Ep19 Embracing Ambiguity - Julian Marshall

Listen to the episode here 

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Luke 00:00:05  So welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is composer and songwriter Julien Marshall. So tell me a bit about yourself, Julian.

Julian 00:00:15  First of all, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you today. I've been a musician all my life. I have a very varied and long career, and I'm 70 next year. So I was a classically trained musician. I went to the Royal College of Music on a prestigious establishment to study piano, and I was a pretty terrible student, actually, left there and got really into writing songs with my ex school buddy Coté, and basically within three bands Back or Marshall in Vancouver, Flying Lizards. And then the band were I to I would be wonderful Deborah Berg in America, working with Gary Katz, who produced all the Steely Dan albums, and then after all that, eventually collapsed. I did an R for record companies for a bit, but that's my way compositionally for a while. And then I started teaching.

Julian 00:01:03  And then I realized I really loved teaching and then began to emerge teaching word composing, which is what I've been doing ever since. And I've been writing more kind of classically orientated compositions for the last kind of 15 years. I'm just now going back into something which I describe as more of a jazz aesthetic. I'm a teaching fellow at ICMP in London, and I teach privately and mentor people rather enormously. Enjoy. And I live in Suffolk. I'm a grandfather. I have two children, Gabriel and Solomon be married to Arabella, who's a glass artist 44 years.

Luke 00:01:41  Great. So I'm going to pay you a piece of music, and I want you to tell me what it makes you think of. If you could switch off the analytical part of your brain, the one that's saying, oh, yeah, particular key in that and just said, what kind of emotion does it bring? Okay. All right. Here we go.

Julian 00:02:52  What I notice is that it's not so much pictures, but qualities that come to mind.

Julian 00:02:58  The words are reflective, tender and vulnerable. And they are very important qualities to me. And by reflective I mean that there's that sense of confidence and uncertainty which can be such a wonderful part of improvising and indeed much composition. And then that tenderness, that sense of sweetness and heart opening and with that of vulnerability, i.e., the strength to be in that place, a combination of those elements. Very beautiful. Thank you.

Luke 00:03:35  Okay. Would you say it's like a paradox? You have this sense of confidence and then vulnerability?

Julian 00:03:42  Yeah. I think that it takes confidence to be vulnerable. It's like we need to know that it's all right to step into that place, and particularly if it's in a sharing situation or any kind of public environment, it takes some courage, I think, to step into that place, and I don't see a paradox. I see it as a partnership that the two go together. People often talk about being confident, but I don't know anybody who is confident. I know people who have confident moments and less confident moments, and the holding that the rise and fall of confidence seems to me about as good as it gets, really.

Julian 00:04:23  Then there's the other sense of confidence, which is just the willingness to allow something. And I think that's what you're doing there and my experience.

Luke 00:04:40  I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind, and then what I'll do is I'm going to break it down into sections, and then I'm going to improvise a soundtrack to that story.

Julian 00:04:51  Yeah, I do have a story. So we going back now to 1981, and I have just left my successful band, Marshall Hang and I'm feeling really at sea. It was a huge thing to leave. And then I was dropped by the record label EMI. And so I stepped from being in this very heartening, successful band and suddenly really a very empty space. And Arabella, my wife and I decided that we would go on an extended holiday. We went to America and we got a car. We just started driving. We ended up in San Diego in California, staying with some friends, and I had a kind of dream, which was I wanted to be with Warner Brothers in America because they were a label that had all my favorite bands.

Julian 00:05:42  They also, in a sense, represented my then favorite music. I could see no way in the world is going to happen in this kind of dream. And the uncertainty and the lack of confidence and the vulnerability and the I'm nowhere near sure about where I'm at, what I want. One night, Arabella said, look, there's this improvised women's dance group performing tonight. Let's go and see them. We went along. It was an amazing evening. The group called Mostly Women Moving. It was contact dance, improvisation, and they were providing all their own music and all their movement. But there was one of the dancers which hurt her knee and couldn't dance as she was singing instead. And as I listened to her singing, she's amazing. And afterwards went up gingerly to her and said, well, your singing is amazing. And we just had a chat and we exchanged telephone numbers. When I got back to England, I called her up and invited her over to England to try doing some writing with me.

