Last week Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah were kind enough to sit down with the Ithaca Times in order to discuss their music, their compositional and improvisational practices, their new album Fantaseo, the changes wrought by the advent of digital technology, and many other aspects of their craft.
Ithaca Times: You are often mentioned as one of the earliest examples of so-called ‘world music’ who achieved success. What was it like when you began, and what changes have you observed over the past two decades?
Jorge Strunz: When we began playing together in 1979, the category did not exist. In fact, we experienced great difficulties finding someone who would release our albums. Record companies considered our music a risk.
Ardeshir Farah: Things began to change in the late 1980s. We would like to think that we may have played a small part in that. Certainly the Gypsy Kings were instrumental in paving the way for a certain approach.
Strunz: Paco de Lucia, John Mclaughlin, and Al Di Meola’s trio were an important precursor, and were very supportive of what we were doing. In the beginning, I think we appealed to a cross-section of audiences, including guitar players and jazz fusion fans, in addition to audiences from our respective cultural backgrounds.
Ithaca Times: The violin seems to play an important part in your music. How do you conceive of its role in relation to the two guitars?
Jorge Strunz: The combination of violin and guitar is a time-honored one, and quite beautiful [. . .] it is also a combination that we have found fascinating and very fruitful for our own music, notably with Charlie Bisharat [the violinist who records and tours with Strunz & Farah, —ed.]. But we’ve worked with other violinists, notably with L. Subramanian, the Indian master, earlier in our career, and we’ve always found that the guitar and violin work very well together. One of the reasons for this, apart from timbral contrast, which I think is a beautiful contrast, is the fact that the violin is able to sustain notes for a longer period of time than the guitar, and so the violin lends a bit of relief to the composition at hand. In fact the violin is one of the most, if not the most, agile instruments of all, in terms of scales and melodies. If you listen to classical violin concertos in comparison to the guitar, well, the guitar cannot possibly do that, no matter how good a plectrum player you are—those things are beyond the guitar.
So the violin has great range and musical ability, and it it lends its eloquence and support, especially in the hands of someone as talented as Charley. His presence brings not only the instrument’s capability but also the player’s capability—his own capability—to the music, and we’ve always found it a fascinating combination. And it’s a combination that goes way back with us. Certainly it’s been done in the past and will be done again. Take John McGlaughlin with Jerry Goodman, even in the fusion period, that was a wonderful combination, the electric guitar with the electric violin was a fascinating combination.
Ithaca Times: What about the choice between fretless and fretted bass? The bass playing on the new record seems to be fretless primarily, but not all of it. Do you have a choice in mind between fretted and fretless bass, or between acoustic and electric bass, at the compositional stage, or do you make those decisions at the time of recording?
Jorge Strunz: The choice between fretted and fretless bass comes in—well, I would say, some of the them were deliberately chosen, as with the album Zona Torrida, where we had upright bass, that choice was made at the compositional stage. But when it concerned to the electric bass, the choice between fretted and fretless was made at the rehearsal stage of the recording, when we were able to play with the different bass players whom we utilized, and we would try things with the bassists, in one case with fretted, and in another case with fretless, and we would make a production decision at that point, and say “well, we will only do this particular piece with a fretless bass. For the sake of contrast, for the sake of sonority, the sound of the fretlessbass in this particular tune might make a nice combination.” So there are things that are based at that point upon hearing it, after Ardishir and I have the piece under our fingers and after we have the particular piece well rehearsed.
Ithaca Times: I also wanted to ask you about your approach to rhythmic composition. And a lot of people have commented in the past on your melodic and harmonic choices, especially regarding improvisation. But what about your conception and approach to the rhythmic side of your compositions, which are striking and often quite complex? For example, the percussion part in “Bello Mundo” from Fantaseo has an interesting percussion part and approach to time. The snare falls on four, but there is an odd accentuation at times.
