Stuart Bogie: Living Music

Stuart Bogie has long made his mark on the live-music circuit. As a saxophonist, he spent over 15 years as a core member of Afrobeat pioneers Antibalas—and still collaborates with the veteran group and other members of the extended Daptone family to this day. As a sideman, he’s toured the world with major indie-rock and pop acts like Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio, racking up credits with The Hold Steady, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, James Murphy, Hamilton Leithauser, Kevin Morby, members of The National and even Taylor Swift along the way. And, in the core jamband world, he’s one of the few people who has shared the stage with Phil Lesh & Friends, Phish, Goose, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, the Disco Biscuits, String Cheese Incident and Medeski Martin & Wood—to the point where it often feels like a Bogie sit in feels as essential to a band’s New York visit as a pretzel or slice of pizza.

However, the Chicago-bred, Brooklyn, N.Y.-based musician’s latest venture is something of a left turn on paper, though no less authentic and experimental—November Variations, an album of clarinet improvisations recorded at a Midtown Manhattan church with organist Buck McDaniel. An outgrowth of the clarinet meditations he streamed for free throughout the pandemic, the album taps into Bogie’s deeply spiritual approach to music as well as the work he has done in various sacred spaces over the years with a cross-cultural mix of collaborators.

As he prepares to mark the release of November Variations with another series of free concerts at New York’s Church of Our Savior, and celebrates his 50^th birthday, Bogie reflected on the decision to pick up the clarinet again, his instant connection with McDaniel and why Wetlands is more like a midtown cathedral than one might expect.   

Your new live album, November Variations, was recorded in a rather unique setting for you—a church in Midtown Manhattan. What were your initial goals going into that series of performances?

Well, I have to start with Fritz Myers, who was the producer of the event. He and I were talking about putting something together. We’d just started working together—he’s my manager, but he’s also my friend—and like a true manager, he counsels me and talks me off the ledge and thinks of ideas I didn’t think of and all of that stuff.

I had told Fritz I wanted to play clarinet-based music at 9 a.m. in the middle of Manhattan. So he put on his thinking cap and introduced me to an organist named Buck McDaniel, who is the music director of Church of Our Savior, which is just blocks away from Grand Central. Buck is both a composer and performer, as well as a natural improviser. It’s actually not uncommon for people playing in the church to be fantastic improvisers. It’s just the nature of their work—they can make things longer and shorter and living music is their specialty. So Fritz connected the two of us and he actually has it on video. We got together and I foolishly had forgotten my clarinet. But I had a flute in my bag, so I played that with Fritz and it was just instant.

We looked at each other and both had this feeling. I was speechless, and Buck says, “My chords are your chords.” We spoke the same harmonic language and, as we began talking, I realized that his musical interests were things I was captivated by but hadn’t explored much. We were very complimentary. So I’ve been in love with Buck’s artistry since I met him—he’s deep, he’s a character and he’s really fun. He’s also just real and will be honest with you. He’s seen it all.

So something just grew out of us that felt incredible. I don’t know how else to explain it, but in all of my days, the last time I felt this amazing of a connection was when I played the music of Fela Kuti for the first time 25 years ago. When I joined Antibalas, I felt like I was meant to be there. And, when I started playing with Buck, it was like, “Yes—this is what I’ve been preparing for. It feels really free, and I also feel like Buck is someone I want to conquer challenges together with.”  

Everyone who’s heard the music has said that the music has opened up parts of their mind and parts of their emotions that they haven’t connected with in some time. So there’s a healing property to the music that makes it worthwhile. So here we are in a big, marble public place that’s designed for contemplating the infinite. And we bring music in there for free, for five days. And then Fritz—being a brilliant sound recordist and mixing engineer—recorded it, mixed it and mastered it. And the capture is absolutely beautiful. The clarinet has always felt a little bit boxy and restrained in my [previous] recordings, but this feels truly free. There’s a natural reverb. There’s no replacement for being in a giant, marble room.

One of the more unique parts of the November series is that you and Buck were positioned on a balcony and all the attendees were a level below you. Some people were seated in pews while others were wandering around the church, but very few, if any, could actually see you.

That’s the concept we wanted. I just love the idea of somebody wandering by this church and there is a sign saying, “Drop in and listen.” And when they wander in, they only hear. They don’t see us because we’re up in the organ loft. Like you said, the organ, in that sanctuary, is situated up in this loft, which I think is common in a lot of Catholic churches. So I was up there with Buck so we could make eye contact. Everyone was down below, and everyone was facing away from the organ loft because that is the way the pews are facing down below. So it required people either to stare at this beautiful, ornate, decorative church or simply close their eyes and enjoy. It removed our physical appearances from the experience. I don’t think that’s required of an effective performance, but I do know, when I’m listening to music, I’m gonna close my eyes for a few minutes and really try and connect with what’s happening. I had a friend that used to work with James Brown, and he was so proud that James Brown had taught him to close his eyes and listen for a while.

