David Lord released his latest album, “Days In The Woods,” on November 6 via his own Cloud Ear label. Joined by drummer Scott Dean Taylor and bassist Dale Black, the LP offers up a masterclass in both performance and composition.
Lord will perform at Harvester Arts on Saturday on a bill that also features Chicago’s Eli Winter, Florida’s Mike Baggetta, and a special video premiere from Jae-Eun Suh. The all-ages show begins at 7 p.m.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and for lengthy.
Tell me about your decision to use Dale Black and Scott Dean Taylor as your rhythm section.
Scott and I were playing together live a lot, touring and so forth. When he lived in Wichita he was one of my main collaborators. The three of us played live a time or two. I thought they were very different players but very complimentary. Scott is a sparse and minimal, textual sort of drummer. Dale’s rhythmic intensity is almost driving the band in a way that oftentimes the drummer would, which leaves Scott open to paint on top of everything. I thought it was a really interesting combination of skill sets.
They’ve both moved out of state. Scott’s been in Chicago for about five years and I believe Dale’s in Oklahoma, but he comes back to Wichita pretty regularly.
Did you have a specific compositional concept in mind for the material this time?
I really wanted to focus in on a guitar trio. A lot of the “Forest Standards” albums were composed with other people in mind. I had Jeff Parker on the second one, the third one was a larger ensemble, on the fourth one we had woodwinds and other instruments. With this one, I had a lot of compositions that were composed for a guitar trio. Some of the other records were kind of looking at the guitar from above, and this one gets right in the middle of it. I think you can hear a lot of the guitar concepts more explicitly than in the past albums.
I picked out an assortment of songs, several of which were written for two guitars, but then I just overdubbed them and filled it out. I was thinking of this rich, forest-y trio sound.
“We Are Shrinking, We Are Shrinking,” especially at the beginning, has an orchestral feel to it.
Another big change is that I finally utilized my [Roland] Juno-106 [keyboard] that I bought many years ago and had barely used on any albums. I pulled that out for this album, and that became an additional voice. I say it’s a trio album but I play about 10 different instruments on it. [Laughs.] It started as a trio album and I just fleshed it out to give it all these additional colors and additional parts.
That song is actually very old. I wrote that probably in 2003. It’s one I’ve had sitting around for a very long time and never did anything with, and then it sort of took on a life of its own. The way Scott plays on it makes it very orchestral [when] other drummers might put time behind it or some sort of a groove behind it, he interpreted it as very open and orchestral. I had really intended the Juno to be on there as background color, but Chris Schlarb, who mixed the album, put it right up front as almost the main instrument, which kind of surprised me. But I really loved it and obviously it became the right choice.
I love “Bogs.” There’s something about that song. The rhythmic elements are so intriguing and then there’s something in there that feels almost like Western music.
[Laughs.] “Bogs” is based off of [Miles Davis’] “All Blues,” if you didn’t catch that, and it even has a similar bass line, though it’s flipped, inverted. It’s actually following a blues form. I think Chris, when he mixed it, said, “This is the most blues-influenced thing I’ve probably ever heard you do.” I could see a Western thing as well. Yeah, I can hear that.
Dale just rips on that tune.
He rips on this whole album. There’s some stuff, like the song “Just Fungus.” When you start to tune into what Dale’s doing throughout …. That’s what I love about working with him and Scott, you can kind of tune in and hear these songs as pretty open, or you can tune into Dale and hear this ferocious sort of rhythmic intensity going on at the same time. I’ve worked with Dale on several albums. This is the most featured he’s been.
Tell me about “Afternoon With Pluteus.”
That one’s based on “Afternoon In Paris,” so just like with the “Forest Standards” [albums], many of these compositions are warped jazz standards. Chris said, “This is the most bebop that I’ve heard you play.” It kind of pokes at a bunch of different jazz idioms and styles within jazz. It’s always poking at it and playing with it, not coming at it from a more sincere perspective. This one is kind of a play on bebop/cool jazz.
“How High The Mushroom.”
“How High The Moon,” of course, if you didn’t catch that. There are three songs on here that I composed together as sort of polychordal guitar duets: “How High The Mushroom,” “Days In Woods With Mushrooms,” and “Orange Nectar.” If you listen, those have two different two guitar parts that combine to make the guitar part. One is the lead, one is the backing. They’re kind of equal. It took on a whole different life of its own when we recorded it. We kind of left it open. Once again, Scott refuses to dig into time and drive some of these songs, just letting them float. I think that’s what allowed for it to be atmospheric and then going back and building these soundscapes, was the space that Scott left, as opposed to other drummers and other albums where a lot of that space is filled. That one’s a very dreamy, psychedelic-y take on “How High The Moon.”
When you’re composing something with two guitar parts, do you hear both parts right away or do you start with one and think, “I should try to come up with something complimentary?”
With my method or composition, it’s all rule-based, theory-based, so I actually write these independent of each other, without listening to the other one at all. I do this with all my compositions, even when I’m working with additional instruments, I write everything with no regard for other parts. I know it’s going to work based on the theory part of it. Then, when I go to put the parts together, which is what I love so much about this process, that it’s a complete surprise to me …. So, I write one guitar part and it’s based off of “How High The Moon,” then I go write another part inspired by “High How The Moon.” Then I put them together and say, “OK, that’s interesting!”
It creates things I would never do in my head. If I were listening to one part, I would never compose in that way over that. But when I compose them separately and combine them, then it gets very interesting for me because it’s a big surprise as to how it turns out.
It’s very math-y.
Very math-y. There are math rules that determine this stuff, but there are a ton of creative decisions of course. It’s not so math-y that it’s like 12-tone composition. It’s much more open and much easier to manipulate it into how I wanted it to sound. But it is definitely a system that generates material or data.
