John Robinson’s opening verse on the first track of Mark de Clive Lowe’s upcoming album, CHURCH, which dropped Tuesday, May 27th, is probably the best description of the pianist, producer, and beat maestro. MdCL’s latest album, CHURCH, is very much like the club nights he hosts of the same name. Outside of sharing the same title- which Nia Andrews bestowed- both CHURCH, the album, and CHURCH, the club night, are mini journeys into MdCL’s life as a musician. It’s a story that starts in New Zealand, then moves to Boston’s famed Berklee College of Music, to London’s house scene, and finally to the shores of Los Angeles, and to East Village club dates in New York.
While MdCL’s wanderlust is definitely an interesting story, CHURCH is also – if not mostly – about the pianist, producer, and beat maestro’s musical and artistic journey. It’s a journey from pianist to producer, back to being a pianist, and finally finding a nice place in what MdCL calls the “spectrum between man and machine.”
As mentioned, rather than these three paragraphs, John Robinson’s verse really does a better job of describing CHURCH and MdCL with two lines:
“A man in his mission to travel around the planet with these rhythms and speak through the music like intuition. Vibrations, love, and greatness spread around to many places.”
Read Part 1 of our in-depth interview with Mark de Clive Lowe below:
Revive: In a previous interview, you mentioned that you had to get out of New Zealand because there wasn’t a scene out there, but now there’s a plethora of amazing performers in Oceania. What happened between you leaving for Berklee in 1994 to the present day?
Mark de Clive-Lowe: I think a few of us opened the doors. There’s this guy Nathan Haines – he’s a sax player – [who] definitely opened up everything. He actually spent time here and studied with Joe Lovano and spent a lot of time with Groove Collective right before they put out their first record. He kind of brought back that influence to New Zealand; I kind of came in just after him so that influenced me, and then we both went overseas and did stuff.
I guess at the time there wasn’t that much happening and we had to make our own scene, but there was this trickle-down effect where what we’ve done and other people have done has influenced the younger musicians. Not necessarily musically, but [with] their aspirations, so they can say, “I can do that.” So, they do their thing, but not everyone can just pack up and [travel] around the world. So the trickle-down brings in more people and it’s just been a very organic thing. It’s amazing to see.
It’s a country of 4 million people. It was 3 million when I was a kid. We excel in a really bizarre way from film, music, sports, and all sorts of stuff. It’s crazy. I’m proud to be a Kiwi.
R: You were at Berklee in ’94. Where did you move shortly after Boston?
MdCL: I went from Boston back to New Zealand, and I swore that I would move to Sydney within three months. Sydney– in that part of the world– had the best jazz scene. Then I left New Zealand three to four years later. I really became entrenched in doing my thing in New Zealand. I was doing a lot of straight-ahead stuff. About once a month, I would have a jam band vibe in a club that was a two-room club and the other room was an acid house vibe, and we’d be in the chill-out room.
It was predominantly jazz musicians, but there were rappers and turntablists and stuff. It was around that Groove Collective time and it was that kind of sound. It was so fun. I remember one time playing a straight-ahead gig in a suit, on stage, at Auckland Town Hall, and I thought, “Why am I being so serious about this serious shit, when I have so much fun doing this other thing? Shouldn’t I be serious about the fun one?” That was kind of a turning point.
Not that I didn’t have the love for the acoustic music. I was heavily into Branford Marsalis’ quartet – around the Crazy People Music time. When I first heard Brad Mehldau, it just blew my mind. Like any piano player, it just changes your whole way of thinking. I was into ‘60s Miles and those kinds of things. I had awareness, on some kind of level, that I didn’t want to try to emulate them – it’s like I love it too much. I don’t want to be a cheap, knock-off type thing. So what’s my music? I was super drawn to jungle and drum & bass at the time.
Photo Credit: Jati Lindsay
R: Those were two huge musical movements at the time.
MdCL: Those were the times! I mean the ‘90s – to me – was the hip-hop golden era and there was a UK golden era, which started with jungle and drum & bass then morphed into what became the West London scene. It was just cool to see really creative and innovative music happening, which reflected the times in the same way that free jazz reflected the socio-political times and the kind of sounds of industry that you were starting to hear. As music changes, the counter culture of the previous movement reflects the environment – especially technologically. So, it was really cool for me to hear and it definitely gave me a lot of inspiration.
