Jasmine on a Night in July - an interview with SCREE'S Ryan El-Solh
Photo by Caleb Bryant Miller
Uncannily familiar, resistant to characterization, and allergic to cliché, the music of the Brooklyn experimental trio Scree calls out to a better world slightly beyond the horizon. The band has made a name for themselves through virtuosic and intimate live performances that blend the colorful harmony and lovingly crafted melodies of guitarist Ryan El-Solh’s instrumental compositions with free improvisations and interpretations of Lebanese pop music, jazz standards, Björk songs, and more.
Jasmine on a Night in July is Scree’s full-length studio album debut. In this interview, Ryan El-Solh discusses the many elements of and inspirations for the album, along with the ways his bandmates Carmen Q. Rothwell on bass and drummer Jason Burger worked to make it all come together along with producer Ari Chersky.
Interview by Interlocutor Magazine
Jasmine on a Night in July is the debut studio full-length from Scree - how do you think your sound has evolved throughout your time together as a band, and in what ways do you think Jasmine both reflects your previous work and expands on it?
Early on we spent a lot of our rehearsal time improvising, which helped us develop a certain language for playing together that I think still forms the core of our sound as a band. We learned how to move together in different spontaneous ways while creating something that still has coherent form and creates drama. This was a type of playing that Carmen and I had done a good amount of in Seattle, where there’s a great improvised music scene centered around the Racer Sessions, a regular free-improv jam session. We both learned a lot from playing with the many great improvisers in that scene, and the musical language we learned there clicked right away with Jason, who has an incredible intuitive ear for form and texture.
Our first two recordings, Live at the Owl and Slow Bloom, showcase this loose, improvisational style. Both of those EPs were essentially about capturing the sound of us playing together in a room. With Jasmine, on the other hand, we took a more involved approach. This followed a change in the music I was writing. The EPs were collections of stand-alone vignettes, tunes inspired by different little moments - a hike ("Season 2"), a rainy night ("Weather Theater"), a cat doing mischief ("Quentin’s Big Night") - with no overarching narrative tying them together. With the material on Jasmine I was trying to get into subject matter that was weightier and broader in scope, so I felt that we needed to add more depth to our sound to match the emotional content of the music. We added keyboards and extra guitars and Ari Chersky, our producer, wove it all together into the lush sonic world you hear on the record. He’s truly a wizard.
So I think what you hear on Jasmine is a more refined sound from the trio, and certainly a broader overall sonic pallet. But that improvisational approach is still there, and it really shines through in some moments, like Carmen’s solo on “Beautiful Days” or the many twists and turns on the album’s title track. Lately in live performance we’ve been going in two opposite directions –– I’ve been writing new music for the trio that’s looser and leans more on improvisation, while also writing more involved arrangements for our expanded ensemble. So maybe the next record will have a bit of both.
What is the creative dynamic between yourself, upright bassist Carmen Q. Rothwell, and drummer Jason Burger?
Generally when I bring in a new piece, I’ll first play it for Carmen and Jason on piano to give them a sense of the tune, then we’ll begin arranging it together, playing through it a few different ways until we arrive at something that feels good. With some pieces I like to leave more flexibility to see what happens in any given performance. With some, like the song “Jasmine on a Night in July”, we’ll go through a lot of different options to try to pin down the specific emotional story I’m trying to tell with that piece. Either way I’d say we’re arranging the music collectively using that band language I mentioned before, which ultimately goes back to free improvisation.
Who are some vital musical influences for Scree?
The music of Paul Motian has been a huge influence. In particular the album Garden of Eden and his work with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano. Their approach to playing “out of time” or “rubato” music is the foundation of our own.
Compositionally I’ve taken a lot from listening to European classical music. Brahms’ music is especially important for me. His “Clarinet Quintet in B Minor” in particular is a piece I never go too long without revisiting. I hear myself taking a lot from him in the melodies on the album’s title track, or on “After the Ashes.”
