M U S I C
DAN McCONKEY is a London-based jazz saxophonist and composer. His new jazz quartet recording (released October 1, 2025), SET, is an outstanding collection of original tunes and unique interpretations of timeless folk melodies. The album features Charlie Heywood, guitar; Sam Ingvorsen, bass; and drummer, Joshua Walker-Martin.
SkyDeck: Dan! How have you been? Your fantastic new album SET, was released October 1 and you had a successful gig to mark the occasion. Hopefully you’re quite proud and happy with the results.
Dan: Hello! Thank you. I definitely get that feeling, sometimes. It's up and down. I can start to feel good about it, but it's always on a cycle for me. Often it’s something to do with how much I’m practicing, what I’m practicing, and what I’m listening to. It's funny.
SkyDeck: I think it’s normal to be so familiar with your own vocabulary as an improviser it’s hard to hear it the way an audience might. I’m working on a couple of different small group projects and thinking I need to be able to do much more and that Chris Potter wouldn't be having these problems. Meanwhile he’s probably his own harshest critic at least some of the time.
Dan: But then sometimes you listen to some of the greats doing that stuff and they repeat themselves all the time.
SkyDeck: Right. Especially in different eras. I remember hearing, for the first time, [Michael] Brecker’s recordings from the mid-80s, like with Steps Ahead. Then, years later, seeing videos of the same era and then you hear some similar phrases or jumping off points in different versions of the tunes. I remember that being my first recognition that maybe he's not just winging it all the way through. And especially guys like him who were meticulous about preparation. Even as a kid, there were some good hints about the amount of work that needed to go into this.
Dan: Yeah. And that's why he sounded so good.
SkyDeck: Definitely. So, talk about your music and background a bit so we can give everyone some context. Where do you come from originally?
Dan: I’m from a place called Ashburnham, which is a tiny village near Battle in East Sussex. It’s Near Hastings, as in “Battle of…” I grew up in the countryside.
SkyDeck: What was your early music education like? Were there any significant musical family members in your background?
Dan: That was sort of true in my case. My dad's a very musical person. He plays piano and has perfect pitch. He's not a professional musician, but he loves music and plays all types of instruments. We had a sort of music room at home where he'd keep all of them. We had a piano and my dad would play a bit of recorder for us, and I'd always listen to him. So that really got me started in music.
I played violin when I was about eight, which was hilarious. I was pretty terrible at it. Then I played piano when I was a bit older. But I was really getting into music when I started playing guitar about age eleven. My dad played guitar as well but he was more of a self-taught blues and rock guitarist than anything else. And so we used to play quite a lot together.
I would learn Thin Lizzie and Iron Maiden songs, and Jimi Hendrix and the classic “teenage boy gets a guitar” kind of tunes. And that's when I started learning how to improvise. Around the same time, I started having saxophone lessons at school. My school was fine. It was just a standard comprehensive school, but they had a nice music department. They were very friendly. It was small but I had nice teachers who started me playing in more ensembles.
And there is a local East Sussex Music Service. They put on some big bands that I started attending. I was like 14 and 15, playing the saxophone, and trying to do some of the improvisational things that I could do on guitar.
There’s a producer and trumpet player, James McMillan. After one of our concerts with the big band, he said to me, “You know this jazz improvisation thing, you should try and do it properly. You should take it seriously. You do all this other stuff but you could be good at this. There's something there.” So I went to this jazz player guy who lived in Hastings, Rob Leak, and started getting lessons with him. He was really great.
And I took my time, getting more and more into it, you know? I was still playing piano at the time. And I was actually still playing viola, hilariously, because I sucked at the violin but I wanted to get in the orchestra. And that worked! So I was just doing music. No disrespect to any viola players. [laughs] They're great. So I was just doing music when I was in my early teens, like all the time, in these various different ensembles.
SkyDeck: Was your father's influence on you mainly by example or did he verbalize anything that was uniquely interesting or profound about music that made you fall in love with it?
Dan: I got a lot from him by example and just playing and just showing me different records. And he'd take me to concerts and gigs. My first standing gig was AC/DC at Wembley Stadium. We saw a lot of rock gigs like that. It was great. He had a funny attitude to music – I think it was really useful to me at the time – which I still find quite amusing now. I’m not sure it’s the best way of looking at things for everyone, especially over a long period of time, but when I was picking up the guitar, he was like, “Oh, yeah, that's easy. Just do this. This is easy.” And it might be a fairly tricky riff or whatever. That created an attitude for me that things were possible. “Yeah, I can play that.” So I'd sit there for hours working at different concepts without much negativity. And it worked really well.
My dad is a doctor, not a professional musician, and he didn't really play or gig with anyone and didn't have much performance experience either than what we did as a kid. Once he was an adult I think he was basically working.
SkyDeck: He's a medical doctor?
Dan: Yeah.
SkyDeck: There's a real common relationship between medical doctors and musical interest. I’m sure part of it is that people who have that kind of a job have a certain level of intensity in the preparation. You have to have a very organized brain to get through all the material they need you to get through to become a doctor in the first place. And then there's an intensity to it. The job or like the level to which you have to be dedicated to it is pretty profound. It seems like music provides some real adjacent elements to life for those types of people. So that's interesting.
But in terms of that attitude where everything is possible or even considered “easy,” if he had the ability to do the studying for medicine, he might not feel it was as difficult as the average person might find it. It's not just the minimum number of years in school. The average person wouldn’t have the capability of doing it at all.
Dan: Yes, I think there's something to that for sure. I think it was funny how, I suppose, to him it was low pressure compared to the stuff he was actually dealing with.
SkyDeck: That's not the worst way to approach teaching. If you're telling some kid, “Okay, this is really impossible, and it's going to take you a million hours to be able to master this, how remarkable would you have to be as a young student to respond positively to that?
Dan: It would be very challenging.
SkyDeck: Most things that you do, almost anything you can play on the saxophone, any one might not be particularly challenging. But it’s that thing plus the next thing, plus the next thing, plus the next 2000 things. It adds up to a level of perseverance and dedication. Now that you’re proficient in many areas, if I were to say, “Play this idea in twelve keys, you’d think, “That's not that challenging for me.” But only because you've got this backlog of doing it for so many years now. And I think that about doctors, too. I think there's a real memory element to it, right? If you were just really good at memorizing things, medical school would be remarkably easier than if you didn't have that ability.
