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.

Hi folks, I'm very excited about our Wood/Metal/Plastic premiere next Friday at The Sound Room in Oakland. The music is really coming together and I'm looking forward to getting it off the page and into your ears! (Tickets here!)Last night I had the chance to visit the great local DJ and music writer Larry Kelp's "Sing Out" show on KPFA to talk about the project and share some rehearsal audio. You can listen to the show here (for two weeks I believe).And here's some footage from our recent rehearsal with snippets of several tunes. It's a little rough around the edges as we were still working on the music, but should give you a taste of what kinds of things we'll be up to at the show. Hope to see you there![embed]https://youtu.be/KjxSO7ltRG0[/embed]

Hi folks! Here's a press release about the world premiere of my new band on 9/22. Hope you can be there! –Ian(Tickets available here. )As a jazz musician and composer, Ian Carey usually viewed string instruments as distant cousins to his musical world, something he deeply enjoyed listening to but didn’t expect to have many opportunities to interact with one-on-one. But a chance musical encounter planted a seed that blossomed into a vivid new musical terrain: his 7-piece chamber-jazz ensemble Wood/Metal/Plastic, which makes its world premiere performance at The Sound Room in Oakland on September 22. “For years I’ve played with Circus Bella, a great local circus troupe which has a live band,” led by San Francisco accordionist/composer Rob Reich. “Our long-term saxophonist left the group several years ago, and Rob decided to fill the spot with the great violinist Alisa Rose, so I spent the summer listening and soaking up what the instrument was capable of.”Carey, who at the time was just finishing up several years straight of writing, performing, and recording the epic hourlong suite and album Interview Music (“[an] ambitious compositional vision” –Andrew Gilbert, San Jose Mercury News) with his long-term collaborators the Ian Carey Quintet+1, was looking for a musical change of pace and a new challenge.He put together a new quartet, the loose and adventurous IJKL, featuring Quintet+1 holdovers Jon Arkin on drums (whose credits range from Lee Konitz to Ben Goldberg to the Afrobeat ensemble Albino!) and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen (who has played with Tune-Yards, Marcus Shelby, and the Holly Martins), and adding Bay Area creative music icon Lisa Mezzacappa on bass (who leads her own Bait & Switch and Avant Noir ensembles and has performed and collaborated with an encyclopedic array of notables across the creative music world); the new group focused on the freer side of jazz, performing new compositions by Carey at Studio Grand and the Make Out Room’s creative music series. “It was an exciting change of pace, jumping from the heavily planned-out world of Interview Music into this unpredictable group based on interaction and never playing something the same way twice.”When a potential composition grant opportunity arose, “I wondered what it would be like to take our little free-ish quartet and stick it in the middle of a chamber ensemble with strings,” Carey says. He reached out to Rose (whose talents range from high classical to backcountry fiddle) and fellow violinist Mia Bella D’Augelli (who has performed with the traditional string quartet the Town Quartet as well as contemporary composers like Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis), as well as cellist Jessica Ivry (who performed for a decade with Rose in the Real Vocal String Quartet and is a composer in her own right), and Wood/Metal/Plastic was born.To prepare for the project, Carey took a deep dive into studying stringed instruments and how to write for them, at one point even renting a cello and spending several weeks practicing the basics to help wrap his mind around how it worked. “I was super-excited when I began to get callouses on my fingers,” Carey says, “but then I suddenly remembered how much time I had left to actually write the music and got back to composing quick.”The result is a vivid musical palette ranging from lush chorales, to dense contrapuntal thickets, to wild cacaphonies and back again. Carey’s compositions incorporate influences as diverse as 20th-century masters Villa-Lobos and Ravel, chamber jazz pioneers Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, and Charles Mingus, and free jazz adventurers Ornette Coleman and Steve Lacy.How to bridge the gaps between these diverse spheres of influence? “As much as I love straightahead jazz, and completely written-out chamber music, and free improvisation,” Carey says, “part of my reason for doing this was that I knew I couldn’t resist writing tricky and beautiful things for so many instruments, and by putting together a group like this, with players this good, I wouldn’t have to choose.”Ian Carey’s Wood/Metal/Plastic is made possible through the Musical Grant Program, which is administered by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and supported by the Heller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation and San Francisco Grants for the Arts.

