Phil Haynes: Banging the Drum for Liberty Now
The drummer and composer discusses how Liberty Now!. Free Country's first album in a decade, transformed from celebration into unintentional protest, shaped by Herb Robertson's death and a fracturing democracy.
Today we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on drummer Phil Haynes.
Since moving to New York from Oregon in 1983, Phil’s played on scores of recordings with artists like Anthony Braxton and David Liebman. Phil has joined me once already, in March 2024, to discuss his memoir, Chasing the Masters: First Takes of a Modernist Drumming Artist.
Phil’s with me today to discuss his band Free Country, which takes American roots music and runs it through their particular jazz lens, using cello, guitar, bass, and drums to create something called “jazz-grass.”
Their new album Liberty Now! did not set out to be political. Phil planned for the group to record original compositions, a departure from their previous work. But then the last US Presidential election happened. And then the band got word of the passing of their trumpeter, Herb Robertson, as they walked into the studio. The music and the plan changed. Phil paired the new recordings with songs from Free Country’s catalog into a double album that runs from Revolutionary War tunes to “What a Wonderful World.”
Phil’s here to talk about grief, protest, making art when the ground shifts under you, and one of my favorite topics: the role of music in addressing contemporary political and social challenges.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Phil Haynes & Free Country’s album Liberty Now!)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Phil Haynes at philhaynes.com and on Bandcamp
• Purchase Phil Haynes & Free Country’s Liberty Now! from Corner Store Jazz or Bandcamp
• Phil Haynes’ memoir: Chasing the Masters: First Takes of a Modern Drumming Artist
• Phil Haynes’ March 2024 appearance on The Tonearm Podcast
Free Country Band Members:
• Hank Roberts, cellist/vocalist
• Drew Gress, bassist
• Jim Yanda, guitarist
Free Country Discography:
• Shenandoah (1997) - pre-1900 American music
• Way the West Was Won (2002) - early 20th century Americana
• ’60/’69: My Favorite Things (2014) - music of the 1960s
• Something Beatles (2013) - live Beatles covers
Herb Robertson:
• Herb Robertson tribute
• Phil Haynes & Herb Robertson: Ritual (2000)
• herbrobertson.com
Influences and Mentors:
• Paul Smoker, trumpeter
• David Liebman, saxophonist
• Elvin Jones - Merry-Go-Round album
Historical and Musical References:
• Max Roach - We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960)
• Max Roach Freedom Now Suite analysis
• John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (recorded December 9, 1964)
• Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, Edgar Meyer - The Goat Rodeo Sessions
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: When Free Country went into the studio at the beginning of this project late last year, you thought you were making a different record, right? I'm curious if you could tell me about the album you thought you were making and how it transformed into the album you made.
Phil Haynes: Well, I thought ten years ago Free Country had run its course, because after the success of the first one, which was recorded—an artistic success and critical success of the first one, clear back in 1997—got rereleased a couple of years later. And it was done the day after I was married, and we had some people from around the world who were all fans. So it made sense—they were there for the record, and our timing worked out with the wedding. Dee was at the studio with us and all that. And I realized at the time of making the first record that it was really to be the start of an American trilogy. The first one was Free Country, was mostly pre-1900 music. And then the second one, The Way the West Was Won, was mostly from 1900 through the 1950s—American Hollywood soundtracks, Aaron Copland, what have you. And then of course, my favorite thing, '60/'69, which was the decade of the sixties, everything from Burt Bacharach to Coltrane. You know, so it was like, well, without a label investing in the band—I mean, we certainly would've made one of Motown or whatever it might've been—it was meant to be a band that could communicate jazz ideals in a really NPR-friendly kind of way. That was the original thought of it.
But of course, I picked the right guys so that there was honest romanticism in everybody in the band. It grew, and it became clear from the beginning that we had to have political discussions about all of it. I remember I used to think that if it was a good melody and it was American, well, then we ought to do it. And then Hank Roberts said, "Do you really think that four white guys ought to be recording certain of these tunes?" I was like, "Oh no, that's right. We probably cannot." So this band was a political awakening, I think, for all of us, because you can imagine the conversations that went on.
