The quintet Daruma formed in late 2023, bringing together pianist Max Moore, bassist Hunter Roberts, trombonist and Wichita native Zach Rich, as well as drummer Shane Dähler and saxophonist Gabriel Mininberg.
With each musician bringing a wealth of experience in both performance and composition, Daruma explores a broad sonic terrain that marries tradition with forward-thinking contemporary music.
The band’s first single, “Warrior’s March,” is out via Monk Music and available on digital streaming platforms on June 14.
Rich, Mininberg and Dähler recently spoke with KMUW about the band’s origins and its current tour.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Each of you brings a different set of influences to the band. Was there discussion at the start about direction?
Shane Dähler: I think it’s something that just naturally occurred based on all the personalities as well as the compositional styles of the members of the group. When we started, we just said, “Can you all bring in your own compositions?” Once we started reading through charts and listening to each other’s tunes, that sort of dictated the styles that we play.
Gabriel Mininberg: We’re all composers in the group, obviously with a strong jazz background, but we’re all listening to different kinds of music as well. Everybody brings to the table what they listen to. Shane spent some time in Trinidad playing with Siparia Deltones. He brings that kind of Caribbean influence. Zach is a very studied jazz composer. I come with some influence from film music and progressive rock. All different voices but all firmly rooted in jazz, and I think that’s part of the thing that makes this band sound the way it sounds.
How do you go about presenting your compositions to the group?
Zach Rich: It really is quite an organic collective environment in which everyone’s bringing in the ideas they maybe want to experiment with or maybe something that they have in their library that’s a good fit or writing something new. It’s almost turning into a lab band of sorts, to experiment and concoct some things. The ones that we all feel most comfortable with, we end up performing and learning them and maybe even tweaking them along the way. It’s a really a pretty true collective in terms of who’s bringing in compositions and the way we’re adding to our repertoire.
The band’s been together since late last year and you’re going out on tour, hitting places you haven’t played before. I have to admit that sense of the unknown would probably frighten me a little bit.
SD: It’s definitely daunting, but I think the best way to develop as an artist and a musician is to take risks and do things that you’re afraid of, to put you in a spotlight to eventually develop and grow. Either people will dig it, or they won’t. But if they do dig it and you’re going into these new places, then that’s the best, grassroots, organic way to build your audience, grow your following, increase awareness of your group through playing, performing, press, different things that gets you to the next step, and it keeps building and then it becomes something. Ultimately, we’re super excited.
Gabriel always brings up how Pat Metheny, the incredible, legendary jazz guitarist, got started. He bought a van with his compatriots and fellow musicians, and they would literally take any gig that they could get and drive around the country for three months at a time, just playing wherever they could get a gig. You gotta start somewhere. I’m sure they were going to all these different cities and places where people had never heard of Pat Metheny before. It eventually worked out for him.
GM: It can certainly be a frightening thing if you’re going at it from that mindset, but I see it as this really honest, sort of pure musician/audience interaction, where we’re daring to be vulnerable in front of the audience. Here’s a brand-new band, here’s brand-new music. We have no clue if you’re going to like it or not. We certainly hope that the audience does like it, but we don’t know. There’s that leap into the void and just hoping that it lands well. I think for the audience, too, it has that element of risk and vulnerability that they’re coming to see [a band that they don’t know] and music that they don’t know and just hoping that it works out. We really do hope that there’s a strong connection there.
But there is that leap of faith from both sides in order to make it happen. That’s kind of the only way forward. You have to introduce people to your music at some point and that’s the only way to do that.
You’re performing music that is meant to be played live.
GM: We would love to introduce as many people to our music as possible live. Because, like you mentioned, it is really a totally different phenomenon than hearing it recorded. I’ve heard some really fantastic jazz players who are really widely respected, and I’ve got be honest, I’ve heard them play and thought, “Wow, this musician is really good, but I don’t see what all the [hype] is about.” Then I go hear them live and realize, “Oh, that’s what it’s all about.” I do think that is an essential component of experiencing and sharing this music.”
And, in the era before Instagram and YouTube, that’s how you’d build your audience. You play a show, 10 people show up. It’s a good show, so the next time that band plays, those 10 people each bring five friends and it goes from there.
GM: You don’t get that interactive component on YouTube because it’s not just the musicians playing on stage. It’s also the audience interacting with the musicians. It’s a two-way street. You can have a really great performance with a great audience and sometimes you have a sleep audience, and the performance is not as strong. So, the audience does play a part in what the music sounds like.
I would imagine that on tour, playing night after night, you’re able to explore some nuances in the compositions, too.
GM: I think that’s one of the things we’re really excited about, having the band sound really tight and exploring this music in a way that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to, exploring it night after night and seeing how different audiences react to it. We’re actually so excited about that prospect that we’re going to be recording in Chicago. After the last date of the tour, we’re going to stay an extra day and go into a studio because there is going to be that tightness and that intimacy with the music.
