My Montanaversary

Plus a Q&A with pianist Karin Johansson

My backyard.

Before we begin: My latest Ugly Beauty jazz column is up now at Stereogum. I profiled the Black Art Jazz Collective and reviewed new albums by Alice Coltrane, Charles Lloyd, James Brandon Lewis & the Messthetics, and more. Go read, then come back.

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The weather is warming up fast here in Montana. When my wife and I flew here from New Jersey on March 15, 2023, it was cold, but not bitterly so — somewhere in the mid-30s, getting down to the mid-20s at night. One year later, it was almost 60 degrees this past weekend, which was somewhat surprising. That said, we’ve been somewhat conditioned after 12 months of living here — 45 now feels like 70 to us. I see people walking around in T-shirts on 45-degree days and they don’t even seem insane.

Life in Montana has not offered the culture shock I feared. The county in which we live, in the northwest part of the state, is frequently described as a conservative redoubt, but overt signs of right-wing brain worms are few and far between. One weekend, while walking down a nearby town’s main street, I saw a big truck with a MAGA hat resting on the dashboard, and I wasn’t worried or even disturbed; I just thought, Really? Still? When we first arrived, we went to Starbucks for breakfast, and I saw a truck in the parking lot with anti-vax bumper stickers (NO VACCINE — I HAVE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM was the one that I remember) and all I thought was, Yeah, but you’re going to Starbucks for your overpriced coffee just like everybody else.

I recently read Betsy Gaines Quammen’s True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, hoping to gain some insight into the people with whom we’d chosen to surround ourselves. (I’m hoping to connect with her for an interview soon, which will appear in this newsletter.) It’s a well-written book, full of vivid portraits of people of varying political persuasions, many of whom are quite insane. And Quammen criticizes their politics and their aggressive rhetoric, and provides litanies of their crimes when that’s important to know, but at the same time she often describes her in-person encounters with them in distressingly friendly language, which can feel like “Well, he was nice enough to me” special pleading. She also paints equally vivid portraits of people on the other end of the political spectrum, and of people who still think of themselves as conservative but have had enough of chatroom hardasses’ bullshit. And she introduces the reader to people grappling with larger issues, too, like wildlife management and agriculture and climate change. Ultimately, it’s not a sensationalistic book intended to scare you into thinking the Mountain West is a hotbed of Nazism or apocalyptic Christian militia-sects building bunkers at the top of every mountain ridge. Which is a good thing, because my impression after a year in Montana is that she’s right — it’s not.

The impression Quammen creates is that the hard-right types in Montana (and Idaho, and Oregon) are like hard-right types everywhere: mostly isolated, mostly distrusted and disliked by their neighbors, and not winning many converts to their “cause.” And indeed, the people I’ve met in my first year here have been really nice. Now, granted, it’s a small sample size, and probably skewed by the fact that I live in a town that gets a lot of tourists in the summer, from all over the country. So people here have a business interest in being friendly and open-minded, or at least keeping their more potentially alienating opinions to themselves around strangers. But the fact remains that the experiences I’ve had that pulled me up short — seeing a dude with a gun on his hip waiting to buy donuts at the grocery store (oh my god, the donuts are so fucking good); the aforementioned anti-vax bumper sticker; reading about someone murdering a homeless person in Kalispell — can be counted on one hand. One of my neighbors drives a giant pickup truck with no license plates, and has a beard down to his sternum, but when I see him, we wave and say hello.

And anyway, for me life in Montana’s not really about the people. It’s about the sheer beauty of the place itself. Every day, I look out my window at a range of mountains that stretches all the way to the horizon. The trees are taller than most of the buildings in the town where I used to live. I can drive five minutes down the road and be standing on the rocky shore of the largest lake in the western half of the US, staring at crystal clear water all the way to the horizon.

A few weeks ago, driving home from Target, we saw four bald eagles — three adults and a juvenile (its head feathers hadn’t turned white yet) — eating a deer carcass in a field. During late summer and early fall, a herd of deer, sometimes as many as 20, would come out of the woods every evening and placidly eat their way across the field behind my apartment as the sun turned the sky pink.

Any time I feel overworked or stressed or annoyed, I can walk out my front door and down the road, stare out at the landscape, and feel a grin of pure goofy joy spread across my face. It’s literally breathtaking just to drive down the highway, or up a mountain road overlooking the lake, and take in the vastness of it. I’ve been here a year and I haven’t even begun to get blasé about it. I hope I never do.

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The label side of this operation, Burning Ambulance Music, has eight superb releases and an equally awesome compilation available. The albums are all pay-what-you-want for the digital versions, and the CDs come in beautiful heavy cardboard mini-LP style sleeves, printed on textured paper. Stop by our Bandcamp page and listen; I’m sure you’ll find something that speaks to you.

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I’ve been a fan of pianist Karin Johansson for several years now. I first heard her as part of a duo with saxophonist Lisen Rylander Löve; I reviewed their album on the main site. The video above was her contribution to the Burning Ambulance Festival, an online-only event I put together on New Year’s Day 2022. More recently, I’ve heard her project Ord, which set poet Thomas Tranströmer’s writing to chamber jazz arrangements (piano, a couple of horns, bass) on the album Hemligheter på vägen, and now she’s working with composer Rosanna Gunnarson on the album I grunda vikar är bottnarna mjuka (translation: In shallow bays the seabed is soft).

