As I wrote in the liner notes to Strange Arts, when this music was recorded in summer 2019, what I didn't know was a lot. I did not expect that by the time it was released my world and everyone else’s would be so unimaginably different. I didn’t know that within a few months we would all be locked down in fear, with music-making the last thing on our minds. I didn’t know our country would soon face a racial reckoning and an attempted coup. And I didn’t imagine life without my father or the years of dealing with the logistical and emotional fallout of that loss.

I certainly didn’t realize that I was unconsciously creating a testament to all the ways his art and mine evolved on similar paths, even as I had (mostly accidentally) followed his career trajectory through music and design.

Five years and an epoch later, the finished album is finally here! It features my 7-piece ensemble Wood Metal Plastic—with stellar Bay Area artists Lisa Mezzacappa, Kasey Knudsen, Alisa Rose, Mia Bella d'Augelli, Jess Ivry, and Jon Arkin, expertly recorded by John Finkbeiner—and explores the connections between my compositions and my dad's intricately creative artwork (which is featured throughout the album design). You can listen to and purchase the album (in CD or digital format) at Bandcamp (which is the most artist-equitable of the streaming/retail services) or stream it wherever you listen.

Album Release Show Sunday April 7 in Oakland

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We'll be celebrating the album release with a special performance on 4/7 at 3pm at Oaktown Jazz Workshops in Jack London Square (just across the street from Yoshi's), which will feature original members saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, and cellist Jess Ivry, plus drummer Jason Levis, violinist Irene Sazer, and another special surprise guest on violin. 

CDs will be available, along with signed original Philip Carey envelope art and books, and a selection of his other artwork will be on display during the concert. I hope to see you there!

Hi folks, the first single from the new album Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite is officially out! It’s the second movement, titled “This Is Fine.” Enjoy the video below, featuring solos by Adam Shulman, Fred Randolph, and me, with Kasey Knudsen, Sheldon Brown and Jon Arkin.

The album got a really nice (p)review in the East Bay Times/Mercury News from Andrew Gilbert:

Cooped up in our abodes, strategizing about how to acquire food and other necessities and uncertain about the pandemic’s course, we’re all experts in anxiety these days. El Cerrito trumpeter Ian Carey feels our pain, and he’s created an ideal soundtrack for these disquieting times. His new album, “Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite” (Slow & Steady), was composed and recorded long before COVID-19 became a household name, but it’s about as tuned into the zeitgeist as an N95 face mask. Evoking anxiety itself isn’t hard. But Carey does something far more interesting: The five-movement suite unfolds like a stream-of-consciousness interior conversation, with recurring themes, counter themes, digressions and roiling rhythms that mimic a pulse driven by encroaching dread. But his extended forms and through-composed passages leave plenty of space for deep breathing.

Hello folks! I’m pleased to announce that after a several-year process of composing, rehearsing, premiering, rehearsing some more, recording, mixing, designing, and producing, my new album is finally ready to go out into the world! It’s being released on San Francisco’s own Slow & Steady Records on April 24. The press release for the album is below (and enjoy the video I created from my album art above). There will also be two single releases in the coming weeks.

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TRUMPETER/COMPOSER IAN CAREY’S 6TH CD, “FIRE IN MY HEAD: THE ANXIETY SUITE,” TO BE RELEASED APRIL 24 BY SLOW & STEADY RECORDS

THE QUINTET+1 FEATURES PIANIST ADAM SHULMAN, ALTO SAXOPHONIST KASEY KNUDSEN, BASS CLARINETIST SHELDON BROWN, BASSIST FRED RANDOLPH, & DRUMMER JON ARKIN

Bay Area trumpeter and composer Ian Carey has long aimed to blend the swing and virtuosity of jazz with the dense compositional textures of chamber music, but for his latest multi-movement creation, he turns that ambition towards a more personal topic. Fire in My Head (The Anxiety Suite) is the centerpiece of his new album, due for release by San Francisco’s Slow & Steady Records on April 24.

 “Normally I write a piece and try to figure out what it’s about later,” Carey says, referring to his previous long-form work, Interview Music (released in 2016 on Kabocha Records). But when he received a grant from Chamber Music America to compose a new suite, he decided to pick a subject close to his heart: anxiety. It’s an affliction he’s long been familiar with, but for the last few years—since the election of 2016, to be exact—it’s one he shares with almost everyone he meets. That includes the members of his band, the Ian Carey Quintet+1: alto saxophonist Kasey Knudsen; bass clarinetist Sheldon Brown; pianist Adam Shulman; bassist Fred Randolph; and drummer Jon Arkin. “The emotions behind the piece were not a stretch for any of us,” Carey says. “That helped—maybe not so much for our mental health, but for the music.” (The advent of COVID-19 has put to rest any hope of that state of anxiety ending any time soon.)

