Patrick Smith: Bebop, Brass Bands, and a Bookstore
With ‘Words Underlined’ out now on Lit Soc Records, saxophonist Patrick Smith talks about the trio format's peculiar difficulty, what he learned from Mark Shim in New York, and why Toronto lets him play everything.
Today, The Tonearm’s needle lands on Toronto saxophonist Patrick Smith.
Patrick has become a key player in the city’s creative music scene. His new album, Words Underlined, came out in December on Lit Soc Records—the first release from the new label started by Sellers & Newell, a Toronto bookstore that moonlights as a music venue. Patrick recorded there with guitarist Dan Pitt and drummer Lowell Whitty. The trio plays without a bass, and the album alternates between composed pieces and full improvisations.
A few episodes back, we featured a talk with Noah Franche-Nolan, who also collaborated with Dan Pitt. A link to that, and my November 2024 conversation with Dan, are both in the show notes.
Patrick’s here to talk about making music in the trio format, the Toronto scene, and why a bookstore was the right place to record.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from the album Words Underlined by The Patrick Smith Words Trio)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Patrick Smith at patricksmithsax.com and follow him on Instagram and Facebook
• Purchase The Patrick Smith Words Trio’s Words Underlined from Lit Soc Records, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Listen to Patrick’s fusion project Pangea: Rebirth on Bandcamp
Sellers & Newell and Lit Soc Records:
• Sellers & Newell Secondhand Books — Toronto’s beloved College Street bookstore and performance space
• Lit Soc Records on Bandcamp
• Why this Toronto bookstore is starting its own record label — Toronto Today, November 2025
• Toronto bookstore is moonlighting as an underground live music venue — BlogTO, September 2021
The Musicians:
• Dan Pitt — guitarist and composer, Toronto
• Between the Lines of Dan Pitt’s ‘Horizontal Depths’ — The Tonearm, November 2024
• Lowell Whitty — drummer and founding member of the Heavyweights Brass Band
Mentors and Influences:
• Mark Shim — saxophonist; Patrick’s primary teacher in New York
• Mark Shim at Manhattan School of Music
• Dave Young — Order of Canada recipient; Oscar Peterson’s longtime bassist, now based in Toronto
• David Liebman — saxophonist, educator, and major post-Coltrane voice
• Developing a Personal Saxophone Sound by David Liebman — available via J.W. Pepper
• Jeff Coffin — saxophonist; source of the Sonny Rollins quote relayed in the episode
Musical References:
• Paul Motian — the drummer whose bassless trio recordings were the direct inspiration for this project
• Paul Motian Trio — It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago (ECM, 1985) — with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano
• Paul Motian Trio — Time and Time Again (ECM, 2007) — with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano
• Johnny Cash — My Mother’s Hymn Book — the stripped-down solo Cash record Patrick cites as a model for songwriting
• Sonny Rollins — saxophone icon; his advice about creativity as resistance runs through the episode
• From Sacred Space to Silent Film — Noah Franche-Nolan Serves the Music — The Tonearm, February 2026 — Noah also collaborates with guitarist Dan Pitt
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)n
Lawrence Peryer: You've been working in various contexts and leading different types of ensembles for a bit now, and I'm curious what the genesis story is for the trio with Dan and Lowell, and what the attraction is for you of that particular ensemble?
Patrick Smith: For me, the genesis of it was that Dan and I had had a similar trio years and years previous — saxophone, drums, and guitar, no bass. I'm quite the fan of the Paul Motian recordings that have no bass, with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, and the later ones with Jason Moran and Chris Potter.
So initially I put a Paul Motian show together and we played some of that music with those guys. Lowell Whitty had been on a previous release of mine, a trio recording, and I've worked with him quite a bit. I've played in his Heavyweights Brass Band a number of times, and I really loved the way he plays drums. I felt that early on in his career, he had more opportunities to play more open, improvisatory music, whereas now that is less the direction his career has taken. But he really loves it, and I feel somewhat similar myself — at the onset of my career, I played a lot more of that music than I do now, and when I make the time for it, it's often in my own projects. My recorded output reflects heavily on that tradition coming out of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and the free jazz movement of the sixties, but my day-to-day work, less so.