Jorge Strunz: Exactly. It has an unusual kick in the melody. You think that you are in a rhumba, which you are, but basically the melody requires a twist, you have to offset it, in order to accompany the melody properly. So in that particular piece, it’s nice that you noted that, the melody dictated the way that it had to be accompanied. So that rhythmic approach—and we tried a couple of things, I remember on that particular tune we tried all kinds of different things to see what would work, because we liked the melody the way it was, and we tried two or three, in fact I think we recorded two or three different percussionists even, didn’t we Ardishir, until we finally decided upon the final thing, which we are finally happy with, being the right accompaniment for the melody. But it definitely took some doing, and because of that rhythmically unusual turn of phrase in the main melody.
Ithaca Times: You often use additional percussionists, congas and so forth. But that piece also featured a more conventional drum kit, correct?
Jorge Strunz: Yes, Jimmy Granly was playing the trap set on that, he’s an excellent young Cuban player.
Ithaca Times: And what is the time signature for the piece, “Bello Mundo”?
Jorge Strunz: Well, we actually of it think of it as being in 4/4. You can write it in 4/4, but you can also say it has a measure of five. It depends on how you look at it. I prefer to look at it, just to keep things simple, as being 4/4 all the way through, because you can write it out that way and it comes out square. Except . . . one of those measures in 4/4 has an accent that shifts, and all of a sudden the melody starts on beat four instead of beat one, where you normally think a melodic turn of the phrase should be, so, I remember when we were discussing it with Charley (the violinist) and the other musicians, they would say, “Jorge, are you writing that in 4/4? Or are you going to put in a measure of 5 or 7 in there?” (laughs) And well, we decided, and we said, “we’re thinking of it as 4/4 for the sake of simplicity, because it is does work out in 4/4, but if it is easier for you to play the melody by thinking of it with a measure of five, then by all means, that’s a good way to think of it.” We hadn’t written it that way, though. Originally we had written it as being in 4/4 and just playing it as-the-melody-falls-kind-of-a-thing. But you will notice that that kick hits at at an unusual place. And I think that the odd kick drum is part of the charm of the melody, we wanted a little surprise turn in the melodic line, one that would not jar the rhythm, but would give it an interesting twist, and hopefully a charming twist. We finally gave it to Jimmy Granly, the trap player, the drummer, and we had already put the congas on the recorded version. This is exactly the way not to record a rhythm section (laughs), that is, to add the drums to the recording last, (laughs). I mean, not recommended! Although it’s done from time to time, certainly; and that’s what we ended up doing on that piece, because the original drum track that we had recorded for “Bello Mundo” was dead in the water and was not helping the tune at all and we said, “My god, that isn’t working,” although we loved the conga part. And so we finally decided to do the drum part again, and we explained it to Jimmy, explained how the melody went, our approach to it, and we ssaid. “Look, please go ahead and play around with it, with the conga and the melody, and see what you can come up with.” You see, we felt that rather than write in his part, which frankly I wasn’t sure how to approach correctly from his perspective, I simply said, “why don’t you do it and come up with something?” and he’s a master percussionist and I think that he came up with a very clever idea as to how to accompany it.
Ithaca Times: What are further examples for your rhythmic resources?
Jorge Strunz: Well of course one of the big resources is the whole Afro-Latin approach. There are a wealth of resources there, which we draw on in terms of different rhythms. It helps us also to specify things to our percussionists. Our percussion section is primarily traditional Afro-Latin in approach, so I say play this one like a mamboor, play this one like walompoor, play this one like a rhumba, or play this one like a songmontuno and everybody knows what I am talking about, and we are all on the same page, so I don’t have to get into writing out charts or writing out the parts. Because we speak common musical languages, the percussionists know these approaches by feel, or by name, and we just tailor the rhythmic approach to the composition at that point. In the case of the Middle Eastern pieces, Ardishir will bring in a Middle Eastern percussionist, of which there are a number of excellent ones here also in Los Angeles that we can choose from, and we will discuss what the tune is, and play it for them, and discuss the various options that the piece could have in terms of the types of drums that we are hearing over it, and then they will then come up with a couple of options that might fit, and then we will select among the options they present, both in terms of the drums, in terms of timbre, but also in terms of the rhythmic pattern itself. So, much of our work with the rhythm section is very collaborative. In our music we don’t like to write every little thing out, so that everybody is playing off of the page, for our rhythm section—in order to maintain the ethnic interest, we find it important for them to be able to contribute to the piece, and to feel free and confident within their own cultural expression, to fit in with the music.
