Impropod Podcast

Ep15 The Whirlwind Vortex & Classical Piano - Jamie Loftus

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Luke 00:00:05 Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is classical pianist Jamie Loftus. Hey, Jamie. Hey.

Jamie 00:00:13 Thanks for having me on here.

Luke 00:00:14 So, what's your relationship with improvisation?

Jamie 00:00:17 I would say it's minimal at best, but I do. Sometimes when I'm sitting on my own, I get a kind of melody coming to my head, and I spend a bit of time noodling around. But the minute there's any sort of purpose to it, if there's someone listening or if it's for something, I find that quite unsettling. So a lot of the improvising I've done for people has been by accident. For example, I was in a mansion in Bristol improvising a bit, just something really simple and a very sweet couple happened to be checking the mansion as a wedding venue, booked the mansion as a wedding venue, and then, based on this accidental improvising, that they had also booked me with the venue. Yeah, it was nice.

Luke 00:01:01 Okay, so I'm going to play you a piece of music, and I want you to tell me what it makes you think of.

Luke 00:01:06 So any kind of thoughts, emotions that come into your mind can be anything. All right.

Jamie 00:02:02 It was a kind of white light spirit ballet dancer coming from some sort of oily depth. And I found it very moving that something really beautiful could come from something very ugly in the beginning. And the contrast between those two things that the white trails of light that would mix with the filthy black oil would somehow coexist.

Luke 00:02:35 Where did this oily texture come from?

Jamie 00:02:36 The cluster chords at the beginning? Yeah. Discord. And unsettling and unstable harmonies at the beginning. From whence came some really vivid, colorful tonal ideas.

Luke 00:02:57 Okay, so I'm going to ask you to tell me a story. Right? And I'm going to break the story down into different sections, and then I'm going to improvise a soundtrack to it. Yeah, I love.

Jamie 00:03:09 To tell the story. It all started at the new Lion Bar in Dartington. We went and had a crazy night where we managed to mess up the dance floor, so the ferocity of footfall actually caused a need for a reconstruction of the dance floor, which that in itself, I think is a point of pride for everyone who happened to be there at the time.

Jamie 00:03:30 Coming out of that night, I guess we didn't take the hint that our footwork up to that point had been a total disaster and we decided, right, we want to be back at our place. We don't want to take the road. We didn't want to take a taxi. We decided to take a straight line path, illuminated by the beautiful green flashing lights of Eric's Porsche, which many a time came into view and kept us on course. So we started off into the darkness across various fields, hedgerows, fences, under the starlight. It was really beautiful. We arrived at what I would describe as a sort of figuratively shallow stream, a shoe ruining depth of stream that we nonetheless needed to cross in some other way than on our feet, where there happened to be an opportune rope swing. So pre rope swing. Our absolute legend of a friend, Eric, had brandished a full bottle of Buckfast. So we thought, okay, we need a refresher. And as everybody knows, once a bottle of Buckfast is open, all chaos is going to let loose.

Jamie 00:04:45 So we swig the Buckfast straight, lined it on the rope swing. There was only one problem the design and fundamental non-alignment of the rope swing. So we essentially jumped on it in a straight line and span into a kind of whirlwind vortex of spinning stars and Buckfast. Actually, with more dizzying spiral. Eventually that threw us down onto the other side. I should have mentioned also the pounding soundtrack. This was already becoming quite an unsettling event, so we stood up on the other side and witnessed in front of us the thickest wall of brambles that either of us had ever seen. It was a towering, two metre high blackened wall of spikes in front of us, and we thought, we cannot possibly go through this. We need to take a right or left. The left looked marginally more inviting, so we proceeded left. However, on the leftwards route there was still a smattering of brambles in the way, and we thought it would be a lot of fun to form a kind of bramble bashing quadrupeds. Me and Alice linked arms with three legs on the ground for stability.

