholarship and pivoted to modern/contemporary art, which I was already studying voraciously They are really of the same cloth, progressive music and contemporary art as they both press against and expand the accepted form. Groups like Der Blaue Reiter included visual artists, Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee and composer Arnold Schoenberg and they were incredibly important to me as a template. I constantly pick up new things but I’ve been at both music and visual art for a lifetime already. Being a wordsmith also helps and I taught myself how to read at age 3.5 so long ago I learned how to find what I needed and by age 6 I was already studying music. I was lucky to get good instructors, Ed Muelling for my Middle School Orchestra gets special mention for his wide taste and introducing challenging compositional concepts. He had us play Philip Glass and Steve Reich. He explained how the Beatles used syncopation, which I have utterly abused! His wife was my private instructor. He will not be surprised that I am a cultural gadfly! I also try to help other artists I find interesting by being an advocate and talent scout, I’ve done this in both music and visual art.
Overall, I appreciate highly distilled idiomatic expression of any kind and any critic has to love sharing discoveries of such things. Studied appreciation. I never gave up music it just wasn’t my public face so all my music industry friends who think of me as “the art guy” were like, wait he can do that? And my art world colleagues weren’t really ready for the kind of challenging music I make… I’m no punk musician (though I have attitude) and I do things that I don’t see or hear much of. As a cultural historian I’m always drawing on templates that already existed, just not what most are drawing from. I think I set aside music in the late 90’s when the only interesting thing I could find was Ozric Tentacles (I also really got into 50’s and 60’s jazz) but the YBA art movement and Takashi Murakami were doing interesting things in visual art and my art world career took off in Portland Oregon as the city became an important cultural center. So many important things go down here, its the least corporate big city in the USA but its an old port like your Genoa, Jacopo.
Today, prog is on the rise but a lot of it is not really that progressive in the Robert Fripp sense… just good musicianship on well worn roads rather than ground breaking these days. That is not an insult, its tough to be original but its all I do… true originality is almost a curse. Contemporary art has similar problems but even today there are artists like Geordie Greep in music and Jorge Pardo (interview link: http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2013/10/interview_with_20.html) in visual art that are legitimately progressive and that’s my focus. I’m very interested in how culture is made, regardless what disciple is producing it. Ai is a new tool that is encroaching on everything and I’m sure some groundbreaking stuff is being done with it but for Sjå I had something very human to present musically without the use of Ai or locking the drums to a quantized beat. Music has become far more mechanical in the last 30 years even before Ai. So as a personal statement I wanted to strip all that back and show what one human can do. Its a flex, but a very human flex for a reason. Its a humanistic statement.
Perhaps its easier to present an example and then reverse engineer how I got there? The music video for for the first single, Minerva, is a full integration of both musical and visual practices, also its my directorial debut but I’ve been doing utilitarian video projects for decades and I’ve taught film theory. First, there’s my music for Minerva, which is quite angular, often with syncopated staccato ostinatos with lyrics about the drift of language, gender and the way definitions needlessly sort people algorithmically… its been going on long before the computers and the internet but its accelerating, almost like a digital caste system. I tend to conflate things that algorithms sort and separate and Minerva is a wild stew influences that shouldn’t work on paper … much less a prompt,its like its made of punctuation. Yet it works. I work at the limits of understanding, Ai is better at patterns that are understood so it can zero in on those structures. I’m all about finding what isn’t so understood, that’s my art side.
To break out of algorithmicly convenient boxes you need tools and both disciples, visual art and music are rich in them. Music teaches one about tempo, rhythm, tonal and perhaps modal things. Composition and flow. Traditional music theory is a tool box to create moods but you can also go your own way like Holdsworth did. Use the tools that suit you, don’t just accept thing because others do it that way… traditional music theory will just make you sound more traditional (don’t even get me started on equal temperament). The visual arts are a bit less ephemeral and conservative than music and persist like a rock in the river. That persistence is a different kind of power. In visual art there is; color theory, spatial concepts and stylistic templates like Expressionism, Minimalism, Cubism and Orphism etc. (all terms the practitioners never liked)… there is cross talk between the two disciplines in terms of composition so if you want to create music that has some of the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s John The Baptist (John in the wilderness) or the solid cor ten steel presence of a Richard Serra, you can do something like that in sound.
For Minerva I chose “collage” as an analog for a fragmented world and the collaged visuals compliment the shards of music with all of its jaunty shifts and 70’s prog elements with modern structure and guitar excesses. Collage was something the Dada movement brought to the fore and it was anti-war and against a lot of capitalism’s effects. In Minerva’s case its against the war on women that is going on, where they are being defined, denigrated and disrespected in language and law. Governments have no business legislating and micromanaging human bodies and minds but they all do it and its trending.