Sometimes I’ll play for 30 minutes without opening my eyes. But for the listeners to have to detach, they have to release whatever thinking muscle is roaming around in their head. They have to let that go. They’ll have to take the leash off their thoughts, and people would come up to us after and say, “I was thinking about my uncle,” or “I thought of everyone I went to high school with 50-60 years ago.”

And this wasn’t anything we prompted them to do. It was just something that regularly occurred. So it’s like, “Oh, this is worth doing.” And I think our placement in the venue was key to that—although, I think it would also be fun to watch us move around and look at each other and smile and laugh occasionally.

What you are describing actually reminds me a little of Wetlands, where the stage placement of the club did away with the more traditional “altar-style stage setup” that most venues have and, thus, encouraged fans to wonder around the space in a different way. It created more of a clubhouse vibe.

I agree, and Wetlands was actually my first gig with Antibalas—the run we did for five weeks in 2001. I was so new to the music. I had just joined, and I remember I had to learn about 20 or 30 songs. And I had to learn them all by ear. So for a couple of weeks before that, I wouldn’t listen to any other music. It was like, “I’ve got no other room.” I’d plug my ears when somebody put on another song. I was like, “I have to just keep working on this because the melodies were turning into each other,” which they do when you memorize a bunch of melodies. They all start to swim together, and they still live together in a soup in my brain. And then, when I hear the guitars and the drums or I’m prompted by a lyric, all the ideas start to organize. But if I just open up that part of my mind, it’s soup.

Improvising with Buck is kind of like that. There’s just this giant reservoir of musical ideas and experiences and they just stream out like characters in a dream. They come out while we play together. And Buck is a little bit like Antibalas. He’s challenging—and caring, mysterious and brilliant. There’s things that are amazing that I don’t quite understand, and that’s so compelling in a collaborator because the music becomes an extension of a means or experiencing life and thought together.

November Variations and the decision to perform morning clarinet music stems from the free solo streams you did throughout the pandemic. You’ve said that the experience of doing those streams reinvigorated your love for the clarinet, which was your first instrument. When did you have the idea to launch that series? 

It was the first week of the pandemic. We were in Brooklyn. There were sirens—pretty much constantly—where we live near Atlantic Avenue. You’d walk out in the middle of the night for a glass of water, and you’d see through your window the red flashing lights of an ambulance picking another person up—one of your neighbors—to bring them to the hospital. We didn’t know what it was doing to people. It was terrifying. So there was isolation, which happened everywhere, but I think in New York it was particularly terrifying at first, as you can recall. I was with my stepson and my partner and I was having more of the biggest human feelings than I’ve ever had. And my partner, Karen said to me, “You need to play your clarinet for your friends.” So she put the camera on me, and we did an Instagram live. We had never done anything like that—she said, “Put on a better shirt!” [Laughs.] I put on a simple drone that I would normally practice to, and I just let the music come out. It was deeply cathartic, and she would hold the phone and kind of communicate with people as they checked in. It felt amazing. So the next day we did it again, and the next day we did it again. And it became part of our grounding practice. We would meditate, we would pray and then we would do this concert—and it kept us connected to the forces that we needed to connect to and helped us keep our heads on straight throughout this experience.

After a few days, friends said, “Can I send you a drone to play to?” And, of course, I said, “Sure.” And before I knew it, I had over 50 drones from all these different friends. Some of them were from around the world—my friend Jeremy Williams made a drone out of the leaf blowers he was hearing outside his window. Someone made one in their kitchen. My friend Korey Richey sent me one. I played to it, and he said, “Can you send me the mix?” because I started recording them.

Actually, it was Steve Mackey, rest in peace, from the band Pulp, he encouraged me to do that. He listened and he wrote me and said, “Stuart, I hope you’re recording these.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I am not recording them.” [Laughs.] And then, immediately, I started recording them and stepped up my game with the recording. 

So while the thing was cooking, I sent Korey mixes of our project. He plays in LCD Soundsystem with James Murphy, and they had been in a COVID group podded up together since they were working in their studio. He put it on while they were working, James heard it and, next thing you know, I’m playing to some James Murphy pieces. That actually led to a record that we put out together called Morningside. The way that it got its name was that, before we finished the record, Gregory Crewdson, the amazing photographer that works up in the Western Massachusetts area near Mass MoCA, heard the music and was touched and wanted to partner his latest series of photographs with the music. So now if you see that series, which has been on a world tour for the last several years, you’ll hear our music. They use it in a documentary about his photography that they made, so as in exchange for that, he gave James and I photographs.

