hi everybody it's eric mintel thank you for tuning in to talking jazz and you know on the show we always feature a guest who is doing some different things with jazz and today is very different which you're going to really really like these these stories  that's incredible what it would tell our audience about that well sustainable jazz that is when i moved to princeton two thousand and three or so i've been living in durham north carolina pretty much raising our kids and had been doing much music i came to princeton the first day i was actually in this town i composition came to mind and i was actually writing it down as we were going to the real in you know a decade before ok but i just started writing stuff again and at the same time i was getting involved with the environmental movement such as it is in and so i had always been interested in science and and had taken tons of courses like that and got a little bit involved i ended up really interested in plants and that got me interested eventually in native plants and made of meaning native native being they've they've evolved in a certain area over millennia ok co evolved with other with other plants and animal the environment commission in town but also writing music and and then so it just seemed a natural name for what i do because i just kind of live and  as a person there's always been science and nature and also music you know being been in the jazz scene various places and what i always like to ask our guests is when did you find like when did that fire in the belly happen like with music do you remember what age you were at where you were you were you got interested in jazz and said this is what i want to do and you play saxophone obviously clarinet you remember when that you had that like maybe a pissing me of well i mean it's interesting because i hear that a lot from jazz musicians that they heard charlie parker and they were just right that you know yeah but for me it was i came pretty slowly to jazz really and for very different reasons probably the most people because i mean growing up there was always music in my house and i remember paul mccartney saying that he you hear music and when you're falling asleep and it just kind of gets in there it's in the smell of things yeah and and that was how it was with me i was in my bedroom falling asleep and there was this classical music in the living room was spinning through the hallway and every night and so then i in fourth grade no fifth grade i had a choice because we were in a really small town wisconsin pretty much everybody was recruited to play in the in the high school band so in fifth grade they remember there was a clarinet and a flute in the in my bedroom in the closet for my sisters and i had a choice and i thought the clarinet was more manly somehow so i've learned otherwise but i went through that and and then i you know they had a good it was a very small school a very good program how they invest in music and which is which is great because yabbies unfortunately you know there's a lot of our marching band and i had to do the sports hero it was all real pride and like an art like a real team effort yeah yeah you know homecoming marching down the main street like a big deal and i just remember daydreaming  and i was in school about what on the clarinet i would i would discover when i got home ok you know because you push a key here and opens the opens the whole appearance like i was fascinated with the mechanism you know y so that got me and i got to be pretty good pretty quickly in eighth grade i was i was first chair in the high school band that's great so everybody hated me so like who were some of your influences would you say then it was did you listen to the jazz player or one of us here in jazz i remember there was servers carnival was james thurber was a writer for the new yorker and so forth and there was jazz on that album because my parents i just hear what my parents had and so there's a little bit there that was joyful you know trombone and just so long as i listened listening back now yeah but then later in high school my brother gave me a and it was kind of what got me into jazz was a rebellion against the tyranny of the conductor because in ann arbor michigan there was a william movie that came out last year with play i i've never seen me neither because the high school directors then copied imitated the university band director and they were pretty abusive been even though they had very high standards that was good but but the way they did it back to you just going to be a good yeah i mean i've heard stories of that you know where you know i used to teach too and you know you would always hear that or they came back into music later on because they had a bad teacher you know right some of the didn't have patients who were was burghley abusive and that kind of thing so that content if you can rise above that somehow a lot of people can't you know and then they wind up giving up on music just because of that yeah i don't believe in all of that verbal abuse that you are bringing out the best in them i think you can bring out the best without all of that other garbage and you know i think written and i don't want to be directed by anybody and so but i love i love playing clarinet and i had switched to saxophone my senior year but so i was playing both but clarinet was i could carry in the natural order yeah right like field trips and i'd have a clarinet and i to be plain and swatting mosquitoes you know trying to but i was what i dedicated myself to was playing what i was hearing in my head and i had not been in the jazz tradition really at all but i just wanted to do this because i heard some kind of music in my head and i was trying to play i hear one note i find it i hear another note i didn't know where to find that note on the morning i could say read but it was like really learning the horn because i had to find the interval you know how to get to that next know so and i wrote like to measure long that i really loved and i thought oh that's you know and i just play those over and over and out in the nature really and because that's where i was and so that got me into improvisation and the whole idea of playing what's in your mind and it's like a conversation and then i happened to meet somebody i was a counselor at a camp up in northern michigan that i longer exists but i met a one of the one the campers was a drummer and he introduced me when i got back to ann arbor he introduced me to the scene down there and i got into a big band the two five one orchestra ok and you know so i disagreed and i was good at reading and then we'd have solos you know in the big band and and that got me listening and i wanted to be able to play better so it got me listening to well when i first heard charlie parker i got that kind of a lot of notes and i i just i couldn't really relate to but then so i went back i went back to lester young who surely parker had your real yeah studied a lot lester young had very tricky rhythms i didn't realize when i you know when you listen to it just sounds natural but there's a lot of really muddy intricacies so i was i had this really a real  record player tape recorder and i would just like reverse it and i broke it just i was trying to transcribe these wonderful solos by lester young and then later wardell gray and dexter gordon and i just whole nother type it's a language obviously you know and it's but it's an experience too because when you know so you are you are formally trained though you were formally trained and but you could still hear and that's you know i think the subconscious i think that's really important and unfortunately it's missing in i think a lot of households today is really good music like that right jazz classical you know  ear buds all the time they've got all kinds of different and they're not hearing the environment the right hearing what's out there and you probably feel the same way like i'll get an inspiration from would have outside on the road or something  some of the windshield wipers on the car have a rhythm you know so you get that kind of thing happening and you have a melody that goes against