I enjoyed that show so much. Dan is one of the few guitarists I have access to in Toronto who can really navigate the world without a bass player effectively. A lot of people can't do it. He is truly a master of tone on the guitar, and that was the genesis: we played this gig doing the music of Paul Motian, and I enjoyed it so much. I had some sketches and old compositions that had never been recorded that I thought were good and would work well in this format.
So then we did another show where we included some of my material alongside the Motian stuff, and it went really well. I felt we should go ahead and record it, because I think there have been too many times in my professional life over the last ten or twelve years — either my own project or somebody else's — where it lasts for a couple of years, there are a bunch of really great shows, and then it dissipates with no recorded output. So I was pretty eager to get something documented, because I thought the group sounded very strong.
In terms of my own recorded output, I had a quintet release and a quartet release that was somewhat co-led with Mark Aanderud on vibraphone, also in this free jazz world. I thought this was a nice foil to what I had already recorded — it represents a different side of me. A lot of my previously recorded material was fairly intense, whereas with this band, I can flex the softs and louds of my expression on the saxophone, which is what I really love. It's open, whereas a lot of my other previous bands and releases were very much more planned out, with room for solos. Here, all the charts are one page for the most part.
I really wanted to get back into this world that I hadn't been super involved with the last few years. I'm fascinated by the trio format, even though it's very hard. I now have two releases with two different trios, and I really marvel at the great trios across all of music history and how hard it is. I keep coming back to the trio format in a variety of ways as the most rewarding and challenging format for me.
Lawrence: I love that comment about the trio format being hard, and I'm curious — is it specifically about the trio and the absence of a true chordal instrument without the bass, or is it all trios? What is it?
Patrick: I think it's all trios. The music I recorded with my chordless trio, with Chris Banks and Lowell Whitty — I released two singles and a video from it — I really love Sonny Rollins and his recordings with no chord instrument, and it is very, very hard to do well. I didn't release everything from that recording because I wasn't happy with how it turned out.
In some ways, even a duo is easier to navigate musically than a trio. I don't know what it is about the number three. In a quartet or a quintet, everybody has their own specific role, but in a trio, everybody has to inhabit a variety of roles to make it work, and navigating that on the fly can be hard.
Lawrence: I love that — it's really illuminating. I wanted to ask a couple of follow-up questions about the actual musicians in this trio, because what you're saying helps me understand a little bit about why it works so well with Dan in particular. The way he plays, his use of electronics and texture, makes a lot of sense to me in terms of why he can fill a lot of roles and space. How important is that expanded palette in this context?
Patrick: It's important, for sure. I find with a lot of guitar players it's very hard to have a serious sound concept through pedals and through a clean tone. The thing that attracts me to musicians is tone. Dan has spent a long time really fine-tuning every aspect of his sound, so every tone he uses — through his pedals, through a straight tone — is incredibly well thought out. You can tell he has really honed in on what pedals he uses over the years. His rig is very small, but he really knows how to use those pedals.
I also use pedals sometimes, and I'm just in awe talking to him about it. That Strymon Blue Sky pedal — he knows every possible way to use it. He has listened to such a wide variety of guitar tones, and every single sound he uses is great. As a saxophone player, tone is everything to me, and that's what drew me to the saxophone. The reason Dan succeeds in this format is because he really understands tone.
On this recording in particular, the brilliant recording engineer Tom Upjohn suggested we bring both of Dan's Princeton Reverb amps. We recorded the guitar in stereo, and Tom brought a little chorus pedal so the two amps have a slight phase between them. It sounds unbelievable.
Lawrence: Yeah, that opens it up big.
Patrick: It opens it up fully. I usually prefer piano in my bands, but Dan's mastery of tone on the guitar is unparalleled. That's why I love playing with him so much — it forces me to really think about my own sound, which in a more open context is everything.
