About Ian Carey & ‘Strange Arts’

Much like one of San Francisco Bay Area trumpeter Ian Carey’s improvisations, the music on his seventh album Strange Arts ends up in a very different place than he initially intended. The debut recording by his Wood Metal Plastic ensemble evolved from a freedom-seeking quartet into a chamber jazz vehicle with three well-integrated string players. Along the way the project became entangled with the extraordinary body of work by his late father, the prolific artist Philip Carey, whose arresting graphics are featured on the album’s front and back covers.

Carey supplements his music with graphic design, and on previous releases such as 2020’s Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite and 2013’s Roads & Codes he created the vivid album art himself. But in sorting, organizing, and digitizing Philip Carey’s vast creative archive after his death in 2022, Ian found a deep resonance between his father’s intricately patterned works and the musical inclinations surfacing in Wood Metal Plastic.

“It was a chance to really look at my father’s pieces closely and appreciate how amazing and dense and full of information they are,” he says. “As I was dealing with all this artwork of his while simultaneously prepping this album for release, I tracked down an interview with him talking about his work, and observing that anywhere you look, something’s going on—he even used the phrase ‘abhor a vacuum,’ which is something I had also said about my composing! I started to see how this could be a kind of dialogue between us.”

A commission from InterMusic SF’s Musical Grant Program provided the initial impetus to expand his Bay Area all-star piano-less quartet featuring alto saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, and drummer Jon Arkin with a string trio. Extensive preparation for his first project involving strings included renting a cello to better familiarize himself with the instrument, but the key was tapping into the particular skills of the players, cellist Jessica Ivry and violinists Alisa Rose and Mia Bella d’Augelli.

“The quartet this started with was playing more free music,” Carey says. “After several projects featuring really dense writing, I had the best of intentions to try something simpler, writing one-page charts and making it all about the improvisation. But I ended up getting this grant to expand the group with strings, and I found myself writing more and more material, exploring all these orchestration possibilities. It’s not dissimilar to some of my dad’s collages, where he may have started with a relatively simple drawing but ended up adding layers and layers of paper packaging and all kinds of found objects. I ended up taking a similar underlying approach, picking different combinations of people to improvise.”

A leap into territory he hadn’t explored before, the music on Strange Arts exists in a liminal realm where chamber music, post-bop, and free improv idioms coexist and interact. Designed for an integrated seven-piece ensemble rather than a more standard jazz quartet–plus–strings format, the music moves from lush, impasto harmonies and quicksilver counterpoint to hints of dissonance and skittering cross-section voicings.

The bulk of the album consists of the initial InterMusic SF commission, Carey’s five-piece “Set for 7.” Conceived in the spirit of a Bach keyboard suite with references to different dances and idioms, it opens with the spacious “Chorale,” a riff on the chorale structure with a series of dialogues between Carey and Knudsen. The strings provide running commentary between improvised passages. “Of all the pieces, you can really hear us going out into the cold of free interplay and back into the warmth of the harmony in real time,” Carey says.

Mezzacappa and Arkin set up “Ostinato,” a stutter-stepping tune that jukes and feints in various directions with the brass and strings ebbing and flowing together in waves. “Nocturne for Solo Violin” is a virtuoso showcase for Rose, a player known for her work in bluegrass and folk, though she was also a founding member of Irene Sazer’s world jazz group the Real Vocal String Quartet (of which Ivry is also an alumna). On Carey’s piece she displays masterly control at building tension with micro shifts in tempo and dynamics. “Alisa was hugely helpful in the development of my through-composed violin piece—playing through drafts and offering suggestions during breaks on our circus gigs,” Carey said, referring to their shared time as members of Circus Bella, a San Francisco–based one-ring circus with live music by composer Rob Reich. “Her experience with jazz and folk led me to give her opportunities for more ‘inside’ soloing, while Mia Bella came out of Mills College and the new music side of things, so I was able to give her space for lots of noise-based, experimental improvising.”

“Unforeseen (CGBG)” is a different kind of dedication. Inspired by Bay Area creative music patron saint the clarinetist/composer Ben Goldberg, it’s an extended, subtly picaresque soundscape that unfurls at a deliciously deliberate pace. Different instrumental combinations ease into the foreground and recede until a satisfying pizzicato conclusion. Shifting into a more sprightly gear, “Set for 7” concludes with “Alien Anthropology,” a piece of refracted bebop that inspires some of Carey’s crispest trumpet work.