The album is in large part made up of underwater field recordings made by Gunnarson at various times of year, and a recording of a piano being lowered into the water — the inspiration for the album was a story by August Strindberg in which this happens. Responding to this sonic material and a partly graphic score, Johansson then added prepared piano improvisations at a studio in Göteborg. The result is dark, wood-toned, haunted music; sudden eruptions of scraping wire and booming keys mix with the burble and churn of the water and soft, subtle drones of indeterminate origin. Although it offers startling jumps in volume over its roughly 45-minute running time, it’s a deeply immersive (no pun intended) record best experienced on headphones.

I sent Karin Johansson five questions by email; her responses are below.

What’s your background as a pianist? What kind of training did you do in school (or anywhere else), and when did you begin to move into prepared piano and other unconventional techniques?

I grew up in Malmö, Sweden, and started to play the piano as a child, mainly classical music. As a teenager I began listening to jazz and all kinds of music. I went to music high school and started to play in various bands. When I was in my twenties I traveled in Cameroon for five months with two musician friends. That journey made a deep impact on me; I learned a lot about life and music. We experienced so much amazing music; among other things, we visited the pygmies. After a while I moved to Gothenburg where I was educated at the Academy of Music and Drama. After my degree I worked a lot with composing and playing theatre music, in addition to playing in bands. I was also active as a trombonist for a few years, but that’s another story. The first time I prepared a piano was in 1994 when I made music for a theatre play by the Swedish writer and actor Staffan Westerberg. I am still fascinated by the possibilities to explore new sounds and to find my own approach to the piano. 

How do you personally strive to avoid clichés in your music — not just the clichés of genre (jazz, classical) but the clichés that govern improvisation as well?

Improvisation is very much about being present, finding your own language and walking into the unknown. It is a never-ending adventure which I constantly practice. Listening and having good communication when playing together is very important to me. Working with creative musicians inspires and challenges me to get new musical ideas. Musicians I have worked with for many years mean a lot to me, as well as new collaborations are important. Everyone has their own individual way of expressing themselves and communicating. 

What was the process (from concept to technical realization) behind I grunda vikar är bottnarna mjuka? Were you part of the field recordings or did you just record in response to what you received from Rosanna Gunnarson?

I grunda vikar är bottnarna mjuka (In shallow bays the seabed is soft) is inspired by August Strindberg’s classic short story about a fortepiano being dropped into deep waters off an archipelago island, Stora grusharpan. The musical content is based partly on Rosanna’s secret underwater recordings during a summer, autumn and winter, as well as her audio recordings of a piano being lowered into the water, to the great surprise of curious fish. The recorded material has then been mixed into an audio file and then, based on a partly graphic score, I have developed improvisations on prepared grand piano. I was not part of the field recordings but we worked a lot together with the score before I recorded, to find the right timing and sounds for my preparations. The score includes both graphic and traditional notation. 

(From the liner notes: The result is a deep dive into an archipelago bay. A collage of the sound environment in an increasingly threatened sea, in dialogue with resounding memories of a lost childhood by the Baltic Sea. It is about setting anchor, learning to swim, and finding yourself at the intersection of three different worlds — the one above the surface, the one below the surface, and your own inside.)

I’ve also heard your collaboration with Lisen Rylander Löve, and the album you made with ORD. What do you think your projects have in common? What is the key element that makes your music your own?

I use prepared piano in different ways depending on the context and who I’m working with; free improvisation, free jazz or sound art/contemporary. Sometimes I combine preparations and alternative techniques with conventional playing and composition in the same context. I like to work with a variety of pianos and similar instruments; grand piano and upright of course, but also square piano, accordion, pump organ, zither, Michelsonne-pianos and different types of kalimbas. 

All of the records I’ve heard of yours are very much records — they’re not just documents of improvisation, you really use the studio and recording technology as a conceptual tool. Why is that important to you?

My ideas for an album often come to me as a combination of music and something else, such as images, texts or an impression I’ve got of a specific place. With the ORD album Hemligheter på vägen (Secrets on the Way) I wanted to set Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry to music and include free improvisations. I also had the idea for the album cover; a photo of myself as a child. Lisen Rylander Löve’s and my album Arter (Species) takes its titles from the Red List of Threatened Species. Many species (plants and animals) disappear completely from our planet yearly, which we wanted to shine a light on. We spent one day in the recording studio and all music was improvised. Vent, the album with Finn Loxbo, is based on the idea of specific acoustic rooms. We recorded in several locations and I played various instruments depending on the situation, all improvised. The album with Rosanna Gunnarson is a bit different because she, as the composer, invited me to the project. I really like her work and she has great ideas. It was an adventure when we carried a grand piano to the beach of Värmdö in the Stockholm archipelago, the place where she made the field recordings, and we performed the piece there. 

Sometimes I record improvised music live in front of an audience, without having any specific ideas in advance. I find both of these approaches interesting and complementary. To mention two live albums: Quagmire with Nina de Heney, myself and Henrik Wartel and Live at Elementstudion [with the] Jonny Wartel Quartet. The next upcoming album is with the trio of Paul Jarret, myself and Donovan von Martens, a Swedish/French collaboration. 

That’s it for now. See you next week!