Lawrence: I really appreciate you going under the hood with me on some of this stuff. And what about Lowell? You mentioned earlier — I'm going to badly paraphrase you — but essentially this record is a chance for him to flex muscles that you knew he had but isn't always flexing. Is that a fair way to put it?
Patrick: Yes. Lowell has played on so many recordings in his life. He is more known as a guy who can play funk, the funkier side of things. He came up quite young in a fairly famous Toronto Dixieland band playing trad jazz — from about seventeen to twenty-two, he played and toured doing that while he was in school, with a band called the Happy Pals. His understanding of that music, combined with his deep knowledge of the entire history of jazz drumming, makes him the type of drummer who is very intuitive — you don't have to tell him a lot. His groove, his sense of pulse and swing, is unbelievable.
Particularly in the Heavyweights Brass Band, his drum feel sounds like those New Orleans drummers — he actually has it down, which for a lot of drummers when they play that way, it's very stiff with no swing and push and pull to it. But in any context Lowell plays in, there's just this sense of swing, regardless of what he's playing. He pushes and pulls tempos. Even the way his snare hits, there's a deeply ingrained sense of swing and pulse.
Lawrence: Academic.
Patrick: In any context he plays in. How that translates for me on this record: there's a tune that's basically metal, there's a tune that swings where I'm thinking about Lester Young — taking that kind of Lester Young approach and reimagining it in a modern context — and then there's totally open stuff where Lowell is coloring. He's listened to all those Paul Motian records and understands how to get the overtones out of a cymbal properly, using his sense of pulse within that context where there's no meter. Just using pulse to color what we're doing. I think it's brilliant, and it comes from the fact that he has done so much in his career that he's able to approach more open music and jazz with a really informed mindset. He's willing to take risks, and all the while it's incredibly funky and groovy. Particularly the way he hits the cymbal — I think he is an amazing drummer.
Lawrence: It's interesting, because to hear you speak about both of your bandmates, you're really talking about two people who have mastery over their instruments and know how to get what they want to achieve — the sound and the contribution they need to make in any given moment. How do you fit into that? Do you view yourself as also proficient as a technician with your instrument?
Patrick: I think sometimes I wonder if I have focused too much on development as a saxophone player. When I was a younger musician, I was perhaps too focused on that side of things. I would consider myself a fairly serious technician on the horn — there's a lot of stuff I can execute — but oftentimes I have to remove myself from the saxophone player and access the musician, because that can be hard. The whole history of the saxophone carries a lot of baggage. Trying to follow in the footsteps of people like Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane, where so much is made of what they can execute at the pure instrumental level — sometimes as saxophone players, we can get caught up in that.
With Dan and Lowell, they are very serious technicians on their instruments. But when I hear the word "technician," I think of somebody with crazy chops — and I wouldn't describe any of us as having crazy chops. I think all of us have really delved into sound and tone in particular. All three of us are pretty neurotic about the gear we play, in very different ways, and all three of us can be very particular.
Lowell spends a lot of time thinking about what the right ride cymbal is for a recording, what the right snare is — he has a couple of different snares. Dan has a custom guitar, the one he's playing on this recording, which is my favorite of his — made for him by a luthier — and I just love the sound of it. On my end, this marks the first recording where I switched from an old Conn American-type saxophone that I had played for eight years to a Selmer, which is the vintage saxophone most people play. When I got the rough mixes back, I felt I might not like this one as much, but the Selmer allows me to be myself quicker. So in terms of a tone concept, I would describe all three of us as technicians of tone. Our primary focus is sound.
Lawrence: You know, it's funny — I was out for brunch yesterday with my partner at a place near us that doubles as a beautiful little venue. On Sundays they do brunch combined with a sort of open mic concept, with a piano on the stage. A young man was there — I heard him tell somebody he was twenty — playing very fast. He would play a little bit of a riff from a recognizable piece and then improvise. My girlfriend said to me, "I don't like this." And I said, "He's amazing technically, but he has zero emotion. There's nothing to grab onto. He couldn't play a ballad to save his life." He could execute fast and play up and down the keyboard. It's fascinating when you're faced with that and you can recognize it.