Julian 00:06:38  And again with no sense of certainty about where this is going at all. We wrote for about three weeks, and we came up with a little demo, and we released a single through a little tiny, teeny rugby label. It was a complete flop. Nothing happened at all, but that very single got played in an INR meeting in Warner Brothers in LA, because the little label did have an affiliation with Warner Brothers. And then out of the blue, we got a call from Warner Brothers from Gary Katz of Steely Dan Bridges are saying, love your single, Would you Like Me to produce your album within a year or a year and a half of meeting Deborah, we were indeed signed to Warner Brothers in America. My favorite book is called The Souls Code, which was about how a lot of the time, this idea of being in control of our lives just let go of all that and just see what life has in store for us, rather than what I think I have in store for life. And that was a wonderful journey of that when we were signed to one of us.

Julian 00:07:36  Was life suddenly easy? No, it was a real challenge working with Gary. He really threw down a gauntlet. I had to grow up big time. But, what it really showed me was just demonstrating something about not knowing about chance. What's possible about intention, but also, in a sense, about how unimportant self control of intention That can be sometimes. So letting go of that.

Luke 00:08:04  It's one of those things. If she hadn't have broken her leg, she would maybe not been singing and therefore wouldn't have led on to other things.

Julian 00:08:12  You're absolutely right that it's one of those examples of out of an apparent disadvantage came something which was very beautiful.

Luke 00:08:20  I'm going to break it down into sections. So first of all, you're in this sense of unease in your life, not quite sure what's going on. So there's a sense of confusion, sense of frustration there, I imagine. And then the dance class, the performance. Something happens here. There's a sense of mystery. There's a kind of encounter.

Luke 00:08:41  And then that leads on to the beginnings of something successful.

Julian 00:08:46  It's more like a door opening. A creative door opening. Yeah, very nicely broken down. Yeah, lovely. A sense of door opening was very clear and something transforming, I suddenly realized it's a kind of classic Hero's Journey monomyth, and I really felt you reflected that in the music.

Luke 00:11:12  In your compositions. Have you explored uncertainty in this idea of not sure what's happening?

Julian 00:11:19  Yeah.

Julian 00:11:20  So in a number of different ways, there's this very nice Buddhist phrase of not knowing. And the idea that in order to really engage with something, we need to really engage with it with a truly open mind and without trying to evaluate, assess, judge or control too much. And what I find really helpful in composing is what I call a splurge and craft approach, right? Just allow myself to really splurge and then bring the kind of crafting process to composer. And I do that using notation software, which I find very helpful as a way to come up with initial ideas of the piano.

Julian 00:12:01  But then taking the ideas to notation and then playing around with the with the notes. So it's got a kind of a, an improvisatory sense to it as the music becomes more kind of crystallized. So that's one area of uncertainty. The other thing is that I feel that music and the arts can deal with a sense of uncertainty and ambiguity in a way that the modern brain doesn't particularly deal with so well. I think this is the area where words stop, the arts take over. He's been able to deal with a kind of a subtlety and and a nuance of, of emotion and experience that it's hard to find anywhere else. when I'm.

Luke 00:12:44  Composing, I find there's two modes. You have the the splurge, which seems to be coming from a source that is unknown. It's intangible. And then once you've had that, you switch modes into something more formal, actually arranging it and making it sound consistent. Do you find that you have two ways of thinking about it?

Julian 00:13:06  I do, I'm very much reminded of the work of Doctor Ian Gilchrist and his work on the brain.

Julian 00:13:12  His latest book is called The Matter with things. It's an extraordinary book, and he really talks about what you're talking about in enormous depth and that sense of if you have a sense of the brain really work together. And this is surely shouting across the divide, if you like, between that kind of, fetid experience, that how the atmosphere approaches the world, how the left hemisphere approaches to what are essentially rather different or very different. But we need both. How the left hemisphere can organize, in a sense, what the right hemisphere has been dealing with, and then it can be fed back into the right hemisphere at the end of the day, if it remains to cut and dried and it's boring, so it needs to come out. It seems to me it's about a three way process of kind of splurge craft, splurge and that seems to me where the pieces turn out the best. Shallows and voices is what I've been mainly working with for the last period of time. A little bit a little orchestral tango and and and some electronic scoring, which I really enjoy.

