‘In The Middle of a Couple of Different Worlds’

Global - Jonathan Scales plays a voguish style of pan. And he does so by articulating life and personal experiences that are crowned in a mélange of musical idioms and styles. Like the mix of instruments in the Panorama, each offers its own delicacy in a smorgasbord of sounds. But, with Scales, the buffet is spooned out as treats from his exotic mind. Here, try this, the band Jonathan Scales Fourchestra seems to be saying. Savor the flavor. And next thing you know he’s whetting your appetite for pleasure. Most times, though, he’s building intense pulses that are esoteric to the ordinary ear, though leaving the listener mesmerized by a welter of skills. Such wizardry brings to mind the admiration for a mason who cannot afford to whiff in selecting the right fit among a mingle-mangle of stones to produce that rare architecture of cobblestone homes. Indeed, when you look a it - or receive it - you’re left with a memento of his challenges. Scales, 26, married with no children, has just released a nine-track CD, Character Farm and Other Short Stories. You’d be missing out on a great opportunity to sample Scales’ precise compositions as well as the band’s novel and painterly expressions.

The following is an interview conducted a few weeks before the CD was distributed. It is accompanied by mini reviews of the new work.

Narine - What’s your creative process?

Scales - Sometimes it will start with just like a style. I might start with a rock section, then I would go into something totally different. Sometimes I lay out some ideas, how I want it to go, as if you’re writing a story. From there, I start crafting the music - like how can I write music to fit this form I’ve just written. The notes come later. First the idea then the notes.

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Narine - When was the first time you heard a steel pan, and what was you reaction?

Scales - I may have heard it some time in my life without realizing it. A friend introduced me to pan in 2002, as a freshman student at Appalachian State University, in Boone, NC. They had started a steel band there 27 years ago, before I was born. I was studying music composition as a saxophone player. My friend committed me to try out for the steel band. I think I was really natural at it, and I took a liking to it. It was nonstop from there. It was more natural for me than the saxophone which I was playing since middle school.

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Narine - Was it easier for you to extemporize on pan than on the sax?

Scales - Whatever we played on pan was all sheet music. It wasn’t like in Trinidad where they teach everybody by rote. But I wasn’t used to looking at the page and playing at the same time. I didn’t want to do that, so I memorized all the music. I was in the pan yard all the time just memorizing parts.

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Narine - So you had a Trinidadian vibe, huh?

Scales - I didn’t know it then.

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Narine - Do you have Caribbean genes other than the pan?

Scales - No

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Narine - What was the name of the band?

Scales - The Steely Pan Steel Band. It was started by Dr. Scott Meister in 1984.

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Narine - Did the band include Trinidadians?

Scales - Just American kids. Predominantly white school, but a couple of times we had a few African Americans in the group. It was a small band of 20 musicians.

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Narine - Did you play for course credit or just performed with the band?

Scales - Students pretty much stayed in the band through college. I played until I graduated in 2006. We did a lot of shows in schools and colleges. So I got a lot of experience playing the pans.

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Narine - Did you come across a video or recording of Trinidadians playing the instrument?

Scales - The band is very focused on Trinidad, so when I got into steel band that’s when I started learning about soca and calypso and the history of pan.

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Narine - How did you receive the story of pan’s birth?

Scales - It amazed me. It changed my perspective on the instrument, because people associate steel drums with vacation, islands and paradise. I get a deeper meaning of the music.

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Narine - How did the switch from sax to pan work for you, now that you realized you’d become a panist?

Scales - I realized it the first day, to the point I wanted to drop saxophone, but I couldn’t because steel pan wasn’t considered to be a major instrument.

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Narine - How did your training in classical composition for the sax fit into your style on the pan?

Scales - That’s 99 percent of what I’m doing. I studied 20th Century composers like Stravinski, John Cage, Aaron Copland and Arnold Schoenberg (who pioneered innovations in atonality that spurred controversy in modern music).

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Narine - Did you also study jazz at the university?

Scales - Not a lot of jazz artists, but on my own I started to listen to Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and more modern jazz players like Chick Corea, Pat Metheny and others. As far as the classical training, that’s a big influence on my style. My composition teacher was the steel band director. He’s a progressive, modern thinker when it comes to music; very outside the box.

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Narine - Has Dr. Meister ever been to Trinidad?

Scales - He visits Trinidad all the time. He’s very informative about the history and culture of Trinidad, and makes it a point to teach students in the band about his knowledge. He takes them down there every couple of years.

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Narine - Were you part of these groups?

Scales - I came in the summer of 2004. We spent two weeks at the UWI campus.

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Narine - Did you visit a pan yard?

Scales - Yes. Trinidad All Stars.

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Narine - Did you enjoy the experience?

Scales - As a composition student, I was really into Panorama arrangements. At the time my favorite arranger was Jit Samaroo. In college, we played some Panorama songs, like Pan in A minor. I like Kitchener a lot.

