Dave: Question part two, because it seems like these things would be related: One of the things I’ve heard you talk about, which is interesting and I would like to understand better, is the mix of you having a musical influence in your family and a lot of professional musical exposure, but also a quality music education experience in school. Your father was a jazz musician and you played gigs with him. And a lot of people would attribute just that to a likelihood of success when you decided to pursue music. On the other hand, you weren't like Dick Oatts, who had a musical father, but was in the middle of Iowa where not much was going on. You had these influences well balanced. Is it possible to figure out which mattered more, if you can even separate them?

 

Donny: I guess I'm always, or at least often, looking for things that will stimulate my creative unconscious. I go through periods, of course, where I don't have that, and I'm actively looking. I follow where that leads, without trying to keep judgment out of it, but I just follow it. And that's something that keeps me engaged and excited about being creative. I look at some of my idols, Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter, and it seems to me that they kept changing. David Bowie, although I didn't really encounter him until later in life, but some of the greats – or Pablo Picasso just kept evolving through these different periods and these different spheres of influence. I think I've always just felt like it's the way it should be to me. And so I've just always lived that way. 

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Dave: So it's maybe an inherent personality trait more than something that you learned early on?

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Donny: Yeah, I can't think of a lesson that taught me that or anything like that. It was just the way it was. I know one thing for me personally is I feel I try to live in the moment and it's what's going on right now. I don't often reflect on some gig in 1987 or whatever. Sometimes maybe those ideas come up, but I'm always thinking about where I am, what I want to get into, what's coming next, and how do I keep growing? 

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It's a real determination to keep growing and evolving. The music world is giant and there's so much to learn. I still feel like a neophyte in some ways. There's just so much music I haven't even listened to, man. Music that I wanted to have checked out or absorbed. There's an endless amount to learn and get into.

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Dave: One of several reasons I wanted to talk to you about this is because I was thinking, “Donny's new album is coming out. I should do a review of it. It'll make me listen to it fifty times in a weekend and it'll be a good exercise. But I'm listening to it and I’m thinking I can just write what I am hearing is happening. But to do that without getting your thoughts on it seemed to be an empty exercise. And to me that means the music is interesting. There are other albums where I start listening and I sort of know exactly what's happening. It can be great music but the creative process isn’t as much of a mystery. But your music is in an identity... I don’t want to say transition and imply that this most recent album is transitioning to something else. But it’s constantly in transition, and it seems essential to get your take on it to get the full picture.

I like those arranging analysis book where the author interviews the composer and tell him what’s in his charts. “Okay, if you say so.” He’s probably not wrong but the interest for me lies in the actual process the composer used. A few years ago, a friend of mine, Eric [Allen], did a book transcribing “Body and Soul” solos by almost a dozen tenor players. I helped with the analysis and I’m thinking this will be interesting and valuable but I want to hear each one of these great players talk me through these solos. Almost all of them are dead so that’s out. And I can hear people arguing both sides of how much understanding someone else’s process matters. But you almost certainly have more insight into what Coltrane might have been thinking while he's playing a “Body and Soul” solo. 

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Donny: Well, I don't know about that, but thanks. 

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Dave: Well, more than the average man on the street, for sure. 

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Donny: Right, okay. I'll take that. 

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Dave: My point is in order to understand the creative process, you can take the music on its own merits, but I want to be getting the thought process of the person who did it. Otherwise it's just speculation. 

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Donny: Right. 

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Dave: So I was scouring a few of your different interviews for this story but couldn’t find a detailed version. I remember when we did that recording with Tain and Luis in 2014 and the night before we did that session, I was at 55 Bar and sitting at the bar listening to your group. Dave Binney came and sat in and was playing the tunes as well. But you came over at the break and you were telling that story about Bowie sitting, basically right where I was, with sort of disguise on. I don't know if I've heard that other than you telling it that night.

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Donny: Bowie came to 55 Bar with Maria Schneider and my band was playing. It was actually the warm up gig before we recorded Fast Future. So we were playing all of that music and David and Maria came to the first set. I just saw him out of the corner of my eye and I don't know if he had on an actual disguise. He just had a hat, I think, and a jacket. 

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Dave: The celebrity disguise. 

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Donny: Yeah. And that was it. They were there for the first set. Then the set ended, people came up, we were talking, and then they were gone. It wasn't until about a week later that I met him for the first time.

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Dave: Wasn't it that the bartender had recognized him?

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Donny: Yeah, but I also knew he was coming, though. So for me, it wasn't a surprise. Maria had told me that they were going to come down because he'd been checking out Casting for Gravity and was checking us out to see if we would be the right group for Blackstar.

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Dave: And so some of the comments made about that project, and I think you’ve referred to them, suggested that your band was recruited for that gig and then sort of co-opted in order to use your sound for that record. But your take on it was sort of the opposite, right? Because there were almost complete tunes being created before you started? 