I think if you were to go back and give your younger self a lesson and say, “Okay, here's everything I know.” That would be pretty devastating to a kid. They'd be thinking, “There's no way I could possibly do this.”
Dan: Yes and I think what was particularly cool about his attitude was the improvising side of it. When I first started I found it easy but, a little later, when I tried to put it on the saxophone, I found it difficult. I don't know if you play the guitar at all but I'm sure you know it's very shape based when you learn it, especially rock and blues style playing. Guitar players, they're not really thinking of every single note they're playing. They're thinking, “Oh, I know this shape in this key.” So when you’re first learning, it's actually helpful for improvising. You learn the sounds and the shape and what it looks like and feels like. And you can transpose it easily.
SkyDeck: We have the opposite problem. I play trumpet primarily and the combinations of things are pretty abstract. There are no reliable shapes of fingering combinations for chord changes. Saxophone is somewhat like that.
Dan: Yeah, we've got a bit of a middle ground, I suppose. It's a little shapey, but not as much. Nothing like the guitar.
So we have to deal with it from the standpoint of, “I have to know what notes I'm playing in order to put down the right fingerings.” The guitar players don’t at first. So one challenge is going to be the opposite of the other.
SkyDeck: You have to take those things and dedicate yourself to really figuring out exactly what you are playing. Whereas we have to figure out what we're playing right at the beginning in terms of note choices and then eventually get to the point where the fingers sort of take over based on the sounds.
Dan: Yeah, exactly. And I think that was weird for me when I first started picking up the saxophone. On the guitar, I learned so many solos before I really started improvising, just because I was interested. And I learned bits of theory and shapes and it came quite naturally. I was way better at soloing on guitar then than I am now.
We'd just play blues and try to improvise with each other. I had all of these backing tracks and tried and playing along with those. And they were great to get me over that first stage where you don't know enough language and you haven't checked out enough music. I think I got through that stage quite quickly in some ways. I was lucky, really. Not through any planning, just through playing a shitload of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page.
SkyDeck: We learn to teach beginners and develop the ability to roll out the information at a pace that doesn’t make the students scared of the amount of work that they're going to have to do eventually. Maybe the reason you play so well now is that you lucked into a bit of a brain pattern at first where you weren't inundated with information or the weight or challenge of it all.
Dan: I think there was a bit of that for sure. And then there was a correction five or six years later when I went to college.
SkyDeck: When you say college, you mean university? That word means several different things depending on where you live.
Dan: Yeah.
SkyDeck: Do they refer to high schools in the UK as college, too?
Dan: Yes, actually they do. Normally what we'd refer to as secondary school would be like 11 to 16 or 11 to 18. It kind of depends because some secondary schools have a sixth form on top.
SkyDeck: The last two years.
Dan: Right. Some people would call 16 to 18 college because they'd go to a different place. And then, in music, we often call it “college” because we think of “music college.” Maybe most people don't use that. It's usually “uni,” you'd say. My secondary school was called Claverham Community College.
SkyDeck: Even “community college” has another meaning in North America. Where did you go to university?
Dan: Guildhall. I did quite an intense course before university from age 16 to 18. I did a lot of subjects in this baccalaureate program, and which was a bit stupid because I knew I wanted to do jazz at one of the conservatoires. So I ended up having to take a year out, which I think was quite good for me. But I went to Guildhall and studied with a bunch of great musicians.
SkyDeck: Is Guildhall the one that Elton John went to or was that the Academy? I remember a music faculty member in London commenting that he was gave a substantial amount of money to the school he attended.
Dan: I think the Royal Academy. Academy. You can see it in their building if you ever go. It's quite an interesting place to visit. They've got a musical instrument museum.
SkyDeck: That’s the full name? Royal Academy of Music?
Dan: Yeah, Baker Street. The foyer is all marble. Very grand. It looks cool. It's exactly the kind of place you'd expect to be called the Royal Academy. Whereas Guildhall's in the Barbican. It's all brutalist and kind of dated internally. I find it quite cool, but it doesn't have this multibillion pound building. Right over the road is one of the most expensive areas of the city to own a building, I think. But Guildhall gets a lot of money from the City of London Corporation. It's quite hard to explain but all these business interests are in the square mile around the Guildhall in the old City of London. And because we're in that we get quite a lot of like art sponsorship from them. I say “we” like I'm part of it anymore.
SkyDeck: Well, you probably have an emotional attachment to it as an alumni? I'm not sure what the next twenty years of music education looks like, but it's looking pretty bleak at the moment. One thing the American music schools have in their favor is their attachment to where they went to school, especially their undergraduate schools. A lot of that has to do with sports.
But tell me about your experience at university. It was a bit of a shock compared to your previous experience? What did you discover about yourself at that point?
Dan: I didn't really know what to expect. I think I just wasn't used to playing as much as I would have wanted. I hadn't gone out and tried to play with people enough or gone to many jams in London. Trying to prepare myself was difficult, from where I was living. In this country, jazz education is so sparse. I hadn't been to one of these performing art secondary schools like Cheethams or Purcell or Wells or wherever. They have great programs and have a lot of people doing the same thing. I think a lot of them are quite new jazz programs, but they're really good. I hadn't done any of the juniors programs either. So, for me, it was a real shock seeing some of the people that were my age, especially the people that had been at university a year already, and hearing how they were playing. “Oh my God, yeah. This is where we've got to get to.” Because I think I was technically okay in the sense of knowing scales and arpeggios, but my sound was not together. My confidence as an improviser was not really there. My language wasn't really there. There was just loads of stuff to get together.
I feel like I worked really hard though. That was it. Especially that first year. I had lessons with a classical saxophonist, which was really helpful for sound and performance technique.
Like one of my teachers, Christian Forshaw. He was brilliant I played a lot of really hard music with him and that was great. I also had lessons with Jean Toussaint, who is really cool. He played with [Art Blakey and] the Jazz Messengers. He had the biggest tenor sax sound in a tiny practice room. He gave me a shitload of things to do in lessons.
