AARON PARKS INTERVIEW
28
Julio, 2025
Interview and Photographs: Daniel Glückmann
Interview with Aaron Parks, American jazz pianist and composer.
“Making music is for me like making origami in a house that’s on fire”
It’s 5 p.m. and the sun is beating down on Madrid. Inside the Sala Villanos, where the meeting with Aaron Parks will take place before the sound check for his concert, the air conditioning is comforting, and the musician (Seattle, WA; 42 years old) shows up to meet the journalist with a smile and an idea: “Shall we have a coffee outside?” “Glop, yes, of course,” I said, and we venture through the streets in search of a place that best suits Parks’s particular taste for the beverage. Luckily, specialty coffee shops abound in the city, and just two blocks away, we find one with a deliciously cool air where we can begin our conversation, initially centred on heat and coffee. The best will come after crossing those blocks again, in the cool of Sala Villanos.
The pianist, with a career spanning 15 albums as a leader and countless collaborations, performed in Madrid alongside his inseparable guitarist Greg Tuohey, electric bassist Morgan Guerin and drummer Jongkuk Kim, presenting songs with his band “Little Big”, the flagship of his recent creations with which he has already released 3 albums, the latest, once again, with legendary Blue Note Records label, after having been with others for several years.
In&OutJazz: You were born in Seattle, then lived in New York and have recently settled with your family in Lisbon. How is the change going?
Aaron Parks: No matter where you go on this planet, there’s always going to be uncertainty because we’re living in an uncertain kind of time on the planet as a whole. But it was once I moved out of the United States that I realized how much anxiety I always had living in America and not only since this sort of most recent round of authoritarianism has begun, but just in general. Being out of the culture of fear, the most noticeable thing, is the feeling of, oh, I can actually breathe. I didn’t realize how much I was holding.
My wife, who is from Colombia, and she moved from Colombia to Paris, and then from Paris to Italy, and then to the United States, welcomes me to her world as I’ve never been an immigrant before.
And what about the music? There is a strong local jazz culture and with fado, together with other African influences, Portugal has its own jazz somehow.
For sure. That was one of the things that I was drawn to when I firstly visited the city in 2022. When I got there, I felt the energy of the city. I went to some of the jam sessions, and I was really struck by the dedication of the musicians, not with a flamboyant performative style, not saying hey, look at me, I’m the jazz, I’m doing it right, I’m the jazz star. Just doing it with a lot of dedication and love for the music when they’re playing standards and calling tunes.
Foreign musicians living in Spain are always impressed by the strength of local music like flamenco. What impact is Portuguese music having on you?
There’s a certain type of melancholy that I find in fado but also with the city and the people that is within me as well. There’s a sense of closeness to sadness as well they call it “saudade”, something which was already very important to me in music. I feel some sense of kinship there.
Aaron Parks has vivid eyes that scan his surroundings in search of the best way to express his ideas, which always flow heartfelt and sincere. It’s clear he enjoys talking and letting his feelings out. Recently, he also began publishing them in writing on a blog called “Always Beginning” (https://aparksmusic.substack.com/), a special space to discover Parks’s more philosophical side.
One of his posts is about the origin of his band’s name, “Little Big,” which takes its name from a book he found himself strongly inspired by, written by John Crowley, also called “Little, Big,” in this case with a comma in the middle. “The further in you go, the bigger it gets” became a kind of profound principle he shares with the writer, and which also reflects his path in music and life. In his post, he elaborates on this link, which he had barely spoken about before, “not because it’s secret, just because I’ve never quite known how to articulate the connection.”
Little big is concentrating lot of your production in the last years. Tell us a bit about the connection you have with the band, now you are in the middle of a new tour?
Basically, there is no Little Big without Greg Tuohey, the guitar player in the band. Greg is my co-pilot. It struck me one day that it almost feels like we’re cosmically predestined. He’s my other half in some kind of way. That’s grown over 11 or 12 years now.
The electric bass for this particular tour is Morgan Guerin, an incredible musician. It’s his first-time touring with the band. He’s also an incredible drummer a saxophone player and a keyboard player. He’s one of those kinds of guys who plays everything. I played with Morgan quite a bit in the band of Terry Lynn Carrington.
And then the drummer, who joined the band on our most recent album, is Jongkuk Kim. He is from South Korea and plays tons of gigs with all sorts of people, very adaptable within the New York scene. And at the same time, he also is a kind of… “secret sauce” as he also played on a bunch of the K-pop records. He has the ability to understand how to really make a song come together, like that sort of pop music aesthetic. And it’s important for all of us, for me, for Greg and for Morgan. All of us, we deeply love all types of different music.
