Words by Sean Victory
Zack Clarke has spent the entirety of his career pushing his music further out, and in doing so he blurs the lines between genres. His piano work is firmly rooted with a foot in the past, and an eye on a future few can see. His skills are on full display on his new record Plunge, where his fingers wildly explore the keys and the rest of us are pulled along to see just what shape the song takes. Each piece stands like a monolith, the sun rises, reflecting off a familiar shape giving way to what is so clearly an alien architecture.
Indeed, Plunge, is an appropriate title for such a work, pulling the listener down into an unfamiliar world, drowning in arpeggios, odd time signatures, and song structures built from the center outwards. There’s no way to prepare for such an experience, this music has a language all its own, and Clarke speaks it fluently.
Off Shelf: I’ve really enjoyed digging through your past releases ahead of this interview about Plunge. I think the diversity of the music you create, and the genre-agnostic compositions have yielded some really powerful material. How is it that your music has found this form? What about combining these elements makes sense to you?
Zack Clarke: I’m of the belief that music is music. Finding a middle ground between seemingly unrelated genres or ideas has been a catalyst for a lot of my work. I think on Plunge specifically, I’ve had a desire to connect with the music that influenced me growing up. I was heavy into both dance music, rock and even Motown before getting into jazz. This record afforded me the opportunity to rekindle some of those mystical experiences I felt listening to music at a young age.
Along the lines of finding commonality among disparate things, I wanted to see if I could take what I’ve learned in Jazz and Avant-Garde and apply it to some of the mediums that initially lead me to loving and pursuing music. There have been many classical musicians in my family and it was important to learn classical music from an early age and it is still something I work on actively today. I also think growing up in a Greek household and having so much exposure to Greek music and dance has helped me to internalize odd time signatures which played a part in Plunge.
In short, I’m really interested in putting things together that shouldn’t work and finding a way to make it work. That’s really exciting to me and brings me to places I would never find otherwise.
OS: There’s a lot of ambience and mood-setting mixed in with your compositions. How does the environment of New York City affect how you think about sound, noise, and music?
ZC: I have always struggled with noise so moving to New York was difficult. The first time I tried to intentionally replicate city noises was the first cut on Random Acts of Order – “Before the Cause”. On Mesophase, the idea was to get as close as I could to the feeling of these everyday noises and then transcribe the sound and arrange it for a chamber ensemble. I found that having these noises in a broader musical context made them somewhat easier to internalize and handle. Aside from the therapeutic benefits, it really taught me a lot about the potential commonality in noise music and acoustic music.
I also had to kind of invent my own system of scoring so the ensemble could play with the noise in real time which was a fascinating experience both in terms of conceiving of it and watching the players adapt to it.
OS: The songs on Plunge are much more dense than your earlier work. The music continues to tumble forward and there’s often not a clear demarcation between one melody and the next. Is this inherent in your sense of improvisation, or are you—as the composer, keeping these changes in mind as you sit down to play?
ZC: Again, I like to work between polarities and find a middle ground. The idea behind Plunge was to essentially write avant garde music and then find a way to package it into small accessible pieces.
I’ve increasingly tried to not follow typical forms. I’ve often wondered, is it possible to make something catchy with an atypical, obscured form? What are the limits to this and how far can you push things like harmony and rhythm while retaining some kind of accessible narrative and feeling? Going back to the idea of polarities, I think one answer is in finding a balance between complexity and simplicity. With anything I do in music, I like to think of myself in a room but never outside the room. How far apart can you push the walls of that room and remain inside of it?
I am very big on practicing and playing jazz standards for that very reason. What is the common denominator that makes something what it is despite how obscured it might become? That essence is really what interests me and I’ll likely spend the rest of my life trying to figure that out. I’ve learned so much from transcribing the masters and really understanding how the essence of what they play and the history of what they play comes through. Often the most mind blowing things are so subtle. I try to bring this mentality to every project that I’ve done and will continue to do so.
The best kind of art, in my opinion, never explicitly tells you how to think, but has a lineage encoded in it that is ultimately embedded in our everyday world. That is what makes something truly relatable.
OS: Plunge is your first solo project in over ten years. How does your process differ when working on projects with other musicians, versus taking the entire process into your own hands?
ZC: Working with others has provided some big lessons on letting go. The more you can forget about trying to make things exactly the way you had envisioned, the more you can allow other musicians to surprise you. Overall, it is a better, more organic product if everyone can be themselves fully and that sometimes means tearing down your own notions of what the piece must be.
Having said that, I do love working on music by myself. You get exactly what you are going for and you have all the time in the world to achieve it.
OS: Piano and keyboard are cornerstones to your writing and performance but are there any specific pieces of gear that you find inspiring or help you approach your music in a different way?
ZC: For this project I didn’t use much gear outside of a keyboard and Logic 9. However, my knowledge of anything from compression to reverb came from the obsession I had with guitar pedals when I was younger. I’d also like to think that the amount of time I spent playing rock helped with this record. Having a background in guitar led me to start experimenting with different kinds of distortion on the piano and at times trying to get a hybrid piano/guitar sound.
I also think—and it’s not just exclusive to this record, that playing the cello growing up fostered a strong sense of counterpoint. Everything from writing a piece to just simply understanding chords and chord progressions can be boiled down to counterpoint.