When you're writing for a trio like this, you mentioned that the Paul Motian songbook and exploring it sort of merged into you composing for that format as well. I'm assuming you have to think specifically about that format — it's a very specific arrangement. Can you apply other parts of your songbook to it, or do you have to write for this format?
Patrick: I essentially applied other parts of my songbook to this format.
Lawrence: Oh, really?
Patrick: This record is a mix of compositions and improvisations. That's what I wanted this band to be — can we do a set where we improvise and then cue into something? As a composer, I'm moving more toward thinking: I can write songs, and I can write compositions. If I write a song, I should be able to fit everything on one sheet, and I should be able to play it in a variety of contexts and instrumentations. If we think about the great songs — I think of those late Johnny Cash records. There's one called My Mother's Hymn Book, where it's just Johnny Cash singing solo with guitar, playing songs out of his mother's hymn book. I love that recording because those are songs. You could play them with any instrumentation, any arrangement, and they would still work. A lot of those Beatles tunes feel like that, and within the jazz context, if you play any of those Wayne Shorter tunes, you can play them as a duo and figure out a way to make them work, in addition to the way they were originally intended — in a larger ensemble, a quartet or quintet.
So with this record, I looked at some songs and compositions I had that I hadn't yet recorded and thought, let's see if this works in this format. I figured it will work — maybe not in the way I imagined, but it will work. The compositions on this record were essentially played as tunes. With the exception of "Banff," they're not parts-heavy. And I said to the group on the session: when we go to do these improvised pieces, let's keep in mind the tunes we've already recorded.
At the time of this recording, I was coming off a really intense period of busyness — all three of us were. We rehearsed a couple of things before we started recording, but then we just started recording. I didn't think this record would turn out this good. I thought maybe I would get a single and could use the recordings to apply for a grant to do it properly. We did this session at the bookstore and, because the room sounded good and the engineer knew what he was doing, it turned out very well. I'm really proud of it.
Lawrence: Well, the playing must have been pretty good too. (laughter)
Patrick: The playing was pretty good, and I think because all of us were so tired, it was just: "Yeah, sure, we haven't rehearsed these two — whatever, it's fine." The looseness serves the record. The four tunes on it — in some cases two of them are seven or eight years old, and the other two I had written in the last year. The two old ones, I was going through some material thinking, I wish I had recorded this song. And then: why not try it in this format? These guys are good, we can figure it out. And they turned out great. I should probably be thinking about writing specifically for this format, but I also think part of the beauty and hardness of a trio is that, because there are fewer moving parts, you can make a wider variety of things work.
Lawrence: I want to talk a little bit about the bookstore. Lots of people in the Toronto scene have played at Sellers & Newell. I'm curious how this project came to be catalogue number one on their label.
Patrick: I think I just got to the edge of the process first.
Lawrence: You crossed the finish line? (laughter)
Patrick: I think I just happened to be the first one where everything got set. He released three records at around the same time, and I think mine was the first one recorded there — though I might be wrong, I would have to talk to Peter. It was one of the first sessions where I had talked to him about using the space.
This is the second record I've done that isn't in a studio, live off the floor. The record I released at the beginning of last year, the fusion record Pangea Rebirth, was done to tape without headphones on, in a basement, and it also turned out very well. I've done this without grant support. The studio route is very expensive — both paying for the studio and then the mixing — and I'm also not the one mixing it. I'm somewhat skeptical of studios for jazz, because all of my favorite jazz recordings were made with nobody wearing headphones, everyone in the same room. I think the next one I do — a full-length quintet project I've had planned for years that just needs some funding — needs to be done in a studio. But with this, I thought, why not just record in this bookstore? If I don't like it, I'll release a single.
Peter was generous enough to lend us the space, and then after a couple of people started recording there, he got this idea to start a record label. Every time I would see him, he would bring it up. It took a year between recording and release, and it was on track to take even longer. He brought up the possibility of helping out with the cost of the CDs if I'd like to be on the label. I said that would be great — it would allow this to get done this year rather than next. He was at the session and was blown away by it, and really wanted it out in the world. He has just been so generous with his space over the years. He has had a fascinating life — essentially, in retirement, he started a second career, opening this bookstore in the west end. And now he runs a record label, deals rare books, and puts on twenty shows a month.