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Narine - What did you learn in the pan yard?

Scales - I was inspired by the execution of the band. So with my band, we do a lot of rehearsing, keeping the music tight, like the Trinidadians do for Panorama. I was inspired by the unity of sound by the entire band. A lot of crazy notes playing together. That takes a lot of work. Tremendous work ethic.

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Narine - What do you think of Clive Bradley’s arranging style?

Scales - I’m still connecting the names, the places, the bands. Usually, when I listen to Panorama music, I’m in it for the arrangements, because I’m on the jazz compositional side of things, so I feel like I’m in the middle of a couple of different worlds.

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Narine - Have you met Len Boogsie Sharpe?

Scales - Never met him, but everybody tells me he’s the best.

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Narine - I read reports that you remind purists of Trinidadian jazz panist Othello Molineaux, Thelonius Monk and Boogsie. Who are you, really; and does the influence of other artists creep into your work?

Scales - My biggest influence would come as a surprise to a lot of people. It’s [American] Béla Fleck (one of the world's most innovative and technically proficient banjo player, nominated in more categories than any other musician - country, pop, jazz, bluegrass, classical, folk, spoken word, composition and arranging).

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Narine - Why?

Scales - He took the banjo and put a whole new spin on it; some really cool out-there jazz stuff. I kinda feel the same way about our band. My compositions pull from other areas other than calypso and Panorama, and music that would normally be associated with steel drums. Some people might think I’m not into that kind of music, but I love it. Say that you’re raised in Trinidad and you’re around calypso and Panorama all the time, you’re gonna be one type of panist. But me, I’m from a military family and I’ve lived around the world, with all the influences from the jazz side and growing up as an American kid listening to hip hop and rock, then studying the modern composition guys, so I just came out with my sound just from living my life experience.

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Narine - A reviewer wrote that you’re like Jimi Hendrix for the steel drums. Do you see it that way?

Scales - I’m still getting into his music more and more, but I was definitely influenced by him as a bandleader. He and Miles Davis are my biggest influences as bandleaders. Hendrix was different in his era from other people of his race. Sometimes I feel like that. In fact, I’ve always felt different even from my family in Virginia because I moved around so much. Jimi was like that.

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Narine - When you performed at Jazz artists on the Greens at the UWI Centre for the Creative Arts in 2009, what was the experience like?

Scales - That was my second visit to Trinidad, the first time performing my music there. I was concerned how Trinidadians would react to it. So I planned to be myself, not try to appease anyone. I thought, maybe I should try to play some Kitchener covers to mix in with my original music to break the ice a little bit. But I decided to just play my set.

I started off with Jam We Did. It was received really well. I felt like they instinctively understood what I was trying to do. I think the audience was glad to see an American taking their national instrument and doing something different with it. That show broadened my fan base in Trinidad. Some of them still contact me.

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Narine - What did other panists say about your performance?

Scales - A few panists were talking about the phrasing of my ideas. It was all encouraging. I was blown away by Mikhail Salcedo and a couple of other Trinidadian panists.

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Narine - What was your experience with the culture and cuisine?

Scales - I really wanted to eat roti and doubles, and bake and shark, which I ate plain at Maracas Bay. We got someone to take us around. We went to all the spots, visited some pan yards. We tried to squeeze everything we could do in two days.

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Narine - I heard a piece of music today, Mind Your 3’s and 2’s. It commences with a pan yard mood and then explodes with your inimitable talent. How conscious were you about the yard when you wrote that?

Scales - The basic form was very mathematic. It’s a series of numbers and rhythms. The rhythm is thought out mathematically. What I tried to do is take these equation in mathematic formulas that modern composers would use to come up with progressive ideas. I started to think of the same ideas, but I wanted to make them accessible to the average person. Sometimes when you listen to modern compositions and modern neoclassical music you might not understand it because it’s not very interesting when it comes to harmony and melody. I try to bridge the gap with how they present harmony and melody with something that people can get into also. I didn’t do it on purpose, I don’t think. It just came out that way.

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Narine - The song Desert comes off as an Arabic thread that stumbles upon an oasis of jams, as opposed to another spectrum, The Longest November, which is so new age, and in which there’s no intrusion at all, it’s almost classical. So what determines your range of styles?

Scales - Longest November gives credit to my studies as a composer in college. I studied minimalism, people like Steve Wright and other modern composers. I wrote Desert for saxophone at 15, while I was in high school. Never played it until I started my band and decided to give it a try.

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Narine - What’s your system of naming the tunes?

Scales - At the time I wrote Longest November, for example, in November 2006. I was out of school and wasn’t working - just playing music for a living. But I had just two or three shows for the whole month. That was a long November. It was about a very sparse time, cold winter and not much money. That was the vibe.