Ithaca Times: What about melodic and harmonic material? If you had to characterize your approach to improvisation, in terms of scales, modes, and other resources?
Jorge Strunz: Well, a lot of the modalities that we use are, for example, found, in the case of Ardishir, in Middle Eastern music, and in my case, in flamenco. But also in jazz, for example we use melodic minor scales, which are not typically found often in Middle Eastern music but are common to jazz. We use a wide palette of scale possibilities for the piece, and although the pieces tend to have an ethnic base or connotation, the improvisation is more internationalized, I think, that is to say, it is expanded out, it is cognizant of jazz, and of other improvisational devices, scale-wise, and harmonically, that maybe are not found, say, individually in strictly afro-latin music or in Middle Easter music, but we try to expand or to open up the box in that way as well in our improvisational parts. The material includes harmonic minors, moorish minors, all of the modes of the major scale; it includes melodic minors and its various applications, which are used for altered chords such as flatted fives and flatted nines, and sharp nines—I don’t want to get too techincal—some of those things come into play.
On the piece “Luxuriance,” the piece on which the flutist Hubert Laws plays, which is the last piece on Fantaseo, in the solo section, to play those solos properly on that chord cycle you have to use three different melodic minor keys, in addition to a simple aeolian minor. The first two chords are E minor and D, so that is going to be clearly an aeolian minor in the E minor scale, but all of a sudden you get into altered chords, and suddenly you get into a melodic minor, and then the next chord after that pops you into another melodic minor, and so those kinds of solos you have to set up ahead of time. You have to study them and you have to practice them. Hubert had a good time with them, because he is of course a master at this kind of thing, and he found this particular string of harmonies interesting, and the use of the different scales required to play those solos is again something that you don’t get a lot in the more traditional musics.
Ithaca Times: But you still play through the changes, when improvising in that sort of chord cycle?
Jorge Strunz: Oh absolutely. That’s why the melodic minors come into play, because each chord requires a certain melodic minor, say. We work it out ahead of time.
Ithaca Times: But you don’t write out the solos ahead of time, do you?
Jorge Strunz: No, no we don’t. that’s the one thing that we don’t write out. We don’t because we like that sort of spontaneous feeling that we get when we improvise. Even if it is in the studio, when you come in, you’ve got some idea. You’ve practiced, you’ve rehearsed, you’ve gone through the chord changes, you know, we tend to study a tune like that in two different sections. One is the structural composition part, and then we separate the solo part and study that separately, because that requires a different focus, because you want to be spontaneous the day of the recording, and you want it to have that composed-on-the-spot feel, because it has a certain excitement to it, and so yes those parts are composed in the studio. if there is a little mistake or error in the studio, you can fix that, and if you went prematurely to one scale, you can try it again, or you can repair the note that you think was mistaken. But by and large you do have that solo prepared and ready to go for the recording. And it requires, as I say, quite a different focus from the rest of the composition—which is all written out, so to speak, and harmonized like a traditional composition would be.
Ithaca Times: Regarding this different focus, the focus required to open up the improvisational demands offered by your intricate compositions, how long does it take to internalize the material that you are absorbing for the solo sections?
Jorge Strunz: For the solo sections? Well, it takes a while. Say, for example, let’s take the piece that we were just talking about, “Luxuriance,” (the final piece from the new album, Fantaseo). That piece requires so many modulations, simply to play the solo part properly—I mean, it does not sound abstract or modern or anything, it’s quite melodic—but it does require you to be shifting keys much of the time as you are playing through those changes. You have to practice on your own. We practice togehter too, of course, Ardeshir and I, but each of us must practice on our own in order to map out wherewe are going to play each key and to understand how it blends in with the part or melodic phrase that comes before it. So it becomes a matter not only of the preparation that you’ve had as a musician your whole life, in order to deal with something like that, but in terms of that specific tune, the piece will require hours and hours of practice in order to master it, to prepare for recording it.
