Joe Armon-Jones interview: “With jazz you’re almost trying to overthink and add things… it becomes difficult to do the opposite”
Ezra Collective co-founder chats solo album action
It’s become a familiar refrain. Lockdown may have caused misery and isolation for many millions, but for the world of some music makers it certainly had its advantages.
For one Joe Armon-Jones, for instance, best known as co-founder of and painist/keyboard player with nu-jazz figureheads and recent Mercury Music Prize winners Ezra Collective, but also a profilic solo artist and collaborator, it afforded the time – and the necessity – to build a home studio in his Bromley base, shipping in a mixing desk.
That in turn, would lead him down the rabbit hole of production – and most specifically the production work of the 70s dub pioneers which would go on to shape just about every form of dance music that followed it. As well as fresh perspectives on his creativity, those experiments also led to not one but two double solo albums, the recently released All The Quiet (part 1) and All The Quiet (part 2), set for release on June 13.
“I was already into that music and into the concept of dub mixing and using the console as an instrument, basically. At first I was just playing around, experimenting, and I had time off so I was just learning how it works. I’m not too technical really, most of the knowledge I had about music is to do with harmony and rhythm really, the playing side of things. It (production and mixing) used to throw me for six and it still does, really, I’m dyspraxic, so certain things confuse me really.
It’s often said that such conditions have upsides as well as downsides, we offer, especially to creatuve people. What does he reckon?
“I don’t know…” It probably does, but all I can see is it makes me clumsy!”
“I got really into the idea of getting a good mix,” he tells us when we meet for a mid-morning coffee and goeey croissants near Camden Market. “It began to dominate my mind, especially with the dub thing. Because you can appreciate a jazz thing even with a weird mix – remember when in the late 90s and the early 2000s they started doing crazy things with the mixes on jazz records, as soon as they got the digital thing… To me those records sound really bad but you can still appreciate them because of the playing.
“But there’s something special about dub music, that part of it has to be right otherwise it doesn’t work. But the more I get into it, the harder I find it to find any rules that you’d actually apply – you know, like always eq-ing the kick like this or always you always make the bass louder than this. Some mixes, they sound huge, but when you analyse it you realise it’s not actually very bassy.
“It’s like when you listen to anything from the Paradise Garage, Larry Levan, that era of music, it sounds really phat but when you compare it to mixes to that came later, oh, it’s not really bassy at all. The bassiest thing is the kicks, then the bass is actually in the mid. There’s some dub music like that as well, because the kick drum’s on the three, not all four beats, that doesn’t matter… The bass is still the main thing down there because you only hear the kick drum one time in the bar.
But isn’t it a similar thing to playing in an outfit like Ezra Collective, where musicians have to find their niche in the arranagements and make space for the other members to express themselves too?
“Yeah, appreciating the group dynamic and not try to put you opinion onto absolutely everything. It’s kind of weirdly similar in the mix, especially in that music, leaving space for all these things to happen. It’s a mix of what music people make, in physical terms, and what frequency you decide to put everything at. It’s the connection between those two things that make it sound like that. Jazz musicians have a hard time doing that – not all jazz musicians, but some. With jazz you’re almost trying to overthink and add things. Making something more complex… Because of all that training and learning, it becomes difficult to do the opposite, to take everything out.”
The resulting tracks are a fascinating fusion of styles, from the brass-swaddled and Rhodes-splashed reggae vibes of ‘Lifetones’ to the broken beat sashay of ‘Nothing Noble’, the frisky piano soloing of ‘The Citadel’ and the hip-hop strut of ‘Eye Swear’, with vocals from Brooklyn-born, South London-based Goya Gumbani.
Part two, meanwhile, will include the dream team pairing of hotly tipped West London singer-songwriter Greentea Peng and South London’s Warp-signed equally lauded hip-hop/indie Wu-Lu. But beyond the high profile ‘features’, collaboration – despite the single name on the spine – is key to its success.
So, before the year solitary and technical ‘dub’-style work of feeding stems back through the mixing desk and processing the results in minute detail began, came something a little more instinctive and collaborative. Asked when he knew he had an album – at least one – in the making, he knows instantly.
“I recorded in Livingstone in Wood Green for three days and Press Play in Bermondesy for a day,” he says, “I had so many songs but I didn’t want to over-write them. I knew the musicians were people I could rely on and I kind of knew that whatever we came up with on the day, improvised, would be better than whatever I wrote. I had melodies and some chord structures but the structure I was kind of directing as I went along. I was sat at the piano and the horns were in a booth but I could see them through the glass, the drums were on the left and I could see them, Natalia on bass was in the room with me. Sometimes it’s scary to improvise in the studio but I actually find it scarier the other way.”
Ultimately, he says, it comes down to trust. “Eddie on the drums might throw in some fill and if I didn’t know him I might be thinking ‘oh, is he going to fuck it up?’ But because it’s him I’m confident he’s going to hit the right spot and I am for that spot as well.
“Some of my favourite moments on this record are the moments at the end of tunes, where we’ve kind of finished the song, and then something else comes out. There’s a lot of that of that on both parts of the record.”
The sessions, in the end, spawned two double albums, All The Quiet (part 1) and All The Quiet (part 2), but to Armon-Jones they are very much part of the same beast. “It’s all one album to me,” he says, “but because I spent a year working on it, adding a bit of reverb here and other elements there, it took me a while to realise, wow, this is a whole lot of music! It was 20 songs, two hours twenty at one point. That’s when I started to think, this is a bit more than one album. It felt like two parts of the same story. It’s a bit like you couldn’t watch the whole of the Lord of the Rings in one go, you need a break. But the story runs through the whole thing.”
He describes part one as “kind of like before the storm, as the storm’s approaching,” while part two is “the big battle”. If that sounds like the plot for a Hollywood blockbuster to you, then you won’t be surprised to hear there’s an All The Quiet comic book that he’s written, that will sit in between two versions and bring the concept to visual life.
“It’s the first time I’ve done anything like that,” he admits, “I haven’t written anything in 10, 15 years. And it’s the same thing when you sit down to right. You start feeling those same things I used to feel when I started playing the piano – ah, I’m not good at this, someone else but would probably be better at this. But I’m lucky to have people around me, But I’m lucky to have people around me to say ‘it’s not really about that, it’s about your voice and what you want to say.”
It’s testament to Armon-Jones’ bravery and artistic inquisitiveness that, even with major plaudits and the long faught for success of a major band to fall back on, he’s continuing to put himself out of his own comfort zone in the search for inspiration, reinvention and the search for creativity. The fact that All The Quiet (part 1) and All The Quiet (part 2) are anything but mere continuations of his work elsewhere proves it’s a decision he was wise to make. Long may he continue to make a big, big noise – quiet or otherwise.
Ben Willmott