A Conversation with Vince Mendoza – HuffPost 11.25.11

Mike Ragogna: Vince, you’ve got a new album, Nights On Earth.

Vince Mendoza: Yes. I’m happy that it’s finally here after a long process of putting the project together. It’s finally available everywhere.

MR: It’s been a while since your last one, Epiphany, was released. And this time out, you’ve got a pretty impressive guest list.

VM: Yeah. The idea of this record–besides concentrating on my own compositions–was to really embrace the various musicians that I’ve met over the years and to invite my old friends to participate in my music. I also worked with some new people that I hadn’t worked with up until now. It’s a reunion of sorts, and I invited some new people to come to the party.

MR: And this party includes John Scofield, John Abercrombie, Joe Lovano…so many others. You’re based in California, right?

VM: I’m based in LA, yes.

MR: And you do your fair share of arranging in addition to your other work.

VM: I do. For the past several years, as well as arranging for pop CDs, I’ve been the chief conductor of the Metropole Orchestra in the Netherlands, which is the only full time symphonic jazz and pop orchestra in the world. So, we do a lot of jazz, pop, and world music. I am also fairly active in European pop and jazz projects. I have a lot of miles under my feet and I’ve worked with some great musicians from around the world, so this album was an opportunity for me to try to grab a few of them to work on some of my music.

MR: What was the mission in creating this album?

VM: Well, there really wasn’t that much of a concept when I first started working on it. The only concept was to get back to my own work and improvisations and approach to writing songs. It was a chance for me to get back to writing songs the way I wanted to. As the songs came together and I started making choices about what I was going to use and play on it, a certain theme started to creep up. The theme turned out to be thinking about the people that I had worked with over the years and the experiences that I’ve had, and how different styles have influenced me. That was really the theme that started to present itself as the songs started to come together.

MR: It also seems that you made this album more centrally focused than a collection of songs. This seems more like a song cycle.

VM: Well, it’s probably one of the more lyrical recordings that I’ve ever done. I really tried to concentrate on melody and making a good frame for each song. I tried to feature artists in a lyrical way. I also tried incorporating pieces with vocals and lyrics, which is a new exercise for me. Of course, working with vocalists for so many years before this made it a little easier, but putting it in the context of my own music is a new thing for me.

MR: Nice. A very beautiful piece from the album is “Shekere.” Can you tell us a little bit about that song?

VM: Well, I recorded that session in Paris with Karim Ziad from Algeria and Nguyen Le, Stephane Guillaume on saxophone, Christian McBride on bass, and Tom Diakite from Mali, who sings the vocals in his native language. It’s a very special and vital piece that we recorded in Paris.

MR: Great. Would you say that the title of this album Nights On Earth was inspired by “Poems Of The Moon”?

VM: Well, I’m not sure. It’s all a part of our experience here on earth. I think that the idea of that title came from my travels. As a musician, you spend many nights traveling from one place to another. It comes from the thought of spending time playing music on stage and in cabs, and on buses–looking at the street lights going by and thinking about your experiences, then heading back home, maybe traveling across the earth to get there. That’s the life of a musician. This particular piece is also, as I said, very lyrical. It allows me to write in a little more of an expansive sense than some of my other pieces.

MR: You’ve done quite a bit of orchestrating for some great artists including Joni Mithcell. I feel that your orchestrations on her albums Both Sides Now and Travelogue helped her become reinterpret her material as the mature artist we heard on those projects. Were you mainly focused on the messages and meanings of that music when you were putting those orchestrations together?

VM: Absolutely. That had to be the starting point for those records, particularly for Travelogue because we wanted poetry and the meaning of the lyrics as well as the narrative of the whole piece from the beginning to the end. We didn’t so much want to focus on what the original songs were about when they were first recorded. We wanted to think about writing tone poems, about the lyric, what the lyric meant, and what all of the songs meant taken together. In contrast, the first record that had mostly standards was really about finding points of departure musically that we could grab on to. For example, doing Gordon Jenkins, Gil Evans, Brahms, or Strauss–anything that gave us a point of departure stylistically to identify each song. Travelogue really had a lot more to do with the poetry than what we were going to do with those songs. I think it was a mutual inspiration, really. The poetry is so strong and beautiful that I couldn’t help but be inspired to create a frame that would inspire her to sing it.

MR: Yes, totally. And she thoroughly reinvented those songs as she melted into the richness of your orchestrations.

