Adam O’Farrill is sweating out a deadline for a commissioned piece. “It’s hard, but you have to make it work,” he said about sitting down to write. “You have to do it in the hotel. You have to do it on the road. You don’t always have a piano, which is hard, but you know, you make it work.”
The commission isn’t due until February, but O’Farrill is a busy guy. I spoke with him Wednesday, hours after returning from Japan, and two days before embarking on a tour that will bring him and his band ELEPHANT to BOP STOP on Wednesday, Sept. 9 in what is to these ears one of the most anticipated concerts of the year.
It’s rich, allusive music, at once dreamy and driving. The sound of ELEPHANT, while transparent and frequently shimmering, is grounded by drummer Russell Holzman’s subtle but insistent dance beats. Holzman, a luminary in the online drum community and collaborator of the hypnotic singer Caroline Holacek’s, has known O’Farrill since their student days at New York’s LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. Bassist Walter Stinson, who seems to be on many of the most interesting recent recordings, provides the magnetic north around which the band orients itself.
Then there’s O’Farrill’s trumpet, which has often been characterized as introspective. That’s not inaccurate, but in big moments, his tone becomes shining and silvery, with the declaratory open heartedness of the great Cuban trumpeters with whom his father, Arturo, and grandfather, Chico, both composers and bandleaders, worked.
O’Farrill acknowledged the lineage but also mentioned another stream of Caribbean music that fed his development. “It’s similar to New Orleans. So much of [that style] is about cutting through and popping and leading into the brilliance of the instrument that makes me think of people like Pops and King Oliver and Rex Stewart.”
Listeners who equate innovative music with density might be surprised by the transparency of ELEPHANT’s music. A lot of the credit must go to the extraordinary young pianist Yvonne Rogers, whose touch and crystalline articulation would be equally at home playing a Mozart sonata. She’s a major talent and I can’t wait to hear her on BOP STOP’s Steinway.
Rogers is a few years younger than O’Farrill, which puts him in the interesting position of being a young-ish leader of a significant band. Others have done it; Miles Davis was not yet 30 when he formed his first great quintet. Working in the bands of slightly older musicians such as Mary Halvorson, Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey has made O’Farrill wise beyond his years.
“it’s tricky,” he admitted. “I always want to hold onto the student in me as much as possible,” he said. ”That’s key to creative longevity: not ever getting to the point where you think you have it all or you know it all or you are bigger or badder than anyone else. But it’s also tricky because I think you really need to have a lot of confidence and swagger and sense of authority to be a bandleader. And so I’m learning that now, how to have that confidence, to really take command.”
O’Farrill is a film buff, who once considered filmmaking as a potential artistic path. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey,” which impressed O’Farrill, for, he said, “how handmade it felt and how little CGI there is in it.”
ELEPHANT has a similar attention to craft and detail, and to how the accumulation of small moments of beauty can construct something quietly overwhelming. He and the members of ELEPHANT make it work.
Adam O’Farrill’s ELEPHANT, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 7 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd., Cleveland. Tickets $25, available here.
ELEPHANT is available from Bandcamp at this link.
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.