 The piece, which was premiered at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco in 2018, is a 50-minute, five-movement tour de force and Carey’s longest composition to date. It is a vehicle for both his intricate writing and the improvisational chops of his group, previously heard on Interview Music and 2013’s Roads & Codes, which received praise from DownBeat and NPR and appeared on many critics’ best of 2013 lists.

 The album opens with the evocative chorale of “Signs and Symptoms,” which segues into a loping 5/4 groove featuring improvisatory introductions from the band, intertwined with increasingly tense variations on the theme. Inspired by a run by Carey on the “undeservedly beautiful” morning after the shattering 2016 election, the movement ends with an explosive drum solo, which sets the stage for the aggressive swing of “This Is Fine,” with its instantly identifiable roots in the “Young Lions”-era bop of Carey’s youth. The title refers to KC Green’s ubiquitous cartoon featuring a dog calmly drinking coffee as flames surround him; appropriately, the tune is a burner, with solos by Shulman, Carey, and Randolph.

 From its obsessive Fender Rhodes vamp to its expansive bass clarinet solo and combative trumpet/alto dialogues, “Thought Spirals” evokes the mental maelstrom of its title. Describing the movement’s genesis, Carey recalls, “I just threw my hands on the keyboard, looped it, and happened to like the way it sounded—that got me thinking about ‘spirals.’ It reminded me of what goes through my head when I’m trying to sleep!”

 While a peaceful three-part canon sets the mood of “Internal Exile”—a portrait of withdrawal into oneself for self-care during anxious times—that mood soon dissipates in the movement’s twitchy, nagging central passage: a reminder that despite efforts to detach from the world, we still have to live in the reality of it.

 Tense but with flashes of rousing optimism, “Resistance” marks the acceptance of reality and the determination to grapple with it. “It sums up everything that’s happened and corrals it into something like a protest anthem: ‘Get up, brush yourself off, let’s go,’” says Carey. After revisiting themes from earlier movements and offering final solo statements, the suite ends with a pyrotechnic display from Knudsen over what a bassist friend of Carey’s called a “classic garage-band bass line.”

 Born in upstate New York, Ian Carey, 45, lived in Northern California before moving to New York City in 1994, where he attended the New School (studying composition with Bill Kirchner and Maria Schneider, and improvisation with Reggie Workman and Billy Harper). During a productive seven years in New York, he performed with musicians as varied as Ravi Coltrane, Ted Curson, and Eddie Bert. After relocating to San Francisco in 2001, he soon met the musicians who became the core of his ensemble (heard on 2005’s Sink/Swim, 2010’s Contextualizin’, plus Roads & Codes and Interview Music), while hustling day work as a designer/illustrator—expertise he used to create this album’s vibrant comic-art–inspired cover, featuring visual portrayals of the piece’s five movements as regions of his own flame-engulfed brain.

 While politics were a catalyst in the composition of Fire in My Head, the work is not specific to that context; it’s an examination of the psychological and physical experience of anxiety, now more than ever a widely relatable topic. Carey’s extended forms are stacked with hooks, grooves, and improvisational smarts that can be as universally appreciated as the subject itself. •

 Fire in My Head has been made possible with support from Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works program, funded through the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Put that thing out Frank, you’ll wreck your voice!

If you’re here, you probably read the column I wrote for this month’s issue of DownBeat—if not, I suggest you pick up a copy (support music media!) and have a look. The gist of the piece is that instrumentalists can really benefit from learning the words to standards—not for any sentimental reasons, but because knowing the words helps you remember the melody, harmony, and form of the tune!

The purpose of this addendum is to share a playlist, which I’ve put together over the past few years, of some of my favorite versions of the kinds of recordings I talk about in the article—that is, relatively straight renditions by the great American midcentury pop vocalists.

As part of this project I also decided to put together the following graphic, which loosely (and subjectively! I welcome your disagreements!) places singers on a straight/loose continuum—with “straight” and “loose” referring to how closely he/she stays to the original written melody of the tune. You’ll notice some people show up multiple times to represent different stages in their careers, and of course most of these singers get much looser on their second time through the melody (though none as starkly as Ella Fitzgerald, who I thought deserved a special mention for it).