Lawrence: That's incredible.
Patrick: It really all started from the first Paul Motian show we did — that wasn't at the bookstore, it was at a bar called the Emmet Ray. Peter came to the show and said he would really love it if we did another one at the store. So we did, and playing Paul Motian tunes in a tiny bookstore instead of a bar or a traditional venue felt just right. The music is intimate in itself, and it was beautiful.
When it came time to record, Peter had started offering the space after hours for musicians. In this day and age, it's very hard to find a space to record, and this record is a good example of how doing it DIY can work for certain projects. In some ways I'm happier with how this sounds than things I did at really expensive studios, because Tom Upjohn is a genius. I got the rough mixes back and couldn't believe it. Tom and I had talked ahead of time about how to make it work — you need to get the room sound right and then mix minimally. And the way he did it, the quality of sound I got out of this is remarkable. Justin Gray, who mastered it, is also brilliant.
Now I have two albums recorded with no headphones on that I think are great. The tone quality isn't quite up to the same level as if I'd done it in a studio, but it's pretty close. And as an independent artist partnering with Peter on a small label, it really gives me faith about the future of music in this day and age — and of creative instrumental music in particular.
Lawrence: And if you compare that with the ability to tap into the grant process — something that seems quite unique to Canada right now, certainly in North America — that paints a potential path forward for creative music.
Patrick: The grant process in Canada in recent years — mostly in the province of Ontario, where I live — has gotten a lot harder. There is less funding. But I'm hopeful that with a collaboration like this, there's a better chance of getting some funding. The next album I do, it's really these partnerships that make music happen. Or a lot of money, which for more creative, instrumental music is hard to come by.
Lawrence: It's interesting that you record in a place where you've both played in front of audiences and recorded after hours. How does the presence or absence of an audience impact you? Or is it just a different mindset — you're almost approaching it like going into a studio, just not a studio? And why not in front of an audience?
Patrick: Well, it's really nice to be able to stop if something goes wrong, which happened — that happened a couple of times. In terms of how we set up this pretty small room, we were spaced out, there were some baffles — just some basic stuff and moving blankets. Tom had gotten there a couple of hours before and set it up the way he thought it would work.
The live recording thing is very hard. I just did a live recording where, if I don't get some funding, I think I will release a couple of tracks off of it. But there are mistakes in some of the tracks. The benefit of recording without an audience is that you can stop, talk about things, and listen back. For me, it feels like a studio — except that I've always found the studio environment challenging, because I didn't do enough of it when I was coming up. Especially when you're in separate rooms with headphones on, it's cold. I liked playing with other people and I liked playing live. My technical tools of production are very minimal. The institution where I studied music post-secondary didn't really prioritize that, and I wish it had, because now I'm in my thirties and when I have to do a recording from home, I can do it — it just takes me a long time because I'm not fast on the computer. That anxiety also translates when I'm sitting in a booth by myself in a studio.
So this kind of setup is a nice in-between. The next one I really need to do in a studio — what I have planned for the quintet recording needs that isolation — but this is like you're just playing, nobody's got headphones on, you're in the same room. It feels like playing live, but you can stop. The only person with headphones on is the engineer. We had a feed running so we could check how it sounded, but otherwise we had everything off, and it's really beautiful to record like that. It feels more like you're just playing.
Lawrence: Can you tell me a little bit about the role mentorship has played in your development? It's so important in this tradition, and I'm curious how the different mentorship relationships you've had show up in the different contexts you work in. Can you draw a thread? Is there a lineage for you that you're conscious of?
Patrick: I think so. Mentorship can go in a few different directions, and a lot of people — especially in Toronto, especially in the jazz world — complain about a lack of it. For me, I went out and sought some mentorship upon graduating from my undergraduate degree. I really wanted to move to New York. It just didn't make financial sense. I'd already moved from Ottawa to Toronto, which is the big city in Canada. I moved five hours away with no family here, and I was overwhelmed by the prospect of moving to the United States at that time.
