For this humble scribe, from the moment I glanced at the Kravis Center’s 2022-2023 season lineup, one named jumped out as the most exciting “get”—and next week, the moment finally arrives.
Born in Auckland to a New Zealand father and Japanese mother, composer-musician Mark de Clive-Lowe has been blending cultures and genres his entire career, excelling as a hard-hitting jazz pianist and borrowing just as much from hip-hop, R&B and electronic music. His recent project MOTHERLAND, which he’ll present March 23-24 at the Kravis Center, represents a departure of sorts for the 47-year-old musician, deploying a minimalist, ambient, mesmerizing sonic language, coupled with curated projected visuals created by Rieg Rodig, in an exploration of his Japanese heritage.
He discusses MOTHERLAND and more in this Q&A with Boca magazine.
Tell us about the genesis of MOTHERLAND; how did this concept come to you?
Over the past six or seven years, I’ve been going down this path of deep-diving into my ancestry and cultural roots and heritage. My mother is Japanese, and that’s always been a huge part of my life. I’ve always kept it separate from my music, and after a significant amount of time, as a career musician touring and recording and so forth, I’m getting to a point where I’m like, what does this all mean? Beyond the music, how does my life, how does my lineage and my story intersect with my craft and what I want to share? And so, I was exploring things like Japanese folktales, and samurai mythology, and my family name in Japan, and all sorts of things that could be different kind of touchstones to reflect on roots—and fundamentally bring meaning to what I wanted to.
Has it worked?
I think I’ve discovered more about myself than anything, in the context of our ancestors, which includes our immediate family, of course, and the idea that families are their ancestral lineage, and that I’m part of that lineage too. So it’s taught me a lot about my identity and sense of belonging, which is something that’s been a lifelong theme for me. Growing up mixed-race, and not quite knowing where I belonged, and falling in love with the whole lineage of Black music, and knowing that’s not mine either. And so, through this journey, it all makes more sense to me, and then it brought me to a point where I’m finding a lot of satisfaction in simplicity, as opposed to overcomplication.
Right, it seems like you’re embracing a new musical language for this project. It seems far afield from your jazz roots.
Yeah, because I came up through this aspiration of wanting to be this super-hardcore straight-ahead jazz piano player, and then fell in love with hip-hop and house music and a whole spectrum of the electronic music world, and I’ve been playing in those different playgrounds to different extents, but this has been … maybe I’m maturing finally, I don’t know! It’s different, and also, I don’t want to stay the same. I don’t want to eat the same meal every night for the rest of my life.
I see “MOTHERLAND” as more in the tradition of Philip Glass, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Brian Eno, Laraaji, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy.
One name I would add into that mix is Ryuichi Sakamoto. He’s always been a touchstone for me, but I’ve never understood quite why. And now I’m like, Oh, now I get it on a deeper level. But also, all those people you mentioned … firstly, I’m totally humbled to be in any way in the same sentence. … I was inspired but what I would call muscular players. And whether that was coming out of the Coltrane school, it was, “how hard can I hit this?” And then in the electronic world, it was, “how much can I bump the dance floor? How hard can I hit that?” And so, it’s been a yin-yang experience, where you go so far in one direction, you have to go in a different direction to find the balance between the two.
I feel like genre distinctions are becoming less important to music consumers than ever before; is genre something you even consider less important now when approaching a project?
Yeah, genre, in this day and age, is a marketing tool more than anything. As human beings, we have this amazing breadth, and so whatever the medium or field of expression is, it makes sense to me that that too should have breadth. I don’t know why it’s popped into mind, but I just thought of when Michael Jordan changed to baseball. I’m a huge basketball nerd, so that’s still funny to me in its way … but also, why shouldn’t he go and play baseball?!
Do you see MOTHERLAND as one 40-minute suite that could be listened to as one track?