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You’ll notice the left side is more populated than the right—this is just because I’ve spent more time listening to those singers (in order to learn the tunes), no disrespect meant to the many amazing jazz singers who take more liberty with the melody!

Regarding the “straight” vs. “loose” labels, don’t make the mistake of thinking that “straight” means unswinging—one of the great things about the experience of digging into all these recordings is discovering how ubiquitously and seemingly effortlessly they swing, even the most genteel versions. You get the sense it was just in the air back then, and as a musician you couldn’t help but absorb it.

Another thing I wanted to mention: you’ll find the quality of the lyrics themselves is… uneven. For every “This will be my shining hour, calm and happy and bright; in my dreams your face will flower, through the darkness of the night,” there’s a “You sew your trousseau, and Robinson Crusoe, is not so far from worldly cares, as our blue room far away upstairs” (or even “Hi-ho, alas, and also lack-a-day,” whatever the hell that means). Again, the main point of this process is to help you internalize the tune, so the odder—or in many cases out of sync with contemporary gender politics—the lyrics, the easier to remember (“but so hard to forget”).

Some singers are more heavily represented on the playlist than others (either because they recorded much more or because I just loved their singing), but I’m willing to bet that if you’re an instrumentalist like me, even a well-listened one, there are probably some people on here you’ve never heard, so I think you’re in for a treat. You can find the whole 340-song playlist here, or start listening below. (Google Music subscribers can go here.) Enjoy!

THANKS TO: my friend the late bassist Sanderson Poe, who loaned me his copy of Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely and kicked off this whole process for me; Loren Schoenberg, who generously gifted me a stack of his Sinatra duplicates; my dad Philip Carey, who helped amass the LP collection that became the raw material for my compilation tapes; Bill Noertker, who confirmed the source of Jerome Kern’s “fraudulent imitation” quote; and my father-in-law Albert Perez, who suggested lots of great singers I hadn’t yet heard of.

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Aaron Novik’s Frowny Frown (with totally unexpected personalized bonus!)

A while back I started a mini-tradition in response to the ubiquitous year-end top ten list–since my own annual most listened-to albums were rarely new releases (and in some cases were super-old!) I chose to focus on records that were New to Me. So here are 10(ish) albums that got me excited in the past year. Some of them actually came out in the past year! But most didn't. (Note: asterisked albums include friends of mine.)

John Hollenbeck Ensemble: All Can Work (2018) I am late to the party on Hollenbeck's bands, but this really hit the spot for me this year. (Also spent time with quite a few of the Claudia Quintet's many great albums.)

Contemporary Composers Series: William O. Smith (1958) Known in the jazz world as Bill Smith, clarinetist and composer of "Concerto for Clarinet & Combo," one of my all-time favorite jazz compositions; I tracked down this long out-of-print LP of some of his early chamber works, and it did not disappoint. Find it if you can! (Hit me up if you can't!)

Marty Ehrlich's Dark Woods Ensemble: Emergency Peace(1991) Loved everything about this album. 

Muhal Richard Abrams: One Line, Two Views (1995) Yet another extremely heavy musician who I unfortunately waited until after his passing to really check out seriously. But better late than never. His combination of dense and heady writing with folkloric freedom was just what I needed at the time. 

Duo Oktava: Pilgrimage (2007) The whole record is great, but I especially dug deep on Walter Piston's absolutely phenomenal Duo for Violin and Cello. 

Bristle: Future(S) Now(S) (2014); Bullet Proof * (2011) Joy and humor and virtuosity. 'Nuff said. 

Anna Webber's Simple Trio: Binary (2016) I forget who suggested I check out multi-reedist Webber's kaleidoscopic music, but thank you, whoever you are! 

Kamikaze Ground Crew: The Scenic Route (1990); Postcards from the Highwire (2007); Madam Marie's Temple of Knowledge (1993) This horn-heavy medium-large band was active while I was in NYC but I somehow never learned about them until this year. Which is too bad, because they're great. Dense compositions (by Gina Leishman, Doug Wieselman, and others), interesting instrumentation/orchestration, great improvisers.

Aaron Novik: Frowny Frown* (2018) Clarinetist, comic artist, and cracking composer Aaron Novik left the Bay for NYC a year or so ago (before I had the chance to play with him much, dammit!). I really love this record/comic set (and not just because he sent me the above sticker with it).

