JAKE BAXENDALE: A Sci-Fi Zen Experience
An interview by Tim Gruar.
New Zealand Music award-winning saxophonist and composer Jake Baxendale returns to the Wellington Jazz Festival with fresh new music. After previously headlining in 2017 with The Jac, Baxendale is adding songwriter to his growing list of accomplishments as he presents his latest work Waypeople.
Featuring over a hundred gigs across the Capital’s bars, cafés and live venues, the Wellington Jazz Festival returns this October with a star-studded programme of international and local artists that span every shade, colour and variation of the genre.
International headliners include Cecile McLorin Salvant, Gogo Penguin and the Zela Margossian Quintet. Offerings from our own feature Rodger Fox Band with King Kapisi, an Amy Winehouse tribute, and commissioned works from Welly music makers Jake Baxendale and Kirsten Te Rito (Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Kahungunu).
Born in rural Yorkshire before moving to Aotearoa at a young age, Baxendale grew up completely unaware of his future career prospects in music, in remote and beautiful Mohua/Golden Bay. At Collingwood Area School, he tells me, his younger self drifted around looking for his future purpose, trying out art projects, playing in local bands and other pursuits until he was directed into more formal training.
Baxendale is now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, where he earned his credentials at The New Zealand School of Music Te Kōkī (graduating in 2011 with a Bachelor and Post Graduate Diploma in jazz performance).
He hit the Wellington jazz scene, making his mark playing with John Rae’s The Troubles, Rodger Fox’s WJO, and in ensembles with local legends Rick Cranson, Alexis French and Nick Tipping.
Baxendale and best mate Callum Allardice also did time in Berlin during 2013 where they met Australian pianist Luke Sweeting. With an aim to create a ’trans-Pacific’ sound the trio formed Antipodes.
Baxendale’s relationship with Alladice goes way back, the two meeting when they attended an early 18-week Jazz Music Foundation Course in 2007 – “a pre-degree thing, then the Degree the next year. And we’ve just been carrying on each year since.”
“We’ve been writing together for so long but it’s been interesting also going our own way, too. It’s interesting NOT to collaborate, too. But as we were figuring it out, in the early days, good to bounce off each other, developing our own style for the Jac and another collaboration, Antipodes. That has helped. Can you tell when Callum’s in the room, there’s a sound now, between us, I think. He’s such a strong personality. His writing is so distinctive.”
In 2016 Baxendale secured the prestigious Edwin Carr scholarship and headed to NYC to further his studies in composition and jazz Sax.
His groups, The Jac and Antipodes also performed in South Korea, as well as regular tours across the motu and across the ditch. He’s also worked with New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, STROMA, Bazurka, The Troubles, Richter City Rebels, The Rodger Fox Big Band, The Wellington Mingus Ensemble, and trio JB3, among many others.
But it’s The Jac, that’s been Baxendale’s longest collab project. Since 2010 the 8-piece ensemble has pushing a modern sound that’s unique and distinctive, and drawing talent from Melbourne and Montreal, from bands that cross the lines between the jazz, classical and metal scenes.
Their debut album Nerve (2014) was nominated for the NZ Music Awards ‘Best Jazz Album of the Year’ and the opening track “Sons of Thunder” from ‘The Green Hour’ (2015) won Aotearoa’s inaugural Jazz Composition of the Year award. In 2017 they performed 12 gigs across the motu as part of Chamber Music New Zealand’s “Encompass” tour, followed by a headlining concert with Korean traditional/jazz fusion group, Black String, at the Wellington Jazz Festival.
‘A Gathering’ The Jac’s third studio album, was made up of compositions directly drawn from, and inspired by, their 2017 collaboration with South Korean traditional/jazz fusion group, Black String.
The opening and closing titles were both commissioned by the Wellington Jazz Festival for this collaboration, and both draw on “jangdan” (literally “long-short”), rhythmic phrases which are the foundation of Korean traditional music.
So, The Jac has now been going for over 10 years. How did it all get started?
“That was a group of us, from the Wellington Jazz School and after. We had a bunch of arrangements, not our music but just various other things, mostly by the San Francisco Jazz Collective – a super group put together in the 2000’s. It’s now a jazz behemoth. We knew it in the earlier days. It was this flagship ensemble. The Jac was me, and Callum Allardice, guitars, and Shaun Anderson, on drums, alongside others – we just really wanted to try and play that material. We put that band together, initially for that. We mostly rehearsed. We tried to rehearsed weekly, and once we had that sound under our fingers, then we tried to try and write stuff like that and it took on a life of it’s own. And it was given a really big boost when the Jazz Festival gave us a commission to work with Black String (South Korea)”.
