Jazz pianist Gerald Clayton has a new album. We have a few questions.
After a couple of decades as one of his field’s most inventive, talented and in-demand players, he wanted to try something different. So he made Ones & Twos with the idea that listeners could play sides one and two simultaneously. Each of the album’s 12 pieces is full of its own delights, stellar interplay by the quintet of him, Joel Ross (vibes), Elena Pinderhughes (flute), Marquis Hill (trumpet) and Kendrick Scott (drums), plus, on one track, a vocal chorus. But playing them overlayed would, in theory, produce new wonders.
The theory, as it turned out, proved solid in reality, fully displayed on a new “expanded edition” that not only has a bonus track added to each side. So he made Ones & Twos with the idea that listeners could play sides one and two simultaneously, though you’d need to have two copies and two turntables. It’s fascinating, often thrilling. to hear the shifting sounds, sometimes meshing, sometimes clashing. But….
What?
“The expanded version is essentially the reveal,” Clayton says, Zooming from his car parked on a street in Los Angeles, where he grew up. He’s taking a break from helping his parents move into a new house after theirs was lost in the fires that destroyed much of their community in Altadena.
“It’s letting people in on the result of the experiment of the project, getting to hear what it sounds like when you overlay the tracks, when you combine the ones and twos, so to speak.”
How?
“I knew I had to create something with a certain kind of structure that matched the structure of the other piece,” he says. “And then thinking of some of the other tracks maybe rhythmically, like if there’s some hits on the one and two [beats] on side A that leaves three and four open on side B to play with. So yeah, just kind of essentially trying to compose two things at once. Truth be told, some of the tracks were songs that I’d written just kind of without the project in mind. And then the challenge became what would be an accompanying track that I could explore with this.”
But….. why?
“Um, yeah,” he says, laughing a bit. “I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons.”
As it happens, he says, he was just thinking back to a conversation he’d had with Don Was, the president of Blue Note Records, which released this album and his last one, Bells On Sand.
“I gave him a little prompt like, ‘What do you think I should do at this point in my career?’” Clayton says. “‘If you were to prescribe me the next project, what would it be?’ And his answer was, ‘Man, just do something that really challenges you and pushes you in a way that maybe some of the song things you’ve done haven’t.’ That was one ‘why,’ but the idea was inspired by a lot of stuff. A lot of it is my own personal relationship with the expressions we associate with hip-hop, from breakdance to MCs. I grew up loving that. Around high school I even got some turntables from a friend and started playing around with what it meant to be at the ones and twos.”
After that he gets a bit metaphysical.
“I’ve had a personal relationship with that,” he says. “Then thinking about the concept of, just coexistence, just what it was. It was something compelling to me, that moment when you’re in the club and one song comes to an end and another one starts up and you live in that sort of weird zone where you’re hearing two things at once. Or maybe you’re at a show and somebody opens the door and you hear some music in the background from the other too.”
And then he gets a little mystical.
“I’m probably rambling,” he admits. “But any project that I do, any album, I can look at it in two ways: On the one hand, it is just a collection of sounds, of music, of songs that I’m trying to figure out what note goes after the other. And in other ways maybe they kind of represent some of the things that I’m thinking about or ruminating on in relation to the moment—maybe this moment in history. So in that sense, it’s like taking this concept of two separate entities coexisting. I felt like it was a kind of, I don’t know, poignant subject to be thinking about.”
And that leads to the philosophical, with a touch of the musicological.
“That part I’m really into thinking about like, ‘What is this? What does music teach us about co-existence?’ you know,” he says. “There’s going to be friction and moments of tension and cluttered things, sort of like checking ourselves. Am I able to allow for this? Or do I come with some sort of, I don’t know, some control impulses or something?”
He did check some of his control impulses by turning the original recordings over to Kassa Overall, a fellow jazz boundaries-breaker, for post-production “processing” with the ultimate combining of tracks in mind. (Overall is also credited as co-producer of two of the album’s tracks.)
For all the cerebral aspects of the approach, clearly Clayton most highly values the uncertainty factor of jazz and relishes in the freedom of trusting his cohorts.
“All the musicians I called I knew I didn’t have to micromanage what they were going to contribute, ’ cause they’re so great,” he says. “There was some discovery in the studio. There was one moment where Joel said, ‘What would happen if Kendrick changed this to an Elvin [Jones] swing feel?’ We tried it and it kind of worked. Then we put it in the hands of Kassa and he morphed it even more. I knew all these cats are open-minded and open-hearted toward new ideas and erasing the boundaries or genres, and also know that if I give them a piece of music with anything on it they immediately go into the mode of ‘How can I bring this to life?’ I wanted to make sure that the stuff I wrote was compelling enough or attractive enough to them that even without the concept they could just dig playing it. But in the studio, in that conversation they were totally on board.”
In some ways, he’s been in that conversation his whole life. His father, John, is one of the top L.A. bassists, composers, and arrangers with credits including Queen Latifah (he won a 2008 Grammy for arranging her “I’m Gonna Live Till I Die”), Diana Krall, McCoy Tyner, Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight and many others. And his uncle, Jeff, who died in 2020, was a sax and oboe player who has worked with Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, Madonna,Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, and many more. John and Jeff also had a regular group, the Clayton Brothers, starting in the 1970s, with Gerald adding the next generation when he joined in the mid-2000s.
He’s had other significant mentors as well, notably pianists Billy Childs and Kenny Barron, with whom he studied at USC Thornton School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, respectively, and sax giant Charles Lloyd, who has made Clayton a steady partner both in group settings and remarkably expressive duo recordings and performances. And while building his own performing and album career as a leader and composer himself, Clayton has been tabbed by such stars as Krall, John Scofield, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Roy Hargrove. He has now joined Blue Note’s roster of go-to collaborators, working alongside other young talents including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins—as well as his own quintet members Ross and Scott.
Have any of his mentors heard the new work?
“I mean, my dad’s heard it,” he says. “He is into it. He was intrigued and confused and then he heard it and loved it. I played him some of the roughs when we first got in the studio, before I even started working with Kassa. So he’s been with me through the evolution of the project. And he is supportive as always.”
And now, at 41, he’s finding ways to lead the conversation, not just with his projects, but in the community. Among other things, he’s been hosting regular jams at the Los Angeles jazz club Sam First.
“Every Tuesday when I’m in town I put together a band and play a set at 7:30, and then take a break, play another tune and then open it up,” he says. “It’s like you never know what you’re going to get.”
It’s not that different from the thrill of Ones & Twos. No question.
“I call them Tuesday Happenings,” he says. “As in something happens.”