James Newton Ensemble: Suite for Frida Kahlo (1994) I have Ethan Iverson's in-depth profile to thank for introducing me to Newton's phenomenal writing, which ranges from freeish straightahead to full-on chamber. (This, as my friend Lorin Benedict would say, is my shit!) This album, chock full of interesting and woody textures, was my favorite of the many of his I checked out this year. 

Michael Coleman & Ben Goldberg: Practitioner* (2018) If you know anything about me at all, you know I normally hate "[blank] Plays the Music of [Famous Dead Guy]" albums. But: Coleman! Goldberg! Steve Lacy! Original art baseball cards! And super-imaginative interpretations of extremely rarely played tunes. 

Adam O'Farrill's Stranger Days: El Maquech. (2018) O'Farrill is from another planet where the musical gravity is much heavier, so when he arrived here he was immediately imbued with superpowers. We're lucky to have him. 

Sanity-saving Honorable Mention to Walter the dog and James Drummaboy Harris. (2018)

In Need of a Deeper Dive

These are records that came across my radar but that I haven't yet had the time to give the attention they deserve. First look at Top Ten 2019?

Steuart Liebig: Pomegranate (2001) Chock full of amazingly dense and interesting writing in mini-concerto format for a variety of interesting soloists–randomly found this last week and can't wait to dig in. 

Sam Rivers Trio Live (1973) Rivers is a fascinating improviser and I especially want to spend more time with this period of his playing.

Holus Bolus: Pine Barren This 2011 album from composer and reedist Josh Sinton grabbed me on first listen. I'll be back for more.

Ethan Iverson: Live at Smalls (with Bill McHenry, Reid Anderson, & Jeff Williams) (2000) Kasey Knudsen, one of my favorite improvisers (who kindly consents to playing my music regularly) recently mentioned this one to me–I somehow missed it the first time around, but will be rectifying that pronto. 

John Lewis Presents Jazz Abstractions (1960) Especially Jim Hall's Piece for Guitar and Strings!

Rediscoveries

These are albums which I had heard in the past but jumped out at me with a fresh appeal this year. Always be ready to be floored anew by something you thought you knew!

Wayne Shorter: Night Dreamer (1964) (b/w Booker Little & Friend) (1961) I own a 1994 Toyota Corolla (gifted by my wife's parents) which we affectionately call "the Other Car" or "Ol' Bess." In place of the usual satellite radio and Bluetooth, it includes a state-of-the-art cassette deck, which inspired me to dig into my garage and grab a bunch of tapes which I dubbed from CDs and LPs in college–this one actually still worked, so I've just left it in on infinite auto-reverse for the past few months. Night Dreamer wasn't one of the Wayne albums I'd spent the most time with (mostly due to Lee Morgan, who you may remember I controversially don't usually love as much as most of my fellow trumpet players do). But man, does it sound great now–the tunes, the solos, the roiling rhythm section of Elvin, McCoy, Reggie Workman, just one of the finest examples of this music ever. (I listened to it with Mark Levine as we took Ol' Bess to an A's game last summer and he said, "how'd you know to bring my favorite album?") The Booker Little one is of course also a favorite. There's also something great with cassettes about having to just listen to the album in order (unless you want to deal with the dreaded << or >> buttons and risk getting the tape wound into the player), rather than jumping around impatiently and skipping the ballads as we've all gotten used to being able to do.

Directions in Music: Live at Massey Hall (2002) After Roy Hargrove's untimely passing I was digging around for some recordings where he really dug into some modern/modal stuff (in addition to all the great standards, blues, etc. that were his regular jam session fare across the world) and someone posted this album, which I'd previously sort of dismissed as an all-star tribute album. But man, does Roy sound great on this, fierce and inventive and lyrical.

Nicholas Payton Trio: #BAM Live at Bohemian Caverns (2013) I listened to this a fair amount when it first came out, but I noticed this year that just checking out a track or two before practicing or playing would immediately fire up some "good musical decisions" machine deep inside me that I'd forgotten was there. Payton has said "Live at the Plugged Nickel" is his favorite Miles, and this record captures some of that same fearless and funky energy.  He plays some ripping piano solos on this, too!

UPDATE, 2019: I originally wrote the piece below in 2011, in response to the flare-up which followed Nicholas Payton's public rejection of the word "jazz," but the fact that it's still the most visited page on this site by a long shot, even eight years later, tells me these questions are still being thought about, which is good to know (whether you agree with me or not). 