“I think, If I remember correctly, we, as The Jac, did our first gig at this notorious underground club in Tory Street, Poneke, called Happy.” The venue has had various iterations, with the last being run by Ian Jorgensen (aka Blink), of A Low Hum fame.
“When I was studying, The Troubles had a residency there at Happy. And before that, (guitarist) Al Campbell was involved, I think, and various ‘Jazzy’ experimental and improvised groups. So, we put our first group together, played to like a dozen people, about 2010-11. It just took off from there.”
“In 2017 we collaborated with this group from Seoul. Shelagh Magadza Artistic Festival Director, at the time, must have been to Korea or something, she had travelled a lot, building relationships and so on, and originally it wasn’t black String that was involved but another group, a Korean traditional opera group (who did Jazz Versions of that material) and somewhere along the way it evolved into Black String.”
“They were this jazz and traditional Korean Fusion Band that was all instrumental – more in our wheel house. Although, there was a lot to learn about that music. Trying to play with them in a very short timeframe. With funding they came here and we arranged a couple of their pieces for a Jazz Festival event. And that turned into a trip to Korea later in the year which was partly quid pro quo, playing festival gigs. But the main trip was funded by the Korean Olympic Committee.”
“So, we somehow managed to get them to pay, public money tied to the arts, allowing us to gig in 5 or 6 other cities over there. A lot of hard work and a lot of dumb luck getting the Olympic money.”
“From that collaboration came two albums: ‘A Gathering’ and ‘Walking Spirits’, both recorded in the same session at Round Head studios, coming out in 2020 and 2021.”
“‘A Gathering’ earned critical support even before release and the tracks ‘Beyond the Palace’ and ‘A Gathering’ were nominated for the APRA NZ Best Jazz Composition of the Year award in 2018 and ‘Tūī’ won the same award at the Jarasum International Jazz Festival and a tour of 6 cities in South Korea followed. In 2019 they were again awarded Jazz Composition of the Year award for “Chungin’”
‘Beyond the Palace’ was inspired by a visit to a Korean palace in Seoul, during a research trip with Allardice, in December 2016. Leaving the Palace square they witnessed the largest of the “Candlelight Demonstrations”, protests against president of the day, Park Geun-hye, over allegations of corruption which swelled to over 2.3 million people.
“We had no idea what we were getting into. As people started showing up, we didn’t even know if we’d get back to the hotel. We woke up the next morning, looked at the news and saw the scale of it. We must have walked past a hundred Police checks. It was right in one of the squares, near the palace, a big open square, empty, then teeming with people, and the energy from all those people protesting!”
Unlike Trump, impeached presidents in South Korea tend to take their indictments seriously and Park was eventually removed from office. Baxendale’s piece begins with a long, stately opening building to a furious declaration, with chaos ensuing, threatening, violent. It eases away to a more measured, triumphant, denouement.
Baxendale’s ‘Tūī’ was a playful, dancing theme – a nod to both the folk music of Korea and the local birdlife of Newtown, where it was written. Tui, piwakawaka, riroriro, and tauhou are all frequent visitors to the lemon tree that stands outside the studio window where the song was composed.
For the 2023 Wellington Jazz Festival Show, Baxendale will be working with another ensemble of local artists under the moniker ‘Waypeople’, to create a culture clash informed by previous work in Korea and intensive reading sessions during Lockdown. While still under wraps the commissioned work, Baxendale tells me is an amalgam of ancient wisdom and lyrical jazz, inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s powerful and poetic translation of Tao Te Ching.
The Tao Te Ching is a Chinese classic text and often thought to be the foundational work of Taoism. It was written around 400 BC, traditionally credited to the sage Laozi although the exact date of compilation are widely debated by scholars. The oldest writings have been dated back to around the late 4th century BC.
Along with the Zhuangzi, the Tao Te Ching is a fundamental text for both philosophical and religious Taoism and has strongly influenced other schools of Chinese philosophy and religion, including Legalism, Confucianism, and Chinese Buddhism. Many poets, artists, painters, calligraphers, and even gardeners, have used the Tao Te Ching as a source of their inspiration. The influence of the text has spread widely within the globe’s artistic and academic spheres and is one of the most translated texts in world literature.
Most readers know Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) for her extraordinary science fiction and fantasy. Famous for books such as “The Left Hand of Darkness”, “Always Coming Home”, and the “Earthsea Cycle” series. She’s won six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
However, fewer know just how pervasive the Taoist themes of the Tao Te Ching is to so much of her literary work. Her book “Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching” is Le Guin’s own unique take on Taoist philosophy. It draws on a lifetime of philosophy and contemplation. It’s a ‘jargon-free’ but faithful observance of the original work and, as Baxendale says, a touchstone to his compositions.