In fact, that was it for the first year. And then lots of like group lessons and yeah, it was a real shock. Like, I mean getting roasted in feedback is always interesting as well. Feedback that was quite. I'd gone from being like kind of. I did quite, you know, I was always quite academically minded at school and I'd always done pretty well at things. And then it was a bit of a shock being like, oh, okay. I'm actually like, I need to put in some time and this is not, you know, this is difficult.
But it was great at the same time. It wasn't a negative experience. I needed that kind of push to get me where I am in many ways. And I met loads of friends, a lot of whom I'm still in touch with. It gave me such a good network of people to start with.
I got to live in central London, around the corner from the Guildhall, for a year. That was amazing. I went to loads of gigs. Practiced loads. It was great. I got in the big band and learned how to arrange things. I started writing music. I tried to learn how to conduct, but I'm rubbish at it. I think I got a pretty well rounded education.
And then I managed to start working quite quickly. I started doing functions and little jazz gigs here and there. And I started teaching almost straightaway, mostly private lessons.
SkyDeck: Who are some of the recording artists that you think were the most influential? Was it significantly different between high school and university? I know I've got my list of people who made me love music. But if I had to make a list of musicians that were going to teach me how to play on chord changes, they were not always the same guys.
Dan: Yeah, I think you're right. That's an interesting distinction. Yeah, there's. I think my list would be a bit different too.
SkyDeck: And did it change over the years? I’d guess was there a shift when you got to London. Because you were probably serious about music as a kid but in university, now you're like required to be serious about it.
Dan: Right. Before I went to uni, it was people like Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker. I was more of an alto player, actually, at the time. I still played quite a lot of alto for a while anyway. But yeah, Bird was the main one, really. And then when I got to uni, I think, as you say, I was trying to learn how to put things together. The other person was Kenny Garrett, before I went to uni. I was really, really into him. And listened to him a lot.
But in terms of the people that really taught me how to put things together, Jean Toussaint was great for this. He'd always bring in like transcriptions I would never have done myself. One of them was Benny Carter. He's fantastic. And I was really not aware of him before.
Paul Desmond was another one. I was obviously aware of him but hadn't checked out his playing properly. But man, his change playing was amazing. Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, of course. Lee Konitz, too, who I hadn't really checked out before college. I got really into Sonny Rollins. Charles Lloyd. He's a big influence on me. And Will Vinson. I remember hearing some of his stuff in first year and thinking, “Oh God, this is amazing.”
SkyDeck: Yeah, he's great. He's on one of my albums with Alex [Sipiaign] and I had only heard a few things he’d done by that point but he’s one of the absolute best guys today. He’s in London now after some COVID-forced time in Australia.
Dan: Yeah. His wife, Jo Lawry, she's Australian. She's head of jazz at Guildhall now. Apparently she's been a fantastic head of the course. Everything about it, it's been really positive.
But the way the government deals with the whole tuition fees system, seems Kafka-esque. I was in the student union during my last couple of years. My title was “academic affairs” so I used to go to all these weird meetings. Some of it was interesting. I remember going for this meeting with the Office for Students, this new body that had been set up to regulate and pay universities. They were responsible for all the funding. And you sort of sit through an afternoon of meeting and they'd say a bunch of stuff without really telling you anything. And the people with me, like the dean for students and the head of a particular course, were like, “God, this is so stressful. What, what do they want from us?”
SkyDeck: That's almost dangerous for a young person to be put into the inner workings of that bureaucracy, especially as an artist. You’re too young and hopeful to have the life sucked out of you like that. As a teacher you’re often asked about your interest in administration but once you take yourself out of the classroom, you have less influence, not more. “If I ran this place I could really fix some stuff.” But you realize that you can't. The only way you fix anything is with direct access to students. You can’t fix someone else’s teaching. I also understand that, in the UK, it's about £10,000 a year to go to university? That seems like a challenge for recruiting students when there are far cheaper options in Europe.
Dan: If I was going to do a master’s, there's almost no way I'd do it in this country. I'd love to go to the Academy but unless I got funded... I mean, you can borrow some of the money, but then it's taxed at a higher rate than the undergrad. The student loan system here, for now, is fine. It's not amazing but we don't have to start paying it back until we earn over about £28K. So it does kick in, and you know a typical musician's income, it's not huge.
SkyDeck: Yeah the American student loan situation can be pretty ugly. I know some people with two, three, and five hundred thousand dollars in loans. That’s in US dollars. That’s a lot for musicians and teachers.
Dan: Do you have to pay it off yearly, regardless of income?
SkyDeck: I think if you don't make enough money you can defer it, but it doesn't go away. Some people have had their loans forgiven. That’s a big battle between the current and previous presidents. But by the time some people have their loans forgiven, they’d already paid several times the original amount.
Dan: Yeah, the only thing in our favor is it gets forgiven after thirty years. I don't think about it. It just comes out of my tax. It's just like a slight bit on the top of my tax. If I was earning more money, I would probably think about it more because it'd be a lot higher, it'd be a much bigger proportion. But yeah, it's, it's frustrating. And for the Masters, it's very expensive. And it's frustrating because it came in in my lifetime, when I was like sixteen or something.
SkyDeck: On a more positive note, let's talk about your fantastic album. I’d like to hear about the musicians and the tunes, what might have inspired you to write each one, and if there's a story behind any of them.
Dan: The musician I was working with first on any of this material was Josh Walker-Martin, the drummer. I met him at a jam session after college. He was going to Guildhall to do his master’s just after I had finished. We played together loads during COVID. He had a spot we could go and play. And that was really important for me at the time because I wasn't playing with anyone else. I wasn't doing anything else.
COVID hit my confidence quite badly. It came at a bad time. I was lucky not to be at uni when it hit, but I had just graduated. I was just starting to play new music that I was excited about and then it hit. But Josh is one of my best mates. We go back quite a long way and I got to play with him a lot. I also saw him develop loads while he was at Guildhall. That was really inspiring for me, just seeing him practice. I love his playing. He's quite loose. He's quite expressive. He's a very creative player.