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Narine - You just kept playing and playing and now I see why. Let’s revisit Trinidad. Did you come away with a sense of renewed enthusiasm, say, more musically spiritual from the experience?

Scales - I wished I could have seen the bands playing their Panorama songs, but it was inspiring to come back to the US knowing that I went to Trinidad to play my own music and people liked it.

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Narine - Do you hope to see a Panorama competition someday?

Scales - I’d like to, but I’m very focused on my career.

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Narine - Would you arrange Panorama music?

Scales - Panorama naturally is a composition event. I feel like I have the ability to do it. I feel confident as a composer, but with the history and culture of Panorama, Trinidad, pan, I would never personally set out to be an arranger. Unless someone asks me to do so. It won’t be my mission.

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Narine - Who manufactures your drums?

Scales - I’ve been using drums tuned by Ellie Mannette and his group.

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Narine - What influences the way you dress for your gigs?

Scales - I dress to be free about myself in an eclectic way. I grew up like that. People are encouraged to be themselves in the art community of Asheville. I find clothing in thrift stores that I think is cool stuff. I wear a cut-off sweater with a shirt underneath sometimes. Robin Hood boots, studded belt, glasses. Occasionally, I’d raid my wife’s closet and find cool scarves.

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Narine - If you’re planning another trip to Trinidad and Tobago, what do you plan to take in the most?

Scales - I want to be around when the Panorama season starts. To watch and see how it happens with the arrangers and the musicians. I definitely want to do that. Also, I want to go to Laventille. I’ve heard so many things about it that it becomes mysterious to me. People would say don’t go there. And I feel as if I should be there.

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Narine - Thanks for your time. Best of luck in all your endeavors. May you make it up the hill one day. I’m sure Desperadoes will accommodate you.

Scales - I hope so.

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THE ALBUM - CHARACTER FARM AND OTHER SHORT STORIES

Narine - About your new album, Character Farm and other Short stories, how did that evolve?

Scales - What spawned the idea - I have a friend who plays with Bela Flack...very forward-thinking guy. he was telling me back in the day people would write long form, like one big work, from beginning to end it was a single cohesive idea, and that today people have a collection of songs that they put together on CDs. He’d like to see someone writing a big, epic work that’s cohesive. So this is my attempt to use the steel drums to do that. There are still different songs but I have a vision for each, like a story or an idea. When you open up the album, each piece has a different illustration.

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Narine - Let’s run down the list. Jam We Did.

Scales - When we play that song live, it gets very intense, and that’s a little bit different than the original use of the steel drums or what the traditional person thinks when they hear - or what they think of the steel drums. The video producer called it “slamming.” I like the energy. Done any faster, it wouldn’t have settled in as nicely.

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Narine - Jay Sanders Singalong

Scales - I have a friend, Jay Sanders, a local bass player where I live in Ashville, North Carolina. We were at a bar one night and he had some drinks. He said, ‘Man your music would be more popular if you wrote simple melodies that people could walk away singing.’ A student at the bar said, no, Jonathan needs to do just what he’s gonna do. He doesn’t need to conform. I’m standing there and these guys are arguing about my style of music. I went home and wrote something with a nice groove but the melody is overly complicated. I did some metric things with the rhythm. Mostly, music is 4/4 time, but in this piece some bars are 13/16, 5/8, 8/8, 6/8, 7/8 and 15/16. Different things are changing around, but you can listen to it without having to keep track of the math part of it - so you can still feel good about it.

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Narine - The Longest December (There’s an interesting interplay of notes that gives the work a kaleidoscopic sound. Am I right, or hallucinating?)

Scales - No, that’s right. I wanted to have a song where I play the same thing the entire time, and I wanted the guitar and the bass to have a melody together. So there’s no distinct bass line. The bass line is the melody and the melody is with the bass at the same time. And there’s a hip drum beat that pushes it along. That was the idea for the song. I didn’t have the title at the time, but then I decided to throw in elements of the longest November. I started writing it in December 2009, and it was based around the problems I was having in my life at the time. A turbulent relationship with my wife back then - but everything is fine with us now. So it was fitting.

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Narine - Character Farm (There’s an African vibe that kept loping around. What’s the connection?)

Scales - What really gives it that sound is the guitar, how it has a...like a single line comping (playing a jazz accompaniment). Usually, in American music when the guitarist is comping he’s playing a lot of notes at the same time. But in African music, it’s a melody on its own happening in the guitar underneath everything else. It helps along the rhythm with the drums to give it that vibe. I thought of Character Farm as a nursery rhyme without words. Think of it as an old lady who swallowed a cat to catch the bird, which she swallowed to catch the spider, which she had swallowed to catch the fly. Character Farm does exactly that.

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Narine - Complete

Scales - I picked up my phone with a recorder on it and began to sing a melody. I was happy because my [earlier] album was completed.

