Maria Elena Silva has issued two albums this summer.
The first, “Wise Men Never Try,” finds the former Wichitan interpreting standards such as “All of Me” and “The Night We Called It A Day” through her own inimitable lens.
The material maintains its emotional centers, but the musical settings acknowledge the musical tributaries that have emerged in the decades after writers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein penned “Some Enchanted Evening.” Jazz guitar is not necessarily any longer rendered in the pristine melodicism of Wes Montgomery but sometimes arrives in the sharp stabs and fragments heard in the work of performers such as Nels Cline and Marc Ribot.
Silva has absorbed those changes and more and made them hallmarks in her work, including her 2021 recording “Eros” and its follow-up, 2023’s “Dulce.”
Her strength is not that she honors tradition so much as she acknowledges that tradition, like the music itself, must change in order to thrive. “Wise Men Never Try Vol. II” is populated by songs of the Civil War era but reimagined and recontextualized. The abolitionist anthem “We Wait Beneath The Furnace Blast” and “When This Cruel War Is Over” are rendered with an immediacy that stirs the listener’s emotions and may call them toward action, whatever that may be in their present circumstance.
For these recordings, which Silva has made available via her Bandcamp page, she is joined by musicians that she met shortly after relocating to Chicago a few years ago, including double bassist Tyler Wagner and pianist Erez Dessel. Ben MacDonald lends electric guitar to material heard on the first volume of recordings while Silva handles acoustic guitar on both.
Silva recently discussed these recordings and their origins from her home in Chicago.
The interview has been edited for clarity and for length.
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What inspired these collections?
I knew you were going to ask me that, and I’ve been thinking about it for a day or two, and I don’t have a good answer. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.]
It seemed like the appropriate time. I have wanted to, in the back of my mind, do a standards record for a long time. I don’t know why I kept putting it off, but maybe now it felt appropriate because of the ensemble that I’ve been working with recently and being able to trust the pieces in a way that I would be comfortable not coming from a jazz background myself. But there was no real plan.
For the last few records you did, you were working with people who were largely assembled for those sessions. It wasn’t like it was your long-term band.
Right.
Can you talk a little bit about the difference between having three or four players you’ve been working with for a while as opposed to someone who comes into the studio for six hours on a Saturday. You’ve got them for that window, and then you’re done.
There was a difference of attitude in the room. I was a lot more relaxed. [Laughs.] I knew the guys really well. I’ve been using them on my own material since I moved to Chicago [circa 2022]. Our rapport is established; we know what the others sound like, we can anticipate how the others play. Having that in the background [allows everyone to trust] a little more, and I think I can let my guard down a little bit more for sure. I trust Erez and Tyler. No matter what I bring to them, I pretty much know how they’re going to treat it without me having to ask very much. I don’t really have to say anything to the two of them, and I know that they’re going to be very delicate and careful in how they approach whatever we’re doing.
As far as the standards collection goes, was this music that you grew up with or was this something that you encountered later on?
I definitely grew up listening to [some of that] stuff. I didn’t really have access to the myriad of vocalists that I’ve really fallen in love with as an adult. There’s definitely some ladies that I absolutely adore: Blossom Dearie, Betty Carter, Patty Waters. These songs have been done by everybody. Blossom Dearie did “I Walk A Little Faster” on “Give Him The Ooh-La-La” (1958). Betty Carter did “This Is Always” on “Inside Betty Carter” (1964). I didn’t take anything from the “Patty Waters Sings” (1965) record but that’s one of my desert island records for sure. The way that she treats “Black Is The Color of My True Love’s Hair” and “Moon Don’t Come Up Tonight”? Those are my all-time favorite versions of those songs. So, I think using my voice more as an instrument now than I have before, or at least thinking about it that way, was probably more inspired by listening to these women and how they do that.
Let’s also talk about “Wise Men Never Try Vol. II,” which features songs from the Civil War era. These are songs that would have been written before recorded music, but people have certainly recorded renditions of songs from that era. How did you encounter these songs? Did you hear them through recordings, or did you look for songbooks?
I decided which pieces to use from songbooks. This one took a lot more research. Once I knew that I wanted to do the standards record, I knew that I wanted to pursue the American historical oeuvre of music that is influential, whether or not we perceive how influential it is as artists. In looking through all the Civil War stuff, like you said, there are no original recordings of this stuff, so it took a lot of research and finding melodies that I thought I could treat appropriately with my voice [while] keeping the styling that I wanted and making sure that I was going to do these respectfully.
That one was a little more sensitive in that I felt like I needed to give more attention specifically to the lyrics and seeing that it was done from a place that was going to give the utmost respect to the writers of these pieces. With the standards, everybody has done those so many different ways. I didn’t feel too much pressure in terms of just interpreting it the way that I naturally would. With this stuff, I wanted to be really, really careful.
I had a strange experience listening to “Battle Cry of Freedom,” which opens the second volume. Do you know William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops”?
I don’t.
He’s a composer who had these tapes filled with found sounds and shortwave radio broadcasts. He’d had them for a long time and at some point, he decided he’d transfer them to digital but, as it does, the tape had decayed. So, what you hear in these loops is the tape actually further degrading, disintegrating.
Oh, wow.
They’re really beautiful and listening to “Battle Cry of Freedom” had a similar impact on me as a listener. You’re singing about this moment in time but there are no longer people alive who have direct access to it. So, the performance put me in this head space of: The moment might have faded and yet there are places in the world where we might be on the precipice of this again. Is it over and removed or is it about to happen?
It’s all plausible in terms of how we interpret life or what’s going on. The future, the present, all of it. I think anyone could point to something written from the perspective of something so dire and find a sort of potent familiarity there. That was the first one that we recorded, and I think that was the first take. And it might have been the first thing we did overall because we recorded the records at the same time. That one set the tone, I think, and I’m really grateful for how it did. I told Erez, “Just play free, whatever you want.” He heard me, clearly. It worked out so beautifully, but I hear what you’re saying about decay, disintegration, the intrepid attitude that’s enclosed in such an unstructured performance with what he’s doing harmonically against the melody and against the weight of the lyrics.
When I listen to the compositions as a whole, I guess there’s some kind of hope that unifies them somewhere, but it’s often hard to imagine how the people writing the songs or hearing them for the first time were finding hope.
I don’t know. What a place to have a silver lining outlook. I cannot imagine looking toward something in those situations, any of the writers that did these pieces.
The emotionality of this material is different than standards; there’s a different kind of emotionality.
In “I Walk A Little Faster” or “Some Enchanted Evening,” there’s this kind of anticipation and hopefulness from the narrator that this love will come and if it’s clouded it’s clouded by self-doubt rather than an environmental thing that is out of control. Maybe hope is a little bit easier and a little bit more tangible in those pieces just because everything that is happening is coming from within, and so can be controlled by the narrator, by the writer. With the other pieces, it’s really left up to God if you will or powers that be to see what the outcome is, and all you can do is hope and pray that something positive can come out of something so ugly and terrifying.