Anyway, without major label support, which I'd always hoped somebody would pick up the mantle, I thought it was over. And then the sound of the band for the last ten years never went out of my head. Reflecting on COVID, trying to figure out what I could do, and as I searched for very much younger-generation collaborators, I realized that the only thing I could do immediately were things that maybe had some unfinished business. And I had always thought if we were ever to make another record—I was going to finance it—it would be of our music, instead of being a cover band, which the band was brilliant at. Let's take that sound, let's take that heritage, let's take that chemistry, and turn it to our own tunes. So it was supposed to be Free Country, quote unquote, our music.
And that's what we went into the studio last December to do. And then of course, the election intervened, and personal loss—Herb Robertson passed. We literally found out as we were loading into the studio, one thing after another. But I don't think I realized it was a protest record until a couple of months later when I started going through the material.
Lawrence: I want to come back to that point in a moment, but you brought up Herb Robertson. In our last talk, you had this great line that I wanted to read back to you—and maybe you've said it elsewhere, but I'm going to pretend it was special for me. And you said there's Phil Haynes before Herb Robertson and Phil Haynes after. That's heavy. I wonder if you could unpack a little bit for me about what a story—you're loading into the studio, you get that news. How does that impact what results?
Phil: Well, you can imagine it was huge, because each of us—Hank, Drew, Jim, and I—had all recorded with Herb individually over the years, over decades. He was not only a close friend and colleague. He happened to be, at least for me, one of the ways that it struck me. Besides, of course, out of the blue, it struck me because he was the first important person I considered in my generation to pass. And I mean important artist. He helped to change our generation in such a way that now it doesn't seem to matter whether you're into avant-jazz, avant-classical music, progressive rock, hillbilly music—everybody knows about open improv.
And when I got to New York in the early, mid-eighties when I met Herb Robertson, it was like, oh, that's what free is. I had been labeled free, but I didn't know what free was. He could take the most common, literally dime-store toys never meant to be instruments, and he saw in them their potential and then revealed their potential as serious music instruments. And at first, he called it ritual music, not free music, because he thought that we needed to come to it out of silence, out of respect, trying to become vessels for something greater, to get ourselves out of the way and thus sort of refresh ourselves in a greater community. That greater community, of course, is accessible through the subconscious.
Well anyway, I used to joke that, well, if the worst happens and there's only a burning hulk of the Empire State Building left, if Herb Robertson's there, he could play a solo concert on that and people would come around and cheer. He had that ability to take anything and make music on it. I never saw anything like it. But it affected me. And he did it usually—it wasn't just that you came out of silence, it was the quietest sounds. And all of a sudden things that I had been doing when I was in hotel rooms trying to not be heard or whatever, all of a sudden these things that I had been doing that I just thought were experiments and ways to keep myself creative in restrictive circumstances, all of a sudden they were opened as this—it was like this magic curtain opened. He opened that for many of us. And of course, in his prime, he was a great lead trumpet player. He could read bird droppings, as we used to say, on manuscript paper. And then he also had this ability to play—oh, so that's what free music is. It was the most both spiritual and sort of community democratic and also self-revealing music I had ever been around. And then I noticed if there were two of us in the room that had been affected by him, then the whole ensemble all of a sudden was just way more sensitive and way more willing to improvise, to take chances, to take what is instead of what I'm trying to make happen. That was great.
Lawrence: When you describe him, I'm trying to reflect back some of the things I'm hearing. You know, there's a musicality, there's a sensitivity. When you describe free music or what you saw in free music for him, it seems like there's a willingness to be vulnerable, because that's kind of scary to pick up an object and decide it's going to be musical.
Phil: Yes. I had a teacher, my first teacher in, I think it was fourth grade—finally talked my parents into drum lessons. He had a lot of problems. He was not very good, as it turned out. I had a lot of issues afterwards. But I remember one thing that he said that I learned from. He said, "That's a wrong sound." I knew what he was trying to say, even though in my fourth-grade language I didn't have it. But I understood intuitively that, oh, that's out of context. What he really meant to say was that was out of context. And my whole life I've been trying to say, take sounds—because percussionists are sound generators and orchestrators—and can I frame it so that it's musical and not just musical like a sound effect, but musical as lyricism, as harmony, as part of the main story, not just the background or part of the background, not just part of the main story. Trying to raise the percussive arts in my own small way to be an equal with these amazing composers and horn players and pianists and all of that. I mean, we have an inferiority complex. I think it goes along with vocalists. (laughter)
But you said it, vulnerability. That's one of the things that I think—my buddy Jim Yanda in Free Country, he always feels vulnerable. And I said, but that's what's so great about your playing. You do find yourself taking chances, and it isn't easy for self-acceptance. And yet when it's that human, when it's that sincere, when it's got that kind of earnest wisdom, real romanticism instead of some kind of schmaltz looking back and, oh, isn't that cute? No, you know, this is who he is. And I mean, this is what you try to strive for as an artist. Can I be completely translucent and completely vulnerable and inspiring to others to be their best?
