Jackie Myers, who relocated to Kansas City from Austin, Texas, has just released a new album, “What About The Butterfly.”
It spotlights her prodigious gifts as a composer and performer on a series of compositions exploring microtonality and spectral composition in vocal jazz.
Myers notes that much of the experimental spirit of the LP was inspired by her time studying at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she intended to study jazz but found herself deeply immersed in compositional studies.
The following interview has been edited for length and for clarity.
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When it came to making this new album, what did you have in mind about what you wanted it to sound like and how you wanted to make it?
I’d made a couple of albums in Kansas City, but I had not made a studio album before this one. I had made a couple of studio albums in Austin, so I wanted to do that. During the pandemic, I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to take in grad school. That’s what I did with that time. While I was at UMKC doing a Jazz Studies program, I ended up studying a fair amount of composition. I snuck over to that composition department incessantly, so much so that I had to submit portfolios and there would have to be a slot open for me. If a true comp major wanted to take the class, they would have to be given preference.
While I was over in the comp department, I realized that there was this whole world of music that I was not privy to: modern composition and its extensions of the instruments and extensions of scales and theory that we don’t really use in jazz as much. It’s starting to happen, but historically speaking, we usually use a 12-note scale. The theory in jazz has evolved but not as quickly as it did during the first 30 years after inception.
Modern comp has all these extensions and things you could use, and it was very exciting, and I thought, “Why can’t I use that in this idiom that I already love and practice?” That inspired me to combine some things that I had wanted to learn with the language that I was already using in the community.
You’re also singing over music that is different melodically and harmonically. Was there a learning curve with that?
For folks that are not familiar, what happened was that I used microtonality in the world of jazz. The microtonality that I used, those scales have 24 notes. I used what’s called 24-TET and that just means that in the space of what usually 12 notes can cover on a piano, 24 notes would cover that exact same distance in sound.
It’s a good question because how am I going to sing in 12-note scales over stuff that has 24 notes in it? What I used to try to access that — at times really successfully, at times I don’t know … it’s very experimental — is to try to look at it through a spectral composition viewpoint. Spectral composition is, quickly: Let’s say I hit a really low note on the piano. In that tone, to make up that tone, there’s many notes. It’s not really just one note. The sound waves that come off of there [involve] a harmonic series. Some of those notes in the harmonic series do not fit cleanly within our 12-note system. Some of them are kind of in-between. Some of those in-between notes do come close to the 24-TET notes.
What I strove to do was to find those in-between notes that would resound with whatever my root note was in order to support the harmonic content of that chord that I was using in that bar. But I could still sing what I usually sing over that chord just like the improvisors could still improvise what they wanted to over the harmonic content in the song because the strings and sometimes the horns would simply be emphasizing, even though they would be playing outside of what we commonly use in our 12-note system.
So, this was fun in all the right ways?
[Laughs.] I had so much fun, and I would really, really like the opportunity to do more of it, and I’m really hoping to do that because I think there are more ways to open up what we think of. If you listen to the album, the point is not to make people get up and running screaming out of the room, it’s actually to get them to say, “That’s not quite right, but it sounds fine somehow.” That’s the whole thing. It’s like a trick. “How can I use this outside language but also support the stuff that we know and love?” I have the greatest respect for jazz history, especially being a jazz musician in this town. That’s an honor for me to participate in that community. The last thing I would want to do is to try to steer away from it. I would like to support it, emphasize it.
How did you go about selecting the players who appear on the album? Were these people you had played with, or did you have a dream list?
Kind of both. Both of those things happened. There are a lot of people on the album. Bobby Watson [alto sax] is the biggest name on the album. He was one of my teachers at UMKC. That was definitely dream list for me. I just talked about being honored by being a jazz musician in this town [and] that was a huge honor. He played on more than half the album, which I was just totally flattered by. He was definitely my reach.
The tenor player, Rich Wheeler, I’ve played with many times. He’s an incredible improviser, an incredible player. He doesn’t play with me every jazz gig that we have, but we’ve played somewhat regularly. The rhythm section of [Seth Lee, bass] and [Matt Leifer, drums] and I make up a trio that does play with some frequency. If I travel, I’m usually traveling with a trio, very occasionally with a quartet, sometimes solo. But that trio and I, we’ve been together for a couple years now.
Then I needed strings, and I never work with strings. I knew Alyssa Bell [viola]. She’s a friend, and she is incredible to work with because she has all the professional skills, and she’s crazy talented at viola. So, she could help me organize the other string players, tell me who to use and, of course, she has her own quartet, so she was able to pull from there. That’s how I met Sascha Groschang [cello] and Mattew Bennett [violin]. [Sascha] helped head up that small department. They were willing to rehearse their parts because in a lot of ways I was asking them to learn a new technique. A lot of the microtones are within the strings.
The baritone saxophone player, Aryana Nemati, is a great player in town. She answered the call and showed up, and we made that album together.
When you finished the album did you have a sense of, “Hey! I pulled it off!”?
There are still days where [I wonder], “Did that really work?” I had no idea if it was going to work. There were times when I was playing back the drafts that we made before we recorded where I thought, “Did I ruin perfectly good songs, or did I create something fun, new and exciting?” It’s so hard to make anything new. What hasn’t been done? The idea that I could be a person who did that was sort of like, “That’s got to be impossible and what right do I have to try to do anything like that?” But it was so exciting. It’s so much fun to experiment and try out these sounds. When it worked it was, like, “I think this is going to be alright.”
