Name: Dave Wilson
Nationality: New Zealand
Occupation: Saxophonist, clarinetist, improviser, composer, scholar
Current release: Dave Wilson's new single “For Olivia” is out now. Full-Length Album Ephemeral will follow on Thelonious Records on December 1st 2023

If you enjoyed this Dave Wilson interview, and would like to find out more about his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and twitter.  



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?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how making music isn’t a metaphor for relationships, it actually is relationships in action. When improvising I’m listening to either sounds in real time or from my memory, sounds that are in some way generated by or at least heard by other listening entities (human or otherwise).

This was a big part of my approach to the track “speak to me of yesterday and tomorrow (elusive as the dead)” from my new record Ephemeral, where I am trying to sonically express, through collective improvisation, the feelings I had from listening to and relating to a particular bird (a riroriro near where I live in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington) and its song.
 


When it came to recording Ephemeral, I wanted to bring together musicians who had highly developed but diverse ways of listening, so that our relational listening could bring a wide range of sounds to the surface that served the moment and the music. What a musician listens for, and how they listen, is radically different depending on the musical setting.

The group had musicians with experience in indie rock, orchestras, pop bands, straight-ahead jazz groups, classical chamber ensembles, big bands, and more. I gave the individual musicians directions in musical language they could relate to, but the fewest prescriptive details possible so that they could contribute what the music needed from them at each moment using the fullest extent of their own listening and musicality, and of who they are.

How do you feel your sense of identity influences your collaborations? Do you feel as though you are able to express yourself more fully in solo mode or, conversely, through the interaction with other musicians? Are you “gaining” or “sacrificing” something in a collaboration?

When collaborations are at their best, for me, they are when the relationships are full of trust. Humans don’t exist in isolation, we are always and only in relationship to one another and to the other species we share our spaces with. In a collaboration, whatever elements of our identities are known to one another will somehow affect what comes out of that collaboration.
 
For me this project is probably the first where the collaborators had a more complete understanding of my identity when it comes to my sexuality. I developed and recorded this project during and after my first serious relationship with a man, and the gradual dissolution of that relationship is reflected in one of the tracks on the record (“Dissipation”).

In the process of recording, I experienced so much support from everyone involved in the project in so many dimensions of my identity, and we strove to create that kind of space of trust for everyone in the project. I wanted everyone to feel they could bring as much of who they are to the music as they were comfortable to at that moment, in terms of gender, sexuality or any other part of their identity important to them.

That trust was so important to a collaborative process that involves so much risk and vulnerability, and I can hear that in the music throughout the record.

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

I moved to Skopje, Macedonia (now called North Macedonia) after I finished my undergraduate music degree. I didn’t have a lot of vision for being a musician or an artist at the time, but I understood the power of communities and relationships for positive social change. So I got an internship with a religious non-profit and ended up working for them in Skopje, mentoring and working with university students (I was a devout Christian at the time).

I brought my alto saxophone along with me and performed and recorded with some musicians there, which allowed me to take some early steps in opening up to new frameworks for improvisation as I cast off those that were restraining me or whose liberating power I didn’t yet understand. To the greatest degree in my life to that point, I began to connect with people musically who came to the moment with experiences, values, beliefs, and ways of knowing and being in the world that I hadn’t encountered before.

In my desire to connect, I looked for common ground and decided to embrace difference and understand it to the extent that I could. This relational opening-up in me extended to my improvisation practice, and it’s a path that I’m still on.

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?

I played saxophone in a performance at the Skopje Jazz Festival in 2018 with Macedonian guitarist Toni Kitanovski. He’s a prominent musician in that city, and the festival featured him as a headlining artist playing two sets at the Opera house celebrating his thirty years in music. The group featured musicians mostly from outside the country who had collaborated with Toni over the years. We played a set of nearly fully improvised music, based on grooves and melodies that Toni had composed.
 
In the days leading up to the set, something had happened at a private and personal level where I felt wronged by a friend in a way that I felt the trust between me and that person was broken. I was feeling pretty angry, and I couldn’t let it go. As I was preparing to go onto the stage to join Toni and the others – an environment that required openness, vulnerability, and generosity – I realized I actually wouldn’t be able to play as I needed to if I didn’t forgive my friend. The music would fall flat and I’d be showing a lack of respect for Toni, and for the audience at the Opera house full of inhabitants of a city that I loved.

And so as I went on the stage and began to play, and in the act of playing saxophone with this group, I forgave this friend. I had known for a while that forgiveness was about releasing myself from the prison of bitterness and resentment, but this was the first time I had stepped out of those chains through making music in real time.

What I found as I played with Toni and Jon Sass (tuba), Vasil Hadzimanov (keys), Piero Epifania (percussion), and Viktor Filipovski (drums), was that as I played and became free from bitterness, the collective sound reflected a great sense of love, and became more powerful. I think there might be a video of this floating around somewhere.



But I also found that as I forgave and released myself and expressed love even for my friend, that this was completely separate from the issue of trust being broken. For that to be addressed, it would take much more time to heal and would require action from my friend and from me. This was all internal, I wasn’t talking to anyone about what was going on.
 
Since that moment, I have had a deeper understanding of the difference between forgiveness and trust. Forgiving someone and loving them can still mean that you might never be able to trust them again, and that’s ok, though the door is open for the re-building of trust together. My playing began to change after that performance, as did many of my ways of relating to people. I’m becoming more open and generous, I hope.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? In which way is it different between your solo work and collaborations?

For me a lot of it is about being confident in who I am, a feeling that can come and go. It usually works better for me when I’m working with people in a group and we all trust each other.

Like I said I’ve known my preference for working in groups for a while, but I feel like only recently I’ve been able to more deeply understand how to tap into it. This record is one of the best examples of it in my work so far.