Pianist Andy Milne uses building metaphors to talk about music. Construction is “about how you bind two things together—and that’s how I think about composition,” he explained during a March interview in the Harlem apartment that he shares with his wife, singer La Tanya Hall. Mere feet away sat the glossy Juno Award that he’d won in 2019 for The Seasons of Being (Sunnyside), the fifth album with his long-established band, Dapp Theory. One of his idols, pianist McCoy Tyner (1938-2020), had just passed, and New York City’s sudden lockdown in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak was still 16 days away. But Milne didn’t know any of this yet.
Well before the Juno win, Milne had spent about a year renovating the couple’s apartment and pondering “how you design the bones of something,” as he put it, noting that “composers and architects, they have a way of figuring that out.” Soon, he’d be thinking about how to design the bones of a trio ensemble, a format that he’d never taken on as a leader. That Milne, accomplished in a multitude of small ensembles, had never led a trio recording during the course of his almost-30-year career puzzled some. Traditionally, jazz pianists make their most seminal artistic statements in the trio format.
Milne was doing other things, though—big things—and he hadn’t felt the need. As an undergraduate at York University in Toronto, he’d studied with legendary pianist and fellow Canadian Oscar Peterson. Soon after, saxophonist Steve Coleman had tapped Milne to be the regular pianist for his game-changing ensemble, M-BASE Collective, and in 1998 Milne formed Dapp Theory as a vehicle for his own inventive, syncretic compositions. He liked what he was doing.
But by spring 2017 Milne was ready to scale back. Several members of Dapp Theory would be unavailable for touring that fall, and Hall was preparing to record a standards album, with Milne as arranger and producer. Perhaps he, too, would do a standards-based album, utilizing the same trio for both releases.
“And then in the fall of that year, I got a cancer diagnosis,” Milne recalled. “I had to rethink everything. But I didn’t have any gigs with Dapp Theory then, so I just shifted gears.”
Unison, the trio whose construction he’d spent so much time pondering, had its first gig in December 2017, just a few days before Milne’s surgery for prostate cancer. At the time, he hadn’t much repertoire for a trio configuration. “But I had the musicians,” he said, referring to bassist John Hébert and drummer Clarence Penn. “I had taken a long time [in selecting them] because I really wanted to feel how it was going to work with the musical personalities. So, that was a pretty profound first date.”
That date marked both a professional and personal transition for Milne. He moved from spearheading a seasoned, 10-person crew to nurturing a newly hatched chamber ensemble. And after surgery, he faced a lengthy and uncertain road toward remission. Though long in tenure, it turns out, both journeys were successful—this past April he released The reMission, his debut trio album, on Sunnyside Records, and he’s been officially cancer-free for more than a year.
These transitions were anything but straightforward, however. Soon after surgery, he was jetting to Europe for some concerts (in hindsight, “a bad idea,” he admitted); finishing up the winning Dapp Theory album; recording Hall’s sophomore release, Say Yes (Blue Canoe Records); recording and touring with prolific trumpeter Ralph Alessi; gigging throughout North America with Unison; and recording the trio’s first album not once, but twice. All the while following a rigorous healing protocol.
“I still managed to [create music], which is incredible,” Milne said. “But it was hard. I ended up having radiation treatment every day, for seven and a half weeks, in the middle of the summer. And I rode my bike down there. Every day.”
Milne gives some credit for his recovery to the exertion of that daily, 20-mile journey. Besides such strenuous physical exercise, he also changed his diet completely and fasted intermittently. “I really did a lot to make sure that those typical radiation symptoms didn’t happen to me,” he said. “So I didn’t end up being super fatigued, and I was able to do this stuff. Mind you, [that time] was a little nuts.”
Milne’s interest in alternative healing modalities would come as no surprise to Dapp Theory fans. In 2013 he received a commission from Chamber Music America to compose the music for The Seasons of Being based on the unique homeopathic diagnosis of each musician in the group. And as the adopted son of a physician in Ontario, Canada, he grew up immersed in Western medicine. In fact, the interrelatedness of medical science, music, and healing has long fascinated him.
But while Milne was putting into practice the homeopathic principles that he’d explored on his previous album, his concept for the new album had begun to change. “It ended up taking a turn when I realized that maybe [standards] were not going to be the primary focus,” he said. “They were the primary focus of the arrangements that I did for La Tanya’s record, but not so much for what we were doing as a trio. That material was just getting baked as we were on the road.”
A quick, seven-city tour in the spring of 2019 made all the difference in the group’s sound. Milne had written nine originals for the trio and had even recorded them—a first stab at a trio album—but the tracks didn’t feel quite right.
“After we toured, though, we really had a vibe,” recalled Penn, speaking by phone from his Brooklyn home, where he and his family have been sheltering since the lockdown. “We ended that tour and went [back] into the studio maybe two days later, and that’s what you’re hearing now. I think every take was from that one session.”
The emotionally complex album that came out of that session owes much to the single-minded focus of the three players as they moved fluently through Milne’s dynamic compositions. Some tunes brim with hopefulness, like the crisp, brightly melodic “Winter Palace,” or the final cut, “Sad to Say,” with its reverently resonant outro. Others plumb the darker places, like “Dancing on the Savannah,” a rhythmic tumble into jarring harmonies, or “The Call,” a stark portrait in modern expressionism. But none of them lingers in any one feeling state for very long. Milne’s vision is changeable.
“The music for the trio is quite different from all of the other stuff that Andy’s done out there,” Penn said. “It’s introspective and calm, but at the same time, there’s an intense burning going on.”