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Donny: Yeah, I think he knew about us and had checked to Casting for Gravity. I know he was listening to that. I think he was listening to Jason [Lindner]'s Now Versus Now, Mark [Giuliana]'s Beat Music. So I know he made some references. In one email he sent, he referred to “Alpha and Omega,” which is a track off Casting for Gravity, which is a cover we did of a Boards of Canada song.

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He referenced that, so I knew he was checking out our thing. I can't say how it directly influenced the song demos that he sent. But the songs that he sent were great and really had all the elements beautifully in place. So it just felt really seamless. I got the music and I eventually distributed it to the guys and sort of processed it and added the winds.

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But I would dispute the notion that he co-opted the band’s sound. We went in with the energy that we play with. It's a lot of interaction and a lot of back and forth. And he just really stepped into that energy as a fifth person, just elevating it all with his conviction. And all of it within the framework of these great songs that he brought. It all felt very organic and cohesive. 

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Dave: I also remember at Systems II, having a conversation about some specifics of the creative process. At that point, you and Jason, Mark, and Tim, you're no beginners in terms of a solid process, having the music evolve through rehearsals and then performing it at a high level. So an interesting aspect there is what did you all take away from that that affected your process afterwards? I have all your lead sheets from those albums [Casting for Gravity, Fast Future]. My students and I look at your lead sheets in jazz composition classes and I explain what I assume is the rehearsal process and rationale for the format of the charts. They're very minimalist in that everything's there that you need: a saxophone line, bassline and chords. “This is probably what Donny gives to the group.” But sometimes on your records not everything on the sheet is presented the same way or even in the same order.

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But then Blackstar happened and you’re doing a similar process, at least theoretically, but you're doing it with this rock star. Can you contrast the two environments and experiences? And then how much of an impact has that had on your creative process after that?

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Donny: Yeah, the lead sheet thing, it's like you described. Often I have some piano voicings written and I always feel like that's because I want to show the starting point where it was conceived, what I was hearing. Then, often the bass line depends on who's playing bass. With Tim [Lefebvre], he'll often start to augment things and improvise with what's there. Jason will start with the lead sheet, but the more he has the song internalized, he’ll process it through his lens and he does his thing with it. I've always felt that when you have musicians who are on a high level, you want them to do what they do. When I think of the band leaders like, you know, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, they didn't seem like they were control freaks. It seemed like they were just letting it all happen to a certain degree. And that's the philosophy I think I've always gone with. I just want people to feel empowered to bring their thing to it. And when I need to say something, I say something. But I'm wanting the lead sheets to contain the essential elements of the song. 

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This is something that was fantastic when I was in Dave Douglas's band. He had really concise lead sheets that were clear, that had all the essential elements in place. So that's what I strive for. I don't want to have six page charts. I just want to keep it concise, clear, and not overwritten. So it's not like you're having to decode F over E over C over G5 or something. It should be clear for the musicians, so they can get comfortable as quickly as possible. And from that comfortable space, they play more. I just happen to hear music that way. That was sort of my modus operandi. 

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But then with David, with Blackstar, I mapped everything out. This was particularly true because I wanted to add all these voices with flute, alto flute, and clarinet and some other things. So I had a lot of the music laid out, multiple parts for different woodwinds, and a sense of what the song forms were going to be. I wrote out the bass, the harmony, and learned them. My parts had almost everything except the drum grooves on them. 

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But everybody had their method. Tim, for example: he wrote out the bass lines from the original demos and wrote out the song form. I don't even know if he physically wrote them out or learned them by ear. But he didn't take the lead sheets that had more information included. Mark made a little drum chart of the drum pattern because all the drum patterns that we had from the demos were all alike. But for me, in the role of the orchestrator, in a sense, I had done a lot because that’s usually just how I do it anyway.

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So that's basically what was happening with Blackstar. And then after that, I think I've continued in a similar way, still just trying to have a lead sheet with melody, bass line and chord voicing. It just feels like it's the clearest method.

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And then when I bring those kinds of charts in, I often see what the musicians do first. And sometimes I'll say, “Okay, can it be more of the written bass line?” or “Can there be more of the original chord voicings that I have there?” But I'm always curious to see what people do and what they bring to it. There's a lot of opportunity for learning there for me. And to figure out what I want more of in the music.

 

As you can imagine, there's a lot of trust involved in that. And we've built that over the years.

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Dave: I wrote down something else along those lines. You've been playing with some of the same people for a long time. Clearly they’re good enough to play great things in many contexts and you’ve had enough time together to develop a rapport. And it’s a composition cliché to talk about writing for certain players and having them in mind while you’re thinking of ideas. But by this point, have there been instances where you actually know those guys so well that you actually predicted how they were going to transform their part of the music after a series of rehearsals?