Part 1

Name: Carlo Mombelli
Nationality: South African
Occupation: Bassist, band leader, composer, improviser
Current release: Carlo Mombelli teams up with Wolfgang Muthspiel and Jorge Rossy for Lullaby For Planet Earth via adventurous new Swiss jazz label CLAP YOUR HANDS.

[Read our Wolfgang Muthspiel interview]

If you enjoyed this interview with Carlo Mombelli and would like to know more about his music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.



When did you first start getting interested in musical improvisation?

I believe that improvising is one of the most natural ways to make music. Children do it with uncontaminated innocence. I started improvising as a child long before I knew what improvised music was.

Improvising was easy: I found simple melodies that I played over and over again - little compositions.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances involving prominent use of improvisation captured your imagination in the beginning?

My earliest deep experience of music was at the age of eight, when my mother took me to see the ballet Swan Lake with music composed by Tchaikovsky. At that moment I fell in love with music and after all these years I have never forgotten that moment. It was obviously not improvised music in the sense of your question but very important to me.

As a teenager I listened to classical music, prog-rock bands like Pink Floyd and reggae. I loved The Police. At 16 years of age, I taught myself how to play the electric bass after hearing the bassist Jaco Pastorius in the group Weather Report. Weather Report was my transition into discovering jazz, and Jaco had a major influence on my instrument of choice.



That led me to Joni Mitchel, then Pat Metheny and that led me to the ECM artists like Egberto Gismonti, Nana Vasconcelos, Ralph Towner, Gary Burton, Eberhard Weber and many other. One of the main ECM recordings that had an influence on me in an improvisational way was Alfred Harth’s This Earth with Paul Bley, Trilok Gurtu, Barre Phillips, and Maggie Nicols. I loved her voice and the poetry and the way the musicians interacted with that.
My love for jazz i.e. Miles Davis came much later.



[Read our interview with Steve Rodby of the Pat Metheny Group]

I didn’t study improvisation and composition in an institution as I never had that opportunity. I did however, study composition from transcribing compositions from my vinyl LPs.

I also picked up much from listening to NATURE in Africa. I spent hours doing this. The colours, the sound and balance of composition, silence and density, and off course improvisation. I loved the insects, the birds, and the space between the trees. Nature taught me about reverb and adding sand between your toes. Nature showed me the beauty in tonal and atonal melodies. It taught me about call and response as well as repetitive motives. I loved listening to running water.

This was a big part of my school of music and it has shaped the way that I compose and perform my music, the way my music sounds today.

Focusing on improvisation can be an incisive transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

In my world of music, composition, improvisation, and performance are so entwined with one another that each co-exists because of the other. If my favourite artist brought out a new recording and the musicians played and improvised fantastic on it, but I do not like the compositions, I would not buy or enjoy the product.

People remember Beethoven not because he was an incredible pianist, but they remember him by his compositions. We buy products of great improvised music if the improvisation is so brilliant that it is in itself, a great composition.

Composition has always been my centre.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage?

I have never tried to place my music in any genre or box and worry about rules and tradition, but I rather let the music develop where it wants to go, and this helps me grow my originality as a composer and improvisor.

I never had the opportunity to be part of a tradition or historic linage.

What was your own learning curve / creative development like when it comes to improvisation - what were challenges and breakthroughs?

To be quite honest, I have never really learnt those jazz rules in a traditional improvisational way. I didn’t have formal jazz studies, and because of this I did have a lot of FEAR.

I always compared myself to other musicians that were way ahead of me and younger and had an inferiority complex about it. As I grew older, I became scared to improvise at the fear of being judged, so I jammed as much as I could with friends and later went to jam sessions to help me with this that in the end I could have fun doing it. My breakthrough was when I realised, actually it doesn’t matter. I need to just be myself and I started to imagine I was growing up in this garden.

In a garden, where many different flower seeds have been planted, each seed will grow at its own rate - and each seed will flower at a different time, - each flower will be of a different size and colour. No flower will be jealous of the other’s speed of growth or size or colour. The poppy is just as beautiful as the sunflower. So yes, some people are incredible musicians at an early age and others only reach their potential much later, - that is okay. The important thing is that the flower eventually blossoms.

Children usually express honestly what they feel and play fearlessly, no question of the dangers or consequences asked. As we learn and study, we run the risk of being out-educated of our inner child, the connection to our originality, - and then we have to find it again. Connecting to that inner child is one of the goals of any great artist as that is who you are in all innocence, and that is how I follow my muse.

Now for me, the spirit of music is more important that the mathematics of the music.

Tell me about your instrument and/or tools, please. How would you describe the relationship with it? What are its most important qualities and how do they influence the musical results and your own performance?

I have always experimented and have not fallen prey to the traditionalists.

My voice is on my electric bass, and I treat my electric bass as an acoustic instrument. It needs to be tuned, has overtones and harmonics and I can get different timbres out of it, and then different woods effect the sound. So yes, an electric bass is a soft acoustic instrument with a pickup that I use to tell my stories through my compositions.

As I developed on my instrument through lots of practice and lots of live performances, and as I continued to compose music, I have found that I started to compose more music using my bass as my main compositional tool. The music developed differently because of the way I played. And my playing started to develop differently because of the way I was composing.

My playing inspires by my compositions and my compositions inspire my bass playing. I feel if I did not compose my playing would not have developed like it did.
 
Can you talk about a work, event or performance in your career that's particularly dear to you? Why does it feel special to you? When, why and how did you start working on it, what were some of the motivations and ideas behind it?

Recording with Egberto Gismonti was naturally very special for me and working with Jorge Rossy has deepened my values of space and colour.

However, one of the events that did shape a moment in my life besides meeting my wife Sandra 40 years ago, is the trip Sandra and I took up the Himalayas in Northern India. The peace, the space, the spirituality ... I came back and composed a lot of music after that and found new ways and approaches in my sound. I recorded an album called Theory just from the inspiration of that trip.



Also, my work with the Paris based company Lutherie Urbaine, building instruments from recycled material and teaching children in underprivileged communities in South Africa how to play them and play really complex music in a simple natural way taught me about the power of music.



I also worked with an incredible singer, Mbuso Khoza who learnt his music as a herdsman in the mountains of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. He had a melody for each cow. That is how he called them. He has no idea what it means if you say “come in after 8 bars”, but he always enters at the perfect space and with every note he sings it is pure spirituality and beauty. I never give him written melodies. I just tell him the story and meaning of the composition, and at every performance he improvised a new melody with new words telling the story.

I love working with musicians like this. I had a band with him and the Cape Town pianist Kyle Shepherd who is as myself, a self-taught musician. Our improvisations got into such deep places. We recorded an album called I Press My Spine To The Ground.



I performed with Mbuso at the Birdseye in Basel Switzerland.