This band has done that for each of us. Hank Roberts or Drew Gress are on so many great things. I don't think you'll ever find them on anything better. Oh, it's different, but they play brilliantly, as does Jim with this band. Each of us managed to frame each other in our most flattering ways, and that doesn't always happen. You know, you try to put friends together, you try to put colleagues together, you try to—what's the sound going to sound like before we put it together? But you never really know until you do. And then if you do it over years, when you find out that something good happened initially, which it certainly did, I was like, oh, it does grow.
And then there's—let me just say, when Herb passed and we all got the news, none of us felt like playing. And yet we knew we had to. This project had been postponed twice for various reasons. And you know, months and years. And so this was the time we were all here, and Herb would've wanted us to play. And then what came out—you said the word vulnerable. The music has a vulnerability and a translucency too. It isn't common. You know, we're all professionals and we're—I'm going to bring my craft to bear and honor this composer, whether it's the guys in the room or whoever it is. And next thing you know, you're stripped down to your basic humanity, and that can be inspiring when it's right.
Lawrence: Something I admire in this music, and especially reflected in this album, is the transcending or even the sublimating—I don't know what the right word is, but it's almost a new genre. The Americana meeting the spirit of jazz or the facility of jazz players playing. It seems authentically American. This music seems authentically American. Now, a lot of that's the context that has been brought to it because of the song selections in the past. And it's hard to divorce from all that, but that's the conclusion I come to. And I'm curious, did you ever hear the record that Yo-Yo Ma made with Chris Thile and I think Edgar Meyer? It was Goat Rodeo Sessions. Did you ever hear those records?
Phil: No, I didn't hear the records, but I heard some of that because they were performing in areas that I would, and they played some of that material—Edgar and, you know, absolutely. It's in the ethos. It's in our generation.
Lawrence: Yeah. The mixture of creative music but taking on sort of the American narrative is really—you know, it's fertile ground.
Phil: Well, let me digress again, because it's all a piece of history. But I had this idea of doing the first book of music, pre-1900, the Stephen Foster and the Revolutionary Civil War themes and whatever. I had an idea of doing that, and again, trying to see if I could get a label in the early nineties to be able to pick it up, just as labels, independent labels, were closing. Of course, I wanted to see if they'd do it, and I wanted to do it with my four-horn band. Well, I'll arrange these things. And this material—one of my friends in Germany who was a producer of festivals, who's now passed, Christian Kvech, said, "Oh, it's avant-garde oom-pah," the four-horns band. And he says, "Oh, this would be a great program." Five years later, he knew that I had had no success in pitching it and whatever. Bill Frisell is doing Americana, and various people are doing—I mean, it's in the air. And all of a sudden he says, "Yeah, but you, Phil, I love this idea." He says, "I want to help you do it." And he says, "But I think you should use a string band." I said, "What?" He says, "A string band, like your roommate, Jim Yanda." And of course I thought of Drew and Jim because we already had a trio. And then I said, "Okay, but only if I can get Hank Roberts, and it will cost some money." I didn't know Hank personally yet. And of course to do well, anyway, it takes money to do these things. And he says, "Okay, let's make it so." And his deal was he would help me make a couple of records with this band so that he would have first editions. He would help me press 500 copies, and he'd take 250 as business gifts to his business associates, because he liked first editions and he likes music that many people would like that was accessible and yet would draw them into one of his passions, jazz. So that was the beginning of all of this. And I know I digressed—remind me of where you wanted me to go with all this. I felt like I had to go back. (laughter)
Lawrence: I got lost in your story.
Phil: I know. Oh, because it is—it's this Americana idea and because I found the right players. Knowing that I needed somebody like Hank, I need to go with Jim. I had actually told Jim three years before this idea of Free Country came up. I said, "Jim, you've been looking for a saxophonist or a trumpet or whatever to go to do a quartet of your music. I said, you need a cellist." He says, "What?" I said, "Come here, Hank Roberts. You guys would be magic together." You know, I listen for chemistry, and I have a good batting average, but you never know until you do it. And then all of a sudden, that's why it was sitting there in front of me when Christian mentioned, "Oh, you should do it with a string band." What's more American than strings?