Think of it… language and music are collages that are never static and there is a frisson to abruptly combining angular elements alongside one another like I did in the Minerva video… with the kind of staccato quick cuts that you’d see in Orson Welles’ film The Trial. Sonicly, for Minerva I’ve used elements of Zappa, Bowie, Fripp, 70’s King Crimson, The Cars, a little funk and some Steely Dan + the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Even the drum beat is a bastardization of Duke Ellington’s Blue Pepper. In the video I have curated the fabulous collage artworks of Eva Lake, whom I have long championed. Eva currently has an exhibition in New York at Frosch and Portmann and has strong viewpoints overall. So I was honored when she thought the song was “incredible”… she would tell me if she hated it. Eva has an edge. I respect her musical taste and she said It reminded her a little of Eno’s album The Green World with Fripp. So as a director/musician I wanted her visual push back and a woman’s strong points of view in the video, almost like punctuation and commentary on the other elements, especially the black and white footage, which has a lot of old patriarchal things encoded in it…. but it also a glamour and the cinematographer was James Wong Howe. He’s truly Great (lets reclaim that word) and yet the studio let the film Algiers copyright from 1938 become public domain, so I used it.
The Minerva video also includes myself as an actor (I was discovered by Disney at age 6, a half boring story for later) and classic footage of genius starlet/inventor Hedy Lamarr, whom I’ve been fascinated with since age 4 or 5 for her invention. In her movie Algiers the Casbah is an an exciting cosmopolitan place in the city where people from many different backgrounds mix. Its an old citadel. It has narrow streets not unlike your Genoa’s, “caruggi.” All of these angular interlaced elements are pulled from original contexts and I’ve collaged them into this bouillabaisse of a cultural product that shakes itself rhythmically and harmonically. Like a dragon its a polyglot of things but that makes it a fire breathing fantastical beast! By timing the visual content with the syncopated ostinatos going back and forth its both sonicly and visually like being in a boxing match, a sword fight or my favorite sport, tennis. I grew up with Borg/McEnroe and actually it was Mac’s guitar playing on the Barbara Walters special that lead to my need to have an electric guitar.
In the visual arts I like art that has am activating physical presence… someone like Robert Irwin where he pushes visitors to navigate and sense their way. Meeting and interacting with Robert Irwin was a life highlight. Simply, the most intelligent human I’ve ever encountered. He had this focused intensity that expanded possibilities of understanding and in part they created the MacArthur award for him. When I do something I want it to have that focused intensity that also brings in a lot of other possible interpretations. I think Sjå has that… its hard to define but what it has is very distinct.
To bring up another song off Sjå with direct visual connections there is, Frank Lloyd Fire, which has lyrics about; painter Barnett Newman, art critic Robert Hughes’ book “The Shock of the New” and a terrible fire at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin East in Wisconsin (the state where I was born). Its also about personal things in code and the way culture treats creativity today. I want to reintroduce some of the suppleness in culture that is being squeezed out by all this efficiency… where everything doesn’t have to have a discreet objective or meaning. Zero sum thinking is just too prevalent today. Instead of each bit of culture being in the service of a specific point of view, sometimes it can be an odd Jazzy walkabout like the track Saunter, which is a very human exercise without discreet meaning or objectives. The world needs to go on a long walk, where you just look and enjoy the views. In fact, Saunter is the next single and video, which I am working with Director Dave Mosier on. It is pretty psychedelic but like Zappa I’m not into drugs at all Sure, I drink coffee, sometimes a glass of wine… that’s about it. Portland is the greatest coffee city in the world for its quality and variety and that alone is just one of its charms.
For me music and art are both of the same cloth as a way to explore the idiosyncrasies and particulars of highly developed experiences (like Irwin’s art or Bjork’s Post album). Each discipline like music, visual art, literature or movies has its conventions and vernaculars that seem arbitrary and sometimes anti-creative but if you if you are capable in more than one field you can blithely switch creative grammars as it suits you. Creativity is disregarding blind traditionalism.
Lots of musicians and artists were cross trained or adept, I admire How Zappa was pragmatic, interested in multimedia output like his films and specials (I just watched Cheaper than Cheep), he took a keen interest in film editing and stop motion etc. Paul Klee was an excellent violinist and Bowie went to art school. Similarly, Da Vinci couldn’t be troubled with whether he was being a fine artist, a scientist, musician, inventor or and architect. Back then the professionalized mono cultures and resume culture didn’t exist, it was about showing what you could do, to take something from Robert Hughes it was an avocation not a vocation. We really started to lose that in the 1980’s when resume culture took hold and Hughes’ Shock of the New book chronicles it (get the first edition later ones lack the same incredible final paragraph). Its so terrible that when I apply for fellowships here in Oregon half my output cant be considered because one year visual arts are considered, the next its multimedia and literary (then they disqualify visual art criticism) its counterproductive. It isn’t just my opinion I am a cultural historian and historically by hyper segmenting it throttles truly innovative things.
So the problem is narrowing of definitions and disciplines, It is divide and conquer, I’m co-mingle and thrive. Today the algorithms and Ai are running and sorting the show and they were developed by those who only understand a narrow definition of “efficiency.” I’m a tech guy and have done Oracle database work so I’m no Luddite. People are being fed by algorithms and less frequently make personal discoveries or have them suggested by experts (like Progressive Rock Report) unless we seek out those situations. Personally, I like to browse so I’ve taken to antique shops and thrift stores and I love it when people review anything cultural. But if I cant find something I like Ill create something bespoke… that is what Sjå is. I even shot the cover art. I’m a photographer on top of all this and the cover/thumbnail is of the dogwood tree in the back yard with real lens flare through a classic Pentax fast 50 lens… on an Olympus digital camera body. It really resembles process and philosophy behind the recording the album. In fact, the archaic Norse word “Sjå” means to see and to understand so its a very visual album.