I’ve been consciously trying to integrate Arabic music more into my composing and playing in recent years. This is music that I grew up listening to, especially around my grandmother, but I’ve never learned how to properly play it. So in the process of making this album I looked to others who I thought had blended eastern and western musical language in interesting ways. Ziad Rahbani, Omar Khorshid, Mohammad Abdel-Wahab are some Arab examples, but John Coltrane’s Crescent and Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite were also big influences in this process. You can hear this on “Victory Signs,” for example. With the melody in F Major, over the bass figure, I was hearing something Fairuz might sing here. But the overall presentation feels more related to Coltrane’s “Wise One,” with the stormy rubato A section followed by the groovy B section. “Fresh Bread” is another good example: the main melody reminds me of a folk melody from “bilad el-sham” (the Arabic term for the cultural sub-region that includes Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan), but the playful drum/bass figure feels more like something out of Ellington.
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's work inspires the compositions on a Jasmine on a Night in July. How did you interpret the poet’s themes musically? What were some challenges with taking language and translating the textures of his words into sound?
Before I got the poetry involved, when I first started writing the music on Jasmine, I was reading a lot of history books, and I particularly liked the work of the historian Mike Davis. He writes with all these dramatic mannerisms, full of tragedy and heroism. At the same time I was listening to a lot of music that had a similarly sweeping feel: John Coltrane’s album Crescent, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and the Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum’s work with Mohammad Abdel-Wahab. So I was immersed in works with this very weighty feel to them, and I wanted to try and draw from that in my own music. But I found that to really get in the right mindset I had to have some kind of context in which to place the moods I was trying to compose. I had to figure out what I was writing about.
At this point I started reading Darwish and found in his poetry the same emotional themes I was trying to explore. His work has the longing and nostalgia of Oum Kalthoum, the heroism and tragedy of Beethoven, and the spiritual fire of Coltrane. Like Mike Davis his writing has a feel that’s at once ancient and deeply contemporary. And of course his work is set within the story of the Palestinian people, a subject of great emotional significance to me, and a story in which themes of nostalgia, longing, tragedy, and heroism have deep resonance. So in Darwish’s work I found something I could write about. I would look to his poems for ways to frame the music I was trying to write.
In a way this actually made the writing process less challenging. Having something outside of myself as a reference point for what I was writing helped me push through moments when I felt blocked. The extra element made me less reliant on bursts of inspiration because I could step away from the music and focus on a poem or a line and the atmosphere of his language. Or, I should say his language in translation. I wish I spoke Arabic well enough to deal with the originals, but I was mostly working with Carolyn Forché’s wonderful translations in a collection called Unfortunately It Was Paradise.
Scree - photo by Isaac Gillespie
What unique elements and contributions did producer Ari Chersky bring to the recording process for the album?
Well first of all he brought an immense technical know-how of all aspects of the recording process that helped streamline everything, without which I honestly don’t know how we could have made the record.
On the creative end, from our first conversation Ari had a clear understanding of what we were trying to do with this music and a clear vision of how to expand on the band’s sonic palette. His ear for tying together all the different textures on the album (guitars, keyboards, loops he made out of both of those) to create these distinct moments and zones - the level of detail he works in - is really incredible. He also made some crucial curatorial choices, such as the extensive use of organ (a nod to Omar Khorshid’s recordings).
I thought I might share three moments where I think his contribution really shines:
- “Fatigue”, where he figured out that the key to making the melody pop was for me to play it unison on acoustic guitar with my thumb. We tried so many other things, and you can barely hear it, but it made a huge difference.
- The bass solo on “Beautiful Days”, I love the way he blended the trio performance with his loops. I can’t totally tell where one begins and the other ends, and it adds the perfect amount of dramatic effect.
- The beginning of “Victory Signs”. This is the first moment on the album and it’s really all Ari, stitching together samples from Jason and Carmen. But he achieves something that feels totally organic. Like I said before he’s a true wizard.
There is a record release show at The Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn on March 17. Are there other upcoming live performance dates or a tour planned for the album?
The 17th will definitely be a fun one. We’ll be playing most of the album with the expanded ensemble I mentioned earlier (which features Ivan Arteaga, Greg Sinibaldi and Kristina Teuschler on clarinets and Willem de Koch on Trombone). We did a few shows with this lineup last year, each time adding a couple more tunes. It’s tricky to get this kind of music, moving in and out of tempo often, to work with a large group but it’s really starting to click so I’m excited for people to hear that. And we’ll be playing at the Owl which is absolutely my favorite place to play or hear music in Brooklyn.
After that we’ll be taking a little break for Ramadan. Hopefully we’ll do a few out of town dates early summer. Scree has never played outside of NYC so I’d love to bring this music to some new places if we can.
Jasmine on a Night in July is available now
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