Milne included only one tune that he hadn’t composed himself: McCoy Tyner’s “Passion Dance,” from the ground-breaking pianist’s first album for Blue Note, The Real McCoy. Milne’s version, though faithful to the original, has its own surprising harmonic colors and unremitting forcefulness—as an homage, it took on greater meaning with the news of Tyner’s death on March 6.
In an email, Milne responded to the loss of his idol: “One of my first jazz recordings was McCoy’s Inner Voices,” he wrote. “It was perhaps an unusual point of entry because it featured a large vocal chorus. I think that this, in some way, helped shaped my openness towards collaborating across genres and living outside of traditional ensemble structures. I also identified with how he created a musical response to the unprecedented chair that he occupied in Trane’s quartet at such a young age. This, for sure, inspired me, as I searched for ways of navigating my role when joining Steve Coleman’s [M-BASE Collective] in 1991. I am grateful to have learned from him.”
As Milne’s email suggests, there are certain parallels between the two pianists’ careers. As young musicians, both learned to swim in the deep end of a powerful group led by a master innovator, and both drew on that experience later in forming their own innovative ensembles. Tyner, too, went on to explore the trio format most famously after he left John Coltrane’s quartet in 1965.
“There are ways of thinking of the piano inside of larger ensembles,” Milne explained, pointing out that the piano line often disappears in these groupings, in a way that it doesn’t with trios. “I’ve had to find my survival techniques, to cope in all those years of touring with larger groups. It never felt like the piano really sang, because in order to make it work, you have to do things that just really suck the beauty out of the instrument. Then you can’t appreciate the subtle textures.”
Trumpeter Alessi readily attests both to Milne’s adaptability across a variety of musical contexts and his refinement as a player. The two first met at Banff Centre’s jazz workshop in Alberta, Canada, in the early 1990s and have been frequent collaborators since, from the M-BASE Collective 25 years ago (when Alessi joined) through to Imaginary Friends, Alessi’s elegant release for ECM last year. (Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Mark Ferber rounded out Alessi’s regular quintet on the recording.)
“Conceptually, Andy’s music has really evolved dramatically over the years,” he said. “Partly because of the influence of playing in different situations with different musicians, but also because of the choice of musicians that he plays with. I think he’s very mindful about what Clarence brings to the band. At the same time, he knows that John is going to bring different ideas to it. That kind of mix makes the music very compelling, when you have these disparate elements all working together.”
Disparate, yes—but equal. All members of the trio are quick to emphasize the trilateral nature of the group’s aesthetic; Penn and Hébert attribute this balance to Milne’s insight into what makes a trio work.
“A lot of leaders want to solo all the time, and it’s all about them,” Penn said. “In this trio, Andy really gives an equal amount of space to the two of us. He wants to make sure that it’s considered a trio, with three equal parts. He’s a really giving person that way. No ego.”
Hébert echoed Penn’s sentiment, speaking by phone from his home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he and his family had relocated just before New York City locked down. “There’s a lot more interplay and freedom in a trio setting, and within that, way more responsibility, because we’re under the microscope. [In this setting], Andy has a way of delegating responsibilities that also allows us to be free. He wants us to explore who we are and what we can bring to his music. At the same time he’s holding us together so it doesn’t get too out of control. It’s a fine line. But that’s the beauty of a trio, [the balance between] contributing to the band as an individual, and as a group. Being honest to the music as it’s presented to you, and then putting your own stamp on it, serving the music as best you can. Because we’re never higher, or above, the music. We honor that first.”
Two days after the interview in Manhattan, Milne flew to Michigan, where he now teaches full time in the Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation at the University of Michigan. He’d received the job offer in 2018, when he was undergoing all those grueling cancer treatments, and started there that fall. He’d been teaching in New York City for years—part time at the New School and part time at New York University—and a full time position settled in one place was appealing. So, he accepted the offer, at first commuting back and forth, and finally became a permanent Michigan resident in 2019.
What he found at his new job surprised him. “I quickly discovered that I was in a huge research institution, doing wonderful things with a fabulous performing arts school,” he said. “Opportunities to collaborate across disciplines as a full-time faculty member became very tangible. So, within a semester, all of a sudden I'm working on things that are important to me—like a platform to help people deal with chronic pain, with someone from medicine and someone from design.”
As an educator, Milne can use these cross-disciplinary collaborations as another way to teach his students something about music that reaches beyond the fundamentals of time, pitch, and voice leadings. Part of his discussions with students, he says, is to demystify the uniqueness of their own creative struggle by putting it in the context of musicians who have come before them. “So much of music comes from a place of struggle,” he asserts. “At a certain point you have to find a way to flourish.”
With the spread of the novel coronavirus throughout the U.S., the University of Michigan has shuttered its classrooms and switched to remote learning, as has Western Michigan University, where Hébert teaches, and Rutgers University, where Penn is finishing a masters in jazz studies. Milne and his two bandmates aren’t sure if their trio gigs—or any of their spring/summer gigs—will happen as scheduled.
Even in this challenge, though, Milne finds opportunity. He’s been using video conferencing platforms to work with his students from a distance, and through this technology he moderates weekly guest artist sessions, bringing expert musicians to speak on campus in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Learning directly from masters, as Milne did, might help students develop what he calls an “aesthetic constitution.” To elucidate, he again uses a building metaphor: A plumber comes to your house to fix a broken pipe and goes right to the one tool among many needed to remedy the problem. Such mastery is about technical expertise, coupled with wisdom. That’s what he’s there to teach, he says.
“I see artistry in so many different domains,” he went on. “The workshop, the kitchen, the painter’s studio, the dance studio. In a surgeon who can carve you open and know that they can spare all those nerves, get the bad cells, and have you out of there in four hours. And you’ll be okay. That’s artistry. I identify with that.”
(Reprinted from the June 2020 issue of Downbeat magazine)