The album was recorded entirely as improvised first takes with no digital correction or samples. What challenges and rewards did this approach present during the creative and recording process?
In an era when you can fix anything in post production there is simply a tendency to try to match some imagined ideal.. the thing is this preconceived ideal gets standardized and homogenized so everything starts to sound and look like everything else. That is pointless and pragmatism as a philosophy (C.S. Peirce was a major adherent) pointed out how adjusting to what is immediately available brings new, unexpected outcomes.
I recorded Sjå in 24bit 96khz digital so I’m not against the technology at all. I just grew up with a 4 track recorder where editing, even punch ins and note replacements were difficult but now its easy. One shot at it instills a certain urgency to get it right. That urgency is animal response. Also, nailing it in one take is something Miles Davis did and I admire immensely. Miles had expectations of freshness and digital corrections” smooth all that out. Basically, just try to get it in the first take, if it wasn’t great, then try another day or not. In fact, the only tracks that made the cut were all first and only tries… something Id never done before on other recordings for myself or others. In Miles’ case he had a crack group and changes they would all know but in my case I was experimenting and discovering the music one element at a time, building it as an aggregate. None of the parts were preconceived but there was a lot of intention at the moment each note was played. Id play it back and think is there something here or not?
Overall, doing everything yourself takes much longer because you need time to get any objectivity and you only have so much energy… I’m far more energetic than most people but really I could only cuts 3-7 drum parts in a session or 5-10 guitar parts in a day when I felt it. Because I was working alone I learned quickly that I had to be in the mood to make this work, especially for drums. So I would generally record drums around full moon times (I’m a were-drummer?) when I was less self conscious… plus, its not my main instrument though I have played for 29 years. Still, I don’t have a kick ass shuffle like Jeff Procaro so I have my limitations (I did practice a lot though). Still, I’m an interesting drummer who does idiomatic things that are sometimes tricky. I definitely Love odd time signatures and shifting them. I also kept telling myself, look Stevie Wonder could have had any drummer he wanted but he did it himself for Superstition. He may not be the greatest drummer, but for that song he was the best drummer on Earth. Certain things happen when the everyone shares the same brain and the process taught me great deal. It was a process of self-discovery in the depths of the COVID Pandemic and I did skill up.
Challenges? So some days I wanted to fire the drummer… other days I was listening as the recording engineer and thinking alright that’s odd, where’s this going? Then, after a few listens this guitarist would come in, full of confidence and it would work miraculously. As a producer I would never expect another musician to give form and direction to that chaos, but I manged to do it but its hard to have objectivity. Overall, I learned respect myself more as a highly intuitive session player. Jar Farmers was like that, so was Minerva, Occultation Astrocytes and definitely Ithika Iterations. Ithika is just one guitar, first try, played all the way through and naked. Its the last thing recorded for the album and the final track. It was a junk drum track because I forgot to turn the phantom power on for the overhead mic but I rediscovered and loved the performance, so I created a fake room mic track. In the mix I had fun giving each drum hit and guitar chord a different reverb, delay etc… its like I played the ambient spaces between notes as a producer.
On other tracks Id get through the first drums and guitar and have to return to it over a week or even months later, thinking about what it needed to bring things together or should have removed so there’s an editor at work but there was no time or pitch correction. I wanted that real sense of immediacy… not the plastic surgery version. For Saunter the saxophone came last, 6 months later and it made the song. So that’s an advantage… if I felt something was needed I could be there for the session, no phone calls. The disadvantage is its all on me and had to motivate myself, luckily I have a lot of confidence, tend to be hard on myself and like to work.
I wanted to prioritize the spark of creation. Digital tools let us sanitize and make the music more “correct” to a ridiculous degree. So all my pitches are what I recorded… if the floors of the 100 year old house it was recorded in creaked, then that often got left in. Sure, I’d ride faders in mix down but even that is kinda old school performance… so many plugins will do that for you now. I admire Eddie Kramer and what he did with Hendrix, Zeppelin, Bowie and the Beatles etc. and its part of the performance. Hendrix’s music holds up because of its vibrancy and idiomatic elements… not its sanitized perfection. Jimmy Page, who also worked with Kramer absolutely knows that and he’s my pole star… a guitarist producer who thinks granularity. Id love to meet Page and just chat about art, he collects medieval tapestries.
My point is we try to “smooth” things too much these days and I definitely leave in resonances, granularity and strange bracing moments… though I’m surprised at how much more listener friendly with hooks Sjå is compared to music I made over 25 years ago. I think I missed people during the pandemic, I like very different points of view and the feedback. Its nice that some love the album, even a surprising number of women. It isn’t for everyone… if it were bakery it would have lots of whole grains and heirloom eggs… not ultra refined flour and sugar.