Here's another excerpt from my interview in Thomas Erdmann's book How Jazz Trumpeters Play Music Today. (Part 1 is here. )

On "Definitive Versions" of Tunes

TE: When I interviewed Chris Botti he said that after Wynton Marsalis recorded "Cherokee" no one else should ever record that tune. I beg to differ, and your recording of "Cherokee" [from Duocracy with pianist Ben Stolorow) proves my point. You found a unique and original way to approach the difficult changes by playing a series of wonderfully connected short motives before you work yourself into serving as an accompanying voice to Ben's solo... When approaching such defining moment standards, such as "Cherokee," how do you recommend young trumpeters approach the music in order to make a personal statement?

IC: That’s a good question. It’s interesting Botti said that about Wynton, because if you follow that logic, then Wynton shouldn’t have played it because of what Clifford Brown did! But thankfully he did because his recording is pretty amazing. By the way, Wynton probably shouldn’t record it anymore either, because he already set his own high water-mark!

This sounds a little cliché, but I think for "Cherokee" or "Giant Steps," —any of those watershed tunes that are really hard and you have to practice the hell out of—that the answer is that you have to learn them so well you can forget them. I would not have tried to record "Cherokee" 15 years ago, or I might have, but it would have sounded pretty self-conscious.

I talk about this with friends of mine sometimes, where you hear a someone playing along, swinging, then you hear something that sounds like a new lick they just learned. They put the lick in the middle of the solo and it sounds totally prepared and out of context; it doesn’t fit. The solution to that is you need to get tunes like that to a point where it is in the subconscious and subsumed into your musical language. When I listen to our version of "Cherokee," the thing I’m most happy about is how little it sounds like we’re trying to impress anybody.

For tunes like that, the flag-wavers, as one of my old teachers, the great drummer Michael Carvin, said, there are different ways to approach solos. You can start simple and build; or you can take one motive and develop it; or as he said, “You can come in doin’ it, and keep on doin’ it.” I think that’s great, if players are really at that level. For me, I didn’t want it to ever feel like it was a fast tune. Some of the reviews of that recording said we were playing that tune at a "leisurely tempo," or something like that—but it’s not at a leisurely tempo! We did it at something close to 300 beats per minute. That was gratifying, to me, that it didn’t sound like it was fast. I think the reason for this was because we both internalized it to the point where we forgot about the tune. When you're able to forget a tune, you can be surprised, and stumble on things, more so than if you are really conscious of the tune as you're playing it.

On Playing Fast

TE: Talking about playing fast, on "Cherokee" you also play some beautifully constructed improvised contrapuntal lines with Ben after his solo, not to mention the ripping fast notes that are absolutely locked in the rhythmic pocket. You also play fast flawlessly on "Tom/Tom" from Contextualizin’, and rip it up on your Interview Music CD as well. How do you practice in order to be able to play as fast you do, yet still play so cleanly and rhythmically perfect?

IC: Thank you. This goes back a little to what I said about swing earlier, in that I realized, when I was learning lines back in my 20s, that you really want to practice that stuff evenly. I remember Claudio Roditi came to The New School when I was there. His chops were so fluid, clean and smooth. He was giving people a hard time when we were playing Brazilian tunes about how they were swinging too much. He said, “No, no, play straight, play even.” These were kids who had heard all of the (Stan) Getz records; to me Getz doesn’t sound very Brazilian on them. I remember after that going back to my line practicing—like everyone else I was learning ii-Vs and transcribing solos and so on—and taking Roditi’s lessons to heart; trying to practice playing lines perfectly evenly from super slow to fast. If you're trying to learn something and you start at a slow tempo and are swinging it and not playing evenly, then by the time you get it up to a fast tempo it'll be a jumbled mess.

... I also feel like I don’t sit on fast lines for a long time. I like to use them as a color, throw that color and texture out there, let it sit there and allow people to think about it, and not just have a solo be a constant string of fast notes. If you are judicious about playing fast notes they become more effective than if you’re just burning eighth-notes all the time.

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.