Jamie 00:06:00 The forth tiny but surprisingly aggressive walking boot held high in the air. Crushing the brambles into a flattened mass. So this went on for some time, and the dimming hope of finding a thin point in the brambles at this point was almost gone. And we thought, okay, look, we're gonna have to go straight through. There is no dip in the iron curtain of brambles in front of us, so we took the nearest sticks we could find and started to smite a path forwards, making incredibly slow progress. The sticks we could find were more or less the X brambles versus the living brambles. It was some sort of budget episode of The Walking Dead. So we looked back across the river and there was an opportune hazel thicket that we thought, this is our ticket to freedom. So essentially our monkey bard across broke it off with my feet and monkey bard back with the smiting stick in foot. and I was greeted from one drunken to another by the rallying battle cry from Eric Urie. And so essentially then we took it in turns, smashing a path through the brambles.

Jamie 00:07:12 And there's one final obstacle, the boss Bramble. And so we we brought the stick down on it and it rebound. This bramble was rebounding harder than Shaquille O'Neal. It was an impenetrable bramble that wouldn't yield to this mighty stick in the darkness. We sort of knelt down and realized this is actually not a bramble at all. Not only is this a barbed wire fence, it's the worst kind of barbed wire fence. A loose, low hanging, badly fenced barbed wire fence. It's too high to jump. It's too low to cool under. It's too stubborn to smite. How are we going to get past this fence? We had one choice. We can climb over ourselves as a kind of collective hive being. or we're about to get cancelled quicker than Phillip Schofield. It's one thing or the other and we climb out and make it to freedom. And we burst out of the the bramble hedge and hung underneath the stars. Cut to the next morning. We get a video in the WhatsApp. Suddenly there's a clear view of the scene.

Jamie 00:08:21 Vortex. Rope. Swing. Smitten path to the left. And then on the right is a beautifully planed symphony of straight lines in the form of a bridge crossing both the stream and the brambles. It was literally no point in anything that we did last night. We could have easily just taken a right across the bridge and have been home unscathed. I would say the moral of the story is I think you just roll the dice.

Luke 00:08:47 Yes. Good story. It's a story of of determination, really, but also ridiculous determination.

Jamie 00:08:54 It was an adventure. Yeah, it was about determination. But also, I would say, a higher level of hubris to think that we could possibly mess with the curves of nature and take a straight line. Nice. It was a bit of a handful.

Luke 00:12:37 The more things that happen in the story, usually the harder it is. Because yeah, I have to not only play the piano, but also think about each individual bit in sequence and also use my musical knowledge of whatever that is to convey that.

Luke 00:12:56 Yeah. So for example, in in the beginning I tried to get a kind of dance music almost Halsey vibe.

Jamie 00:13:05 What I got from that is the very innocent optimism of people that have just set out somewhere, don't know what's going to happen, but there's a real yeah, I think we've got this.

Luke 00:13:15 So if I was to break down the musical interpretation of a Bramble, just kind of go over this wide, discordant, spiky harmony.

Jamie 00:13:31 Yeah, also static chords, because that really reminded me of seeing something that's supposed to be really beautiful. Literally, the brambles were touching the stars and seeing starry night sky. And then there's this very overbearing, completely motionless wall of brambles. There's something very monolithic about a black silhouette of brambles that is actually stopping you getting home, and it comes across in the static chords.

Luke 00:14:06 Okay, so we've now swapped places and I'm going to tell Jamie a story. And Jamie's going to improvise a soundtrack to this story. So this is the first time we've done this. So it should be interesting.

Luke 00:14:24 I'm going to tell you the story about when we went to Jordan on a family holiday. The year is 2007, and I'm about 15 years old. We're visiting the ancient city of Petra as we approach the city. We go through these narrow corridors carved out of the rock, which have incredibly tall walls and strange acoustics, giving a sense of unease. We turn a corner and bam! We see the Treasury building. Alcazar, an ancient and elaborate building carved out of the rock, believed to have been the mausoleum of the Nabataean king Albertus the Fourth. It has a crown at the top and four weathered statues around the edge. It was once believed to house ancient treasure and featured in the Indiana Jones film The Last Crusade. We then go to explore the rest of the city and get persuaded into buying little bottles of sand with patterns on them by the locals. After a while, it begins to get dark and we decide to head back. The atmosphere in the ancient city quietens down, but there is a strange vibe we can't place.