He basically wrote the first track, “Thameside.” We did the changes together and some of the melody, but it's his tune. I think the writing on it's beautiful. Sam Ingvorsen, the bass player, starts that track off and it's one of my favorite bits of the album. At the beginning, it was really fun to improvise with all that space. I love Sam's sound and the way he approaches the tune. He's a lot of fun to improvise with. You don't need to hold his hand. He's always happy to do his own thing and fill gaps. Really great bass player.
The next track, “Laszlo,” was written by Charlie Hayward, the guitarist. He's someone I knew for even longer than Josh. He was at Guildhall with me and I've always been really drawn to his playing, especially for me, as someone who plays a bit of guitar. He's got a nice mix, someone whose voicings and writing and comping are all very tasteful. He's got a bit of that Bill Frisell sort of sound and approach to tone, which I like. And I think he wrote this tune for this band. We'd been playing a bit together, but other music, and he brought this along. It's medium up and free and quite melodic. He’s got a slightly brighter, more resonant sound than some jazz sounds. And when he solos, he's got such technique and command of the instrument. Maybe as guitarists, and as saxophonists as well, we like to play a lot of notes. [laughs] I like that. I just always like that in a guitar player when they've got a real freedom to express themselves. And Laszlo, I just think it's a great composition. The sections flow really nicely, the riff is catchy, the melody is great.
When we first played it, we just read it through, played it down. I was like, “Yeah, this is happening,” straight away. It kind of plays itself.
SkyDeck: Would you ever spend any time just appreciating that? When you're in school or when you were a kid, of course you're not making really good music yet. You don't yet have the collaborators that you have later on. Was there a feeling of how good it was for it to feel easy in a sense? “Now I get to be part of this group.” And not to diminish your contribution to it but surrounded by serious musicians are you thinking, “I'm super lucky to have these guys. There's really nothing better than this?”
Dan: That's true. It is an amazing feeling. I think I haven't appreciated that enough sometimes. Not that I'm like, “Oh, it's my band. I'm doing everything.” Not from that sense, but I think it's easy to miss how cool that is. And how much fun that is.
SkyDeck: “We're functioning the way we dreamed about it not too long ago.”
Dan: Yeah, you're so right. I think sometimes I forget that.
SkyDeck: To me, those are really cool things that we don't spend enough time appreciating. And the number of hours that have gone into it. You spent an incalculable number of hours. Each one of the guys has done the same, but in their own way. Even though you play guitar, the guitar player can, presumably, do things you can't do on his instruments.
Dan: Yeah, like a million things.
SkyDeck: Sure. But they probably can't play the saxophone at all. It's an opportunity for appreciation. If it was a saxophone quartet, you would all understand each other really well. It would be more difficult to be mesmerized by what the other guys were doing.
Dan: Maybe a little bit. I think that you're right, though. That's what's been really nice about the project. Everyone's got a kind of different slant and bringing different things to it.
SkyDeck: I’ll say this with an appropriate amount of respect for your individual style, but one of the first things I thought when listening to your record was, “I think this person appreciates Joe Henderson. This is a jazz artist who's clearly been influenced by him.”
Dan: Well, yeah. He's a huge influence, especially on my sound. And also the intensity with which he improvises. I've never been one to not say what I think or hide my feelings on things. And I think I play in a similar way. And I like having some intensity in what I'm doing. I don't like leaving things unsaid. I think Joe Henderson's got a bit of that. That live [McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson] record that came out recently [Forces of Nature]. Have you heard that?
SkyDeck: No, not yet. It’s from the late 60s? [1966]
Dan: I think so. It’s McCoy and Henry Grimes. Who's on drums? I can't remember who the drummer is but somebody amazing. [Jack DeJohnette] The first tune is like a 25 minute blues. I think “In and Out,” and it's just the most ridiculous thing. The intensity of the playing is absolutely stunning. It's like the kind of thing I'm getting at, I suppose. But yeah. Thank you. I always take that as a compliment when people compare me to those people. I never mind being compared to a great musician.
SkyDeck: I was fortunate to see him a couple of times not too long before he died. We did a road trip to Minneapolis to hear him, drove back to college through the night, and still made it to theory class first thing in the morning.
You can tell the people who spent time learning other people's music, and they tend to play better and write better.
Dan: I think it's actually less derivative when people do that.
SkyDeck: Yeah, exactly. Because you can't know what's been before you until you put in the time to learn. And then your work becomes meaningful because you're building upon what came before.
Dan: Totally agree with you.
SkyDeck: Going back to Kenny Garrett for a second, when I was in graduate school, there was an outstanding freshman alto player who came in every week for his improvisation lesson having transcribed a new, complicated Kenny Garrett solo. And he'd just done fifteen Cannonball [Adderley] solos the semester before. Now, you're not going to judge an 18 year old kid on his level of individualism or artistry while he's in the process of transcribing 30 difficult solos. But you know there’s the potential for all of that to lead somewhere significant down the road.
Dan: I think people are too scared to sound like other people. I was. I felt like this when I first got to college. I didn't really understand the process and I think I was a bit lazy and I found transcribing hard and, “Oh, I don't want to sound like other people.” I still did it but I wish I'd done much more. I wish I'd done like 100 times more of it. Because that's mostly what I practice now. And it's so much better for you. You get so much out of it. It's like working all your musical muscles at once. At least a lot of them. And yes, I'm totally agreeing with what you're saying. If I had an 18 year old student learning a Cannonball or Kenny Garrett solo a week on the alto, I think, you know, they're gonna be something.
SkyDeck: You know, they're going to have learned a lot about how to play the saxophone.
Dan: Yeah. By the end of that, right. That's amazing.
SkyDeck: Even in modern times, jazz still, realistically, has the gatekeeper aspect. It's not as blatant as it was in the past where you heard about Jo Jones being pissed off at Charlie Parker for not making it. It's not blatantly ugly like that but there is something attractive about hearing a new artist who has done their homework, especially if they’re advanced enough to have turned that into a personal musical identity. You appreciate that more than almost anything else at first. “Now let me listen to it and see what they bring to them music.” That's what I appreciated about listening to you. It's beautiful music played by really good musicians. And so there’s nothing cooler than that. You aren’t drawn to any academic or theoretical aspects. You can just enjoy it. Whereas, if it's not good, now you're starting to go, “Why is it not good?” Your brain can't help but analyze what they’re doing wrong or what chord changes aren’t being played competently, or how bad the time is, or this or that. But when it's good, it's the best thing.
