A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH ARAM SHELTON


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

ARAM SHELTON: I didn't come from a musical household. Basically, the group of friends that I was in, we were all going to play instruments in the band. So I picked an instrument along with them and I picked saxophone, the tenor saxophone, actually. Someone had picked alto saxophone and I didn't want to pick the same one. That's a boring introduction to playing music, but I liked it a lot. I liked playing music with other people.


FJ: Apart from the camaraderie, what other aspects of the music did you feel an affinity towards?

ARAM SHELTON: That's a good question. I don't know. It just became a natural thing for me. It wasn't that I was attracted by certain people playing saxophone or playing music. It is just that I did it and I kept doing it for the inner satisfaction that I got from playing an instrument. That's what kept me playing music since I was young. I started listening to lots of different music, late '80s on. I was born in '76. I listened to rock and classical music and some jazz at first. I listened to more jazz as I got older. I've always listened to a lot of different types of music.


FJ: What was in your record collection?

ARAM SHELTON: I would buy Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. They were big ones for me when I was listening to mainly jazz. Later on, I got more into Ornette, as I think a lot of people did, people that listened to different kinds of jazz and wanted to hear more than just standards. Ornette knocked my socks off.


FJ: Why is it easier for our generation to hear Ornette Coleman than Charlie Parker?

ARAM SHELTON: When I first heard Ornette, it seemed so much more emotional. There was a lot more happiness in the music, it seemed. It didn't seemed to be worried about the technicality. You are just making music. That is something that a lot of people that play jazz get hung up on. They get hung up on technique and they forget about the emotion. Bird, he's great and I listened to him a lot, but it is not quite the same. He was at a time where he was playing over these horns and he was melodic, but he wasn't quite as good as expressing his full range of emotions. We're not in a world where we have to do this or that. We're allowed to do lots of things and so when you come across somebody who does lots of things and he does it with emotion, it is amazing.


FJ: Are you a Chicago native?

ARAM SHELTON: No, I'm from Florida. I moved to Chicago in '99. When I was in college, I studied classical saxophone in Florida. I went to D.C. first and things didn't work out so great there in terms of my living situation and the musical environment being stalled, so I took a big trip and went to New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and I came to Chicago, just thinking one of those four cities would have something for me. And Chicago just seemed to be right for a lot of reasons, people that I met, the musicians that I met were into talking to each other. When I first came to visit, I met Ken Vandermark. I met Tim Daisy, who I still play with a lot. I still play with Ken. But they were about talking to whoever wanted to talk to them and in other cities, I felt this exclusionary thing happening that I didn't like. As opposed to New York, I figured Chicago was less expensive to live in and you have more of an opportunity to make your own thing happen because you're not worried about having to work all the time.


FJ: Chicago has a very co-op vibe, conducive to one's maturation as an artist.

ARAM SHELTON: There is a bit of competition, but it isn't a cutthroat competition. It is more of a pushing each other competition.


FJ: Healthy.

ARAM SHELTON: Yeah, definitely healthy. And there are people who play with certain other people more often and it is not that people get into camps or anything, it is just how it naturally works out. I feel like I've been able to play with pretty much everybody here that I've wanted to. That helped a lot because you can try out different ideas with different people and if the music doesn't work, you can switch the people around and see if it works better. People are willing to play your music, so you can write the music and you can get it performed and see if it works. That helps with the growing as a musician because you get to try more things. You get to learn things from other people and it is good.


FJ: And you have released a co-op album with Jonathan Crawford - Grey Ghost, How to Create Words.

ARAM SHELTON: It is a duo and it is not a group where I wrote all the music. The two of us, me and Jonathan Crawford, we create the music together. Somebody brings in an idea and working with that music over time, it becomes a song. The music is electronic and acoustic. Some of it is all electronic. Some of it is just saxophone and drums. We're trying to figure out a way to use the acoustic and electronic instruments on equal footing and use the electronic instruments and not background things, but as an accompaniment, but also have it interactive enough that we're not just playing along to a prerecorded track.


FJ: What freedoms do the electronics afford you as a composer?

ARAM SHELTON: What we do in that group, we set up structures moving from section to section and sometimes the emphasis will be on the acoustic and sometimes on the electronic and both of those things are going on at the same time. The freedom is that we can do a lot of different things because there is such a broad range. Tough part is making it all make sense together and having it not be these weird, different things juxtaposed on top of each other. The way that we do that is what I do on the computer is I do a lot of live sampling of myself and of the drums sometimes. I take that and it gets turned into something else that we can play along with. It is basically constantly changing.


FJ: And with the technology, just between the two of you, there is an intimacy, but also you can create a large instrumentation as well.

ARAM SHELTON: Yeah, definitely. We can be real simple or we can thicken things up. I think one of the main things that we're trying to do though is get it to the point where we're using the electronics in a way that they are constantly there, but we are not sacrificing improvisation on our other instruments. I'm not hunched over the computer. I am actually playing saxophone. We have it down to a point where we have enough freedom that we can handle these things.


FJ: And the future?

ARAM SHELTON: Next is in January, Locust Music is going to release music from a trio that I write a lot of music for called Dragons 1976. That's a trio with Tim on drums and Jason Ajemian on bass. He plays in Triage. A lot of the music that I wrote for that is simplified jazz. The bass and saxophone are very important in the songs and the melodies that I wrote. We're the only harmonic instruments, it is important that we are playing counterpoint to each other. It is really rhythmic. We're getting more East tour going. I think Dragons is going down South to do about eight dates. Touring is a tough thing to get started when people don't know who you are.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is Wang Chunging tonight. Comments? Email Him