The biggest challenge was skilling up as a mix engineer with all new tools on the computer but there is great info on youtube. I recommend channels like Produce Like a Pro and In The Mix with Joe Carrell (though I broke rules for good reasons, like not using Soothe 2 plugin, which is an industry standard I’m avoiding). I also had to build out the studio with a treated environment and then I had to learn the room… my main monitors are 30 years old! I should upgrade those but I finished all mixes with headphones, which is very today. The technology is really incredible for musicians today… Frank Zappa would have been in heaven. Suddenly, I have all the consoles, eq’s, compressors and reverbs I could dream of so I had to learn those though I did have my collection of mics… many vintage but not the really expensive large diaphragm condensers, I still need to find the ideal vocal mic. A very generous musician lent me some fantastic mics including a JZ V11, which has this amazing low end you can hear best in vocals on Draupnir Wave, The Ballad of Hulda Klager and Frank Lloyd Fire, their Vintage 67 might be more ideal overall (Id like to try it) but the V11 is unique. Creating Sjå I learned I can trust my voice to pull a song together and that V11 mic is smooth without costing as much as a car.
Today many plugin programs will mix a song for you, but not my music because all those jaunty spikes and novel quirks are what drive it and make it work. Sjå is designed to confuse AI by testing humans to the limits and generally its too complicated and idiosyncratic. AI wants an efficient outcome to shoot for, a human artist is on a journey and Sjå is basically a travelogue through a strange land. Its designed to challenge but I’m happy it has so many hooks. I do listen to it every day. Frankly, that’s never happened for any of my other music before. Greats like Zappa, Jeff Beck and Peart are all gone. I want to pick up some of that slack any way I can and it wont happen by by copying them.
You mention strong influences from Frank Zappa and other guitar virtuosos like Vai, Holdsworth, and Di Meola. How do these inspirations manifest in “Sjå”?
I saw electric guitar as a way to develop my own voice away from classical music… and long before I stopped playing in orchestras I was developing my own technique and sonic palette on guitar as a kid growing up in Wisconsin. I was voracious, looking at other musicians who played by their own rules so of course Zappa was the first name I found, some of his humor is too puerile for me but Shut Up and Play Your Guitar was important as well as Black Napkins and Inca Roads. Then I realized I didn’t have a drummer of that quality available so I practiced guitar to Buddy Rich drum solos (I did go to a Terry Bozzio drum clinic and have some of those Paiste Vision, cymbals he used to use.. a cup chime and ride. I should note I found Zappa’s music at first through Dr. Demento’s radio program, he just retired after 55 years. Is the Make Weird Music YouTube channel the new Dr. Demento?
I love Zappa’s tone as much as his note choices and the way his guitar solos were opportunities for improvisation. On leads he’d use these in-guitar mid boosts and his sounds were often gnarly B movie alien things and like Hendrix and Zappa, I love ring modulators and other rude effects… it sounds like the guitar is out of phase with the rest of the planet… I used one on my first solo on Minerva where I’m also do Paul Gilbert style string skipping… its actually my warped version of the Sweet Home Alabama solo, squeezing out notes and shredding… I envisioned a green squirrel on another planet leaping from space tree to space tree. Like sonic wasabi I don’t want people to be impressed with the technique, I want them to wonder… what just happened? So the next experience can be savored.
Its not just leads though, Zappa’s rhythm playing on The Ocean is the Ultimate Solution is just so good and I definitely take cues from that kind of angular chord work, Nile Rogers too. I really liked early Vai and his Alien Love Secrets column in Guitar Player but after Passion and Warfare I lost all interest… I don’t like his glossy production style and preferred his old Carvin X100 tone and production when his studio was less sophisticated but his live work is generally magic so the studio is the problem. Its like eating over-processed food. I have a lot of opinions about production and I hope that this BEAT project gets Vai back on a more interesting course as a very progressive musician. Till Beat, nobody was talking about him as a prog great, which is absurd. It is like Belew and Fripp staged an intervention. LOL.
Early Vai was a major major influence and I thought, “ok he transcribed human speech… I’m gonna study songbird phrasing and note clusters and work that into my playing.“ That’s where those little chirpy runs and fills come from on Sjå Nobody complains about all the shreddy notes and dissonances that birds chirp, they are often in the background like birdsongs in a meadow but if a redwing blackbird goes off nearby its an experience. This came from when I was when I was a teenager practicing ridiculous amount of time on very esoteric things trying to build a different vernacular, its just a part of me and I can do it in my sleep. My cats like that kind of lead playing… One of them, our Lynx Point Siamese loves Jeff “The Skunk” Baxster’s solo on My Old School. He jumps on my shoulder. If I got his attention while mixing a solo of mine and he jumps up, then I’m happy. His hearing is immensely better than any human’s and he is just locked on the tweeters of my monitors with a different way to evaluate sound. I like all of Steely Dan’s guitar players especially, Baxster, Randell, Dias and Carlton.
The first song I learned on electric guitar was Synchronicity 2 by The Police and I learned about 11th and add9 chords from Andy Summers. I also loved his collaborations with Robert Fripp and those were immensely influential for me (King Crimson came later). All of that weaving of guitar parts on Sjå, that’s partly Fripp and Summer’s influence… also the band Television. BTW Summers absolutely deserves song writing credit for Every Breath You take and Fripp deserves songwriting credit for Heroes. Two of the greatest songs of the 20th century. Maybe on my next album Ill shoot for something like that? But I wont play everything.