Ithaca Times: Obviously music technology has changed since you first began. How much of an impact has the developoment of computer software and digital recording environments made on your music?
Jorge Strunz: I think that Ardeshir would agree with me on this, we use the luxuries afforded by digital manipulation only as needed, and thus quite rarely. Our music tends to be very organic, and we try to render it as we would a live performance. Having said that, yes we do record in multitrack, we don’t go in the five of us and all at once and record the tune all at once. It is a multitrack process. We usually use one or two people, at most, at a time, and then, one person at a time after that. So you can focus very, very closely on one person’s performance. The idea is to get the best performance possible. It’s almost like making a movie. You want to get the best reading, the best performance, the best emotional context. It is definitely a studio art. But having said, that we do not use much editing. The amount of editing and sampling used, say, in popular electronoic music today is far, far beyond what we contemplate in the studio. We do take advantage of modern editing technology, as do all of our peers, obviously, in order to be competitive. But we do try to keep it organic sounding, as if it were a flawless performance, in other words. But yes we use a click track, a digital metronome if you will: you have to use it to provide a grid simply because musicians are recording on different days. So yes, most of our pieces have a click track or metronome, that’s the one universal standard that you can count on. If you didn’t use a metronome or click track, it won’t work—unless you are all recording while all performing together, yes, there is a pulse and a nuance when everyone is performing together live, and sometimes there is a moment when everyone is moving or rushing together at one particular bar in order to arrive at a certain moment that catches you, and that is exciting—well, when you do multitrack recording you give that up for a different kind of perfection, a different kind of approach. It has good and bad to it, but it is in fact the style of the day.
Ardeshir Farah: Digital technology has basically provided us with a lot of simplicity to record the performance, the performing of our music maybe faster or easier. But we don’t use technology to change pitch or speed to affect it.
Jorge Strunz: No, no, nothing like that. We do not alter the music with digital technology. I am always amazed by much of popular music today, how it all sampled. That is an art form in and of itself, but it is not the way that I am accustomed to playing music.
Ithaca Times: So have the costs of recording records gone down, thanks to digital recording technology?
Jorge Strunz: They have. Which is fantastic. The technology has liberated the musicians quite a deal in this regard. Because you don’t have to go into a studio now and pay hundreds of dollars an hour in order to get a state of the art recording, with state of the art specs and such. We record most of our records here at home in my home studio, and we get all of the specs fully professional, up to par, and we know how to get a great guitar sound, since it’s basically a guitar studio that we run here, it’s great for recording the guitar. The focus is clearly on acoustic instruments, we wouldn’t know what to do with a very electronic thing, that’s a specialty that we wouldn’t know where to begin (laughs).
Ithaca Times: And so Selva is your home studio. Do you engineer the recordings yourself?
Jorge Strunz: We do. Usually since there are two us, one will engineer while the other is performing. As for mixing, Ardishir will sit at the mixing desk when we mix, he’s the hands-on mixer. I will sit at the back and give verbal commentary. We do have help sometimes from one of our assistants, Chris, who is an expert in pro-tools recording and who helps us out in the office. He comes in for any of the more techically advanced issues concerning Pro-Tools.
Ithaca Times: And so you use Pro Tools as your environment?
Jorge Strunz: We use Pro Tools, but also Tascam MX 24, or a combination of both of those things. It’s like a pro tools thing but it’s hardware, it’s not a DAW.
Ithaca Times: Along these lines, the changes in technology, how has that affected the distribution of your music? How has the internet affected distribution?
