An outtake from Sam Shepherd (Floating Points) interview w/ RR on making Promises with Pharoah Sanders

In advance of Floating Points' performance at the Hollywood Bowl, the artist talked to me for the Guardian about collaborating with Pharoah. Also: Mary Lattimore on Roy Montgomery, RR on Scott Tuma

For the past six or so months, I’ve been quietly anticipating the release of an interview I conducted with the UK producer Sam Shepherd, who makes music and DJs as Floating Points. Originally designed to be released in its entirety via the label Luaka Bop’s portals, at some point the transcript was returned to me with the suggestion that I pitch it for use as the foundation of a feature. That feature just published in Friday’s edition of the Guardian.

Saying yes was a no-brainer. Sam had never publicly spoken about making Promises, and after Pharoah’s passing last year, enough time had gone by that he wanted to offer some context. For the LA Times, I’d earlier written about attending one of the tenor giant’s final performances, a closed show during the pandemic at Zebulon where Pharoah and fellow sax player Azar Lawrence teamed to create fury and grace.

I’d sat a few feet away from Pharaoh in a booth at Zebulon, where I attempted to interview the historically inscrutable artist, to little success (but no obvious tension). In the week’s following, Luaka Bop’s Eric Welles-Nystrom sent me an advance of the then-hush-hush unnamed Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders project, which I wrote about again for the Times.

As the Grammy Award voting season was coming to a close, Luaka Bop hosted a Promises listening session at Sargent Recorders, where I again absorbed the album and, after, chatted with Eric, Sam and Kieran Hebden. This is all very name-droppy, I know. But’s it’s a roundabout way of explaining how I’d come to earn the opportunity to speak with Sam about the remarkable Promises.

One crucial excerpt from the Guardian story. The second paragraph made me hear Promises differently:

As a Sanders devotee, Shepherd confesses to being overwhelmed by the responsibility, thinking: “This could be his last record. So that last phrase he played, I was like: ‘This could be his last recorded phrase.’ All those things are going through my head. Maybe they shouldn’t have been, but I was there every day with him. I knew the reality of what was going on here. And it was beautiful, but also within me was a little sadness.”

Shepherd was keen to focus on what he called the recording’s “in-between sounds” such as “the creaking wooden switches of the Leslie [speaker] cabinet going on and the machinations of instruments. Hearing the thumb pad and hearing the breathing. All those sounds that are extraneous to the musical content are actually super important to being inside the world of this piece.” He says that Sanders’ spontaneous burst of vocalising during the fourth movementhas “something quite ornithological about it. It’s like birdsong.”

You can read the whole Guardian story here.

At some point I hope that the full transcript will be published, but until then I can only offer this single exchange, otherwise unpublished.

Roberts: There's a moment in the fourth movement [of Promises] in which Pharoah starts vocalizing. And at first I thought part of it was a bass solo—that little run. What do you recall about the vocal takes and sessions? You can hear his breath when he’s vocalizing and when he's playing. It's an amazing series of moments.

Sam Shepherd: I'm very keen on recording the saxophone. I’m going to get beaten up by Yale [Evelev, president of Luaka Bop] for saying this, but I've got problems with the sound of the saxophone on recorded music. I often find that some of the greatest musical pieces of jazz, I struggle with the tone of the sax. I sometimes find it doesn't sound as lifelike as it does in a live setting.

Some of the recordings of Joe Henderson, for example, are some of the great saxophone recordings. My friend Shabaka [Hutchings, of Sons of Kemet and The Comet is Coming] was telling me that often Joe would play really quietly, and that's why it doesn't saturate the microphone. I like Joe’s tenor sound on his Milestone records, and I'm always thinking quite critically about the sound of the saxophone because I'm very nervous that it's gonna sound honk-y.

We positioned Pharoah’s mic with a little distance, but we also got an [Electrovoice] RE20 on his finger pads and close to his mouth. There’s a song on Steve Kuhn’s self-titled album, “The Meaning of Love.” It's on Buddah records, randomly, which was, like, a disco label. The voice on that is the RE20. It's a broadcast microphone that’s right in the center of your face. It’s flat as a pancake so it takes up the whole image. What I wanted, combined, was that Pharoah could be right up in your face, breathing on you, but also have the sort of depth of the body from a large capsule microphone.

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You listen now: Mary Lattimore

You’ll want to carve big chunks of time out of your busy schedule at some point after absorbing Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, harpist-composer Mary Lattimore’s new album, for the first time. Not that you must. Drop the needle anywhere on the six track work, named for a hotel on the Croatian island of Hvar, and you’ll soon be enveloped in Lattimore’s rich sound waves, lush with velveteen layers and composed to consume you. But given ample volume and focused, non-screen attention, the record blossoms. As it fills the room and/or your consciousness, Goodbye … seems to shimmer and cascade through space and time.

For In Sheep’s Clothing, the artist took time out of her schedule to recommend five pieces of music that she’s been listening to. Here’s one. The rest are here.

“Roy’s is just the most gorgeous, enveloping guitar music; you really feel it so deeply when listening. This record has been filling my house in the late summer, and the tones are just so rich and warm and heartbreaking.” — Mary Lattimore on Roy Montgomery’s Island of Lost Souls

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And you listen now too: Loren Connors & Scott Tuma – “A West Bound Brook” / “Gone To Turin”

Few guitarists of the past three decades have carved a more singular sound and feel than Loren Connors, whose delicacy on the fretboard is matched only by his ability to conjure the so-called feels. For this peaceful, inspired split 12-inch, label Profane Illuminations captured a lightning-in-a-bottle 2019 Connors performance at Union Pool in Brooklyn. Called “A West Bound Brook,” the side-length piece finds the guitarist channeling his instrument through an array of messy effects pedals, which play with the venue’s natural acoustics to create deepness.

Tuma is cofounder of the brilliant Chicago proto-cosmic-Americana band Souled American. Like Connors, Tuma does his own amazing thing using his six strings, which on “Gone to Turin” features more twang, structure and melody — but just as much freedom to roam.

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Fashion prediction: Bigger hair is on the horizon