Lawrence: Fife and drum, maybe that's about it. (laughter)
Phil: Drums. That's right. Well, it just toggles everything that America is. It's got the European instruments, it's got the African rhythms, you know, the trans-African rhythms and aesthetics, and then you've got all—everything in our melting pot is right there. You know, it's folk musics, and as you say, with jazz musicians, particularly my generation of jazz musicians who often are highly classically trained as well, all of a sudden there's just a lot of forces to bear. Again, can you find the true nuance in the music in an authentic way instead of just interpreting it?
It was sort of like trying to get—years ago it was, can you get strings to swing? Most of the time you couldn't, any more than you could get a jazz musician to play well in a classical context years ago. But of course, those things are changing. The American—as we look back on what it is to be American, and particularly in the last just few years, who would've ever believed before 2016 that our democracy might be this fragile? And you look back, and now all of a sudden we are forced—everybody, artists, everybody's forced to look back. It's like this great American experiment. And we may have taken a lot for granted. I don't know about you, but—well, no, I do. Anybody who's alive today, Americans, was born into a privilege of being born into a country that just took for granted freedom of speech, due process, created equal under the law, you know—all people were created equal. Wow. And our forebears not only enacted this, they fought to maintain it. And of course, theoretically, we realized that the fight's never over. But it's been easy-ish for too many of us, for too many years. And now all of a sudden, who knew? Who knew it was this fragile? And so back to Liberty Now!—I'm just glad, I'm just grateful we weren't tone deaf, you know? (laughter) We walked into that studio, and as it turned out, we actually had the makings of a protest record, and I didn't realize it until—none of us realized it until two months later.
Lawrence: Yeah. Tell me about that. Were you—I would assume, although correct me if I'm wrong—you were in your downtime or over meals or what have you. Everybody's seeing the news, hearing the news, processing the news. So it was in the air. There was not a conversation about overtly bringing it to the music. Tell me a little bit about that.
Phil: No, it's interesting because it is pretty much the first thing that you talk about when you get off the bandstand. Once you get past, "I'm sorry I missed your second ending," you know? (laughter) That goes by pretty quickly. You're consumed with the grief about Herb. You're really consumed about the disbelief. You know, I think a lot of us thought that a piece of cardboard could have won the election from a centrist, liberal side. And nope, wasn't true. I had this great illusion, and I think many of us did during 2008, when Obama was elected—I was surprised. I thought that we would have a woman or an Asian or whatever first before we had a Black brother or sister in office. And then we elected him a second time, rightfully I thought. And he wasn't perfect, but gosh, what a—it looked like we really—our country had maybe gotten past its adolescence, and maybe we were finally getting, even though we didn't have everything in a row, we were moving in the right direction. It's like, oh, we really have grown. And then of course we watched what seems to be now in retrospect a backlash, even though we knew that certain southerners, certain people on the far right—not somewhat right, not the old right, but the radical right—never gave up the ideas of the Civil War. They believed in various things—white supremacy, what have you. And not taxing the wealthy at the same rates as the rest of us. Boy, that felt like it was un-American. And all of a sudden those people who had been keeping their heads down because the culture, American culture through about 2015, had been predominantly trying to find the better side of ourselves, working step by step as well as two steps backwards here and there, but trying to bring out the better side of us. And then all of a sudden those people found that it was okay to say outrageous or even hurtful things or worse in public. And just because you're able to blame somebody else for your problems or our problems, it made them feel better or something. Some change happened, and it was represented by this guy. We looked at him twice, too, apparently. And it never—well, I just didn't see it coming. And certainly—yeah, anyway, you could go on and on about the politics. It's just—and yes, it's the first thing on everybody's mind.