Jorge Strunz: Oh my goodness yes. We are trying to grapple with that, as is everyone in the industry right now. Chris was just telling us the other day that he read somewhere that half of the revenue generated today in the recording business is generated by Cds and half by the downloads. And the trend is going up for downloads and down for Cds, so we are seeing the end as we know it for Cds. That will be a technology of the past before too awful long and will be a thing of the past sooner than we think. Tower Records just shut down, those were landmarks in LA and other cities, which was sad in a way, to see that go, that was where we used to go for music, although I suppose lately I’ve been getting most of my Cds from amazon, the ability to order them and have them delivered to my door. I hadn’t been to a Tower in a while but their closing affects our sales in that we are learning to make less Cds now and to use the internet, and finding ways to promote through the internet is the nut that we are trying to crack. People are tryign to find different ways to do that, which make sense, most of the music, if you are on the internet it is not like browsing the jazz section in a record store. But now there’s YouTube, there’s myspace—my god, with myspace has become such a huge thing, using it for promotion. All of the major artists have myspace presence. We have a page, or are working on one. We have two actually, which were set up by two different fans who very kindly took it upon themselves to set up pages for us, and now just redcently we are working with one of them to take it over and have our own space on it. Chris advised us to that, and the guy who put it up was very amenable to that because he himself was a guitar player. He had set up a page, as a fan, because no one else had, and we are a little late to the myspace business, but we are climbing on board now.
Ithaca Times: Are you distributing the new CD yourself?
Jorge Strunz: We are. We work with a national distributor for the actual plastic product, and we work with people who service I-Tunes and other download service—iota is the company’s name and they provide our music to I-tunes and others . . . Strunz & Farah appears in I-tunes only with the ampersand, not with the word “and” spelled out, and there are thirteen albums and 143 some tunes are available.
Ithaca Times: There are famous instances of so-called ‘college’ rock bands selling thousands of records after receiving a favorable review on a national music website, such as Pitchforkmedia.com. Is there anything comparable in world music or jazz? Is there a web hub or central node for the community of listeners?
Jorge Strunz: Well we are trying to figure it out too! As I am sure others are. It is a game that is relatively new, but one that I’m sure where you have to climb aboard otherwise the business will shift without you. You can’t rely on Cds and selling plastic anymore. I mean 50% is still a massive amount of the market, but it’s not the entire market, as it was a few years ago, when Cds were 100% of the market.
Ithaca Times: So do you see monthly repoorts on downloads?
Jorge Strunz: We do, and we get a monthly check from the services that provide them. And we’ve noticed that the checks can be significant. We notice that there is increased activity in downloading for example our music on the internet. Conversely we notice that the orders that we are getting for manufactured Cds are less. The distributor, a manufacturer, and so on. The manufacturer ships to the distributor, who happpens to be in the Bay area, and then the distributor from there will send them to what’s left of the records stores which I guess amounts to Barnes and Nobles and Borders-type stores, and the occasional mom & pop stores here and there, b/c there’s not much in the big chains, and I wonder how long the distributors will stay in business . . . it’s still 50% of the market so it’s not over yet, but the handwriting is definitely on the wall, it’s going to be a thing of the past. The question now is how to monetize the internet so that the artists aren’t left out in the cold, I mean, it was bad enough in the music industry for artists years ago, where you never get paid anyway, but at least you understood how that game worked, but now, it’s like, it’s a state of flux, . . . it certainly offers a lot of potential, but it is something that we will have to see how it plays out. This particular record is interesting b/c it is one that is right in the middle of things and we will have a sense of how things are going in february and march, so that we can see how much we can afford to invest in making a CD anymore, where we are recording perhaps single tracks and offering them for downloads or even taking a different approach to the whole recording process.
Ithaca Times: At what point, in what year, did you begin to see the annual reports for downloads and to begin thinking about mp3 sales for downloads? In the last year or three or?
Jorge Strunz: In the last year and a half, certainly not before. It’s very recent.
Ithaca Times: So what is the role of the internet in the world music ocmmunity or the jazz community? In some genres, communities of web users seem to comprise the whole story, especially in urban music and other smaller, more obscure dance genres. Cultural capital, and what some refer to as “hipness,” for example, can generate significance sales through the internet, especially now that the possibility of simply ordering a tune of interest immediately through the computer now exists. Is there anything like that in your musical communities, for world music or jazz?
