The Westerlies

As trombonist Andy Clausen explains: “For this project we very consciously wanted to take our time in the composition, workshopping and rehearsal of the music. We spent four weeks off the grid, spending eight, sometimes ten hours a day workshopping and rehearsing this music – which seems totally crazy and luxurious looking back. We wanted to go into the studio with as close to perfect technical mastery over these pieces as possible so the recording process could be more about experimentation and shaping the performances to be as expressive as possible.”

The high-res recording is a collaboration with Producer and Engineer Jesse Lewis (A Far Cry, Roomful of Teeth, Brooklyn Rider, Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma), and it pushes the expressive palette and sonic limits of this unusual instrumentation.

Trumpeter Zubin Hensler acted as co-producer: “Part of what first drew us to Jesse was his ability to produce recordings that sound perfectly polished while still full of life and complexity. He certainly did a fair amount of editing, but he was brilliant at pulling performances out of us in the studio that would make the editing fluid and musical… Our goal was to create a sort of sonic continuum with Chamber Music Blend on one side and Folk Music Intimacy on the other. Thus the massive number of mics – we essentially wanted to capture every possible angle so as to allow for extremely expressive mixing. There are definitely some techniques used at times that are not typical for chamber music or jazz albums, such as hard compression, dramatic reverb automation, delay, distortion, overdubs, but I think they were all used for expressive purposes that grew out of the compositions themselves. This is what excites me more than anything else about Jesse’s work – he accesses the creatively expressive studio techniques that are so common in popular music forms and harnesses them for use in more abstract art music. It’s brilliant.”

So this is not conservative music: it exudes warmth and beauty, with bursts of humor, surprise, and genuinely quirky attitude. As influences the band cites Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon, Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, Roomful of Teeth, Goat Rodeo, and American Brass Quintet.

Zubin: “Additionally, we each have very distinct and sometimes contrasting influences that we each bring to the ensemble. Willem’s the only one who spent time as a classical trombone major in college, Andy has definitely studied the compositions of Third Stream far deeper than the rest of us, Riley performs classic jazz arrangements more than the rest of us, and I spend most of my non-Westerlies time in the experimental indie-pop/rock/electronic world. So I view our influences as a sort of Venn diagram, where some things intersect, but some are very unique.”

The Westerlies
Riley Mulherkar & Zubin Hensler, Trumpets
Andy Clausen & Willem de Koch, Trombones