VM: Well, I think it was also a different point of view than what the originals put forth. Having a different orchestration helps, and maybe even a different harmonic language to accentuate the meaning of the poetry in a different way.

MR: I did kind of feel that “Both Sides Now,” and “A Case Of You” would have madeTravelogue feel more complete

VM: We probably wouldn’t have done the album Travelogue if those songs that you mentioned didn’t work so well on the first album. I think the fact that we realized what we could do with all of her other songs after those songs were done with an orchestra made the desire to do Travelogue automatic. We had to dive into that body of work to make it special.

MR: Vince, you’ve also worked with some pretty great producers including Larry Klein onTravelogue. Is a good producer an added bonus for you or mandatory in order to capture each individual artist’s style and how it relates to the music?

VM: In a perfect world, you’re working with a producer that you can communicate with very specifically–someone you can pass ideas back and forth with creatively to decide what can be done with a particular artist and text. You should be able to talk about what you want to say or feel or what you want the listener to feel. The good thing is that working with Larry, we had similar points of departure musically and artistically, so we were able to very easily communicate what is needed on each song. So, with each artist, obviously, the music is very different, their “voice” is different, the poetry is different, so you need to paint it all like a different painting.

MR: Working with a wildly imaginative artist such as Bjork must have been an interesting challenge.

VM: It was. It’s a similar idea there, except that I was working with Bjork directly on most of the creative aspects of writing. She was much more open and a little less focused on what she thought I should be doing. She gave me a fair amount or freedom to explore different approaches to writing her songs. Of course, a lot of it was electronic and done ahead of time with the people that she was working with.

MR: Nice. You also worked with Elvis Costello.

VM: Yeah. We did a project with Elvis at the Metropole many years ago. His partner Steve Naïve was the pianist, so we did some of his music with the orchestra, which we recorded live at the North Sea Jazz Festival.

MR: Getting back to Nights On Earth, you contributed more with the lyrics.

VM: Yes, more than before. Epiphany was, I feel, a more lyrical project, but it was a lot more expansive in terms of the orchestra and the improvisation; there was a lot more attention on improvisation and orchestral textures on that project. Nights On Earth was a lot more focused on tunes, lyrical writing, and making a frame that would feature the soloist in a way that would compliment what they would have to contribute to the record. When you ask someone to play on your record, the best case scenario is that you have material that will inspire them to play or sing the way that they want to play or sing.

MR: Which song or songs on this album feel the most personal to you?

VM: The piece really pointed me in the direction that this album went is “Gracias.” It’s a very simple piece and very meditative. It centers around the organ and the batá drums. For me, the history of the use of the batá in Santeria–the melding of the Nigerian traditions, Cuban music, and Catholicism and how it related to my background growing up Catholic–was always very interesting to me. So, that piece focuses on the meditative nature of the batá and the guitar. John Scofield’s guitar solo on this piece is just exquisite and lyrical and soulful at the same time. That is, I think, one of my favorite pieces on the record.

MR: Do you have any wisdom you’d care to impart on new artists?

VM: My advice to new artists is to be yourself and to try to draw from your own experiences to create original music. At the end of the day, what you’re going to be asking yourself is what you’d created in your artistic life and hopefully the answer will be that you’ve come up with something that is completely you and your feelings and approach. In turn, I think your colleagues and fans will respond in the best possible way. To come up with honest music is what I aspire to do every day, and that would be the advice that I give to new artists coming up.

MR: Is there anything that you know now that you would like to go back and tell yourself when you first began?

VM: Well, I grew up listening to the radio. I, of course, studied instruments as a young person, but my start really came from listening to r&b and soul on the radio. When I heard all of those pieces when I was younger, I always thought that I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be in the studio, working with an orchestra, writing great tunes for great artists. That inspired me the most. When I look back on what I’ve done so far, I am so happy that I’ve been able to work with a lot of different great artists and make some great recordings. I’m hoping that will continue and that I’ll have similar experiences over the next years of my career. And I hope to continually be inspired by the community of musicians around me.
MR: Will you be touring to support this new album?

VM: Well, you might have heard that times are hard economically. (laughs) Right now, it’s difficult to bring large groups on tour, but I’m thinking about scheduling some concerts in various parts of the US. We’re also going to do a little tour of some European festivals this summer. If the gods are smiling down on us, we may be able to bring this music to the stage. (laughs)

MR: I’m sure the gods are with you, Vince. It was great chatting with you today. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to chat.

VM: Thanks so much for having me, Mike.

Transcribed by Evan Martin