The album opens with “Rain Tune,” an extended, semi-programmatic piece that was part of the repertoire of his group the Ian Carey Quintet+1. In orchestrating it for the septet he discovered new layers suggesting the sounds of precipitation, with lapidary lines that evoke looping while circling back for a series of increasingly gusty solos. But no track better captures Carey’s puckish sense of humor and lightly self-mocking proclivities than “I Still Remember Clyfford Still,” an antic piece inspired partly by the starkly monumental black-and-white canvases of Clyfford Still (an early Abstract Expressionist). Years ago in his high school jazz choir, Carey sang Jon Hendricks’s lyric for Benny Golson’s famous tribute, which ends with the line “believe me, I remember Clifford, still.”

“My dad heard that and told me he thought, ‘That’s great! They wrote a song for Clyfford Still,’” he says. “So I wrote a piece trying to capture some of the shapes on those huge canvases and when I told my dad about it and said I planned to call it ‘I Remember Clyfford Still,’ he paused for a second and said, ‘No, it’s got to be I Still Remember Clyfford Still.’”

Born in 1974 in Binghamton, New York, Carey grew up in a house suffused with music and art, and not just from his paternal side. His mother, the late Judi Carey, worked as an illustrator and arts fundraiser. His father was also an adventurous vocalist who performed with the Gregg Smith Singers in the 1960s, a chorus that frequently worked with Igor Stravinsky and won a Grammy in 1966 for the Columbia LP Ives: Music for Chorus.

“Aside from the visual side of things, he’s responsible for laying a lot of my musical groundwork,” Carey says. “Some of my first memories are of listening to recordings at home—Bach, Ives, Stravinsky, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Miles and Gil Evans. Having those things in the air when I was a kid set the stage, and my taste expanded from there—my dad was famously not a fan of string music, for example, but I came to love it, and it became a big motivation for this project.”

His first musical outlet was singing Baroque works alongside his family in a church choir, where a visiting Easter brass quartet caught his ear. Starting on cornet in elementary school, he took a several-year detour to the French horn before finally taking up the trumpet seriously after the family relocated to Folsom, California, home of a now-famous high school jazz program and close to Sacramento, where he caught live performances by locals including pianist Jessica Williams and visiting stars like Freddie Hubbard. 

After two years at the University of Nevada in Reno, Carey transferred to the New School in New York, where he studied trumpet with Cecil Bridgewater and Charles Tolliver and composition with Bill Kirchner and Maria Schneider while honing his improvisational chops in small group classes with Joanne Brackeen, Andrew Cyrille, Billy Harper, and Reggie Workman and doing his best to soak up the scene at night on a student’s budget.

Loathe to leave New York City after graduating, he reluctantly spent five years with a night job as a proofreader, which left him little time for to sit in at jam sessions and gather with colleagues, let alone pursue gigs. “New York was an incredibly stimulating environment, but like so many people I ended up having to take something totally unrelated to music to pay the rent, and that got very frustrating,” Carey recalls. When a friend hooked him up with a summer sublet in San Francisco he was ready for a break from the Gotham grind.

Quickly recognized as a formidable improviser, Carey performed around the Bay Area with top-notch ensembles like the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, trumpeter Erik Jekabsen’s Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, percussionist Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra, saxophonist and poet Lewis Jordan’s Music at Large, and the Nathan Clevenger Group, as well as the Circus Bella band (in which he still performs). But his ambition was always to create a band focusing on his original material. He got the chance when he landed a regular spot at the Financial District bar The House of Shields in 2002. The gig lasted for four years, enough time to develop a book of some 40 original tunes.

He first documented the group on 2005’s Sink/Swim, an impressive debut session featuring pianist Adam Shulman, saxophonist Evan Francis, bassist Fred Randolph, and drummer Jon Arkin. By the time he released 2010’s critically hailed Contextualizin’, the band had consciously sidestepped the hard-bop sound by foregrounding Francis’s highly accomplished flute work. Over the past decade he’s increasingly focused on composition and arranging, efforts that earned a four-and-a-half star DownBeat review for 2013’s Roads & Codes, the project that introduced his Quintet+1 by adding Knudsen’s alto sax into the mix. He followed up with two Quintet+1 albums with Sheldon Brown on bass clarinet replacing Francis, 2016’s ambitious Interview Music and 2020’s Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite, a five-part work commissioned by Chamber Music America.

Wood Metal Plastic’s Strange Arts represents both a leap into new territory and a homecoming. Recorded in 2019, “it’s kind of a time capsule, pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd and January 6, and before my dad got sick,” he says, noting that one title, “Unforeseen,” seems to speak to the momentous events lurking around the corner. “As I was thinking about incorporating my dad’s artwork into the design, I started seeing these common touchpoints in how we interpret the world. As much as I appreciated his artwork while he was alive, there was always something else to deal with at the time, situations to manage. This is a dialogue after the fact.”