So the decision I made was to find a teacher in New York that I liked, and I was lucky enough to have a couple of connections with couches to crash on. From about when I was twenty-two until I was twenty-seven — for five years — I would go down twice a year to see a teacher named Mark Shim. I probably only saw him seven or eight times in total, but each of those sessions was very profound. Particularly the first time, he kind of broke me down, rebuilt me back up, and said, "This is what you need to focus on." I'd been warned that this guy was like no other teacher I had ever experienced. Because I saw him so infrequently over such a long period, in a very formative part of my twenties, and those lessons were always generous in terms of time — because he knew I was coming from far away — I think a lot about his generosity.
I got to sit beside somebody who had played with Elvin Jones and Betty Carter as a young man and who now plays with Vijay Iyer and all these heroes of mine. The main lesson he really taught me about the saxophone is that it should be thought of as a rhythmic instrument, and a lot of people don't think of it as a rhythmic instrument. His whole thing was trying to make the way he plays the saxophone sound more like a drummer — like Max Roach on a snare drum. That level of precision when it comes to rhythmic articulation is the basis of all Black American music: push and pull, swing, rhythm. I think about Mark a lot on a day-to-day basis, because even though I didn't take that many lessons with him, he was very generous with his time. I see a lineage there — in his case, he was mentored by people older than him, and so despite being demanding, he was generous with his time with me.
In the last year and a half I've done a bunch of playing with Dave Young, who was the bass player for Oscar Peterson and is in his mid-eighties now, here in Toronto. Dave has hired me to do a bunch of things. He played with everyone, and you can hear the whole history of the music through working with him. There's a similar sense of: let's go, it can be hard on the bandstand, but there's also a deep caring about the future of the music — and all of this from a guy a couple of generations above me.
And then there are various teachers I've had over the years. I like to use the term "jazz generations" to refer to eras of about five to seven years — that's a jazz generation. Lowell is the jazz generation above me. I'm thirty; Lowell I think is around thirty-five or thirty-six. When I moved to Toronto as a nineteen-year-old, he was already established and gigging, in his mid-twenties. Even when I first started playing with Lowell, I was a bit younger and more inexperienced, and he had played a million gigs. When you play with a drummer who has spent thousands of hours on the bandstand playing time, it feels different — they're very solid. I think about that kind of mentorship a lot as well, people in my life who have really gone out of their way to help me.
I think about it especially when it comes to what I'm doing artistically and just continuing to do it. I heard a quote from Jeff Coffin, who was told it by Sonny Rollins. Sonny was being asked in a group context what advice he would have for younger musicians coming up today — this was around 2012, near the end of Sonny's playing career. Sonny responded, from what Jeff told me: "The forces that be have always tried to squash creativity, and it is up to the artist to push back against that." Just continuing to create and do the thing is kind of an act of rebellion. I think about that a lot in the context of mentorship — I better keep going and keep treating this seriously, because I had these people who believed in me, who gave me the time of day when they didn't need to. Every single time I go to play, I think about that.
Lawrence: I've talked to a lot of people who have had mentorship experiences with Dave Liebman. It's always something to hear about. He kicks people's asses — there's no other way to say it.
Patrick: I spent a lot of time with Liebman. He was at the University of Toronto quite a bit when I was there, and I got to spend quite a bit of one-on-one time with him. It was great. Even just being around the guy — that level of intensity. (laughter)
Lawrence: And you talked earlier about where the saxophone goes in that post-Coltrane world. I think Liebman was a pivotal figure in opening it up again, making it possible to say the saxophone has not reached its end.
Patrick: Correct. I one hundred percent agree. I'm very grateful I got to spend time with him, and even his book on saxophone — Developing a Personal Saxophone Sound — as well as his harmony book, where he breaks down what he and Steve Grossman were doing when they played with Elvin Jones and how they were approaching playing outside. His book on developing tone on the saxophone is extraordinary. It exists in a post-Coltrane world, and so does the Eddie Harris book, which is also an extensive guide to playing and developing the saxophone. I've owned both for so many years and give them to students. I don't think we're at the end at all, and a big part of that is people like Liebman, and Wynton as well — this relentless drive to educate people and push them.
