Bill Anschell: unearthing jazz's improbable solutions

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: I don't know if you've ever been on a bill with an artist where you didn't want to go on after them, or I'm sure stories like that, or maybe you've been the person people didn't want to follow. But as I've talked to other artists in our area and mentioned that we had time coming up together, they all seemed greatly relieved to be talking to me before talking to you.

I suspect nobody wanted to follow you because I get to talk to a lot of people doing this, a lot of interesting people. That sets the bar when you talk to somebody who's won an award for humor.

Bill Anschell: Ah, okay. Do you know Clarence Acox?

LP: I know of him but don't know him.

Bill Anschell: Well, yeah, he's got this incredibly low booming voice like, uh, James Earl Jones. He's got that kind of thing. He and I went on KBCS several times to do their fundraiser with him. And next to him, I felt like I'd been swallowing helium or something. So I understand.

LP: Reading that article is incredible—the Careers In Jazz article.

Bill Anschell: Oh, no, you've read that. Okay. (laughter)

LP: Oh, I mean, come on. I found it difficult to read, and I'm not a working musician. People must just see themselves in it, and it's got to hurt.

Bill Anschell: 90 percent of the people think it's funny, and 10 percent take it personally. And the people who take it personally, I think, do exactly what you're saying. They think I'm writing about them, even though I'm not writing about myself more than anyone, which is always the case in my writing.

LP: What brought it out? Like, what were you experiencing that made you have to express that?

Bill Anschell: Oh, I don't know. The first piece I ever wrote that kind of got viral before what we consider viral now—people were just emailing it back and forth—was the one I wrote about jam sessions. Up until then, I'd never written for anybody except my friends and myself, you know, but that got, that was huge. I got it sent to me, and they eventually took my name off. And so people were sending it to me, like, "You like humor. You probably think this is funny." I was like, "I hope it's funny!" But that kind of encouraged me to write more.

Careers in Jazz is just kind of all-encompassing. It kind of gave me a chance to talk about all the dark things we must face, no matter where we're coming from. It's just the weird stuff that jazz puts us through.

LP: Are those conversations that players have amongst each other?

Bill Anschell: Not really. They're a little too dark for that. Some players talk that darkly, but people don't want to be around them. Like I said, it's supposed to be funny, but I think, I think face to face, it's a little harder to have that kind of humor and have people not take it seriously. I don't know.

LP: It's interesting because one of the reactions I had reading it was like, I wonder if there's a version of this in every profession. What do the doctors say about, or like the lawyers with the ambulance chasers, or, and I'm sure there are other less obvious examples, but…

Bill Anschell: I'll tell you something funny about that piece. It got huge exposure because a writer for the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about the disappearing jazz audience in the thread. It started with a quote from my piece and talked about my piece a lot.

One of the reasons that a Wall Street Journal writer wanted to write about it, at least according to him, he said it, it had gone viral among economists, whereas the jazz world was a study of when supply exceeds demand in a closed system. And so that was of interest to economists. I never would have had that. I didn't have it in mind when I wrote it. I didn't see it coming, but that's cool.

LP: Yeah. The part about supply, I mean, I'll paraphrase you badly, but the bit about the number of people creating jazz exceeds the audience.

Bill Anschell: Oh God, it's only getting worse. It continues to get worse. The university systems are cranking out so many good players now. You can be a great player but still have nowhere to go.

LP: This set of themes, as expressed in that piece and this piece of our conversation, has only recently come up in some of my discussions here. Many of the conversations here, and I'll apologize to my listeners who've heard me say this a few times. I've spent the last few years feeling like it's been a great moment for jazz, especially being of a certain generation growing up in the eighties and into the nineties where the predominant discussion was like, is jazz dead and like, is it just going to be ossified into like sort of to just blame him for a moment into like the classicism of Wynton Marsalis and the genre's dead, and there's no innovation.

As a listener, I feel there's more jazz in other music than in a long time. In mainstream music, in hip-hop. I talk to many artists from Europe, specifically Germany—electronic artists doing interesting things around improvised music. And so I feel like jazz's reach hasn't been this long in a long time. Although maybe it's not under its banner. Perhaps that's what I'm experiencing. But it's just been very jarring to feel like I have felt so optimistic and then to realize I was, maybe, I had the rosy glasses on.