Then there are the major 70’s fusion guitarists like McLaughlin, Di Meola. I love them all… I appreciate expertise and that era had this brashness. Another guitarist I think about a lot is Robert Quine. I love his work with Lou Reed, Matthew Sweet and John Zorn. He had immense intensity with wild bends and my favorite distortion box is a Prescription Electronics Yardbox. Like Quine I have a prototype one that I fell in love with only to realize its just a few serial numbers away from one he had. Portland is a hotbed for guitar pedal makers.
Alan Holdsworth was especially crucial for Sjå as he absolutely had his own idiomatic way of playing, which was mostly legato, which was completely different from all the alternate picking I do, which is more Al Di Meola. Holdsworth created his own music theory, which was very inspiring and his close interval clusters of notes and long stretches combined with alien phrasing, what’s not to love? In fact, my beloved Kiesel Vader 7 string has Holdsworth pickups in it and it was THE crucial piece of gear for the album. I have other 7 strings but all you hear on the album is the that Kiesel. Such a joy and those Holdsworth pickups are so expressive. Also, I love headless guitars, you kind forget about them physically as you hold them and just play… Allan was a major proponent and Kiesel builds great headless guitars that are very consistent, especially the necks. Look, you can have 30 guitars you like to look at or just one you Love to play… if you are a player then you want that one. Mine is that Kiesel, best gear purchase ever… they arent paying me… I just love that guitar and Holdsworth is the reason they make headless guitars. When I was shooting the Minerva video a guy from Fender came over after I was done and asked about the incredible woods and wondered what it was I was playing. I love that they are a family company.
I met David Torn last year, like Holdsworth he does his own thing too and I showed him this old Door X cassette from the 80’s I had to special order. He said he wished it had been mixed better. I thought, ok even legends like him have an ordeal when its time to mix, never feeling completely satisfied. This was just before I was about to mix Sjå Good lesson.
The single “Minerva” has been described as a collaboration in spirit between Zappa and Bowie. Could you elaborate on the story and concept behind this track?
Bowie and Zappa are two of my biggest influences and well, wouldn’t it have been interesting if they could have worked together? I call it an unrequited collaboration between the two, lol. Of course they were polar opposites in the 70’s and at one time competed for the same musicians… most famously, Adrian Belew. They just weren’t going to be compatible but it is hilarious that Bowie’s charm was worthless when confronted by Zappa’s acid sarcasm in a Berlin restaurant. Some guitar forums have said I sound a little like Belew, I think it was progressive ears. I don’t hear it but OK. So Minerva was this unrequited collaboration thought experiment and a breakthrough moment when recording the album. It is a toe tapper.
During the depths of the pandemic I had already recorded like 26 songs and thought ok im close to done. Up to that point everything was very complex and resembled little of the music that most would recognize so I thought, lets try something people might recognize and illustrate my interests? So I simplified the drums (its a bastardization of Ellington’s Blue pepper and some stuff from The Cars). It came together in 1 day and I wanted it to start with a counter to the “millennial whoop,” which is overdone so I did my chanted my version of the 7 dwarves work song and the Flying Monkeys from the Wizard of Oz with Bowie like vocals (also kind of a Greek Chorus). The first guitar guitar solo I was envisioning something like a squirrel from another planet jumping from tree to tree… I am doing this Paul Gilbert style string skipping and the tone is intentionally low distortion like sweet home Alabama but there some ring modulator and strange distortions at certain frequencies. There is a quick descending run a little before that which is a nod to Steely Dan’s Bodhisattva.
The lyrics are about bucking this tend of labeling everything, especially gender related things as well as the overall drift of language. The basic understanding is that the Greek goddess Athena had a direct Roman analog but both feminine deities are polyglots of other entities. There were pre-Roman cults that exist in some form today, many are celebrations of Mary but they are far older. Its is syncretism and I think about how culture coalesces. There is a drift and all of it is suspect Language is a tool, not some owners manual for what is what and the music is designed to convey that having the melodic Bowiesque stuff contraposed with Zappa/Frippian/Ronson guitar countermelodies and snarky Zappa like spoken word stuff and harmonies. I love women and they go through so much… expected to be goddess and saints… or off the pedestal all sorts of demeaning things. For such progressive music my album has done well with women, maybe its because it isn’t about propping up a grandiose male ego… my male ego is plenty grandiose without musical support! Its just a tool to motivate myself. As a rule never let the tool take over the spotlight…. that goes for technique or something Like Ai. That’s the tail wagging the dog.
Minerva has hooks for days but its still rather strange and suddenly after its completion I went on a wild 27 song recording streak. Of the 14 tracks on Sjå 12 came from that streak post Minerva, plus Minerva herself. I just got better and I’m aware that some might consider Sjå extremely demanding to listen to I find it far more listenable and hook laden than anything else I’ve ever put out… I’ve done about 5 albums, between myself and my first group which was a duo called ABL. Minerva is a super important piece of music for me and I should be sick of it but I am not… it has a dance bounce to it and I learned my voice could elevate and carry a song hook-wise too.
Besides guitar, you performed many instruments on the album, including viola, drums, bass, Oberheim synth, Nepalese death flute, trombone, and saxophone. How did you approach playing such a variety of instruments in a fully improvised way?