What's interesting is that vulnerability that we talked about before is the kind of vulnerability that can be beautiful or can close you down artistically. I don't think we closed down. It was not an easy session. Took a lot of takes to get the one that I like. I like complete takes, and so, you know, after a false take, you do—we did three sets. We did a complete take of our originals, and as soon as you got through the false take if you had one, then as soon as you finished a take, you talk about what you like, what you didn't like, and then you just moved on, because I like albums that sound live. I like albums that sound real instead of tailored within an inch of their lives. I like the old-style records or aspects of them. It was not an easy record, especially, you know—it wasn't an easy record. And all of a sudden when I was producing at the end and I'm looking at the takes like, my God, there's nothing to choose from. It either has to be this take or they don't exist, because we were hurting. Everybody was hurting. And it takes away from your attention span, but it also feeds you. Anyway, what I heard instantly was, oh my God, the pathos in losing Herb and this election, this disbelief, is in the music. It's in every take. And particularly in some of them. It might have been hinted at by the themes and the harmonies or the title, but now all of a sudden it's in there. Can you ask any more of artists? I mean, it's what we all dream of, being able to communicate times and emotions and relevancy. And it became clear to me—is this a failed record, or is this, oh, you actually have a work of art? You did really well. And then so I took these, and I put them in what I thought was the only sequence that came to me pretty quickly. It's one of my superpowers, they say. And I noticed, you know, "Situation Ethnics," "Past Time."
Lawrence: "Past Time's" a great track.
Phil: Right? And it's like we're in this time where every ethnicity, if you're not white, is under attack. And some people would have you look back to past times as if we had it together. And then I went on, and it was like my working title for "Strands of Liberty" was just "Strands." And it became clear to me what it was about, because everybody has their own part. They're making up their melodic content. I only gave them the rhythms and the shape of their counterpoint. And you can hear—you can hear the trying to make sense of this. And because of how I structured it compositionally, and then Jim's cadenza toward the end, you can hear it just come apart. And that's how it feels like when your liberties are questioned—you're losing control. And I couldn't believe that our band's collective subconscious and mine had all been working. It was as if it had been planned, and it was not, and yet there it was.
Lawrence: Can you tell me about the dialogue that the title Liberty Now! is in with Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite? If it is in dialogue? Or maybe even I'll broaden the question—you add the exclamation point, which makes it a demand or a call, or it adds a...
Phil: Insist!
Lawrence: Yeah, that's right.
Phil: We insist!
Lawrence: Yeah. Now! And you know, I, for the longest time, I had a hard time understanding the definitional difference between freedom and liberty. And it's only been very recently that I finally grokked that freedom has to do with your ability to do what you want. And that liberty is the application of your freedom, the responsible application of your freedom, living with or living in freedom. Tell me about your word choices there and tell me about, again, if it reflects at all into the Max Roach work.
Phil: Well, it absolutely reflects on Max's work. The sixties were our last social revolution. I had been saying since the two thousands, you know, boy, when's our next—it's been forty, it's been fifty years. Like, it's kind of getting to be a long interval between social revolutions. And obviously, you know, the raised brother fist, freedom now, Black power—all of those things that were part and parcel of the Black and the American experience in the sixties, and Max's incredible work—yeah, it's a landmark. It's one of those things that we as jazz musicians point to, and at the very least, let alone some other Americans, but certainly we point to. And so freedom now didn't quite work, and we insist and whatever. And of course I had this tune, "Strands of Liberty," and the next two titles, by the way, in that sequence on the album, "Higgens" and "Diaphana," and you know, anybody's name—it's confetti. One's rights, one's liberties, are confetti. And so we were at a point—again, the collective unconsciousness was just crazy. And so I look at this and it's like, well, oh, well, no, it's Liberty Now! instead of Freedom Now because, well, because as you say, you're trying to parse what your rights are versus your action in public. And you know, your rights are supposed to stop at the next guy's nose, and boy, is that a big question lately. We need liberty and everything that it implies because we seem to be giving it away. I think unexpectedly. Some people don't realize what's going on, or they've been hoodwinked, and the rest of us are horrified that it can go this quickly. You know, how is it that our courts—whoever thought the Senate would give up their power of the purse? I'm just saying, just for one. It's like, what? So anyway, I was thinking these things, and you know, like social media, I'm sure, would be a good piece of evidence against me. You know, many of us have been thinking this for a long time. Now the rules are changed. We grew up thinking and saying these things because we assumed