Levon Henry
An intimate conversation with Levon Henry; photographed by Ivy Meissner.
You are most likely aware of Levon Henry’s work with folks like Meshell N’Degeocello, Joe Henry, Bettye Lavette, and Blake Mills, and now the saxophonist/clarinetist, composer, songwriter, tune-smith, singer, & dreamer presents his album Sinker via Tiny Montgomery Records. Presenting the premiere for “Short Fiction”, Levon Henry provides mind opening short stories of chords and keys that glitter & shimmer like the morning sun reflections on the sleepy seas.
“Short Fiction” is the kind of story song that makes everything else around you dissolve into the ether while the warm instruments take full, front, and center of the mind’s attention. Henry displays a composition mastery that utilizes some smart knowledge of classical components to create an arrangement that moves through the ages as lyrics observe life from an out of body perspective. Commitments and commentary on contentment are sorted out in a song that seeks to discern the real and now from the fictitious statements of appeals and feigned affections. Join us now for a candid interview with Levon Henry.
Describe your composition process that created Sinker, and how this solo experience is different from your other collaborative work.
My composition process for Sinker was and still is pretty irregular. As an instrumentalist first, and with an interest in (mostly un-rhymed) poetry that predated my interest in songwriting or lyrics, the most difficult element for me is the integration of words and music. I used to try and write either complete words or complete music independently and then add whatever the missing half was, but I’ve come to believe that both elements have different jobs to do in the presence of the other. When I would let the cement dry on either before introducing the other, I continually felt like I wound up with songs where the music didn’t need the lyrics or vice versa. As a result, the most consistent part of the process for me is trying to strike a balance where the two feel equally weighted I don’t feel like one is being subservient to the other and neither is destroying the tone of the other.
Outside of my overall writing process, this record in particular is influenced by the wake of Sandy Bull’s early records with Billy Higgins and Astral Weeks. Those records really bridged folk and jazz in a way that mysteriously appeared and then disappeared, like it was discontinued or nobody grabbed the torch, not even Van. He and many others including Joni Mitchell all started or continued to adopt a jazz influence, but very suddenly the influence was that of dense harmony, electric keyboards, and smooth saxophone; it was all int he vein of jazz fusion. Eventually people like Tom Waits come along and invoke jazz again as an earthy compound, but by then it’s living alongside swampy roadhouse R&B and the smell of gasoline so it’s a different ingredient entirely. By then, Astral Weeks feels a million miles away in that it’s the first and last time for a long time you heard a swing feel on the ride cymbal behind someone singing when it wasn’t purely a jazz record. Jazz influence on those terms is more in the vein of the early Ornette Coleman quartet where jazz had a folkloric feeling. The ride cymbal on Ornette’s “Ramblin’” doesn’t feel tonally that different from a cow bell. It isn’t so surprising that Sandy and Van wanted to tap that vein as Don Cherry referred to himself as a folk musician, many of Charlie Haden’s records involve samples of field recordings, and Billy Higgins was a multi-instrumentalist who sang and played a diversity range of folk styles from around the world.
That’s all a very long way of saying: there is an overlap between these worlds that are presented as very far apart but which have a good bit of connective tissue between them. As a jazz saxophonist who had a latent awakening to folk music I’m compelled to that overlap, and also surprised that it hasn’t been more explored. When I met RJ Miller I felt immediately struck by that spirit in his playing and with him as the known center I was able to imagine the rest of the album around it. It’s exciting for me to be a musician at this time because there are a handful of musicians on both sides of the instrumental-jazz and vocal-folk spectrum that are also riding the same border (Sam Amidon, Ryley Walker, Robert Stillman, Bill Frisell, and their music has been a huge part of my development. The lyrics are a whole other story.
As far as differentiating it from my collaborative work, there’s a pretty straight delineation there at the moment because I’ve never really written music in a collaborative way, so the role I play in other people’s projects is not as a singer or songwriter, but just as a sideman reed-player/arranger and in those settings the songs have always been finished before I entered the picture.
What brought you to the instruments the saxophone & clarinet?
The saxophone and clarinet were actually somewhat of a thoughtless choice. I’m a bit of a late bloomer to music, and even though I grew up around it, I didn’t pay it much mind. I started playing clarinet in 5th grade band because my friends were starting band and clarinet was randomly chosen out of the 6 options: alto sax, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, flute, and snare drum. I stayed in concert band but still wasn’t a “music fan” and didn’t listen to records or anything like that. My relationship with it was mental and I enjoyed it like I enjoyed math, so by 7th grade I wanted to switch from my middle school’s concert band to the jazz band because the music was more challenging. The teacher didn’t allow clarinet in the jazz band so I switched to the Tenor Saxophone because it was the easiest crossover to make. At that point I started listening to jazz and became more passionate about music overall.
Catching up with Levon Henry; press photo courtesy of the artist.
Tell us about the facts & fiction that inspired “Short Fiction”.
Facts and fiction behind “Short Fiction”: The word fiction was the maybe the last word I wrote in the song, I started singing it instead of the word “friction” in the final choruses when I would perform it. ‘As good as it gets—with anybody else—there’s plenty of room—in the divided self—enough of a rub—between my hand—and my glove—for a friction/fiction like love.’ I guess that song as much as any sums up the lyrical perspective of the album. Near the end of writing all the songs, I noticed that I had been writing to work through and process how I feel about the relationship between the physical and the emotional, which at that moment in life was something I thought about a lot. Though it’s always been a part of human behavior to have a wide spectrum between the connect and disconnect of those two things, I think the portion that separates the two is more visible as we become less and less private about our sexuality. I don’t really hold to the opinion presented in that chorus, or any of the other lyrics in the album to be my own personal opinion, but part of figuring what you actually resonate with is stepping inside the vast array of opinions, so the process of exploring these different potential voices is what feels uniformly personal to me about all these songs.
Other things the world needs to hear/see/read.
Hear:
Charles Lloyd and Billy Higgins, “Which Way Is East”—Jazz as true Folk Music or vice versa.
RJ Miller, “Ronald’s Rhythm”—Glad to know drums as mythic instruments still exist.
Jib Kidder, “Teaspoon to the Ocean”—The best and worst kind of thing to discover near the end of making an album because it makes you want to change everything.
See:
Photos by Elena Montemurro and Ivy Meissner—They understand the humans and their faces.
Paintings by Peter Doig—Reminding us that we come out of the land and disappear back into it.
Read:
Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion—Inspires a lot of thinking about the narrative of one’s life and the flexibility we should bring to it.
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood: In it she says “Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.” which is worth the whole price of admission.
Levon Henry’s album Sinker is available now from Tiny Montgomery Records.