There is a bed instrument… usually drums but always a rhythmic pulse. I usually have some mood idea in mind… for example with Quiet Eye there’s a calm in the storm. It is a kind of Neil Peart tribute (he did a lot of disco-like hi hat work, especially in the 80’s). For Draupnir Wave its throat singing and on Incredulous Resonance its repeating snare/hi hat stumble pattern inspired by Bowie’s 5 Years. Sometimes that bed instrument is removed and I kept layering but either way its an accretion process. After the bed is down Id often listen to it on my walks and really familiarize myself with what I played so I can internalize it. I recall music and visuals in a cinematic way in my head after a few listens. Then when I felt inspired Id lay down guitar tracks cold, with nothing worked out ahead of time and the guitar/drum interplay would work… or not. If something doesn’t work it just gets deleted but after a while it builds up and I start hearing where I want it to go and the melodic parts get added. I recorded 57 songs songs, 14 made it on to Sjå and I think about 18 were under consideration. All had something going on but the ones that weren’t considered just didn’t sustain themselves from start to finish… There’s a song about the lawyers for famous musicians like Tom Petty, Robert Fripp and Robert Plant all forming their own band but they just end up suing each other as an encore. Its funny but as you’d expect… its anti-climactic.
Generally, I want things to weave and even the impressive guitar solo stuff isn’t given a pure spotlight like some other shredders might… to me fast notes are just a kind of conveyance of adrenaline like a squirrel jumping from tree to tree… not a gee that’s impressive moment, I just want to quicken the pulse. For instruments like saxophone and trombone I had to consciously practice daily for weeks before tracking to build up my embouchure as they aren’t daily drivers like guitar and drums. For Saunter that barely in control saxophone sound, especially when I go a few cents flat became interesting microtonally and I ended that song at the point it squeals. The sax was a late addition and it really makes Saunter work and gives it a summer vibe (nearly all of it was recorded in the summer but the sax was tracked this past winter, while I was mixing. Usually, the bass guitar, the Tar (a one of a kind fretless instrument with classical guitar strings that sounds like a plucked upright bass built and gifted by my friend Todd Milovich) or the throat signing (which is the bass on Jar Farmers) all happen after the primary vocal take… that way “the bass” and my deep baritone voice stay out of each other’s way or support each other. I’m not sure of my exact baritone vocal range but I think it might be a noble baritone? Perhaps I could do voice over for intimidating robots for film and video games? I also play viola and 7 string guitar so mixing music with so much low mid range is tricky and having the bass guitar or Tar, even Oberheim tracked late helped. Vocals were typically towards the end too.
Vocals and lyrics were improvised on first takes as well, which is quite rare. How do you prepare yourself mentally and emotionally to capture that immediacy in singing and writing?
I like words, perhaps too much but I also distrust them because they come so easily. For Sjå the lyrics came in a variety of ways. Sometimes I would think of a phrase, in the case of Minerva I thought of the 7 dwarves and the flying monkeys in the wizard of oz as a contrast to the millennial whoop so that, “Ohhh eee Oh ahhh” figure just came out. Sometimes, Id just put a bunch of loosely related words down on paper with no idea if id use any of them. Other times I just went for it cold. On Selkie I was thinking about several women I care about and have worked with who are facing life threatening skeletal system conditions.
Sometimes, I had just one word in mind and Id freestyle off that. For others like Jar farmers I had the title ahead of time but to prepare Id wrote down a bunch of economics concepts and pull from that if I got stuck but even that was mostly free-styling. There’s this stunt I pull live which is to freestyle complicated vocals while shredding improvised Paul Gilbertesque riffs. At the album release I did that on a song called The Son of Roy Thomas Baker (who had just died and we made it up on the spot) and I felt the room kinda go, whoa! Apparently my speech center and my improvisational guitar note selection of my brain can function independently? On Sjå the tune that became Occultation Astrocytes (which is probably my favorite track, along with Quiet Eye, Draupnir Wave and Ithika Iterations) had vocals but I nixed them and added the trombone. I do like ballads and I have a file of interesting song titles and potential phrases that I go to. For vocals Ill listen to the instrumental tracks over and over again to learn that music inside out then when I am very familiar and feel eloquent I go for it.
Frank Lloyd Fire is intensely emotional… I’ve been preparing for that for nearly a decade. I’ve learned what it takes to get in the zone and there’s no formula… that said the right microphone helped and the JZ V11 was it. Its deep, silky and drenched in doom when combined with my voice. Its a jazzer of a tune and that mic wouldn’t work for more rock tracks… but for FLF as I call it its the best option at a great price. Not paid for that at all, just a kind musician who lent me his.
The album’s organic and human-centered production is a direct response to the rise of AI in music. What is your perspective on AI’s impact on music today, and how does “Sjå” position itself in this landscape?
Ai is just a tool, but its potentially the most powerful tool we’ve ever created because it doesn’t just save human labor and decision making, it can replace it. It can isolate creators and reduce distinctiveness. That said it definitely makes things more accessible, you can see it in videos and content generation. Yet, Ai and what has lead to it have been ever present in music since the 80’s with its click tracks, drum machines and analog/computer editing. The editing has just become more seamless, standardized and easier to achieve.