He said, “You can choose anything from the series.” The name of the series was “Eveningside,” so I called one of the pieces “Eveningside” and another one of the pieces “Morningside.” And we used his photography on the cover, too. The photograph that both James and I chose was one of a child looking into a barn—or a garage really—and in the edge of the garage you can see there’s a coffin in there and there’s a light going from it. I didn’t know which photograph to pick because he is a brilliant photographer and these images are all so incredible. They’re also very heavy. I was talking to Karen, asking which one of these we should get, and she said, “This one kind of reminds me of how we experienced COVID together and how you became a part of my son’s life through this and how an experience of nearness to death was part of our connection.” So that’s the beautiful thing about this.

By the end, we had done that clarinet concert, which we called Clarinet Concert For You, every morning for 150 days straight. And by the end of that series, I had cultivated a voice on solo clarinet. It was calling to me. I had to go and find it, but I didn’t have an occasion to find it until we had the pandemic.

You have continued to hone your voice on the clarinet since the pandemic in a number of settings, including with Joe Russo in Selcouth Quartet. In fact, I think many people now see it as one of your primary instruments

I’ve done a bunch of things that draw on the pandemic-clarinet experience, and November Variations really traffics in the same feeling. But, of course, it’s alive and there’s two human beings having an experience together. It’s the next phase in it. And I can say that the feelings I have playing with Buck are very similar to the feelings I had in those early days of the quarantine—there’s feeling in the music that feels essential. And playing that music is a practice of dwelling in these feelings.

Most of our readers know you from your work in the Afrobeat, jam and Downtown jazz scenes, as well as the many prominent indie and pop acts you have worked with in the studio or enhanced on stage. With that in mind, it is funny that your work the classical world, as well as your involvement with Buck in a church setting and Jeremiah Lockwood in the Jewish musical world, could almost be considered “alternative” bookings for you.

I’m stepping out of my role as a musician maybe by saying this—I’m getting into the musicology department a little bit, so forgive me if I’m out of bounds—but there was a trend around what they call Second Vatican. And it happened across religious space where everyone was like, “I don’t know about this classical music— just give me a few chords on the guitar.” And I did that. I would sing songs that Cat Stevens had written and it’s beautiful, deep-feeling music that was based more in the folk music of the late ‘50s and ‘60s. But what I’ve experienced with a lot of people in my generation is their renewed love for sacred sounds that reflect classical traditions and that includes like the music of Arvo Pärt and Jeremiah Lockwood, who studied with his grandfather in the cantorial tradition. Even though Jeremiah is an incredible guitar player, it’s not just a G C D-chord thing. There’s a classical composition within this elaborate tradition. And Jeremiah is incredibly articulate with that, and I have learned so much about spirituality and music from Jeremiah. When we used to play with The Sway Machinery, we would stare into each other’s eyes before we went out, just really encouraging each other to get free, to open our hearts. And Jeremiah would tell stories that felt ancient and futuristic at the same time. We really dug into these amazing places in our shared experience of life and our childhoods and our fears. We actively opened doors to new spiritual places when we played. Jeremiah taught me a lot about how to do that. And he has just such extensive knowledge of the cantorial music. With the High Holidays shows we do, it’s so moving how he presents this music. When we do a rehearsal, it’s not a light once over. We’re talking about a Moby Dick-level things here.

But, when you talk about something like the High Holidays, they deserve something as deep and amazing as what Jeremiah can offer. Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” these requiems are spiritual presentations of the highest order that the composers of the time could achieve. It’s the same with A Love Supreme. I’m not saying that I could ever make anything as glorious as A Love Supreme, but I will say that the nature of being a child of God is that I can make something as beautiful as I can in that path.

After the release of November Variations, you are returning to the church where it was recorded for another stretch of free shows with Buck. Now that you have done this once, how will you approach this upcoming run differently?

From November 17-21, Monday through Friday, we are going to do our second annual series. And, by popular demand, we’re gonna do it at 6 p.m. [Laughs.] Fitz wants to get some people there. The idea is that it’s the opposite side of rush hour and the nature of the music will be different from the morning music we played the first time—though, maybe we’ll livestream to Hawaii where it will be morning for some fans. [Laughs.]

Finally, you just turned 50, which seems like as good a time as any to look backward and forward at the same time. How have you felt about that milestone birthday?

I’ve got so many hot takes that I’ve been saving up, but now I would say that all the wrong turns that I cursed—and that I beat myself up over—all went into the recipe that creates who you are. And, I always think about what Bill Withers said in that documentary Still Bill—“I’m just trying to be OK with everything.” That’s the feeling I want to have when I take a breath and blow through the horn. I want to feel part of the world. I hope that the music I make is of some spiritual value to people, some emotional value—however it is that they come to it and relate to it. I don’t want to demand people’s attention. But I do want to earn that with the music. And I want to share it. And if there’s some way I can convey to those people that their awareness touches me back, I’d want to do that. 

[When I play in front of an audience], I can feel the pool of water before I dive in—everyone brings their hearts and their ears. And they sit there with you—it’s like they’re calling to you and you can feel that. The psychic sauce is in that exchange. It is made of love and to traffic in that is the aim of the work, so that no one cares if I miss a note. And I want to just be OK with that.