These guys are just really, really wildly imaginative, creative musicians, very focused and producer oriented as well.
I’ve been always very curious about the dynamics that take place during a tour, both inter-personally and musically. What is your experience?
Yes, there’s no substitute for a bunch of gigs in a row and every tour is different. To sort of help a band start to understand things about themselves.
And so, some of the things happen in the music. Others happen just as much sort of in interpersonal things. I noticed that most tours you get little inside jokes that somehow start somewhere in the beginning of the tour and find their way, keep on going as the tour progresses helping us stay sane during the crazy travels. Nevertheless, most of the time it’s okay. I mean, it is a gig every day, basically.
¿Is the music the same after 20 concerts?
Of course not. And it’s not as simple as that one side is better than the other. There is something very exciting about the first few gigs of a tour and something really interesting often happening about the very last ones as well, because it’s been cooking for the longest. But every tour has its own thing. There are moments where there’s a wave that things start to make the most sense and others where we feel like we start to repeat ourselves or beat our head against the wall or we’re just always doing the same shit.
¿How do you handle those moments?
I record almost every show and I listen back. With greater experience, I neither am beating myself up, like, “oh, I’m playing like shit”, nor am I like, “yeah, that was great, I’m the man”. I’m doing neither of those things but trying just to be objective, like looking at, okay, how did that go? What were the things that pulled me out of the listening experience? Where did I notice that as a listener that I’m like, oh man, that was really feeling good, but then my comping got to be a little bit too rambunctious or maybe the piano solo felt like it had an energy of striving, like trying to make something happen rather than letting something happen? You watch the tape. Just to fix a few things. See what it actually sounds like.
If you’re tying your whole sense of identity to the music, overall, it can be therapeutic but depending how you take it could also be torturous.
Following with your live experiences, you are one of the “in rotation” artists of the Village Vanguard, the legendary New York’s jazz club, where you performed already for four whole weeks. Is it the same for you playing at the Vanguard than in any other club?
No, it’s not the same, of course. No, there’s nowhere like the Vanguard. It’s my favourite place to play music. And the way I put it is that it feels like there’s ghosts there, but they’re rooting for you. The ghosts, they want you to succeed as long as you’re showing up with the right intention. As long as you’re showing up and you’re after the music rather than glory, then they will help.
One day after the other?
One day after the other. Every time I play a full week at the Vanguard, I come out of there a different musician than I started the week with. Every single time I go through that experience, it’s a transmutation, a transmogrification.
You have recorded quite a big number of albums as a leader. But you also participate in a lot of collaborations. How those two different facets play with you musically but also personally?
All of it’s really important. And what I’ve learned from being a side person or a collaborator is integral to how I want to lead a band as well. It’s very important to know what it’s like to be a band member. It also helps me because being a band leader is ultimately also about being a band member in your own band and knowing how to serve the music itself.
What are the things that feel important as a side man that make you feel valued and seen? And that I wish that I experienced. Or sometimes knowing about the things I didn’t love that much. All those are things that I learn and can take away for my own projects.
But then musically, I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t particularly make a distinction between the projects that I’m a side man in and a project that I’m the leader of.
Maybe the difference could be that you are not the composer of the music…
That’s a huge difference, of course. But I guess the thing that’s surprisingly similar is that with my music or somebody else’s music, I’m doing the same job, which is trying to understand what the music is. Just because I wrote the song doesn’t mean that I fully understand what it is yet. I wrote the song and then it’s like, OK, well, here’s this thing. How can I bring it to life? You can sort of do radically different ways of imagining it. One of the things that “Little Big” is about, is subtle reimagining, where we’re actually sticking to the idea, but we’re always changing small little things.
Are you a kind of leader who defines one hundred per cent how the music has to sound or are you giving more freedom?
Yes, and yes. Both. It depends on the song as well, but there are many songs that have very, very clear ideas. What my approach has been, is let’s try my idea. And often we’ll just play it first. And then, what do we think? Have you got any other ideas?
Recently, there’s a new song that I wrote for the band, but I’ve never found the right way to do it. We practiced it a few days ago and Greg told me this morning that he woke up from a dream. And that he woke up and he had this song in his head that he was like “what a beautiful song”. It took him a while and he realized that it was my song. But it was a totally different rhythmic context. He was imagining a totally different way of approaching the song than I had conceived of it. That was this morning, and we haven’t had a chance to explore what “Revolve” actually might sound like yet.
