The Arts: Dylan Rynhart's jazz ensemble breaks many moulds, with his innovative compositions and unusual juxtaposition of instruments – including a voice – in the 10-piece orchestra
JUST about the last place you expect to find a jazz musician is on the River Shannon, doing a spot of sailing. “Hi. I’m dry,” says Dylan Rynhart. “The sun came out. It’s been so windy all day – we’ve been reefing sails and we got absolutely soaked. But it’s a nice way to spend a week. The Shannon is a lovely place to be.”
His words conjure up an image which is light-years away from the heavy-drinking, smoky-bar jazz stereotype. But then we don’t have smoky bars any more, jazz ain’t what it used to be and this young man – voted Best Young Irish Jazz Artist at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival four years ago, when he was just 24 – is accustomed to demolishing preconceptions. He describes himself as a composer rather than a performer; and when, almost a decade ago, he came to set up a band to play his music, he eschewed the trios and quartets he saw around him and established a 10-piece orchestra. Why? “I think it’s the sound,” he says. “When you’ve got a trio, okay, there’s great things you can do. But when you’re trying to deal with sonority and musical texture, which is what interests me – well, I mean, there’s so many different sounds that every instrument can make. When you multiply that by 10 it just becomes massive.”
Besides, he adds, no one else is doing it – at least, not in quite the same way. “There are a few people who are doing big bands, and are actually playing big-band scores, and that’s great. But it’s not necessarily what we’re doing. I would consider Fuzzy Logic Ensemble to be a contemporary music ensemble that improvises, rather than a jazz band as such. I don’t want people to think they’re coming to a big-band gig. It’s very different.”
WELL, YES. There's a clue in the name. Who came up with Fuzzy Logic? "I did, actually. We had our first rehearsal, and I was driving some of the lads to the Dart station, and we were, like, so what are we going to call this band? And for some reason I had written 'fuzzy logic' into my phone because I liked the words. I liked the idea of making decisions – about writing, for example – in a kind of illogical way. It was only afterwards that I discovered it's a mathematical term. The way I had it described to me is that if your microwave is open, then it's open – and if it's closed, then it can work. In fuzzy logic it can be closed enough to work, but not really closed."
Difficult mathematical abstractions are not, in any case, what Rynhart’s music is all about. “I love the idea of surprise in music,” he says. “I think it comes across in the way I write things. I love to change the context all the time – which probably makes my music a bit crazy and not as cohesive as it might be.”
It’s also attractive, easy-going and – according to reviewers who are expert in these matters – highly distinctive in the sonority department. This is partly because of the way Rynhart structures his pieces and partly because of the way Fuzzy Logic Ensemble juxtaposes classical jazz instruments – with a central trio of Cathal Roche on soprano sax, Nick Roth on alto and Brian Wynne on tenor – with more untypical instruments such as Kate Ellis’s cello and Lee Tobin’s electric guitar. Most distinctive of all is the role played by the voice of Rynhart’s wife Sue, a classically-trained soprano who has studied with Emma Kirkby and is a lay vicar choral at Christchurch Cathedral.
“Our use of voice makes the ensemble sound very specific,” says Rynhart. “The voice is prevalent in any mix – whether you listen to live or recorded music, your hearing automatically gets drawn to the voice as a kind of centrepiece.” But Sue, he says, thinks of the group as a choir rather than a band with herself as “lead singer”, which is a very different proposition.
The mellifluous voice of the English trumpeter Tom Arthurs is also a centrepiece of Fuzzy Logic's new album, Mouthpiece, which will be launched with a live performance at the National Concert Hall next week.
The album is, in Rynhart’s words, “a collection of music written for trumpet and ensemble . . . inspired directly and indirectly by speech, patterns, emotion and expression”. He describes Arthurs, who was commissioned to write a piece for this year’s BBC Proms which will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 on August 31st, as “a superb trumpet player – someone you can rely on being 100 per cent honest all the time – a fantastic performer”.
The title track of the new Fuzzy Logic album, however, features someone much closer to home. "The inspiration for Mouthpiecewas an interview I did with my mum," says Rynhart – whose interest in jazz is also something of a family affair. His uncle Ivor Carroll, now deceased, was a tenor saxophonist and his cousins Justin and Roy Carroll are major players on the scene. "I want to hang on to the family stories because some of them are really, really bizarre," he says.
HIS GRANDFATHERmoved to Ireland from Germany as a young man, moved into the Shelbourne Hotel and lived on the seventh floor. "It was all very outlandish." In the Mouthpiece interview, Rynhart's mother speaks – with great affection, it must be said – about her stepmother. "All kinds of people have played with the idea of speech in music, from Steve Reich to Zappa to the piano player Jason Moran," Rynhart says. He took the recording of his mother's voice and transcribed it musically, mapping the pitches on to the stave, writing down the rhythms, then arranging the melody for the band in various different ways.
“I think one of the most important things when you’re writing music is to try and think about the relevance to people,” he explains. “If you’re used to hearing a lot of polkas, say, and I put a polka into the music, it will be a reference point for you. Speech is an interesting one, because everyone hears people talking all the time – but they don’t generally associate it with music. With my mum talking, my idea is that she has an accent that I’m familiar with. So when I hear her ‘speech melody’ in the music, it’s an anchor point for me because in some sense I would feel I’ve heard it before.
“The strange thing is that the meaning in the words doesn’t necessarily translate into music. When you record someone laughing – or saying something in a kind of a joyous way – sometimes it can really be sad musically. The intervals in the speech are exactly the opposite of what you might expect.”
As a concept, speech transcription may seem to be a long way from the traditional jazz set-up of improvisation on basic, often familiar, melodies. But Rynhart insists that jazz itself has moved much faster than our preconceptions often allow.
‘IT’S SUCH A fascinating art form – it’s so intricate and there’s so much to it,” he says. “And we’ve got to the point now where we’re not just playing music which was popular in the 1930s and 1940s any more. As a composer, I spend a lot of time working arrangements; and I like the idea of written music as a starting-off point for improvisation.
“You learn all these rules when you’re learning to compose,” he adds. “And then it all goes out the window when you start putting pen to paper. Or finger to keypad. Getting going is the really hard bit. Getting started. I really want to write a piece for the album launch, because we have this fantastic piano player, Florian Ross, coming over from Germany. He was the conductor and musical director for the recording, and he has written a piece for the band – so I really want to write one as well.”
He is, he says, toying with a new piece based around the medical card protests last October. “I was really angry about it, so I started gathering all these recordings of people getting really upset about the recession and how the Government was really squeezing the small people, or whatever. There was one woman who spoke in a very articulate way about how it was morally wrong.”
Let me get this straight. Rynhart is planning to produce a new composition between, what, now and next week? “Okay, let’s see,” he says. “What day is today? Oh. Tuesday. So I have to write it by tomorrow fortnight – but I also have to score it and deliver the parts. I don’t know if it will happen or not.”
We’ll just have to wait and see. But personally, I wouldn’t bet on the likelihood of the terms “happen” and “not happen” being able to withstand a bit of determined fuzzy logical magic.
Mouthpiece
will be launched in the John Field Room at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on August 19th at 8pm. The title track can be downloaded from fuzzylogicensemble.com