Waypeople is also Baxendale’s first foray into composing music with lyrics, juxtaposing the sounds of The Great American Songbook with ancient Chinese wisdom, Baxendale’s groundbreaking composition aims to capture the spirit and intent of Tao Te Ching, bringing it to life with a talented musical ensemble anchored by the guzheng (Chinese string instrument).
So why did Baxendale chose this for his composition. “She,” Le Guin, “is an author that kept coming up. She’s done a lot of writing. She was a source for my partner’s Science Communication PHD Project. (Le Guin) has done a lot of writing about ‘writing’. And I got to know more about her theory on story writing by proxy, I suppose. She calls it the ‘Carrier Bag’ theory. A sort of ‘anti-hero’ story, basically. That’s it in a nutshell. Instead of telling stories about people that do good things and defeat baddies and such, there’s conflict and resolution. But these are stories about normal people doing normal things. It’s messy and it doesn’t resolve, and there are no world ending conflicts. Everything and nothing. Hard to describe.”
“After that, her version of the Tao Te Ching, this 2,000-year-old philosophy text, partly in text, partly poetry, 81 verses. It’s Confusion philosophy but feels very relevant in the modern day. The main principle, for me is ‘doing by not doing’. And y partner just saw in a bookshop Le Guinn’s book about it a bought it for me – The Tao Te Ching has been a companion for her for a very long time. This was her version and her thinking on it based on English translations and transliterations of the original Chinese characters. It just blew my mind.”
“It came at an important time for me. I was burnt out from all these albums and release gigs. And totally stressed out by getting cancelled by Covid and Lockdowns. And then totally stressed out by not being able to do anything – from going totally crazy working on all these concerts to twiddling my thumb and listening to the silence. And this ideal of ‘doing by not doing’, contentment in stillness and all this other amazing wisdowm in the Tao couldn’t have come at a better time for me.”
And how does that translate into music?
“Well, the way Le Guin writes it, as poetry, it has an incredible rhythm to it. And so, I have thought about writing music to poetry but haven’t done it. It was from lying in bed and reading it out loud that I started to realise it had this incredible rhythm. And if something has rhythm, it’s got music. And so, she leaned into the poetry in the text and I leaned into the rhythm in the poetry.”
“Last year I wrote a short piece as an example of what I can write if I was commissioned. And, luckily, the Festival liked it too and invited me to write more!”
“I’ve chosen some verses that I think really run across the emotional spectrum in her text. They go from the ‘reverential’, as it were, to the ‘irreverent”. Funny, frivolous to deadly serious. That will be offset with a bit of a ‘theme’ in the music with the guzheng, which is this 21-string Chinese zither. I think it’s a a very cool instrument. You don’t hear that in jazz.”
“My writing style has changed a lot since I first became a Dad. I’d get an idea, hide away and thrash it out until I was happy. Now, I got to plan and take time when I can. I’ve never created music for poetry before, that’s new for me.
I spent a lot of time over Lockdown mainly, with the Le Guin’s text, making notes, reading aloud, bookmarking my favourites, listened to an audiobook of it, narrated by her. I also listened to other work by her on writing. All of it was very revealing”.
“Waypeople is the ‘ensemble’ for this project. It features two close friends, Chelsea Prastiti and Callum Passells. Prasati (Skilaa) is a highly talented, and very versatile jazz vocalist. In the rhythm section there’s some of Welly’s grooviest and hardest working, including Daniel Hayles ( piano). I must have worked with in various bands for, like, 10 years. Johnny Lawrence (bass) plays in a jazz standards quartet we share. Cory Champion, on drums, did some recording work on a live band thing called Gardening Music (which he also played in).”
“I think it’s great to have people who know you and trust your thinking when you work on new stuff. It’s like a support to make it successful.”
The newbie, though, is Jessie Ling, who will play guzheng, a 21 string zither, plucked by the fingers with or without plectra, similar to the Japanese koto, the Korean gayageum or the Vietnamese đàn tranh. However, there are many examples of zither all over the world and variations can be found in countries as varied as Mongolia, the Sudan and Kazakhstan. The Chinese guzheng has an ancient past, having gone through many changes during its long history. The oldest specimen to be discovered to date, held 13 strings and was dated to possibly during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE).
“Not something Jazz players come across every day. So, I just put out the word that I needed someone who could play it, Michael Norris hooked us up. Not something she’s ever done but she’s up for it, eh? It’ll make a unique sound and really bring it all together.”
Jake Baxendale is performing Waypeople, 6pm, Saturday 28 October, Meow as part of the Wellington Jazz Festival 2023. Tickets are still available from the Jazz Festival website, but get in quick as this will surely sell out!
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