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.

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.

A couple of years ago I was asked by author and trumpeter Thomas Erdmann to participate in an interview for his book How Jazz Trumpeters Play Music Today, along with 11 other players of varying renown including Christian Scott, Wadada Leo Smith and the late (great) Ted Curson.

We had a very interesting conversation covering a lot of ground, but since the book has been out for a while, and isn't in a price range where most people can afford to pick up a copy (currently around $200, which I guess is the norm for academic publishing these days), I asked Dr. Erdmann for permission to post a few excerpts, which I'll be posting in bits and pieces. Here's the first:

On Practicing...

One can’t help but know, in listening to you, that it’s obvious you practice the trumpet; people don’t just pick up the trumpet and sound like you do without putting in the time. What does a practice session of yours look like these days?

IC: Thank you—it has not been a straight-line journey as I’m sure any musician in their middle age will tell you. I went through years of really difficult embouchure challenges that I think were formative for me. I was late in getting serious about practicing. I played the French horn up until high school, and didn’t get serious about practicing the trumpet until I was 16 or so. But at that first burst of trumpet interest things came really easy. I had high chops even though I wasn’t doing it in a healthy way; using lots of pressure and making all of the usual mistakes. In college I was unsatisfied with the pace of my progress and felt I had to move things along faster, so I was going to fix my embouchure for good. At the time I played out of the side of my mouth, and so I decided I was going to move my embouchure by playing right in the middle of my chops, and that would be the secret to finding a shortcut. Instead, it ended up leading to 10 years of wandering in the wilderness where I couldn’t count on anything from day to day. It was tough, and there were many times I was on the verge of quitting.

But there were also some really positive things that came out of this, like discovering late Chet Baker after his chops got smashed. I learned how much music there is to be made even if your body is not at its best that day. As messed up as Chet got, he never lost that amazing gift for melody and swing. There’s a version of “But Not For Me” he did (on The Touch Of Your Lips) where he plays a trumpet solo and then scats a solo, and there's almost no difference in feel between the two of them. The trumpet and the chops have nothing to do with what he was doing musically at that time; he was “letting a song go out of his heart,” if you will. To me, that was a valuable lesson.

... As things started to slowly get better, with the help of teachers as well as dumb luck, and as I worked my chops back to regularity—it’s easy to kick myself over that detour—but as I came back to “chops normality” after having learned all of these lessons about music, the trumpet and my chops, I think it took all of that mess to get to the level of self-knowledge that I am now in terms of how my chops work and how to play.

I forget who said it, but the saying goes, “There are two things you should work on, stuff you’re good at and stuff you’re not good at.” The reason is that on the stuff you’re not good at, you need to develop; but with the stuff you are good at, you also want to work on it because it will become your sound, your thing. You don’t want to stop working on things you do well, you want to build on those things!

Read another excerpt from my interview for the book here.

While I'm in my "not here to make friends" mode (see my previous post, The Case for Vibing), I thought it would be helpful to elaborate by sharing a few examples of behaviors I (and many of my fellow musicians) consider to be deserving of a serious vibe-down. Context (open jam session vs. regular gig with guests vs. sideman gig, etc.) is important, and not all are equally vibe-worthy, but if you engage in any of these actions there's a really good chance you'll find yourself on the midnight train to Vibeville. Let's begin!

• Losing the form on a blues (bad as a soloist, worse as an accompanist)

• Losing the form of a tune while reading the chord changes off your phone

• Texting/sexting on the bandstand

• Acting like a bandleader while sitting in (e.g. trying to dictate solo order, trading, or other similar micromanagement--this is worse when sitting in on someone else's gig than on a more chaotic jam session)

• Not knowing what key you sing a song in

• Fumbling through the melody of a tune before the tune has started (Either you know it or you don't. Don't give it away. Especially don't do this before the band has agreed on the tune)

• Noodling behind someone else's solo (I'm not talking about purposeful accompaniment, although you probably shouldn't do that either unless you know the person soloing well and know they don't mind that). Everyone can hear you, especially the soloist, and they will drop a vibe bomb on you when they're done like you wouldn't believe

• Calling any of the following tunes: My Funny Valentine, Summertime, The Girl from Ipanema, My Way, Chameleon, Take Five, Freddie Freeloader (unless it's your gig, in which case knock yourself out but be sure to get some tips)

• Calling a tune which the band finished playing less than 30 minutes ago

• Asking someone in the band "What tune is this?" while they're playing and you are not (goes double for when you are playing)

• Calling a tune with a very notey bebop head but then not playing the melody yourself (piano players, looking at you)

• Calling an obscure tune (not a problem in itself) but having no backup choice if the band doesn't know it

• Cutting off someone's solo on someone else's gig

• Requesting something be played as a funk tune (unless it's a band which regularly plays funk)

• Calling the same one or two tunes every time you sit in on every gig (and making the same mistakes every time)

• Playing many choruses on a tune you obviously don't know either the changes or the form to, hoping you'll eventually get it (which usually results in ending your final chorus in the wrong place). As your high school band director said, practice at home!

But just for fun and in the interest of running the Vibe-o-rail in both directions, here are some poorly-executed vibing behaviors which may result in a serious counter-vibe:

• Vibing the house band on a gig you're being invited to sit in on (for pretty much any reason!)

• Vibing the bandleader on a gig he/she hired you for (sometimes this is indeed necessary, but you better be prepared to never get called again)

• Vibing someone in the band for not knowing that difficult tune (26-2, Slings and Arrows, Countdown, something by Kurt Rosenwinkel) that you really want to show off on--come on, you can show off on something everybody knows (unless your licks are all for that particular tune! Vibe alert!)

• Vibing someone for not wanting to play in 7/4 or a weird key at a jam session (unless those are a normal expectation of said session)

• Vibing someone who's got a good attitude and is looking for pointers (save your vibes for the truly deserving!)

• Vibing someone for playing the Miles version of "Well You Needn't" instead of the Monk version, or vice-versa

• Vibing your fellow-sufferers on an already awful gig

• Vibing the band by introducing yourself and saying, "I usually play more modern stuff than you guys" (true story!)

• Vibing the entire band for not being on your level (maybe that is not the right band for you to be playing with?)

• Vibing someone for vibing you over your excessive vibing

Got more? Throw 'em in the comments!