Dan: Yeah. Just what you said about getting away from the scale side of it, like the theoretical. Whenever I first tried to write tunes, I ended up way too far down that path. I was finding it really hard to write melodies. I still like a lot of rock and pop music, and folk music – Singer/songwriter stuff. I just got into a bunch of folk music. I went to a folk session in Hastings and I hadn't really checked it out much before. I liked Nick Drake but that was as far as I got. But I went to this traditional folk session in a pub and it was fantastic. There were barely any instruments there. There were a couple of people with guitars and mandolins, but the most amazing thing was you'd get these people just stand up and just sing off a tune totally acapella. It was the most amazing atmosphere. Totally electric. Everyone's just focused on this one person and they weren't trained singers. Technically they didn't have super even or smooth ranges or anything like that. But it was so powerful.There's so much behind it. And that really got me thinking about music and melodies. I just like simple melodies and cool melodies that have a bit of something about them.
I wish I could say I love the lyrical element of folk music and the kind of storytelling, and I do, but I'm terrible at remembering lyrics. I have no brain for it at all. I'm always looking at other things. I could write riffs, I could write grooves, I could write all of that stuff, but I found melodies really difficult and so I got stuck into all these traditional folk tunes. I bought a bunch of weird books that have collections of them.
And I listened to all these old recordings, like field recordings. There's always that little thing about a tune that sticks in your ear. And it's a completely oral tradition, pretty much. Although I just said I bought books about it.
SkyDeck: SkyDeck: So this third tune, “What Will We Do When We Have No Money?”
Dan: It's a traditional folk tune and the version that inspired me to cover it was by a band called Lankum, an Irish folk band. They've just kind of blown up in the last year or so. I guess I heard them play that and I just thought, “Wow, what a haunting melody.” They do it with the drone as well. A bit like how I started it off. And I couldn't even tell you what the little thing about that melody is. I suppose the phrasing is interesting, but it's very simple. It's just like a major scale. I think there's not an awful lot to it musically, but for some reason, it's really powerful. It just really struck me and it was in my head for ages. And I was like, “Yeah, I've got to cover that.”
And I definitely wanted Sam on bass. I knew Sam. One of the things I love most about his playing is his sound. He's got a nice big bass. He's got a nice high action. He's always proud of his high action. He's one of those. “Nobody's got higher action than me.”
So, “Yeah, we're going to get Sam. We're going to get him to do some big arco things on this and we're going to get the bass sounding huge, as part of the mixing as well. Right down the middle with lots of transient wooden sounds on the bass. What you get in real life. So I thought, “Get Sam going on the drone, write some loose harmony that we can choose when to play, and just see where we go with it. And use it as a way to improvise.” Charlie plays beautifully. And then Josh has got free reign to be expressive on this one.
SkyDeck: Have you felt that by choosing tunes that are somewhat afield from standard jazz literature, like folk tunes, it gives you permission not to play a bunch of change-playing bebop licks on the tunes? Does it feel like you’re turning in a certain direction deliberately, and that it’s easier to think about it all differently?
Dan: Don't tell anyone, but that's also what I came up with. I guess I was doing it first before bebop stuff. And I really like playing like that and thinking of improvisation in that way. Not that I don't love playing bebop as well.
I always like thinking of who has the intensity in any one tune, who's providing the real energy to what we're doing. And in this one, that's not really me. It's osh on the drums, more than anyone else. He's quite free to improvise around it. It's out of time. It's nice to switch the roles in the band a little bit and approach things differently. And it's fun to just try and think melodically.
You know, being a British guy trying to play jazz, there's a little bit of an abstraction. There’s the Atlantic Ocean between us and the blues. And I'm white, obviously. Not that I can't delve into it, love it and play it. But the blues isn't my folk music. And I love playing blues. I have so much respect for it.
SkyDeck: And it’s undeniable as a part of jazz.
Dan: It's fantastic. But it's also cool to be able to play a folk song and improvise and play around with music that has a direct link and is part of the history of where I'm from. It's nice to play music from Britain and Ireland which all of this is. Not in a nationalistic weird way, but it feels real.
SkyDeck: We might be coming out of it a bit, but we've been in this age of hypersensitivity to cultural appropriation where, “You can't say this and you can't wear that. You’re stealing my art.” Maybe it’s because it is such a small portion of the music industry now but it seems like jazz never got caught up in that. You can’t avoid appreciating where the music came from and having respect for the thing that you’re trying to do that’s legitimately difficult. You can’t just steal it. You have to work for it no matter where you’re from of what your heritage might be.
And there’s a lot of good work happening now in all kinds of places, especially in Europe. Not just London, but in Amsterdam, in Austria, in Germany. Of course there are bad jazz musicians everywhere – there's no guarantee of anything – but you've either done the homework or you haven't. It's certainly helpful, probably essential, to have a teacher to point things out. “Here are some things to listen out for.” But of course, they can't do the work for you.
Dan: And it's nice to bring improvisation and bring certain things into these new tunes and this form that I like and can relate to. It's always fun to add.
SkyDeck: Add things, but it's not gimmicky. It's not like, “We can't play this music properly so we're going to superimpose some gimmick on it in order to try to attract attention.
Dan: Yeah, I'm pleased about that.
SkyDeck: I think that you play on a high level where this is just good music to listen to, regardless.
Dan: Aural traditions are by nature very strong. Because if you want to remember something, it has to be pretty good. The melodies are often very strong and very simple.
You want to be able to pass it on to the next guy and people will change little things with each generation. I find that part fascinating.
SkyDeck: And one of the fascinating things about jazz musicians is that they have the ability to adapt something that's very simple and choose how complicated they might want to make it, in the places where you think it's appropriate.
Dan: And somebody who is really into folk music, played by people who didn't really have the ability to improvise something particularly complicated, they might not appreciate it in the same way that we would.
SkyDeck: But you're selective about what you bring to it. You've got such a huge arsenal of material and vocabulary behind you that you could throw everything and the kitchen sink at it, but you don't do that. You choose when to release a little bit of something that the average non-jazz musician couldn't do.