The difference now is this is beginning of generative Ai where the software can interpolate and generate content. This is great if you want to do what is standard but that’s not my focus. I’m going for maximum idiomatic signature sounds… so called flaws like not being perfectly on pitch or timing discrepancies are all part of what gives music its character. Inconsistencies are an asset. Its why I love the recordings of the 70’s, especially say 1974-1984, which was an era of massive change…. even the tape it was recorded onto had wow and flutter. There is jitter with digital too but its minuscule by comparison and different. By the 1990’s the ability to fix things and make everything more consistent with samples etc. we started to lose idiomatic aspects of the original performance. I wont go down the digital/analog rabbit hole here and I mostly just care how things sound… lets’ just say late analog and later digital both sound great. The real issue is the veritas of the performance and in this case I just wanted it to be as human as possible…. So if I drag or rush in tempo because I got distracted by a bird outside the window or on purpose it might seem arbitrary but it is also character and is a record of my problem solving as a musician to make it fit with the other instruments. You lose that with Ai or using any of those drummer programs. That said such tools allow musicians the ability to be one man band’s without learning 12+ instruments. Since I can do it all myself without ai I thought I should demonstrate the difference and I had all this music coming out of me.
You have a significant legacy as a cultural influencer in Portland, including your role in establishing the Rothko wing at the Portland Art Museum. How does this legacy shape your current artistic goals?
When I moved to Portland I was shocked that the city’s most famous son one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, Mark Rothko, had no recognition in the town where he grew up, Portland Oregon. Even supposed admirers of his still aren’t aware he grew up here and had his first museum exhibition at the Portland Art Museum. It isn’t discussed in schools and there are no bronze placard saying this is where he sold newspapers beneath the Burnside Bridge, but there are for other people. Its not like Europe where there is history everywhere and Americans are amazingly bad at history. My masters degree is in history and I am a cultural historian.
As a critic and historian I took it upon myself to raise Rothko’s profile and do original scholarship… other writers on my site PORT like Arcy Douglas also took up the topic. PORT gained approval with the author of Rothko’s Catalog Raisonne, David Anfam (RIP). Later when Portland put up a new bridge spanning an area where Rothkowitz lived and wanted to name it. I thought, no way will Portland recognize an artist but perhaps it will highlight the fact he’s unrecognized? It was a knight’s move and I was very high profile about it with front page newspaper articles, OPB radio (big here) and lots of website chatter and in depth articles from my site PORT (http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2013/10/rothko_bridge_n.html) . Apparently, it caught Rothko’s children’s attention and now we are getting a pavilion in the new museum expansion dedicated to his works… Rothko’s family foundation still controls a large # of his works and frankly Rothko detested the art market with rich collectors posing with trophies. This pavilion is a way to highlight the work not the monetary value, which is what Rothko was about.
As for today its a bit of a victory lap. I’ve been here 26 years now and when I arrived in Portland so many said, “nothing ever happens here.” Well it does and lately quite often, Ive had a role in that and its rare a critic can say they changed things. I can and have played a major role as an effective visual art talent scout. The Rothko Pavilion opens November 20th and I’m curating a Rothko related exhibition at the same time. Overall, I consider all the various paths Rothko tried out… he even took acting lessons from Clark Gable so my multitude of interests in composing music, art, writing, even film making just seem natural.
Can you share some insight into your songwriting or composition process when improvising? Do you have any structure or themes in mind, or is it purely spontaneous?
Sometimes I’m just thinking of a mood, other times its a musical agenda. Draupnir Wave was about this immense wave of unstoppable dread and awe that I wanted to be cinematic. It also relates to nature and resource extraction as well as Norse myths. I think everyone expects something arch Scandinavian from me and I felt let’s do something that shows I can score a film, so I guess that one is symphonic skandi-prog. On Saunter I did want it to feel like going for a walk, something close and personal. I’m an avid walker… If you haven’t gone on a walk with me you probably don’t know much about me even if you’ve known me for years. For Incredulous Resonance I wanted that lurching trickle of disinformation to reflect what is going on today, so I wanted a stumbling doubt ridden song with all that palm muting, ala Steve Lukather… in my first band ABL the other member once dubbed me “Wierdkather” because I could play anything but it was always quite strange.
The Ballad of Hulda Klager Writes itself was a special case where I wanted a ballad form because I had the song title first. I admire Hulda, who was a real person and noted lilac cultivator… she actually fought the Columbia River and blazed her own path (https://lilacgardens.com/about/) It is the only acoustic song and I feel like its somewhat Velvet Underground with touches of Michael Hedges and Peter Murphy vocals. I met Hedges on my 22nd birthday when I was playing in the quad during grad school. He was complimentary of my playing but I didn’t recognize him (he had regrown his hair). Later that night during the concert, he came out in the audience and played with the sound hole of his Martin next to my head for the encore.
For Ithika Iterations I was thinking of the end of The Odyssey and the way Ithaca as an island has so many questions around its true location. I had just returned from a road trip out to Utah where I went to grad school then through Montana and back home. Its a vast area and a lot of it is empty. I thought about that scene where Odysseus is restringing his bow and shooting an arrow through axe heads. There’s a unique tension and relief in returning home and finding that home in your heart remains. I’m very proud of that particular track, its more naked than others on the album.