Jorge Strunz: There is a world music site, world music central, it is something like a clearing house I believe, but it does not necessarily generate income or have an active messsage board even. It helps to disseminate information about world music, I suppose, but basically we don’t have anything like that for our genre of music. There’s probably guitar-oriented sites and forums, they tend to cooperate a lot by linking up with each other and so on, but we haven’t climbed aboard that world yet. YouTube and Myspace both offer some of that, but we are brand new to it, we are neophytes in that realm, and it would be premature to say how well it is working out. We are so new to it that we really can’t know. In about a year, or even six months, we should know, how that whole thing is shaking down with our new record. But it’s still premature. I think that to a certain extent we are as confused as anybody else as to which way the thing is going or as to how to make it work, how to get new fans for the music in a sense. We have the traditional activity of performing and gigging of course, that is one way to do it. But in terms of other outlets, well, radio for example is just so narrow today, radio play is a very difficult thing to get, in the sense of getting rotation, which is the only meaningful kind of radio play to get, because if you don’t have rotation it’s a hit or miss proposition, you have to have rotation to make any segment of the population that this kind of music, or even this specific tune, even exists. Smooth jazz is the only thing that offers anything like that on a national basis, and you have to fit very much into that category, and it’s a Clear Channel kind of thing, you have to fit into that format, and it’s very conservative, and you know very narroww as to what they will accept. A lot of jazz musicians hate it. So there’s not really a broad forum to reach the public, which is a problem for instrumental music, how to reach the public broadly. And I don’t see anything that’s coming around to replace that. Maybe some of the satellite radio has differnet genres and I know htat we’re played on that occasionally, but again I don’t know how much rotation that is, and it’s rotation that generates a lot of economic interest. Like for example in the early 90s when we were being played on the NAC, “new adult contemprary,” which was the precursor to smooth jazz, when our records came out in those days, they were very popular in that format, that means that you got rotation in New York City, in San Francisco, in LA and Houston and Miami, and you were there nationwide, and our record sales went through the roof, because people heard it and we were selling hundreds of thousands of records for guitar music, because we were being exposed to a mass market and a mass audience. There is nothing like that today that I know of. For much instrumental music, much less our own. World music has its outlets hither and thither, but they are not really rotation oriented, and it’s flavor of the month, and it’s tossed out the next time a new exoticism comes, and it’s no way to make a living. We have our own label, my wife runs the label with Chris’ help. And we’re not sure where this goes. We’re lucky in that we have a good core audience, we have people who have been following us for a long time. The trick for us is to find new audiences, in addition to our core following. That’s becoming a little bit more difficult in the sense that it’s all fragmenting in so many different ways that you need to follow so many different threads to reach your potential audience. It’s a fascinating study, and I’m sure that there are many different ways to do it, and we are in the process of finding those ways. But it is very much in a transitional stage for us as a company and record label.
Ithaca Times: What about soundtrack work, for movies?
Jorge Strunz: We’ve done that very, very occasionally. It’s not something that we’ve done a lot. Even though we live in LA, it’s a whole specialty area, there are agents who specialize only in that, and since our music is so genre-specific, so guitar-specific, that we haven’t really thought of marketing our music to the movie industry. We have gotten calls from them occasionally because they know the sound would suit one of their scenes or some aspect of their production, but it isn’t something that we look at as a steady form of work, the nature of our music isn’t exactly suitable for that. In other words, the two guitar format, the Latin and Middle Eastern combination, there’s only so much of that that any movie studio might want.
Ardeshir Farah: We did something for Michael Mann back in the late 80s, in about 1987 or1988, and again in 2003 for a Tom Cruise movie. It’s been sporadic.
Jorge Strunz: It hasn’t been something that we’ve really pursued, maybe we should. It’s been off our radar, but every now and then someone does mention it as a possibility and maybe it would be interesting to see what the possibilities would be.