By now you're aware that there was another jazz blogo-Twitter-Facebook-sphere conflagration this week (they seem to crop up every few months or so like drug-resistant bacteria)–this one in response to a post by accomplished trumpeter and opinionator Nicholas Payton (who is always a good read, whether you agree with him or not).

The post that set it off, "Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore," is a collection of thoughts covering Payton's problems with "jazz" as a word and marketing concept and its place in the history of racism in the music, plus a varety of other stuff including silence and whether it's romantic to be poor (his take: no). It's all interesting and debatable, but that's not what prompted me to write today–my issue is the kinds of reactions these sorts of discussions tend to bring up from some white musicians and fans. (There's that voice in my head telling me to close the laptop and walk away. No? Shit, here we go.)

On the list of topics most white jazz musicians would rather not be talking about, I think issues of race in jazz fall right behind their parents' sex lives or when the biopsy results are due back. It's uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons, which is why most of us choose to avoid getting into it if at all possible. It tends to explode the happy illusion that the jazz scene is a harmonious colorblind family where musical achievement is the only metric that matters. If it is discussed, it's usually among friends in a non-public setting where good faith can be assumed and people can accept some basic facts as givens:

• that jazz is a music that came out of the African-American community and is a deep part of that culture's historical identity;

• that great respect is due to the black masters who shaped it;

• that those masters were on the receiving end of vicious racial animosity for much of the music's history;

• that white musicians unfairly profited from discrimination against black musicians by audiences and the music industry;* but

• that white musicians also played a role in the development of the music; and

• that America isn't yet over these wounds, and people, especially musicians, ignore this to their own detriment.

[*To be clear, this usually wasn't the musician's fault! By all accounts Paul Whiteman was actually a pretty decent guy who cared about his musicians, and Chet Baker openly acknowledged that winning a trumpet poll while Clifford Brown was still alive was ridiculous (and I love Chet, but c'mon). But the fact that nobody calls Paul Whiteman the "King of Jazz" anymore, or thinks the ODJB was actually "original" is a good sign that history is a better judge than short-term marketing hype.]

But on the internet, in public, things are very different. Anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account can instantly jump into the fray with thoughts ranging from well-thought-out arguments to idiotic name-calling–so after a brief honeymoon (ten minutes? 15?) of respectful disagreement with Payton, sure enough, out of the woodwork came (mostly white) people calling him a racist, accusing him of calling them thieves, etc. This is par for the course in American discourse (see here) but disappointing, since I like to think jazz musicians are a little more attuned to how loaded these issues can be.

But as I said in one Facebook thread which I couldn't stop myself from getting sucked into (after it followed the standard devolution from reasoned debate to incoherent jazz Fight Club), it's unfortunately easy for white jazz players to fall into the trap of walking around in a haze of proactive defensiveness, ready to drop Bill Evans on anyone who brings up racism in the music's past or present.

But to those white players who feel themselves veering toward that defensiveness, I would say the following:

• The fact is, you are occasionally going to run into people who think you probably shouldn't be playing this music, or think white people are generally bad for jazz. Some of them may be your friends. Some of them may be your heroes. Some of them may be German tourists who think jazz can only be played in sunglasses. Some of them may know much less about the music than you do. This is just a fact of life and a natural result of the history covered above.

• This is indeed a drag. Trust me, I get it. It's a drag to spend your life (and yes, it takes a lifetime) learning to play a form of music you love, only to discover there are people who think you'll never be authentic because of who your parents are. But:

• Compared to what the black architects of this music went through over the first century of its existence, this is a pretty minor price to pay. No one is throwing you in jail. No one is making you walk in the back door or use a separate water fountain. There is no vast population of white jazz musicians being deprived of work by inferior black jazz musicians. Being called a thief is a hell of a lot nicer than some of the names I'm sure those pioneers heard on a regular basis.

• In case you've forgotten, being white is an advantage in just about every other area of your life, short of the cost of sunscreen. (In case you need a refresher: see here.)

• This doesn't mean you should never respond to a dumb argument or defend yourself, just try to have some perspective and be grateful that you live in a relatively peaceful country and can study music and (God forbid!) occasionally get paid to play it.

But if it still bothers you and you really want to change peoples' minds, take a cue from that Bill Evans guy you're always mentioning and win them over by being a respectful person and playing your ass off.

... WHILE YOU'RE HERE, some other posts to check out:

• The new album: Fire in My Head: The Anxiety Suite

• Jazz Philanthropy & The Gig

• Technique in Jazz: One Guy's Take

• Jazz According to G

• Or you can check out my music here.