Quiet Eye was another walking song and as I mentioned it has some Neil Peart-isms on drums but also I wanted it to be about focusing one’s attention. Quiet eye is a trait found in some top athletes. In tennis players its they way they take a tense situation and quiet their mind to focus. I wanted a song like that in a world full of distractions. Jar farmers is about questioning this fetish of efficiency in our economics. By what measurements? All of these ultra efficient discreet objectives have massive consequences.
Moonsooth was a kind of pagan justice fantasy. Go Get That! started as this funk thing and I love Fishbone. Everything I do has a funk element to it and that song really gets at the way we used to hunt and gather things and during the pandemic we just ordered things to be delivered. We really have atrophied as hunter gatherers. Then there’s the infamous, Robot Sex Workers Holiday Party, where I’m doing this radical empathy exercise. Humans are terrible to other humans but you know we will be worse to sentient and semi-sentient robots… by having a holiday a degree of sentience is implied and all these sexbots might just want to be far away from the needy meat bags? I love Battlestar Galactica and the second version is a masterpiece of science fiction, its dark and existential.
How has the pandemic influenced your return to music and the themes expressed in “Sjå”?
I had planned to record an album over a few weekends with some friends in April 2020 but the COVID 19 Pandemic hit in March. So at first I just played a lot of guitar but then realized I might need to get my drum chops more in order. The first year and a half was really about switching to 7 string guitar (I had a custom Carvin 7 string already but I only played it 25% of the time… then I dropped in some new pickups and it came alive and I was excited. Then I realized a recording revolution was in progress and like I surfer I know a good wave. The pandemic was good for existential woodshedding on the drums and guitar but the music got better as things began to open up more and vaccines were available.
Songs like Saunter, Go Get That! and Quiet Eye have direct roots in the pandemic but rather than the content being determined by the pandemic it was the process that was most impacted. I could take my time and get my studio chops in order. Minerva took 2 months to mix properly. Saunter was 2 weeks but by the time I was finishing up Sjå I could mix a song in 3-4 hours.
What message or experience do you hope listeners take away from “Sjå”?
I hope that Sjå conveys a message of human empowerment, efficacy and expanded possibilities by taking the idiosyncratic path that creates more options for everyone. Dont just follow the standard templates. So much of what passes for thought today is just presenting just 2 choices, often the standard ways of doing things… that’s always a false framing of any situation. With minimal thought 10+ different courses of action can be produced. Perhaps, not all good ideas but sometimes exploring bad ideas helps you understand new options. With some real creativity, hundreds or even thousands of new options can come forward but one has to not be satisfied with the status quo. I want to shake things loose of their ruts and evaluate them for what they are with originality. That takes better critical thinking skills, which are in a state of atrophy lately, partly because predigested choices are presented. Music effects how we feel and feeling colors the way people think. The “seeing” in Sjå is evaluation and vision for the time at hand. I want to reintroduce some of the suppleness in culture that is being squeezed out by all this efficiency… Suppleness means everything doesn’t have to have a simplified, discreet objective utility or meaning. This plays into Ai and digital sorting because Ai etc. is trained to narrow options. I’m presenting alternatives and everyone can do this in their own way. Originality is possible, Ai is extremely iterative right now but so are humans. We should value originality, especially when it is so rare.
The album is also quite anti-fundamentalist and by fundamentalism I mean a world view based on a single screed, text or ideology that seeks to be the guide and arbiter of all things. No text gives all the answers and there is no owner’s manual for being human. Also, something is not right because it is familiar, so I am presenting unfamiliar things and new ways to look at things. I consider this the suppleness of thought… you just cant expect one strategy and outlook to work in all cases. I want to bring more suppleness back into civilization in whatever way I can and that mean sconflating and complicating things. Modern conveniences are often at a point of diminishing returns now, sometimes something slower, more meandering and less efficient… more organic is more worthwhile and less disposable is what we need. Originality is rarer and more valued now if it is appreciated. Sjå is about reveling in the inconvenience and challenge of something new… perhaps we can grow some new neurons just trying to deal with this music?
Are there any future projects or directions you are planning to explore following this album?
I have a documentary film of the last show I curated, Biomass. It was the first big art show in Portland as the world began to reopen after the waning COVID 19 Pandemic. I’m certain I’ll have some music on that. I also shot a movie called Cardenio… an adapstraction of Shakespeare’s lost play. It is a retelling of Don Quixote from the viewpoint of another character Cardenio. There will definitely be a soundtrack for that and it has a lot of sword fighting in it. Its in black and white because Shakespeare did not have color film… lol.
In the immediate future I’m completing a revamp of my art criticism website PORT: www.portlandart.net and I’m curating a Rothko related exhibition at the end of the year on the block where he sold newspapers. It will be full of surprises.
Thank you very much, Jeff, for taking the time to share your insights and story with us. It has been a pleasure to explore your unique artistic vision and the creative process behind “Sjå.” We wish you all the best with this release and your future endeavors.
For more information and updates, please visit Jeff Jahn’s official Bandcamp page and social media channels.
Purchase “Sjå” on Bandcamp: https://jeffjahn.bandcamp.com/album/sj