Part 2
Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.
Interesting question! It’s tricky as no two days are the same! I feel really blessed to do a job that I really love, and one of the reasons is that every day is different. I would say 50% of my time is spent creating in studios, and the other 50% of my time is spent on stage. So, either I wake up and I go to the studio to meet other musicians and share new ideas, improvise, create new stuff and see if it’s interesting to keep and think about what it means. Or it would be travelling to some place in this world with my trumpet, and rehearse with the musicians, so the soundcheck, some promo, and then go on stage!
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
A big part of the way I create is to just let my soul express itself. Improvise new ideas, find out something that touches me, it’s like being in a laboratory! To create something without even knowing if it’s going to be right or not, if it’s gonna be interesting, just create. Sometimes even just randomly. And at some point, something comes out and happens to be interesting, and sometimes if I remember it a few weeks later, it means that maybe there was something interesting about this music. From that starting point, if the idea is interesting then I keep working on it, trying to model it, to transform it in a way that makes sense for me.
After some time, I listen to something and think ‘OK, it doesn’t move me, I’m done with this’ and just put it to one side, and sometimes when I listen back, it moves me and I’ll keep it somewhere in my head thinking this might be good to play some day. Maybe months later, a few years or even a few decades later! For example, ‘Beirut’ was music I composed when I was 12 years old, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with it. When I was 20/21 years old I started playing it occasionally with my first band, playing it differently. Now, 20/25 years later I really started playing it the way I do now. So sometimes the processes are very long.
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?
I really believe that there are different ways to compose & create. Being alone and creating that way can be very interesting, I don’t think it’s something that stops you from creating, it’s just different. I like composing alone, but at some point this thing that’s come out of this very lonely composition is shared with other musicians, and they bring their own new colours and new ideas to what I’ve been doing by myself. This makes me enjoy creating music even more than if I was just doing it by myself. That would be the main difference for me, that we are connected and we are creating together.
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?
I don’t know if music has a specific role, but art generally has an important role, because art is always ahead of us. In my opinion, if you want to read the future, all you have to do is read art. Especially if art was created in a very free way. Because most people, when they create art, they always want to experiment with something that goes far beyond what we are living in right now. Music isn’t only about painting what we are experiencing now, it’s also about expressing what the future can be, and a better future in my opinion! One of the most interesting things about art in general is when you watch a movie or go to the theatre, or look at a painting or listen to music, it’s about the fact it’s already mirroring what the future could be.
Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?
I used to experiment with this a lot when I was younger, especially when you’re a teenager and your emotions are so strong. Sometimes you need peaceful music, sometimes you need something that cheers you up, sometimes you need something that brings you to the past, sometimes you need the energy to do your workout, things like this. Music can be a tool to help you express or experiment with emotions. Especially when you compose your own music, you’re expressing your own emotions, so you know exactly how to express what’s in your heart, in your mind. Most of us listen to music to help us express something, when you make a playlist, that shows who you are. That’s why you can say ‘show me what music you like, and I can show you who you are’
There seems to be increasing interest in a functional, “rational” and scientific approach to music. How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
Maths and music have a lot in common. There is still a lot of mystery to maths and music is the same. Also, the architecture of music and maths is very close, you always have to build music on the frequencies of harmony and the pulse, the rhythm, those are the fundamental elements. Otherwise, you can’t build any kind of melody or music on top of it.
So, there are so many aspects of this that are alike, in my opinion. I don’t think it’s by chance only that when I was younger I wanted to be an architect and now I’m in music - the link between music and maths is huge. One of my favourite composers is J.S. Bach, and the way he would compose his music is very, very architectural and scientific. The rhythm and use of counterpoints is extremely precise, it’s almost mathematical. Also, there is something I usually like to say, Pythagoras was one of the first musicologists in history. At this time in Greece, they used to ask a lot of questions about astronomy, maths and music and Pythagoras was the first to discover how frequencies worked. And I think the link is inevitable. When I hear people say ‘I like music but I don’t like maths’, I think you don’t know it, but actually you love maths too!
Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
I’m not certain I’m understanding your question, but what I can tell you is that for some people, music is just something like sports, you just put music on and that’s it, and you just enjoy it. But for other people, it’s much more than this, it’s memories. In my opinion, when you listen to music at a very specific point in your life, it’s gonna touch you, and be very important for you, and become a part of the memory. This music is going to be printed on the memory of it. I think music is much more than ‘just music’, it’s a way to print our memories into time.
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?
We underestimate the importance of rhythm. Rhythm is everything in our lives. The cycles and the rhythms are the base of everything in our lives.
When we are in the belly of our mothers, her heartbeat is like being in a nightclub, for nine months and knowing nothing else. It’s a very strong experience of life, of music. Once we’re outside of the belly, we never forget that - we hear lots of other noises and people talking, but the rhythm is still very important to us. And then we have the harmony which is important because it brings even more specificity to the rhythm. And the melody is going to being the memory, the moment, it’s gonna sign the choreography of this rhythm. Basically, we can’t live without music because it reminds us of all the important memories of our lives. And rhythm is the secret.