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Narine - Hallucinations of the Dream Chasers (Is that about the American Dream?)

Scales - Yes, it is about achieving a dream of being as successfully as you want to be. Having a fan base around the world who appreciates my music enough for me to keep a strong itinerary. It’s kind of a scary thing to pursue music.

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Narine - Muddy Vishnu (What’s the mixture of composition and extemporization in your tracks?)

Scales - Muddy Vishnu is a mixture of two styles. One is Muddy Waters, the blues guitar player and the other is Mahavishnu Orchestra, a jazz-rock fusion group that performed in the 70s and 80s. They had forward ideas of the era. Their compositions were really difficult. So Muddy Vishnu is my take on the solid blues-rock of one artist and the complex jazz-rock of the other group. Most everything is written except where each instrumentalist has a few seconds to ad-lib.

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Narine - Science Fair

Scales - It was one of my earlier pieces that I wrote in college in 2003. It was an experiment, mixing Latin with funk with the very composed unison lines, and there are parts with time-signature changes.

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Narine - The Trap

Scales - Two ideas working there. In 2010, I was asked to participate in an event in Asheville, NC. It was about taking a compositional idea, which is the first eight notes of a piece, to see what four groups would do with these notes. I agreed to do it, then later the promoter said it was a volunteer thing. Which is fine, but he hadn’t said that when he called me. So I felt I was trapped into doing it. I wrote the piece in five minutes. I felt obligated to write it. When we performed it at the event it was a big hit. We got a standing ovation. In the end, I was happy we performed.

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CD REVIEWS FROM THE PAN WHIRL

This is an outstanding jazz album. The pan is clearly the lead instrument, but it blends with the other instruments to create a unique sound.The pan is not some exotic thing here, it is a musical instrument on equal  footing with the other instruments. The music is clean and crisp. The players are highly proficient, the pan is well tuned and the panist is a "crack shot." - GLENROY JOSEPH, pan aficionado.

 

A relatively new panist, Jonathan Scales has taken the instrument into a new multifaceted arena, with a blend of instruments never before tried by the steel pan, particularly in the genre of jazz music.

Character Farm & Other Short Stories, Jonathan’s latest recording, brings to the ear shades of the Mahavishnu Orchestra  and a unique blending of the pan with flute, guitar and fiddle. They do so in a relatively free-form but  controlled manner that at times seems both simple and complex, merging contemporary jazz with a taste of hip hop.

Jam We Did gives musical room to more instruments than probably any other steel pan recording but places emphasis on bass a la Jaco Pastorius.

Character Farm with its simple melody sounds quite African. In a rather unusual way the bass and pan carry the same melody for most of the tune with guitar riffs punctuating rhythm.

In  Hallucination, the pan ‘plays’ a bit of a minor role, but adopts a unique approach to the music - ‘grooving’ its way between the soprano sax and tabla, which spices a tune that takes on a unique East Indian and Middle Eastern flavor. It is testament to the innovation and versatility of Mr. Scales as a composer and musician.

Science  Fair  is a musical lab that experiments. It provides a controlled mixing of the pan with flute that tests the ability of the instrument to be showcased in yet another nontraditional manner.

Complete also features the guitar, and bass along with Scales on pan, which sounds like an organ. It very well could have been the title cut of the album, which indeed is not only complete but it also completely stretches the limits of the pan. 

Mr. Scales seems destined to be a major player in moving  the steel pan to yet another level as he waves his “pan sticks”  higher and higher above that which is commonly referred to as Island music. - SKIPPY LEZAMA, host, 88 Jazz Place, Saturday mornings, WDNA 88.9 FM, Miami, Florida.

An excellent album.  Scales approaches the instrument in a style that harkens back to its African polyrhythmic roots. He seems to understand the way pan can use its legitimate voice in a conversation with other instruments similar to how the conversation flows in a drum circle. Technically he is adept - still some way to go to really be on par with some of the other young, gifted panists. But his musical voice, his compositional voice, stands out. I'll be keeping tabs on him. - DR. DAWN K. BATSON, Chairman, School of Arts & Sciences - Visual Performing Arts, Florida Memorial University.

Scales is contemporary, and he had the benefit of an environment to explore a fresh thing - compared to where he came from - and take it to a different situation and be unique with it. When I hear him play, he listens. A good artist is a true economist. he knows when to give color. He deals with proportion in sound. One who doesn’t dominate the overall sound. Sound is regardless of the instrument. Scales makes the notes sing in a different way. He’s melodic. Reminds me of Ray Holman and Clive Bradley. They don’t go into that rote Blues scales. You don’t put butter on a roti. You have to put different ingredients the roti calls for. - DAVID BOOTHMAN, musician, whose latest CD is Sweet Lime and Passion.

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Dalton Narine is a former Trinidad All Stars player who is currently working on a novel and screenplay