OS: Is there anything you’ve been listening to lately that you find yourself continually coming back to?
ZC: I will always go through phases where I listen to nothing but Bach. That is pretty consistent. Same with Keith Jarrett or Coltrane or even Radiohead. I like to discover new music but even still, I like to keep my listening rather narrow at any given time.
What I’ve been listening to continuously for the past few months? The Ink Spots. I listened to the Ink Spots so much that I started dreaming Ink Spots songs. I just love everything about them. They have this crazy two step feel that brings me back to my roots in Texas. The way they do it is so subtle and effortless. The harmonies are incredible. I’ve never been much of a lyrics guy as I always tend to focus more on the music but their lyrics are beyond poetic. Unbelievable songwriting and character. I’ve also recently been checking out the catalog of pianist Nick Sanders, Matt Mitchell’s Zealous Angels, Miles Okazaki especially his record Trickster and Kim Cass’ Levs. Kim played bass on my trio record Vertical Shores and Levs is a truly remarkable record.
OS: I’m a big fan of jazz music, and I was wondering are there any foundational artists of the genre that you feel opened some doors for how you think about music, write, or perform?
ZC: My favorite jazz musician is Keith Jarrett. His music was a big catalyst for exploring jazz early on and I feel he’s probably been the biggest influence on the way that I play.
For Plunge in particular, I would say listening to Hermann Szobel was paramount. That was the kind of fusion I always wanted to make and I believe it was a big influence on this record. I also learned a lot about the possibilities in production techniques for something like this from Pat Metheny’s The Way Up and for sure growing up listening to Todd Rundgren, especially No World Order and The Individualist.
Outside of direct influences for this record, there are too many musicians to list that continue to teach me as a pianist. I’m still transcribing legendary pianists like Chick Corea and Oscar Peterson to this day. I’ve obviously learned a ton from Bill Evans with regard to harmony—like virtually every other pianist and I’m a big fan of Brad Mehldau. It’s not just piano players though, I’ve been heavy into Coltrane for a long time now. Of course, the Miles Davis Quintet. I think specifically Wayne Shorter opened a lot up for me. Especially his later work like Beyond the Sound Barrier really initiated me into the possibilities with improvised music. Having studied with Danilo Perez, he would constantly reference Wayne’s influence on him and I wouldn’t nearly be the musician I am today without that knowledge. A few of my former teachers who have written books—like Kenny Werner and Joe Morris, are invaluable resources both in their playing and writing about music.
OS: Are there any other art forms that have informed your own creative process? Anything specifically that pushed you forward with Plunge?
ZC: At every stage of my life I was checking out my parents books on art and constantly having discussions with them on these subjects. It can’t be understated how much this exposure to art has helped me. It was never about what is right or wrong, or good, or bad, but much more subtle and interesting than that. I was never stifled.
Coincidentally, the first time I was even exposed to those kinds of ideas was when I started going to public school. In elementary school art class I was called an “airhead” for the way I drew pictures. I think the biggest lesson I learned from art— and it is certainly applicable to Plunge, is that you cannot force anything. Whatever you are making, it needs to be an open conversation between yourself and the piece. Oftentimes on Plunge, I didn’t feel so much that I wrote the music, more so that I worked with what was already there and what the music required of me.
When I was at New England Conservatory, I was practicing so much and was so bogged down with information that I began to feel creatively stuck. Painting really helped to free me because the process became much more about play rather than having to do something properly or with expectation.
OS: What does your performance schedule look like? As an improvisational artist in New York’s scene, what does that look like?
ZC: After Covid it really seemed like something had changed. Half the venues I was familiar with had either closed or moved very far out of the city. Many of my closest collaborators also left the city and never returned. During this time, believe it or not, I actually performed more in Europe than in my own backyard!
It has only been recently that I feel there is a resurgence in Manhattan, especially for improvised music. I’ve heard many musicians share this exact sentiment. This year I did a ton of performances at a venue called 2b2c with a trio I’m a part of called the ZEL trio. It features Evan Crane on bass, a former member of the Hot Sardines and Estonian drummer Leonid Galaganov. I also performed there with cellist Chris Irvine in anticipation of an upcoming release that we have. Mostly it was nice to have a legitimate place for musicians to hang out, meet and play in the East Village, as for some time that was lacking. It was really nice to perform with old friends and new musicians including a quartet featuring hip hop legend and saxophonist Rodney Chapman. The cool thing is that all of these performances were recorded and filmed professionally in house and will be put online beginning this year.
OS: What do you have coming up in the near future that we can look forward to?
ZC: I have a new record coming out on New Focus Recordings on February 7th. It is a duet with my longtime collaborator on cello, Chris Irvine. We also put out a duo album 10 years ago that features free improvisation based on Bach’s third cello suites and he played a very pivotal role on my record Mesophase. I have a completed record of mostly improvised music that will be released with the ZEL Trio at a later date. I am also planning soon to go into the studio and record a solo piano record. It will be a mixture of improvised music as well as jazz standards. Finally, I’m writing more through composed music kind of in the vein of Plunge but more acoustic oriented. It will be something to look out for in the coming years as it is a massive project.