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.