Dan: I feel like Lester Young's the archetype of that for me. When I first listened to him and checked him out…I didn't dismiss it. As a saxophone player I thought, “This is clearly great.” I loved it but I sort of put an older label on it and moved on a bit. I’m a bit embarrassed by that now and cringe thinking about [having that attitude]. Apparently, Charlie Parker, one of his foundational periods was on some summer residency. He had a Lester Young record and learned like eight of the solos from memory. I mean, 12 keys. I've been checking him out recently. The phrasing is beautiful and it's simple and clear. From our perspective now, there's nothing that's going to blow your socks off or completely subvert your expectations. But it’s still so interesting, so complex, intricate. And the phrasing is so clever. I think we forget, as jazz musicians, that all these small moments of tension and release and creativity in the phrasing, they're just as important for a listener. But if you hear a solo with a bunch of clever phrasing in it, you'll think, “This is great. I'm enjoying this.” Do you know what I mean? It’s those small moments that you don't necessarily notice that much. They’re so much a part of the language, but they tell the story and they're really important.
SkyDeck: Well, that's a level of maturity that a lot of us don’t have early on. There’s the “gatekeeping” aspect of it, that’s been in jazz since almost the beginning, but you’re also trying to put yourself in the position of someone who's never studied music at all.
Dan: Yeah, exactly.
SkyDeck: Because this is your audience, right?
Dan: Yeah, exactly.
SkyDeck: And you wonder, “It took me dedicating my life to this in order to understand it even a little bit. But somebody who's just listening in the audience, who hasn't thought about it, cared about it, studied it, how can they possibly be appreciating it on the same level?” So then you ask, “Well, how do they actually appreciate it?” Because you know that music connects with people regardless of what they understand about it. “And what do I need to do to not dumb it down, for my own sake, but what do I do to connect with an audience that doesn't hear it anything like the way I hear it?”
Dan: Like the tension and release in any given piece of music to keep someone interested. It's not even about keeping it accessible either, but to keep the flow. To tell the right story is probably the best way of putting it. It's quite an abstract idea. I'm getting it, slowly, I think.
Dan: Back during COVID, one thing that I did enjoy was writing a bunch of new music with a singer/songwriter. And it was really interesting doing that because I had to get away from all of this complex, crazy shit I'd been studying.
You can't always just put mad chord changes into that. If you're soloing on it, you can't put a crazy [Michael] Brecker side-slip lick in there. You're gonna struggle.
SkyDeck: Or she'll just get pissed off and tell you to do it again.
Dan: Which is really what would have happened. It's not like you can't have complexity. You've just got to ask, “Is this the right way of putting it?” You've got to earn it a little bit. It's got to be justified and it's got to be serving the song. When I first got to uni, I was very much like, “I need to catch up,” in terms of chops. “I need to learn some long phrases. I need to get this stuff together.” Now, the more I play, and I play quite a lot of pop and soul music anyway, and I play with singers a lot, I think about my performance life at the moment. It's something that I've always been interested in. When I'm the front line of a band, that's important to me as well. I don't just want to throw a load of licks out or play a bunch of scary chord changes for no reason. Especially if it's on a folk song that's already beautiful.
In this Lambkin tune, the melody is super simple. It's the one with the weird rhythmic things going on. We tried to put some changes on the melody and there's not a lot you can do with it. I was also listening to this record, We Know Not What To Do. I'd been doing these pretty long, pretty rubbish, function gigs with requests and playing all this stupid music. And I’m driving back, like an hour and a half into London, and I put this scary, weird music on. All of this clicky, aggressive stuff. It was great to wash the “function” off of me. So it's not a rip off of that, but it's very much inspired by that kind of music.
I created a little study for myself, because I've been talking to Josh a lot about writing in subdivisions and thinking in subdivisions. Will Vinson is great at that as well. He's got loads of tunes where he's moving in and out of the divisions. I've been trying to check some of that out. This was sort of an exercise in that kind of thing. It ended up being really fun to play and really hard. Sam was a bit bemused when I first bought it, but, yeah, it's great. And the clever thing I've done, which is absolutely genius, and I recommend it, is that I've made my part quite simple. [laughs] There's not loads going on harmonically. It's just kind of a vibe. And that's really fun to do with Josh and Sam.
The tune, “Beeswing,” I wrote ages ago. This is probably the oldest arrangement on the record. I wrote this for my final back in 2019, so I probably started writing it in 2018. It's a Richard Thompson song. He's a folk singer from the band Fairport Conventions. I was hearing someone else playing it and I thought, “Whoa, this is stunning.” His voice on it is amazing, the storytelling is fantastic. It's got this interesting phrasing on it that I keep coming back to. I just thought, “Yeah, I'm taking that.” I think I'd been playing quite a lot of contemporary jazz that was in three anyway, that had a somewhat diatonic harmony. But I thought, “Wow, yeah. This melody is so good.”
SkyDeck: Is that from that album, My Mirror Blue Pass, by Richard Thompson? It says 1994.
Dan: Yeah. Is it as late as that? I actually can't remember what album it's from. I thought it was older than that. That's terrible. I should know that. There you go. Shows how long ago I wrote this. Yeah, I guess it must be from that. It's great. It's just a brilliant recording and I wanted to play it. Similarly with the next one: “Father. Father.” This was Laura Mvula. She went to Birmingham and studied composition there. She's a very successful singer/songwriter,. I just heard the song and thought, “Wow, I have to play that. That is a beautiful song.” You know when you hear someone sing a song, and you're like, “Yeah, I want to play that tune.” It's very simple and it's got that thing, again, about the phrasing. I just love cool phrasing, cool melodies. And it's got fantastic harmony…loads of interesting sections to it. It's such a brilliant composition. So it was easy to write a cover. I just had to write some blowing changes, really. And the section to do that.
It's got this quality which, I suppose, is also a bit of a folk music quality. There's a crossover between hymns in this country sung in church and folk melodies. It makes sense that there would be. It would be before recorded music. The most music you're going to hear is in church on a Sunday. So you might pinch a melody from that to write a song. I think some writers of hymns pinched folk melodies to write their hymns. It kind of went both ways. And all the time you've got this very strong crotchet thing. The melody is very simple rhythmically, but there might be something in the phrasing. And then you can do other things with it. Father, Father reminds me a lot of that.