I absolutely see it as a suite. At the same time, each of the pieces has a whole story behind it. Quite a few of the pieces I first recorded on my Heritage double-album series—a full quintet, and exploring them that way. When I did those shows, I would go to great pains to tell the entire story of each piece before we played it. And I feel like it provided a lot of meaning for the audience, especially in the context of instrumental music. But then, presenting it as MOTHERLAND in this context, as a live audiovisual experience, I want it to be immersive and to have a water-like flow, that isn’t so much about stop-starts, and “when do I applaud?” I just want you to sink into the spirit and the vibe of the moment, and let us transport you somewhere.
As opposed to your quintet performances, would you say these concerts will be a stripped-down take on your sound?
Absolutely. When I first did the MOTHERLAND project as a digital audiovisual project, it was just me, and I relished the opportunity to take my compositions and just strip them down to the base fundamentals of them. And so with this presentation at the Kravis, I’m having Eric Harland join me, who is one of my favorite drummers on the planet. Eric is as happy zoning out in some rubato freeness as he is digging into something. So to have someone with that breadth who can just bring some more dynamics to the story is amazing. At the same time … given my catalog, they know to expect the unexpected. But someone else might be like, “wait, I thought this was a jazz gig, or an electronic music gig.” We’re bringing the essence of everything into an experience I hope people will leave with a feeling of depth and substance.
Is improvisation a part of it?
Yeah, to a point. More than anything I’ve done, this project is more about the compositional themes, and pushing and pulling that somewhat in the improvisation sense, because that’s part of the core of what I love to do, but also … this is so innately personal that I don’t feel the need to prove anything with it. And therefore, I feel very confident in just, let me just present the compositions and the intention with which this project was put together. And let that translate.
You released this album in an unusual way; you didn’t put it on CD or vinyl. It’s an NFT?
That’s right. It was the first audiovisual album on the blockchain. And then I eventually put the audio on Bandcamp and the video on YouTube.
Why did you go that route and embrace this technology?
This is something I can speak for hours about. On the one hand, fundamentals about the music industry that are just wrong, highly exploitative and don’t remunerate fairly, and blockchain has a lot of ability to rebalance. And then on the other side of it is that if you believe in the tech, this is like the digital archive, the time capsule, for future ancestors. And the idea that the way people love vinyl and might go record-digging through some obscure little shop, I’m imagining a hundred years in a future, and people are crate-digging on the Ethereum blockchain. That’s crazy to me! So I’ve always loved technology and the intersection [with music], and I’ve always thought of that in terms of my musical craft; but now, with this tech, I think, wait … I can explore this and have fun with it too.
Finally, I’d like to ask you about your 2022 album Freedom, your interpretations of works by the late giant of the saxophone, Pharoah Sanders. What inspired you about Pharoah’s music?
The first time I heard Pharoah’s music was his album Thembi, and I was very young, I was in Japan, and I was already into jazz, but I hadn’t heard something that … had I been born 10 years earlier and heard that, I would have immediately chopped it up into a classic hip-hop beat. It had such a draw to me. And it was different from all the jazz I’d been listening to, whether that was ‘50s bop or experimental ‘60s stuff. But Pharoah settled all that energy but still had a burning intensity with it, and the whole thing, I felt, was very reflective of the human sprit. I think all music is, but some music is more obviously that.
When we did that live show, which became the Freedom record, a two-night show in L.A., I felt like … I love this music, I want to play it, but I don’t want to write the body of work in the style of Pharoah Sanders; that just sounds ridiculous. So let’s just pay homage to his music. And Dwight Trible, who is on the record, is a longtime collaborator of Pharoah’s, and he was in touch with Pharoah right before the show, so he knew about it. Dwight was telling us that he was so grateful to have these musicians doing two nights of his work, which isn’t the most common thing to happen. So, that he was touched was really sweet as well.
Do you have any new projects for this year?
Yes, on March 24, there’s a new album dropping called Hotel San Claudio. It’s a collaborative album with Shigeto, who is drummer from Detroit, and Melanie Charles, a vocalist, flute player and sample chopper from Brooklyn.
See de Clive-Lowe perform MOTHERLAND at 7:30 p.m. March 23-24 at the Kravis Center, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Tickets cost $29-$49. Call 561/832-7469 or visit kravis.org.
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