Lawrence: You mentioned earlier a quintet project you have sitting on the shelf. Can you tell me about it?
Patrick: I have all the tunes written and a plan. I recently brought up a fabulous piano player from New York, one of the guiding lights of his generation on the instrument — Lex Korten. He plays with Melissa Aldana, Tyshawn Sorey, and a million of the next-gen New York players. He's a brilliant pianist I've been a fan of for many years. He recently came up and we did two quite successful nights playing the music, and I recorded them — they sound pretty good. It's the quintet project I'm hoping to get recorded by the end of this year or early next year, hopefully with Lex, because I think he just colored the music brilliantly.
All the songs are based on places. After I finished my university degree, I was lucky enough to join a fun, party funk, disco, rap ten-piece band that toured extensively — I think in three years I did two hundred gigs across Canada and the US. We were doing a million shows on the hippie circuit, and it was amazing as a young musician. I learned so much just being on the road and having all these experiences in different places, and I wrote eight or nine tunes about those different places, particularly within Canada. It's essentially a full record, and it chronicles me growing up in my twenties, becoming a musician and becoming a man in some sense — all these profound realizations I had while on tour, what that does to the mind, what it did for my thinking about music and what is important in music. That's what this quintet record is about, and I'm really excited about it.
Lawrence: Other than how all experiences interact internally and shape each other, are there any more overt or obvious ways that working on the trio project will now inform the quintet project? Is there connective tissue through your work, or are these discrete projects?
Patrick: I think I do have some definitive themes in what I do as an artist. The main theme is that I really like music that breaks boundaries, combines things in an interesting way, and pushes forward. In music, for lack of a better way to explain it, we have neoclassical things and avant-garde things — and bebop was avant-garde. Black Sabbath was avant-garde. I've always been more drawn to music that pushes in that direction. I love swinging, and it's complicated for me because I like doing everything, but the records that really make me go, wow, are the ones that push forward.
A great Dave Liebman quote that he told me directly was: you want to be able to put your album up on your shelf next to the albums of your heroes and be proud of it, and think that it does them justice. That has always stuck with me as a guiding light. Just trying to balance the full spectrum of human emotion within music and to have some honest expression — even though it would be a lot easier if I focused on just one thing, which would be a bit easier to market. As it stands now, I have this weird collection of recordings that are very different in scope, but the thing that combines them is that they're different.
Lawrence: That's incredible. It also seems like a hallmark of the Toronto scene. You used the word "avant-garde," and that blending, that thirst for innovation — I don't know the right word — seems to mark Toronto. Maybe it's because there are so many working musicians who have to go off and play in other contexts that when they come back, their music is just slightly left of center.
Patrick: I would describe it as such. I went to New York many times, and then shortly before Trump won that election, I went down to Nashville for a week and got to hang a bit with Jeff Coffin and see the Nashville jazz scene. That's the only place in the US where I thought, I would love to live here, because it reminded me of Toronto but was smaller and had more touring opportunities with bigger-name artists. Everybody in that jazz scene was killing it, working in such a wide variety of contexts, and when they wrote original music it reflected that. Nobody was trying to put each other in a box — everybody was cool with other people doing other stuff.
I think the reason I like Toronto is that I can show up to a straight-ahead jam session and sound great, and nobody is going to be weird about the fact that I was coming from a rock gig. In general, people are pretty supportive. In New York, it really feels like you have to decide what type of jazz musician you are going to be.
I've never fully lived there, but every single time I've been and hung with people there, it's just that there are so many musicians — and that's what makes New York great. You can spend an entire lifetime playing, for example, just the Latin jazz thing in New York, which is unbelievable — the level and the lineage of that music. Even within free jazz, there are so many different niche pockets. It's beautiful and crazy. But I like doing everything, which is why — and I think you're right — when I go to do my own thing, I bring all that working musician energy and those influences into what I do.