we were born into freedoms of speech and due process and all of it, whatever. All of it. And the new rules as of about nine months ago—all of a sudden, 249 years of growing tradition and norms and all but thrown out the window, and it looks like it will only get worse. And history tells you it'll get worse unless something happens that we can't predict. I don't think Superman's coming. And I don't think the rapture's coming either. And this is—it's like we are at this point, this Liberty Now!, unlike probably—it's the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. The only time we're going to have to fight—we're going to have to find ways to rebuild an America that we can all be proud of. And it stands up for mostly the good and is aspiring to be better. It's going to take a massive amount, and of course it's above my pay grade to think I know what it's going to take. But I do know that we have to spread the good to start with, and it starts with we have to be able to treat people in our family who we don't agree with religiously or politically. We have to bring them back in and remind ourselves first, what are our common—what are the things that we all believe in, and that those are more than our differences. And then get them to see that we're not on opposite sides, we have differing opinions, but we share the middle. Because consensus is one of the things that they're trying to say doesn't exist anymore. It isn't valuable anymore. And that's maybe the cornerstone of democracy, is finding consensus, that messy middle. It may not be efficient, but it keeps you from going too far, one side or the other. So, I don't know, it's just it's a politically fraught time. It's hard to imagine if this goes on much longer that the next generation is going to have the opportunities that we did. And it's pretty easy to see that we in our generations, those who are well into our careers and whatever, we're going to have fewer opportunities. It's hard not to face it. And oddly, it's in the music. Well, how could it not be in the music? That's the other side of it. While it has all these political undertones, both meant and subconscious, there's also the side that it's just good music.
Lawrence: That's right. Which we need that too.
Phil: Oh, we need that so desperately.
Lawrence: There was something I wanted to ask you, but I'm going to skip ahead for one second just because you brought up a point that I was going to ask you about anyway, which is, you know, you've spent a lot of time as an educator working with young people. What, if anything, do you tell young musicians about making art during times like this? And I guess the corollary to that would be how, if at all, has your approach to teaching changed in this current environment? Is your messaging changing? What's it like being around all these young faces who, to the point you just made, like they're looking at a much different world than you and I were looking at. I mean, we were spoiled.
Phil: We were. You're probably going to have to remind me of that question midway a couple of times, because it's just—it's a really, it's a pregnant question. First, on the one hand I would say that my message hasn't changed much in that what I have, at least what I have been teaching, what I learned from my masters and they learned from their masters, was you have to be true to yourself first. Oh, Paul Smoker had this great—it may not be original, but he had this great quote. He said, "You need to know something about everything and everything about something."
Lawrence: Hmm, that's great.
Phil: The well-educated person—you need to know something about everything and everything about something. And of course it's a goal. It's not possible. But it's like, oh, if you know something about a little something about everything, it gives you some greater perspective. And if you are a specialist and you are an authority in some area, that has great value, or it had—has had great value for culture for a very long time. As an artist, it means if you're an expert and you really are a great artist—in this case, it means that you have managed to not melt down, you've managed to condense and purify. You've recognized your inner child—to take that terrible, you know, term—but you know who you are, or it sounds like you're being honest with yourself.
What I tell students is, if I teach a singer-songwriter, it's like I had one that just came in this semester, and I listened, you know, had her read her lyrics first before she read the title, and then read her lyrics to me before I asked her to sing. And I said, "Oh, it's autobiographical." And anyway, anything that I would say was this surprise. And it's like, well, it's the best thing you can write about is things from your experience. Which is kind of—what else can we write from? Well, you can imagine things, but it generally has more power. We have more sensory information to compute and communicate through our music if we've experienced it ourselves. And so I always tell them that. Write what you know. Of course it's powerful. This is working. This is great. You need to leave enough breadcrumbs so that if you're going to make me listen to your lyric four or five, six, seven times, like a good piece of poetry—not everything is understandable the first time. If you're going to make me listen to it that many times to get your meaning, it better be great. Otherwise, you don't—you've got to not be quite so subtle. Let us know. Give us enough to go on so that, oh, I see. Oh, because I need to identify with it. We all need to identify ourselves in you and your experience. That's what an artist does, at least what we aspire to.