that rhythm you know so the second of idea so you're using your environment around you to try to come up with different songs in and improvisations and we're improvising all the time i mean people are improvising all the time like we are right now we're having a verbal right station we just met each other today but we're i'm learning about you and  it's a going back and forth same thing with jazz and a lot of what what jazz musicians are doing a lot of people don't understand it is that conversation where you initially say it's a lot of notes and that's what the but if people listen and can understand it it was crazy fast paced world we have and they get it you know and we've had that happen as well people after a concert they'll be like you know i never really understood or really even like jazz  your music right because you're doing it in a way that it's acceptable and you've got to be accessible to start off with you know and sometimes jazz can be really really out there and i'm right that's the kind of jazz that can turn a lot of people o initially you can always go out there but you always have to come back home to home base but i love it because it's an adventure all the time you're all it's always different all the time now you've got a band right you're in right in a band now tell us a little bit about that yeah well i at some point i met well i had a benefit for the new orleans after the after the hurricane at westminster they had benefit and i met a piano player  i met him again at a phil woods concert somewhere in new jersey a few years later and i made sure i got his phone number then and so we connected and we've been playing playing quite a bit sometimes we have bass player not too often a drummer but just a small group and and we play all riginal stuff pretty much good that's great because i've written tons it's and you're composing all the time now we have a clip that we're going to hear what cliff does this funky thank you rick where was this play where was this clip do you remember where it was where you were performing oh well this is actually in my living room because ok at some point god i have a lot of friends i you know through environmental worship and i could invite them over to have a part of living or a concert and the piano is the piano i grew up crawling underneath you know while my sisters played so is not a lot of jazz out in the media so they're not hearing it right although they're hearing it in the in the background yeah a lot of commercials have jazz in the background if you listen so it's always in the on the fray you know it's always back there but yeah i mean the whole thing is just an educational part of it so when did you move from michigan to to here why did i move from michigan ninety five down to durham north carolina to ok and we just had a daughter two weeks was exciting and a little challenging yeah so we got into stuff down there i started a nonprofit the other big creek watershed association get tell us about that well i feel like when i move  know guitarist jake wright bird in harbor and he came from europe he immigrated from europe and we go to like a treasure but we go to one of those places with used clothes and everything fits him nothing fits me and i'm like from the u s so i was kind of need to have this kind of immigrant experience because i was seeing germ with new eyes and yeah i was from the midwest and and we so i saw this creek where i was taking my daughter to play and and and i thought this kind of you know what is that where is this come from where does it go and and everybody thought of it as a ditch and i thought you know this is a creek that unifies all these neighborhoods through the city and has all these little natural areas along it why don't we make trade when we preserve those and make trails through them so that people can just walk out their door get into a natural area and take a walk that's going to great and that's pretty much what's happened just it was a ton of work to get this  profit going but that's what i've devoted myself to hours raising the kids and read and then you know then we moved up to princeton and and so is that doing the same thing they are in the nonprofit still happening in it is and it's  i i was working in doing plant inventories of the local preserves and came upon this house out in the middle of the woods and as wondered what is this in one of the had the idea of bring it here and then he had the idea of saving all these jewish scientists who were getting kicked out of the universities in in germany in the one nine hundred thirty s one nine hundred thirty three they started ticking all the jews out brilliant mathematicians physicists and so forth venom and saw that and said we have to bring these people over because their lives are threatened and we need their brilliance you know so he brought in more later academia in the u s so he is sort of like schindler's list he came up with all these lists and of people over there trying to match them up with universities here and so he brought einstein over and fly around who you know one of the early computer pioneers and  he did all the stuff behind the scenes in all these different areas of computers and mathematics academia and human rights and princeton nature because he and his wife donated the first nature preserve in princeton while they the whole you know what a great big or is or thing go in and they left this house which had been boarded up for two it's been boarded up for twenty years now and we're finally getting a chance to to start fixing up the friends of heron town woods and so f o h w dot org and so we've been building this nonprofit pretty much like i did down in durham the other was great what a great story and  that's awesome and you know will put some identification on there so people can find out where the you know where the foundation is and the price and you have a website obviously and do you have it i guess people can donate to the com website for music i have this little small universe of web sites that i may save you know what as as musicians we all we have to be versatile right and i think anymore with jazz especially i think more a lot more jazz artists are putting out their own records on their own labels not you know going for the big record labels right or because it's you know sometimes a big waste you know but i think it's i think what you're doing is phenomenal and what a great story wouldn't with that with and i do want to say that i think my experience leading the band i mean as a musical director for a band in ann arbor called the lunar octet and we just did a recording as well so i'm noticing that all of these things have the like an out otherworldly type of what my father was an astronomer yeah yeah yeah but i will say that you know because i started composing i got into this so the position of leading the band b rehearsals i was a composer so we had to you know they had to ask you what was going on and i think that translated really you know collective enterprise and that's what i love about music you're collectively creating something beautiful and i think the collective in society you know in general has been downplayed and you know we can't talk about collective action or something but it's purposeful collective action and it's and to see it on stage is you know a band like music it's that's what you're well yeah aries over to the nonprofit you know so when i started a nonprofit it was kind of bringing people together to create something you know i couldn't agree with the more i always say that music is the glue that holds that community together yeah because if you have a strong foundation that way and you have a supportive community with music and as a jazz musician you know that's the that's so special the people that come to the concerts they are if we said before sometimes they know they know jazz but sometimes they don't you know and that's the people that you want to reach because those are the people that you're going to remember you right they're going to remember that music right and so i think all of these things are great so tune in next time for another interesting guest on talking jazz god bless