And what about the other musicians of your bands? Do they always like this type of leadership?
I normally call musicians who don’t mind getting specific direction. There are some people who are open to that but there are some people who don’t like that. In some of my other projects, like my next album that’ll be coming out which is an acoustic quartet album, that’s a project where I say much less, hardly anything at all to the musicians.
But it’s still your music….
Exactly. And for them to find what the part is that feels correct. It’s a very different approach I take depending on the project and musicians I’m playing with.
In 2023, Aaron Parks suffered a serious personal crisis which obliged him to cancel a tour. He was very brave sharing his mental health issue with the community and from there on, he started a recovery path which brought him to the creative and positive moment he’s currently living. Not a long time ago, speaking about this kind of problems wasn’t common at all but fortunately it’s becoming normal, not only in the art world but also in sports and in general, in our normal lives.
I’ve known about bipolar disorder for myself for years. But I essentially denied it within myself because I wasn’t speaking publicly about it. When I decided to do it, I didn’t do it for anyone but just because it was what I needed to do for me. Then I was really happy to hear from folks who talked about how much it meant to them. To have someone speaking openly about this.
It’s the same thing in music. You have to play the music that you need to play, that you want to play with honesty, not focused on how the audience is going to receive it. You’re not trying to tell them what they want to hear, but you’re preparing it in a form that makes it possible for them to hear what you’re after. So, you’re arranging your words, you’re arranging the music into a way which creates the possibility of reception. You’re aware of that relationship between reader and writer, between listener and musician.
And how does this relationship work when confronting music with the challenging times we are living at the social and political levels?
You know, actually, it’s one of the things I wrote about on my Substack blog. The metaphor I used, is like sometimes making music, especially music which isn’t explicitly reckoning with the times, can feel a little bit like making origami in a house that’s on fire.
On the other hand, I’m very glad that there is art that’s being made directly in response and in commentary and talking about what’s happening in the world.
Whether or not all art being made right now needs to directly reckon with that? No, I don’t think that that needs to be the case. I think that there needs to be room for just dreaming rather than rebelling against what’s here, like proposing, what are you for and even, just reminding of what beauty can be. We need protest singers now, but I don’t know that we need everybody to be a protest singer.
Elasticity, gravity, gesture, adventure, contrast, a sense of space, a sense of place, gardening… are all concepts you have highlighted in some previous interviews when speaking about what defines your sound and your way to see life and music. In what sense are these things so important to you?
Yes, you’ve zeroed in on the stuff that I care about more than anything.
It’s not an easy question. I normally talk about this in a 90-minute masterclass, so it’s hard to get boil it in short but let’s try. First of all, your sound will find you. You don’t need to find your own sound. The sound finds you if you make yourself available to it, if you are a dedicated listener, if you surround yourself with music that inspires you and listen to it deeply, not in an extractive way, not like, okay, what can I get from this to use in my playing?
Let’s take “gardening” for example. Gardening is often planting seeds, planting seeds to get something. In music, what you’re doing in the practice room is planting seeds. And then when the time is right, they’ll grow. But only when the time is right and not being in a hurry to make them grow. You don’t plant a seed and then go out the next day and be like, hey, are you a potato yet?
Another thing that is valuable about gardening is how you think about your musicianship and your creative process. You should think you are taking care of a garden but not confusing yourself to be the garden. The music I make is not me, my job is to take care of it. And what that means is to observe it. That’s why I listen back to the recordings, that’s why I try to see what it actually sounds like. I say to myself, I’m not the garden, but I am the gardener.
Sometimes it seems like maybe those flowers are a little bit ostentatious, that they are a bit too much, too flowery. Right over here, there’s a patch, which is kind of dead and there’s nothing growing there. What could I plant here? Over here, there’s a bunch of weeds, some bad habits. What of those are actually weeds?
It’s useful asking these types of questions because that changes the relationship being always alive and shifting environment. And then when you’re making music, you’re going out into the garden and seeing what’s growing like the chef that sees what’s in season. That’s good and it’s a nonstop process.
In the last minutes of our conversation, I saw how Aaron’s eyes flying all the time to the stage where the band was starting the sound check. He felt impatient to jump with them, so I decided to leave it there and follow up with the unique experience of seeing the band working together. Many of the leads he shared in our talk were then happening live on stage, something you reader could hopefully see in the photographs we publish in this article: complicity, passion, leadership, commitment. Lots of skills that make Little Big a really exciting project the audience enjoyed a few hours later.