On the other hand, you know, it was the reaction in Free Country—we were just grateful we weren't tone deaf. And it would not have been as heavy if we had gone in saying we were going to make this protest record. It was just like a little over ten years ago, it happened to be we were recording '60/'69, and we were—the Coltrane suite was last, and we started recording it. And we just finished with—might have been all of it or part of it from A Love Supreme and "Resolution." And Drew said, "Do you know it's this week to the day? Well, actually, yeah, it's this week that A Love Supreme was recorded fifty years ago." If we had known that going in, we would've failed. (laughter) Just too much. Too much. But then there are these interesting coincidences, and the same thing happened fifty years ago, as it turned out. If you live long enough, you get to see these things, these weird coincidences that feel spiritual and sound spiritual. As it turns out, fifty years after I first got my first two jazz records, Elvin Jones, Merry-Go-Round, and who's on that record? I think it's the first with Dave Liebman. He's a young guy. And it's the first that I have, and it was—I got it the week before Christmas, and it was exactly the week before Christmas, fifty years later, that we recorded Codas. I'm sure the last time that Elvin recorded anybody's original music because it was so difficult because he was having his issues. And yet the music that comes out is wow. And you know, you can't make that stuff up. And it does feel spiritual, even though it's just a coincidence.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Phil: Or you start to wonder why people believe certain things. Well, okay, I'm a spiritualist because I've had a lot of wild things happen, and it wasn't on—I just have—I don't know that I'm very religious, but I'm quite spiritual because I am constantly in awe of, maybe it's as little as coincidences. I don't know.
Lawrence: Yeah, sure. It's—I mean, as a rationalist, you can only go where the evidence points you, and if you go where the evidence points you, it's going to lead you sometimes to not rational places. (laughter) Which is okay.
Phil: Yeah. Some of my early spiritual experiences were déjà vu. I would dream things literally, you know, in the middle of the night and not think about them. And then six months later, that very situation would happen, or two years later, that very situation would happen. And for me, what happened was I never had control over it, but the dream informed me of—I could make one decision or another, and I didn't know. I only knew what one path would do. And that was—that happened into my thirties before that strange piece of spiritual wackiness, nonsensical nonlinear time when I were—passed for me. But to not be so quick to dismiss things that others believe, especially if you can tell it's coming from an earnest place, you know, not just a learned place but that's something that they're parroting. No, no, no. This is their experience. So the message hasn't changed. And yet on the other hand, you are living—I would say the other hand is you talk to that student and it's like you are living through these times. What does it make you feel like? What is it? It's clearly got stress on them. What do you feel? What do you want? And say if you're true to yourself and you use your art to help yourself, to feed your own soul so that you can grapple with your own feelings and whatever, maybe if you get good enough at distilling it like a good poem, others will find resonance in it. And yeah, put that in the art. Put that in the art. Fortunately, people who have that—more people have that ability than you think. It's just they don't meet the right people at the right time to help them. It seems like they just find me at Bucknell. Where do these kids come from? (laughter) Sort of self-select or something, you know, they find their way to my little studio down in the basement.
Lawrence: That's funny.
Phil: It is funny.
Lawrence: I wanted to turn back to the record for a moment. Something that landed for me earlier today was the way you've constructed the album with the new material and then the second disc of what I would call curated material from throughout Free Country's catalog. It's kind of like listening to a Ken Burns movie. (laughter) And it occurred to me that maybe you guys should be talking to Ken Burns, but that's another topic. I wonder if you could tell me about—you know, you said earlier that one of your superpowers is in the sequencing of a record, and that seems to be something you're channeling and bringing to bear in this collection, let's call it a collection, the set. What was going on there, and what were the through lines you were trying to bring to the surface for listeners?
