Composer Andrew Boscardin on the New Comics 'n' Jazz Craze

And how would that seeping happen, from comics to jazz ensemble?

It happened in maybe an abstract sort of way, it’s not like there’s comic-book lyrics or KAPOW! or obvious references. For me, I had set out to write this music for a group of musicians in the area that I really liked, and really wanted to play for, guys like Tom Varner, Chris Stover, Jon Hamar, who fortunately had agreed to be part of this project.

So I was writing this music with them in mind first, and meanwhile all this recreational reading was happening. I was still a student at Cornish at the time, and Jim Knapp, who’s my teacher and mentor, and gigantic influence, said to me one day that the music I was bringing in had a “heroic bent,” a positive quality that he appreciated. It had to do with some of the things I was trying to do with harmony, and that chords I was using, but when he said it, it struck me that these two separate activities did have a relationship. The predominance of guys in tights with capes running around in my recreational time was showing up in my writing.

Tell us about the ensemble and the instruments you're using.

The group is kind of a weird septet. Originally, it was going to be an octet, but we couldn’t work out the details with one of the musicians, so it all got rearranged for septet. The group consists of me on guitar, Jon Hamar on bass, Brad Gibson on drums—we also lost the piano player, which turned out to be a positive in the end, because Ben Thomas agreed to jump in on vibes, which gives the whole thing a different, lighter sound.

Then there’s a heavy, low brass contingent, with Chris Stover on trombone and the great Tom Varner on French horn. Rounding it out is my friend Clark Gibson on the sax—he’s a guy I went to Cornish with and just love working with. He’s one of those people who can take the printed music and turn it on its ear.

Who were you thinking about musically as you wrote? Who did you imagine was your audience?

I think overall I’m drawn to other composers who perform. I like Kenny Wheeler’s music a lot, particularly his ECM work. I like Dave Holland—it’s hard to write music for an ensemble this size with vibes in it and not evoke the Dave Holland Quintet a bit. If people hear that in my music, that’s a favorable comparison I’d be honored to have made.

I also like some of the guys who are doing more bleeding edge things, Dave Douglas, as a guitar play I love Bill Frisell—I’m not sure you’d hear too much Bill Frisell in this music, but he’s definitely had an influence on me. The flattering comparisons I’m hearing a lot is people hear a lot of Blue Note in the '60s, the larger ensembles…Wayne Shorter and Grachan Moncur—he’s somebody not many people have heard a lot of, he was a trombonist and composer, and he wrote a lot of stuff with good amounts of brass. McCoy Tyner has an octet record that I really love, that I was listening to a lot to get some sense of how to use these instruments in different ways, to not have it always be the standard horn chart arrangements.

Lastly there’s a lot of local guys I love who are doing really cool things: Jim Knapp, for example, his big band plays the first Monday of the month at the Seattle Drum School, he’s an amazing jazz orchestra writer, back in December they did a set of his music with the Portland Jazz Orchestra. Also Wayne Horvitz is another guy, the Seattle music scene is richer to have him. He’s just restarted a large group called the Washington Composers Orchestra—the group is phenomenal, it’s him and Tom Varner, Chris Stover, Phil Sparks, just amazing players and really great, unusual writing for large ensembles, lot bigger than mine, but those are the kinds of guys that I look to for ideas.

A lot of people still think of “modern” jazz as squawks and chordal leaps. What makes your music so fun to listen to while still allowing you to experiment?

I would probably attribute some of that to melody. It’s kind of funny to say, but as a composer I’m finding it a little easier to write “nice” melodies. It’s one of the most challenging things for people to get over themselves in that way and just write really nice, listenable melodies.

That doesn’t mean they have to be simple or trite, but if you listen to Kenny Wheeler or Wayne Shorter and you take out the harmony of what’s happening, the melodies are really nice, and really pretty and moving, and if they are crunchy they’re crunchy because they need to be. So that’s what I was trying to do, because I had instruments like the French horn and the trombone, which are beautiful melody instruments, is to put lyrical melodies together for these songs and then add another side to it in the harmony.

That’s also the fun thing for me as a composer is how can I now take this melody and make the harmony still support it but be more interesting, rather than just sitting on one chord for the whole time. So I try to find melodies that people want to listen to, but then harmonize it in such a way that it’s pushing things—for me, I mean. I’m not inventing any new harmonies here.

On the CD I think the best example of that might be “Mr. Ditko,” which started as an exercise. I wrote this very diatonic melody, it could all be in D major, there’s a changeup in the bridge, it could be in A major, but then I harmonized it with a lot of triads with strange roots, and got a different sound underneath it. So on the surface there’s this sing-song melody but what’s going on underneath is interesting and crunchy.

Would you say that's the big similarity between the music and the comic books--that there's a presentational aspect to comics, to capture your attention, but then these social issues come in and influence how you perceive these otherwise simple figures?

I think that’s what made Marvel Comics in the '60s jump out, and probably there’s an element of that in all comics. Superman is a myth that speaks to people in a certain way, but I really think it began more consciously on the part of writers and artists in the '60s.

It seems obvious to us now, but you take a hero like Spider-Man and on the surface it’s an action comic, you get your two to three fights per issue, but alongside of that is this very relatable story of this ordinary guy trying to make it in high school and he’s not very successful. He’s always got these problems. And you have the X-Men, who could be a parable for being Jewish at that time, or gay in America, people have all kinds of interpretations—now it’s gotten even more sophisticated, in superhero comics, independent comics, and manga, where anything can be a comic book story.

Going back to “Mr. Ditko,” Steve Ditko created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, and if you look at his art, it’s interesting: it’s standard for the time in a certain way, but in the way he draws faces and people there’s this slightly grotesque element. Especially his Dr. Strange stuff is just weird. So you have this combination of iconic superhero imagery with these weird bodies. The way he draws Spider-Man—later on Spider-Man gets a little more standardized, gets more bulky, and it wasn’t for many years that people went back to the way Steve Ditko drew him, which was this skinny, weird, bendy guy.

Steve Ditko was a weird figure himself—he was really into Ayn Rand and he got into a heated dispute with Stan Lee about Spider-Man and the direction of Marvel Comics and left. He became a pretty marginal figure in the industry after that. Now I think he’s pretty much a recluse and doesn’t speak to anybody. He’s really into the Randian philosophy and does these comics now where he’s illustrating, “yes is yes.”

He did these comics for Charlton Comics meant as explorations of those ideas, and created this character The Question, which was his way of personifying them. The Question ended up being the inspiration for Rorschach in The Watchmen. In fact, Alan Moore wanted to use all of those Steve Ditko characters for The Watchmen, but DC Comics had other plans for them. The character in The Watchmen comic is this very critical examination of Randian thought, where this character just cannot deviate from from black and white and right and wrong.

It’s interesting how that comes full circle, and that’s what, without giving myself too much credit, I was trying to do with that song. Here’s something very simple on top, but the landscape is never very settled underneath—it’s always moving forward and there are very few points of resolution.