Rocky Road to Dublin.This is another traditional one. We actually play it pretty straight to the original. It's a nine-eight jig which I wasn't really familiar with until I heard this tune. I thought it sounded really cool. And, in the writing already in the song, it’s got this energy to it, which naturally attracted me to it. Charlie always plays very differently to me on this one. For some reason, I mentioned earlier, I like to give it the beans when I improvise. On this one, I always do. But Charlie is just super chilled out on it. He lays back, plays sort of a chord/melody thing to start, and then comps himself. He leaves loads of space. I love it, the way it opens right out. It's not something I would have ever thought to do or really be able to do as effectively as he does. In that last chorus, when we come back in, I love this moment on the record. Everyone's just kind of hitting. Josh is hitting the shit out the drums. And there doesn't end up being a lot of rhythmic space. We don't leave any space or leave anything left on the pitch. It's a big kind of heavy ending. We tried to get that across in the mixing as well, which is nice.
Dan: This last tune, “Reedwood Rundown” sort of came from a different influence, I guess. I was listening to a lot of Joel Ross. Do you know his music?
SkyDeck: The vibes player? Yeah it's cool music.
Dan: He's a vibes player. The album Who Are You? was the one I was listening to a lot. It's a really good album. Immanuel Wilkins, that young alto player is on. It's just amazing. It's very melodic. What I love about this record is there's so much space. They play simple melodies. It also has an energy that I really like. You can tell that the writing is just really strong. It starts in a open, loose, kind of quiet place. And then it always gets super involved and it just takes you with it, takes you on this really intense thing.
I can't really draw a direct comparison as to how I got to this tune, but that's just what I was thinking of when I was trying to write it. But this was the sort of music I was listening to. And I suppose it does something similar. It's a very simple melody. It's just like very “major scale.”
SkyDeck: The title isn’t a reference to saxophone reeds, I assume?
Dan: No, it's just the wood near where I grew up, where we used to walk the dogs. It sort of felt like that. Like some dogs running through the woods, chasing a fox they thought they saw and going a bit nuts. Something a bit silly. I think it's also got a bit of Tom Ollendorf, who I was listening to a lot. British guy. He's a fantastic guitarist. I don't know if he studied classical guitar but it sounds like he’s been influenced by it. He's got such an even sound.
And he's got this kind of classical element to his writing. He writes etudes that are just beautiful, really fantastic. He plays them on electric guitar with the pick.
We didn't have loads of time. We had two days to record. And it ended up being more like one and a half days by the time you've got the right sound.
SkyDeckk: Sure.
Dan: It was quite an intense process. It was the first time I'd done a full album studio session. And Sam was ill and one of his strings was starting to unravel.
SkyDeck: Oh, man.
Dan: Yeah, stressful. So that wasn't very nice. And you can do maybe four or five takes of something and you need a break. Probably less than that. Especially if the tune is eight or nine minutes long. There's only so many times you can play a tune before people start to be like, “Oh man, we're not getting this today.”
Dan: That wasn't something I'd really thought about or prepared for and it was quite interesting.
SkyDeck: Because you're so exposed. Oftentimes, on a gig… and as a woodwind player, you wouldn't have the same level of chop fatigue a brass player is worried about. From a physical standpoint you’re thinking. “Can I get through this three hour gig?” And you're, you go, “Of course I can, because I play the saxophone. No big deal.” But when you get in the studio, it's all mental.
Dan: Right
SkyDeck: “I only have so much gas in the tank to be able to say what I want and make the ideas come out with the level of meaning I want.”
Dan: That's what was good about doing it with these guys.
We are all friends. We all get on. We'll hang out outside of the band. They can be honest with me about when it’s time to quit. “We've had enough of this. This is gonna waste time doing this any more.” And at the same time I could relax a bit into it.
But now we've got a record. I recorded at my friend Harry's house. He's got a studio in his garden. So we went down to Hastings, stayed in the town, and recorded out there. His dad is also an audio engineer and built it all himself. It's amazing, man. It's a proper studio at his house. I've been in bands with Harry before and done creative projects with him, so I've recorded in that space a lot. I know what it sounds like. He didn't have much experience producing jazz, but I sent him some references ahead of time. He gets a good drum sound. And it wasn't an experiment, exactly, but at the same time we were figuring things out. We knew he was going to do it for me fairly cheaply. “We'll get something out of this and it will sound pretty good.” And I knew with Harry, he's a great engineer and producer, and I knew I could sit with him while we mixed it and we could do it together. I knew he'd give me the grace to do that. And I knew Harry [Osborne] could get a good drum sound and that drums sounded good in that room. That was really important to me. I think we've done pretty well there. I also knew Harry could get a good guitar sound and he has recorded my saxophone before and I knew that should be okay if there’s good isolation. And he's got good equipment.
The new thing for him was the double bass. He had not recorded much jazz bass. We spent quite a lot of time getting all of this right. Since everyone was my mate, we got a lot of stuff set up the night before. Everyone was really wonderful and helpful with the process and gave so much time and energy. When we sat down to mix it, we knew we had pretty good source material to work with. And I'm not a mixing engineer by any stretch, but I've helped mixed before for other people as well as my own music. I knew what I wanted. Broadly, like, broad brush. And then Harry's kind of the opposite. He's got all this knowledge and amazing equipment, plugins, whatever, but he's not done jazz before. So between the two of us, we felt like we could get it. We got it where I think we're both happy with it. There was a bit of push and pull, I don't mind saying, like creative differences at first, but we figured it out.
SkyDeck: I think the musicians know a lot more about the recording process than they used to as well. Like your bass player, if the instrument was being miked in a completely inappropriate way, he probably has the ability to go, “Well, let's try something different. I've done this enough and I know what my instrument sounds like through the headphones, and that's not it.” I think it's probably more the case now where musicians, especially horn players, they either bring their own microphone or, at a place like Systems Two, they just know, “Well, Alex Sipiagin likes this mic, Donny McCaslin likes that one.This guy likes this one.” And that expertise just makes it so much more enjoyable and stress free. “The drummer is going to use our house drum set. He'll bring his own cymbals, but he likes this snare drum out of the ten snare drums that we own. So we'll use that one.” And it's just a breeze. And then the board is set up with the horn parts permanently on certain channels. And the reference mixes you get at the end of the day are like 90% of what you want them to be at the end before any mixing.