Phil: Well, at first there's just a simple craft thing, you know, it's sort of like, okay, I have this album of new material, and I thought it was strong, but it was also, as you say, you know, vulnerable. It alluded to the theme of Liberty Now!, but the band over twenty-eight some years, almost thirty years, had actually been hitting it on the nail—one or two, three pieces an album. As I said, always been a politically aware band. You know, it's like, and lots of arguments. "We can't say that! We have to say this! You can't interpret it that way!" You know, whatever. I mean, these are—so I needed to, I felt like, oh, a lot of people probably don't know the back catalog of this band, and that's too bad. If reviewers are paying attention, they didn't miss No Fast Food. They now haven't missed the four-horn band, but they might've missed Free Country for a variety of reasons. And it's like, well, I'm not going to put out a seven-disc set retrospective—that's just not going to get listened to. All of a sudden it was like, here's this album that alludes to Liberty Now! I can take one, two, three tracks from each of our earlier records and make a compilation that underlines it.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Phil: That shows our originals, which we did for the first time last December. That's a kind of liberty, that we find our freedom in our—we have the ability to do our own material, but we, as you alluded to, we chiseled it and we crafted it from covers of Americana, from the Revolutionary War through the sixties through today. And so I wanted to make sure that—even though it's big, you know, two CDs. Wow. It's a lot to—either one is a lot to listen to. This band didn't just go blink and make one nice record. It's because this is the fourth studio record and the fifth recording overall, because we did a live record. We've been on this, and we've actually hit it. And I again was amazed to look back and, you know, something as innocent as "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" and "she'll be wearing red pajamas and white horses." And of course we had performed it like a train running off, running out of control, getting faster and faster. And it just was like, oh no, this has to be there. Not just because it's fun. As it turns out, that silly old song actually has resonance. Now, maybe it wasn't intended at the time, but it's got resonance now. We think of red pajamas, and we know what that means. We think of white horses in the apocalypse. So I was like, Jesus. It was like, holy cow. So anyway, some of it was just the craft of, oh, I can't—I would never put a seven-CD set on somebody. But there's a bunch of people if they're attracted and curious about the band, after they hear the new material, they ought to be able to have a, you know, a primer, you know, take this and you can see that the band was good throughout. It just has gotten more this, that, and the other thing. And it certainly has had a political consciousness. And that's when you realize, no, that's the right approach, because that underlines the sort of Max Roach We Insist, you know. It's like, check it out. And one reviewer was kind enough already to say, you know, it doesn't tell you what freedom is—it takes you through all these emotions and landscapes just like real life. You know, it's no one—freedom is not one thing, but it asks you to ask yourself, let alone your nation, what is liberty? What is freedom? What is it to be American? As a result, even though we may not have freedom of speech and due process guaranteed much longer, and many have already had it stripped, here we go. It's worth holding on for, and I think, you know, a lot of us have to—it's like the conversation about anti-fascists, you know, Antifa. Well, I think President—in general, Eisenhower was the head of Antifa. That's the Antifa I know. I don't believe in burning buildings, but guess what? In World War II, had to. I don't believe in war, but I can't say you didn't have to stop Hitler. I just, you know, I don't know where it's going, but I do know you have to stop! We have to not just raise red signs but pass on the good, build community, starting with your family and your neighbors, hold your representatives' feet to the fire. And especially when truth and facts are under siege and being gaslit, you just—most, not all, but most of those people know that they're lying. Most of those people know that they're selling us down the river for the worst of the billionaire class. Not saying that all billionaires are bad, but there's a side of capitalism that is just beyond—well, it's horrific as well as all the good things that it has brought us. And when it's not regulated well, we know what happens. We've got history. So anyway, I don't know. It's just—it's so overwhelming. It's such an overwhelming time. And how can we not stick our hands up and say something? And even when we weren't trying to say something, I was, again, the whole band was relieved that we weren't tone deaf.
Lawrence: You'll come back? We'll do this again?
Phil: Yes. And we'll have to, because you're going to have to edit out so much stuff. (laughter) I'm free-associating and, yeah, emotional venting, you know, it's just—but I do, I do believe, you know, people would say, "I really can't talk about it. It just drives me crazy." And it's like most of us need to be able to talk about it so it doesn't become like a pressure cooker and explode. But you have to let off the steam and make sure that the other person's okay, even though none of us are okay.
Haynes
Veteran drummer/composer Phil Haynes is featured on more than 85 releases from numerous American and European record labels. His collaborations include many of the seminal musicians of this generation: saxophonists Anthony Braxton, Ellery Eskelin and David Liebman; trumpeters Thomas Heberer, Herb Robertson and Paul Smoker; bassists Mark Dresser, Ken Filiano and Drew Gress; keyboard artists David Kikoski, Denman Maroney and Michelle Rosewoman; vocalists Theo Bleckmann, Nicholas Horner and Hank Roberts; violinist Mark Feldman; and the composers collective Joint Venture. His outlets include the romantic “jazz-grass” string band, Free Country; the saxophone trio No Fast Food; the classic piano trio Day Dream featuring Steve Rudolph; and his breathtaking solo project, Sanctuary. He recently launched an ambitious three-year schedule of releases with Coda(s), the striking third album from his trio No Fast Food with saxophonist David Liebman and bassist Drew Gress, followed this fall with his memoir Chasing the Masters accompanied by an audio compilation, A Life Improvised.
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