Profile: Medeski, Martin, and Wood
Medeski, Martin and Wood embrace jazz without become slaves to it. By mixing up styles and genres, they apply the same sensibility to a more varied musical landscape. With John Medeski on keyboards, Billy Martin on drums and percussion and Chris Wood on bass, the band has become renowned for music that is unclassifiable and always pushing the boundaries. .
For its upcoming release “Radiolarians,” the band gathered the results of a year-and-a-half project into a deluxe format featuring three CD volumes of the official project — a rarities disc, a live disc, a remix disc, a DVD and two vinyl LPs. For the project, band members would get together and write music and then take it on the road. They would then hone the compositions live and finally record for release.
“We’re always restless in the way in which we make music and play music. We’re looking at new ways to write music together and keep it fresh,” Martin said in an interview this week. “This is the opposite of what a commercial record label band would do, and it has a lot to do with, when we perform in front of an audience, we always take that approach of playing different variations on our music every night depending on how we feel and depending on the audience, so it makes sense to do it this way, and it was just yet another variation on how to create a new repertoire.”
The band got the word “Radiolarians” from the work of 18th century scientist Ernst Haeckel, a book of whom Martin had found and become entranced by.
“He did a lot of nature illustrations, and his book was called ‘Radiolarians,’ which are these microscopic skeletal structures from microorganisms that lived in the ocean and that died in the ocean,” Martin said. “There are many variations, which is basically how we see our music — as lots of different variations — and in a sense a kind of evolutionary process. That’s how it ties in with the science.”
Science plays a big structural role in how the band looks at its work — building a piece of music relates to the discipline on multiple levels, from comparisons to scientific process to metaphors involving the work of Charles Darwin.
“When we record a song, that’s just a snapshot of where it was at the time. Through all the trial and error of performing, we perfected what we thought would be the best version on the record,” Martin said. “Now when we play after the record, it’s another version of the record. It’s been formalized from the beginning, but it’s a living, evolving process.”
As the American form of fast-moving musical evolution, jazz has often been the designation given to the band, though only some of the music resembles jazz as it is known and understood by the general public. The band understands its relationship to jazz not in the realm of actual musical styling — though that can enter into it — but through the process of exploration employed in making their music.
“It’s in the spirit of the jazz approach where you play a standard and it’s standard, but you’re always playing around with the form,” Martin said. “I think it’s more like we’re still playing with the form, but some tunes are really pretty straightforward. There are some tunes that are very poppy and hooky, and those don’t change much. There are other ones — the way they’re written, they are more open to improvisation.”
The process is typical for the band’s non-commercial approach, and it’s one of trying varying hypotheses on, as well as accepting music as part of an abstract system of linguistics that is constantly being used and built on, and subject to — as with the spoken word — variations and slang.
“The musical language of this stuff, it’s universal,” Martin said, “and there’s a vocabulary that I’m constantly adding to and we’re all borrowing from, and it becomes part of our language.”
Rather than borrowing from one language, however, the band builds from various sources to create a melting pot of musical linguistics that keeps things fresh.
“I’m always open to anything,” Martin said. “Whatever is new to me inspires me. That, to me, is what life’s all about, but I do find myself going back to some things. I’m discovering a lot in African culture because it’s so deep and rich and there’s so much. West and Central Africa, East Africa, there are so many different cultures and types of music — and it’s alive. It’s evolving and growing and changing, so I’m always discovering something.”
Although Africa is central to his influences, Martin’s sources are all over the map.
“There are certain symphonic 20th century music and certain modern composers that I love, and I’m just constantly getting something out of what they are doing,” he said. “And then some new composers. Or I’ll hear a new pop song.”
Keeping the music they create fresh is directly relational to band members’ keeping the music they hear fresh.
“I’m always into the unexpected surprise,” Martin said. “There are concepts, but usually with a concept it’s like, ‘OK, I want to do something here with this; I’m going to file that for later and pull it out — here’s a note.’ More than half the stuff I never knew what I was feeling, so I usually just move on. The other half, I go back and develop something conceptually, but it’s always open for changes. If I get inspired, I want to capture the spirit and energy of this amazing thing that I heard, and it may inspire me to compose something, so I will definitely go back and listen to it and try to capture the energy without ripping it out, or without emulating it exactly, and then grow from there.”
The band utilizes its multitude of influences, from jazz to prog to pop, by folding in the styles it continually revisits, doing so in a seamless way, rather than consciously picking and choosing and creating barriers between sounds.
“We don’t really conceptually plan it out,” Martin said. “We don’t say ‘we’re going to do this; we’re going to do a pop song; we’re going to rope those people in.’ There’s something to this thing that we’re doing that we like, and we’re going to play it because we like it. Whether it comes from symphonic music or folk and blues or coming from Africa or whether it’s coming from disco or coming from progressive rock, there’s something we love about it, and we’re going to play around with it … we’re just bored if we’re playing the same thing over and over.”
The band draws on the unexpected, craving new ideas and adding each to the language of music it speaks — in this way, a direct line to the jazz players through the decades who have approached the music as a dialogue but into the future with the multi-faceted sound that the band has always pursued.
“You’re just taking the essence of something and playing around with it, reshaping it, maybe putting a fresher feeling into it,” Martin said. “The composition, somewhat, you can distill it down to its essence. It may be melody; it may be the way chords change; it may be a drum beat, that makes the song. You play around with that, and sometimes it will be in a genre of jazz where people know it in a generic way, or it will be in some other form or some other genre, but it will be the same idea.
“That’s why we don’t call ourselves jazz musicians — we’re just musicians. We love all kinds of music. There’s no one thing that we are. We’re just experimenting, and we appreciate it all.”
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