By Filipe Freitas

Name: Ingrid Laubrock
Instrument: tenor and soprano saxophone
Style: avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, contemporary big band
Album Highlights: Roulette of the Cradle (Intakt, 2015), Contemporary Chaos Practices (Intakt, 2018), Dreamt Twice Twice Dreamt (Intakt, 2020)

Lately, you’ve been focused on writing for large ensembles. What are the biggest challenges and rewards of approaching your music in this format?
It has been a huge and welcome learning curve for me. I have no formal composition training and had to study how to compose and notate for instruments that are not normally in my daily palette as a jazz musician. This included learning more about bowing techniques, percussion notation and - earlier this year - demystifying the concert harp a little more. So, there was and still is a lot of nuts and bolts work to be done! I pored over a lot of scores, particularly by Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Gubaildulina and Feldman. Making orchestral scores and parts is also incredibly time consuming, but I even enjoy that, as you deepen your knowledge about the piece while doing it.
The reward of having so much color at your disposal makes it all worthwhile, it’s really like nothing else for me. One big practical challenge is of course that large ensembles are very expensive to realize and complex to organize, so without external financial support by a foundation or government it would be completely out of the question for me.

Your new double-record for the Intakt label - Dreamt Twice, Twice Dreamt - was split into orchestra+soloists and small ensemble. How did this idea come up?
The small group versions were the result of John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning series - a monthly series that took place in National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Initially I wrote them for piano, electronics and saxophone with the additions of violin on some of the pieces. For the recording, I extended the group and added electric harp and accordion. The orchestra versions were commissioned by the EOS Chamber Orchestra, a Cologne based group which I have worked with in the past.
The compositions on both records are based on entries in dream diaries I have been keeping for a decade and both sides feature the same pieces but completely reimagined.

Other recent recordings include duo collaborations with singular pianists, namely Kris Davis and Aki Takase. What are the musical qualities you most like in each of them?
Both Kasumi and Blood Moon are part of a planned series of piano saxophone duets. Aki Takase was the first female jazz musician I ever saw perform as a teenager which made big impression on me, so playing with her is an honor and a joy. She has incredible energy, creativity and serious playfulness which I love.
Kris Davis was one of the first musicians I was introduced to when I moved here in 2009. We have a deep understanding of each others’ playing and composing, and it feels like I can be in almost telepathic synch with her. She is a virtuoso and master pianist who has the ability to really tune in.

Tell us more about the 30+ episodes of the Stir Crazy Series that you and Tom Rainey create weekly from home. Did it bring something new to your musical interaction?
We started this series just after barely making it back into the States after the March lockdown and travel ban. We were on the last Delta flight coming in from Zurich, where we had played at the Taktlos Festival. We knew we had to keep producing and working on something to stay sane, but also to keep in touch with our fans who are avid concert goers. Tom and I regularly ask other composers to send us pieces which we then rehearse and often have to adapt, as few people write for this instrumentation. It’s creatively fun to find ways of playing music that we have to strip down because there is only the two of us and it has strengthened our musical bond even more, which has always been strong. Rehearsing and playing our friends’ compositions is a little like having them in the room with us, spiritually speaking, and has become a meaningful way of staying in touch musically.
The recordings are unedited and raw. We live by a highway, so there is background noise and we, of course, record in the same room - they are more like readings than fully realized records. This is one of the reasons we don’t charge for them. In the beginning we used an old Zoom H4N recorder, but we have since upgraded and bought microphones and an interface. In the past - and hopefully in the future too - I have always left recording to professionals and all of this is new to me, but it’s of course a good skill to acquire.

Name 2 persons who influenced you the most as a musician.
It’s almost impossible to limit it to two, but I’d say John Coltrane and Anthony Braxton.

Name 2 persons whom you’ve never collaborated with but you’d like to.
Equally difficult to limit, but Henry Threadgill and Ashley Fure would be high on the list.

Can you mention a couple of records that changed your perspective of jazz?
Miles Davis - Bitches Brew, Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil, John Coltrane - Crescent, Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, to name but a few.

What other styles do you listen to? Any interesting discoveries lately?
Apart from jazz I listen to a lot of “new music” and follow some of the amazing ensembles here in NYC. Wet Ink, ICE Ensemble, Yan/Wire and many others have a great output of interesting music. I also really enjoy Fiona Apple’s new record Fetch the Bolt Cutters which came out earlier this year.

Projects for the near future?
Tom Rainey and I plan to go to the studio to record a new duo record, and I am working on a series of multi-layered pieces that were supposed to have been premiered at the Visionfest this year but have, for now, been postponed to 2021.
Luckily I had a productive 2019 and still have two more records that haven’t been mixed or mastered yet - one being a collaboration of mine with Stéphane Payen and the second a secret record with Tomeka Reid, Mazz Swift, Michael Formanek, Brandon Seabrook and Tom Rainey. Both records are coming out in 2021.