Julian 00:14:20  If there's an idea is germinating. Usually there'll be an instrumental instrumental group associated with that idea. So I try not to find out too much about what the instrument can do. I do feel that through listening to so much music over the years, we do absorb a heck of a lot of info. So even if we're not quite sure of the range of a bass trombone or something, we have a sense of what that instrument does and then, in my experience, is really great just to stick stuff down on on paper, as it were, and just try it out. And one of my favorite composers, Michael Tippett, he, he got into trouble with doing that, is that you could often write music, which was incredibly difficult and actually not that suited to a particular instrument. But his approach was let the player deal with it And if they're really good players, they can deal with it. And yes, they do. It may take some challenge, but the result is so remarkable. But basically it's a mixture of the two things.

Julian 00:15:15  Obviously you've got to write within range. You want to make it enjoyable for the player. Otherwise they're just going to get fed up and not wanting to play it. You want to make it so it feels like the instrument is really appreciated and loved for what it can do, and indeed, sometimes what a particular player or singer can do. I'm a bit throw caution to the winds kind of guy and try it out and then see what happens. And and then somebody can tell me, Julian, this absolutely doesn't work. And so I'll start again.

Luke 00:15:46  Is there anything you want to promote. Have you got any gigs lined up or concerts or anything like that?

Julian 00:15:52  Another kind of work that I've been doing, which is inspired by this incredible poet called Gertrude Coleman and who is a Jewish and German poet who perished in Auschwitz in 1944. And she wrote a cycle of poems called worlds, which I've mined and either setting words or inspired, inspired by certain texts. During lockdown, made a film with some fantastic creative partners, a reimagination of one of the comma poems with yearning.

Julian 00:16:25  And so that was a real thrill. And then I followed that up with another collaboration for setting, and then the reimagination of another poem by Gertrude Coleman called garden in Summer and garden and Summer was a collaboration with another Devonian, actually, Anastasia Bruce Jones. So these two pieces, yearning, garden and Summer and then managing to record another complex, which I'd written it back in 2011, called the Angel in the forest, and this incredible tentacled James Gilchrist. So which six titles from the Philharmonia Orchestra and James Gilchrist? That was incredible. So I feel very blessed to be able to record, create, record and release these three projects just to finally finish off. We did a remix of the original garden and Summer track, which featured the drumming of Steve Gadd, who's been one of my absolute hero drummers for many, many years. There's a new kind of chapter open that really, I think I'm feeling a very strong pull towards kind of jazz started and really gone way back to when I was in my early 20s, when I had these bands, which are quintets or sextet, and I'm really feeling that very strongly.

Luke 00:17:43  At the moment. I listen to the one with Steve Gadd, the remix of Gardiner's. I thought it was great. Yeah, he's very good at just not doing much as a drummer, just doing so little, but adding so much. I mean exactly.

Julian 00:17:55  It was one of how that came about. Understated is the word that I would use. I really was clear that if we needed to be what he wants to come up with, rather than what I thought he might come up with, and he was very clear early on in the process that this idea, this approach, he felt really worked for the track and that's what he wanted to do. But again, he used to say we're going minimal. And then of course, became extremely grateful.

Luke 00:18:22  All right. I think we'll wrap it up there. What what did you get out of this podcast?

Julian 00:18:25  I really enjoyed it. It's really nice to talk to a fellow musician about music, and about the impact of music and about the potential of music, and also to do something so spontaneous.

Julian 00:18:37  And your ability is encouraged just to do that, hear a story and then get into the kind of feeding. That story is lovely. So I feel very blessed and very honoured.

Luke 00:18:48  Well, thanks very much, Julian. It's been really insightful.

Julian 00:18:52  Yeah.

Julian 00:18:53  Thank you Luke, it be lovely and I look forward to seeing you at some point in the not too distant future. I have great cheers. And Luke. Bye bye.

Luke 00:19:02  Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.