Luke 00:15:39 Then a small drop of water lands on the sand and hisses. This is a very dry country normally than another, at which point it begins to rain heavily. A thunderclap, a cacophony of water from the heavens. The remaining stalls hastily pack up. Tourists run for cover as the ground is so dry it refuses to absorb the water. The water begins to rise. A flash flood. We need to get out of there. Suddenly, a guy with camels appears and our guide points to them and shouts, jump on! I scramble onto one camel, my family onto the others. The water is running fast on the ground and through the now defunct irrigation system. The ancients built with a monstrous groan. My camel heads for the exit, forces his way through the current, and I hear someone say, don't let the water get past his knees or he'll get really angry, which is very reassuring information. We gallop back down the narrow passageway, an immensely bumpy ride, fighting against the ever growing current and the water rising towards the camels knees.

Luke 00:16:50 Is this the end? I think. Are we going to make it? And finally we make it to the top. A triumphant escape. Most of us, apart from the kids, smile from the other family who stubbornly refused to get on the camel and was had to be rescued by the military. Anyway, that's my story. Do you think you can handle it?

Jamie 00:17:10 I'll give it a try. Yeah.

Luke 00:17:12 So what I do is I just think about each element. What is it? What does discovery sound like? What does rain sound like? How do you give it a desert feel?

Jamie 00:17:24 Yeah.

Jamie 00:17:25 I've got a good overall view of the narrative arc of the story.

Speaker 4 00:17:30 Okay.

Jamie 00:20:41 What I wanted to do was use the register to create the height of the cannons. And also this static thing. There's a big thing that's there, but nothing's really happening.

Speaker 4 00:20:52 Yeah.

Luke 00:20:52 That was quite successful, but I didn't quite get the sense of fear with a change. The transition between that sense of wonderment and the fact that we have to get out of here, that there's this.

Luke 00:21:07 We're fearing for our lives. This is a an escape.

Jamie 00:21:11 What I was going for was the rain. Mainly the Neapolitan. Six major. Seven was meant to be when you discovered the city, and it lifts up out of the canyon somehow. But then, you know, I guess I was more thinking of the crescendo of rain happening with the the descending things, but it reached a point where it can't really go any further than this, while staying in the same bounds of that, that harmonic landscape.

Luke 00:21:41 I got the sense of rain, definitely, but it seemed like quite nice rain.

Jamie 00:21:44 It was more thinking of the movement of the canals as well. And you were trying to escape? Yeah, I guess it was more literal than being an emotional inner turmoil of actually thinking you might get swept away into some ancient city.

Luke 00:22:05 I think we'll swap over and we will wrap this up. All right. What did you get out of being on this podcast?

Jamie 00:22:12 First of all, is a lot of fun to recount an incredible night with some friends and also then to link the storytelling aspect to music.

Jamie 00:22:23 I think it's inherent in a lot of music listeners to hear a sound as a narrative, but a lot of the time, especially with solo piano, the double edged part of that is it's very abstract. There's a clear narrative happening, but sometimes it's nice to put an actual literal narrative to the sound. I think that's often where the abstract sound of Music has actually come from. To start with, it's written by a real human being, a real human embodied narrative, who then has written music that's very abstract. And I think the level of kind of insular personal expression that comes with an art form that's that's so devoid from linear, literal narrative is nice sometimes, if you can flip that on its head and have an actual story going on. For example, if I play a chord sequence and you get those goosebumps on your arm and it sounds like, wow, something happened, if you sat in an audience and you asked them to explain the narrative, you would get 50 different narratives. So it's nice to have it the other way around.

Jamie 00:23:30 There is a clear story that the sound is about. And it was really fun to play something. Yeah, I didn't really know what I was going to do or if anything would happen at all. So it's nice to be asked to improvise, but the podcast format is awesome. Yeah, and I think it's also got a really unique thing going on.

Luke 00:23:47 So thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Jamie 00:23:49 It's been a pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for the invite.

Luke 00:23:52 Join us next time for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.