R: I recently spoke with José James who mentioned that you introduced him to Pino Palladino. His new album is a love letter to the East London scene. I don’t really know too much about the London scene. What is it about that scene that makes it so important for modern-day musicians?
MdCL: It’s definitely not a right now thing, it goes much deeper than that, and I do have a pretty thought through theory on it. [Take] jazz music, you can really do this with any genre of music, but let’s take jazz music. If you grow up in America playing jazz music [as] an anti-traditionalist, then your subjectivity to being an anti-traditionalist is dictated by the fact that you grew up in a country where jazz came from. So as far as you want to get away from it, there’s only so far that you can get away from it. Whereas someone in the UK says, “Jazz is from that country over there. Afro-beat is from that country over there. SoCa is from that country over there. Reggae is over there. Let’s just take a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” You’re not conformed by those restraints and traditions. This is why I feel that the UK has an amazing ability to fuse music and make new forms.
The immigration culture helps there. They have a huge West Indian culture, huge African culture, and European influences. Those flavors all help it. Imagine being from New Orleans and your mom’s a piano player and your dad’s a trumpet player and you want to make drum and bass. How’s that going to work? There’s a freedom in distance. Maybe it makes a good analogy for New Zealand and Australia.
Hiatus Kiayote can… it’s almost like that telephone game. By the time it reaches there, then it’s a whole different thing. J Dilla’s a huge influence, but the way it’s distilled to a band like Hiatus is so far removed someone in Detroit. I think it’s important to have that freedom in creativity.
I would love to hear acoustic jazz records mixed by rock engineers or hip-hop engineers just so it can be different. So we can re-contextualize it. It’s like when it comes to an acoustic jazz record, which the paradigm is Rudy Van Gelder. Rudy was amazing, but that was a long time ago, and he didn’t know what he was doing. He maximized the technology of the day as much as he could and got an amazing result.
I love Tribe Called Quest, but I’m not trying to emulate Midnight Marauders. There’s a spirit and an essence in that music that I’d love to hold on to. It’s the same essence in Sun Ra and Stravinsky. It’s a [subtler] thing than the individualization of, “Oooh! I like this, let me copy that.” Or, “I’m going to mix this just like that.” There are subtleties that are really important.
R: That’s definitely a well thought out theory and I can almost hear a lot of the points you mention in your upcoming album, which sounds amazing by the way.
MdCL: Thanks man!
R: You’re playing with really amazing musicians on the record including Tivon Pennicott, Jamire Williams, Nate Smith, and Miguel-Atwood Ferguson. Then, you’re taking what they played and live-sampling the recording. So it has this combination of improvisation within electronic and acoustic elements.
MdCL: That’s just been my journey. I grew up aspiring to move here to play with Betty Carter and Art Blakey. Then London was a whole detour that I didn’t expect and the whole technology, sonics, and being able to cut up samples and rocking dance floors changed my life. When I was in London, I was like a Judas Iscariot of the piano. If someone asked me to play piano on a track, I’d say no. If someone asked me to play a trio gig, then I’d say no. I was like, “I don’t do that.” I was running away from jazz and I was trying to deconstruct what I learned as a musician.
It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I started to reconnect with the instrument. I was more open about jazz music. I was like, “Yeah! I fucking love that! I love techno, I love jazz, I love hip-hop. It’s just music!” So to bring them together made total sense to me.
R: I completely understand the need for sabbaticals, but what was it about that period in your life when you took a break from piano? Then what made you get back to the other side when you were okay with playing it again?
MdCL: It wasn’t as viscerally as fun. I was incorporating drum machines into live shows in 2000. I remember playing in a band where the DJ before us would be rocking the sound system and we would come on and we could never compete. We could play better music in theory, but it didn’t matter because we couldn’t compete. The first time I pulled out a drum machine out of the bag was like, “Holy shit! This is a whole new game now.” So the sonic weight, the effects, and the textures were exciting for me. I went from having 88 keys of ebony and ivory, strings, wood, and metal to having textures and electronics. It was just a whole new world for me. There was an excitement in that.
Maybe in hindsight, I didn’t believe in myself as a pianist. I’d hear Mehldau and I was like, “Well what the fuck is there left for me to play?” He just re-wrote the whole book and the next book then destroyed everything there is. Maybe there was a slight fear of that.
