Soundwalker

An hour and a half with the great improvising pianist Marilyn Crispell, winner of a 2025 NEA Jazz Masters Award. We learn how and when she began improvising, and how she has learned to combine energy and calm over the course of a long and ever-changing musical career. Photo by Andrew Pothecary.

A conversation with 86-year old musical master Allaudin Mathieu, who started out arranging for Duke Ellington and went on to become a great mentor and spiritual force, today making some of the best work of his career and continue to teach nonstop. Here we discuss his new memoir The Shrine Thief, what he is listening for, and how much theory and history a good musician needs to know.

Finally I dare to make myself the subject of an interview in my own podcast. The art/science pioneer Victoria Vesna grilled me on how I got where I am today: What I learned from John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, and all those birds, bugs, and whales I have made music with for years.

David James Duncan worked on his masterwork novel SUN HOUSE for nearly two decades, and it has now arrived. I met him last in the early days of the project, and now sixteen years later we sit down to talk about why the best things often take time, and why it was indeed that we all spent so much of  our youth musing on distant spiritualities and philosophies. How to put all that effort into practice? This far-reaching novel gives us the answer.

Sun Chung founded Red Hook Records after working for more than a decade at ECM Records in Munich. It's rapidly becoming a beacon for what a creative music label can be in our tumultuous times. In this extensive conversation, we discuss why it can take years to set up a recording session for improvised music, and why it then might take a few more years to get a project ready for release. Sun Chung, booked up with releases until 2025, explains his meticulous process.