Dan: I think the musicians are, at least most of them, willing to go into a session and go, “Look, let's not waste time.” Whenever I've recorded with bands, everyone's sort of known what they want to sound like. We talked about this stuff in rehearsals. And Josh is so like most drummers, he's like, “I've got this new cymbal today. It's going to sound great.”
SkyDeck: It certainly helps to know a few things about microphones and basic recording techniques. If the engineer doesn’t know much about getting a sound for jazz, you can mostly work around that if you have some basics. We did a big band album in Sydney in what was probably the top studio in Australia. But in terms of knowing what to do with the horn microphones, the guitar amp, and especially the bass, we would have been in trouble with their setup. We could sort out any issues in about fifteen minutes and it was about as good as could be expected. And then it worked. That would have been endless amounts of frustration going, “That bass sounds like shit.” I might have just replaced the bass completely if it had been that bad. And it was completely isolated, so I could have theoretically replaced it all. Fortunately it worked out alright.
Dan: One challenge we did have was that nothing was very well isolated. That's why I say we had a day and a half because the first half of the first day was just getting a good sound and balance.
SkyDeck: And you were prepared musically so there weren’t basic problems like making a bunch of note mistakes on the heads. Or, “This guy missed this entrance.” Because you don't need [to be perfectly isolated], unless you're going to be doing a bunch of editing.
Dan: I think I'd find a click quite weird with this music. I don't think it would benefit it that much. Maybe some of the slower stuff. Even then I'm not sure.
SkyDeck: This last big band CD I did in New York, that cost about fifty grand, it was about ninety minutes worth of music to do in two days, which is a lot. I wasn't able to be there for the sessions but they were like, “Well, we're just putting a click on everything.” Which made it easy to fix things that they knew needed to be fixed. “Let’s just run that four bars in the saxophones where there’s a mistake.”
And if everything's to the click, you could just copy and move over whatever needed to be fixed. These are some top artists and you’d imagine them being upset not doing it the most organic way possible. But they're also very pragmatic. “Let's just get it right. Let's make it sound good.” Nobody gives a shit if there's a click on it. It's really been an interesting experience, working with top guys, getting a sense of their method. They’re so much less uptight about certain things than you think.
I’ve been surprised by some of the musicians I’ve worked with who are the freest players but didn’t mind overdubbing some parts because they were free to play what they wanted without the fear of messing up the rest of the band, especially if there weren’t going to be enough rehearsals or the musicians weren’t all at the same level.
Dan: There were a couple of other tracks that we recorded that we haven't included and I wouldn't have minded being able to overdub a few things on some of those. But I feel like the smaller the group, the harder it is to do those kinds of edits. And we didn't have the isolation, so it would have been difficult. We also didn't have loads of time, so I think it might have slowed us down.
SkyDeck: Some people get so caught up in “how it's done” which can trigger a whole “paralysis by analysis,” mental anxiety. “I've got to follow the process.” In the finished product, nobody gives a shit about that. They only care what the end result is. Now, there's validity in not faking it.
If you spent a lifetime learning how to be a jazz musician, you're not going to play verbatim solos just because you might make them a little bit better. It just matters what it sounds like in the end, but if it takes away from the essence of jazz, which is group interaction, and the hearing going in multiple directions at once, then it doesn't make it better.
SkyDeck: Tell me what you want to do next. You've got this album and I think it sounds great. Do you see this as a major milestone or is it more the case that, “This is kind of what we do everyday and this is just a document of one of those days?” Like, “Since I recorded that album, I've done five hundred gigs and I don't want to put it too much on a pedestal?”
Dan: Yeah, it does feel like a milestone. It feels like the beginning, the kind of documentation of the start of the band. We've got two sets of original material now and we're adding to it. There's plenty of stuff that's not on the record that we play live and that we could record next.
SkyDeck: Great. So then you're committed to having this group of guys do multiple things.
Dan: I would. Yeah, exactly. And that doesn't mean I only want to record this group of guys. This is a band with the sound that we all sort of write. Which to me is pretty cool. And I'm still trying to get my head around it. I really want to gig it more. I want to tour it.
SkyDeck: With this group, given that you've made this deliberate choice to include these folk songs, to do something adjacent to a standard jazz set, there might be opportunities where you make another deliberate choice to add something as unique or adjacent to the jazz experience, but not the same as. As the folk tunes. And then to see how it evolves over time, which you can't really do on the same level if you start inserting different people into it.
Dan: Right. I'm really into the idea of bands. I think a bit of it is coming from a rock background. When I was a kid, playing loads of rock music and looking at all the bands, all these people just hanging out. And then reading about it. I love Miles [Davis]'s autobiography. It's essentially just a history of bands, isn't it? And I love the idea of playing. Having played this stuff live as well now, we catch each other doing things all the time. It's so easy to play with them now.
SkyDeck: It's hard to replace that in a short period of time. You can't. You have to put in the work into the band just the way you put in the work into the saxophone over the years.
Dan: Yeah, absolutely. And I've really enjoyed that. It's been like the best part about it. I love these guys. They're great and I hope we get the chance to play more of this music. We’ll definitely make some more records. It would also be really fun to work with some singers on the folk tunes. I think about how to do that because I want to put a particular spin on it. I need to figure that out.
SkyDeck: You might have a singer in mind?
Dan: I've got a few.
SkyDeck: Rather than I want to work with a singer, let's go find one.
Dan: Right. I have some people I am thinking of calling, I think will work really well, who aren't necessarily jazz singers. It might be good for musicians who are more songwriters or folk singers. I think that would be quite interesting because I think they would approach things in a different way. So that's sort of it. I just want to write some music. There's also a London alto player, George Garford, who's an absolutely brilliant musician. He's in a band called Dreamscapes. You should check them out. I really want to write some two horns music for him.
SkyDeck: Brilliant, man. Will do. It's been cool to talk to you. I enjoyed it and we'll see you soon.
Dan: Likewise. Cheers, man.