R: Yeah, but he’s getting into your game now with Mehliana.
MdCL: I love what he’s doing with that and it’s amazing. It’s amazing to see a lot of crossover where acoustic musicians are incorporating electronics and everyone’s into J Dilla and whatever. I don’t want to say it’s trendy, but it’s become acceptable. When I started to do it I had musicians [telling] me, “That’s some fucking fashion shit,” basically calling me a sellout. I was like, “I love this! I couldn’t care less what you think and I don’t care how many odd meters you can play. That’s cool, but I just want to groove and look at the girls dancing.”
It was very simple; it was getting back to a more primal and fundamental approach to music. There was also an element to the London scene where I felt like it couldn’t be too overtly jazz. When it comes to club and dance music, every sound and element is functional. I didn’t like having a wailing sax solo over some shit because everything had to be functional. So that was all part of the anti-jazz. But no matter how anti-jazz it was, there was always an element of harmonic richness and melodic elements, which are native to the music.
I think coming to America was a different thing. It was like, “Oh! Jazz is a respected, accepted, and expected art-form here.” So I could actually re-connect with that. It was okay if I wanted to play piano. It was an epiphany after being way from it for so long. The irony and the beauty for me was I could play the shit out of the piano 10 years earlier. But I had been away from the piano, so my technique changed but there were things I couldn’t do, but I could hear it more. It’s like I went back and heard it as a producer.
This is digressing a little bit, but the first session I did in London was a keyboard player for a producer, Phil Asher – a house producer. It was a remix he was doing and I played three chords and he was like, “That’s it!” I was like, “Oh yeah that’s cool, but what’s next?” But he was like, “No! That’s it!” And the track’s a classic. It’s an absolute classic track. I’ve reflected about that many times and thought about that Ahmad Jamal-like space, less is more. How did I learn that from a house producer in London after years messing with jazz? It’s just funny how the lessons come in different forms.
R: I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the reason for your unique sound is because you’ve traveled around so much and you’ve adapted so much of the music culture from each hub into your own style. What did Los Angeles do for you?
MdCL: It’s how it should be. I think one of the primary roles of an artist is to reflect their environment. Your environment changes so it would be weird to not change. L.A. is expansive. I think of the sky when I say that. You can always see the whole skyline from side to side, back to front. That’s incredible! It makes you feel different. It’s always sunny; that makes you feel different. In New York, I never see the skyline and if it’s sunny, I might not even notice because the hustle and bustle is so crazy. But, that’s great! It has a whole vibe.
It was cool for me to be in both cities and do CHURCH every month. I would get both these energies from the cities and I’d put that into the music. I feel like L.A. helped me re-connect with a sensitivity that I’ve filtered out through banging beats. I was playing in Dwight Trible’s band for a while with Miguel and that the dynamic range for that was so huge. It was my first sideman gig in… I don’t know how many years. But, ballads with a singer – I hadn’t done that in over a decade. Miguel and I would do improvised soundtrack mixes and there would be a lot of sensitivity. So L.A. helped in that bag. Being open to a dynamic range much broader than what I’ve focused on in a while.
Compositionally, it made me feel free. I feel like if I moved to New York, I would have felt more restricted. I’m not saying that this is a restrictive place, but it’s more that might I have seen it. But when I would bring CHURCH out here, we got to hit harder. That whole east-coast/west-coast thing is real! So CHURCH was usually Nate Smith and Mark Kelley and we’d go for blood. So I’d take some of that back to L.A. and vice versa and it’s really cool how it evolved.
At the same time, you have Thundercat and Azar Lawrence in the west coast. So, I think the lines are blurring. But I remember having a conversation with Jason Linder and he was saying that he wants to be in L.A. more because he feels he can write more there. He feels like he’s always rushing around in New York. There’s something to be said about that, being able to take a breath and being able to look at the beach. Not that life’s a holiday, but I appreciate having a variety of environments.
Stay tuned for Part II of the interview and order ‘CHURCH‘ here. You can also preview the album via Mark de Clive-Lowe’s bandcamp page. Meanwhile, scroll down for this exclusive behind the scenes look of the making of ‘CHURCH.’
Comments