Bill Anschell: Maybe. I think people who say jazz is dying, and some people still say it wasn't just Wynton twenty years ago. It's a very specific kind of jazz that they're talking about, which is straight-ahead jazz. The type of music that nobody would question whether it's jazz or not, but the various hybrids that have come out of jazz is really what you're saying, but just a different way of saying it.

You know, jazz has been fusing with world music, electronic music, and various other things. If you define jazz as all those things, jazz has never been more creative, diverse, or better. It just really depends on how you look at it.

LP: How do you look at it?

Bill Anschell: It's a tough one. I have a bit of cynicism about the current crop of jazz, young jazz players, just because ear training seems to have fallen by the wayside because of technology, where people don't have to learn tunes because they're on their phones. They don't have to be able to transpose by ear because they can push a button on their phone. Those two things were, at least to me, a very important part of ear training, learning tunes just by listening to them and then trying to play them in different keys.

In that sense, jazz is sort of disappearing. That approach to jazz is disappearing. I think the modern extension of straight-ahead jazz is much more harmonically complicated. Largely because all these students are coming out of great programs and learning a ton of stuff. I don't think most of them are interested in playing jazz, old standards with the harmonies as written.

LP: Why is that important? Is it about shared language? And I'm not asking it necessarily so much as to engage in debate or challenge. It is more from a place of wonder because I could also hear some of what you're saying through the lens of maybe it foretells an interesting time for composition then. So, I'm just curious if you could unpack it with me.

Bill Anschell: No, that's a perfect point. I think jazz is becoming more compositional. Absolutely. At the same time, it is becoming less ear-based because people can write much more complicated music because they know much more. And so jazz has gone in that direction. It's probably not as catchy. And in some ways, it's not as accessible. It's less accessible to those who got into jazz by listening to standards.

However, in a different way, it is accessible because it sometimes has elements of rock, which reaches a larger audience, and elements of electronic music, which can do the same.

LP: It's like a trying-to-handle-mercury type of conversation, right? There's no sort of objective reality, I don't think. Although I believe some folks impose an objective reality, the one thing I would say, jazz or not, is that there's a lot of interesting music that incorporates improvisational elements.

It's been very exciting to see improvisational music infiltrate or finally be embraced by the world of electronic musicians. I find that fun and modern. I would like to think of it as a gateway drug. As a kid, I didn't grow up in a jazz household or be exposed to jazz music. But I was listening to a lot of classic rock. I was a deadhead, and they talked about jazz, and they talked about John Coltrane, and I did the thing that a music lover does. I went down the alleyways that my heroes or the people I was listening to pointed down.

If you knew me, you'd say, you know, I'm not naturally an optimist. Still, I find it optimistic for the music that the more people that are incorporating these elements and who are willing to talk about the sounds that are influencing them, I don't know, I think it, you know, can't be a bad thing to have people out there talking about improvisational music, creative music, jazz.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, I think what's happening with jazz is great for music overall. I think that other kinds of music are being improved by jazz. Compared to maybe ten or twenty years ago, I have things I like and don't like about contemporary jazz. But overall, the marketplace is not improving for jazz if it's called jazz. However, more popular idioms incorporate jazz, so more people listen. And I think we're saying the same thing.

LP: Yeah.

Bill Anschell: I'm happy that electronic music is finding its way into jazz. I don't know if you have my last CD. I finally did that, you know, I was sort of like you. I was not into jazz growing up. I was into progressive rock, and I had synthesizer heroes and all that, and I studied electronic music at Oberlin. And it's just always been something I liked. And my last CD is the first time I tried to put that together.

But I just love other people's music. One person is Aaron Parks, and he uses cool electronic sounds. EST, the Scandinavian group. They use it in pretty cool ways, which is pretty understated. Still, it's like we already have certain instrumental timbres that we're used to—piano-based with drums, guitar, and horns—but electronic music adds another element of textures you can have. I think that's great. I'm really glad it's happening.

LP: I want to get to Improbable Solutions because there's so much to talk about there that I think is immediately relevant to this part of our conversation, but I wonder if maybe we could set the table a little bit for listeners and wind the clock back a little bit.

So you already introduced the idea that you didn't grow up a jazz head. I want to talk a little bit more about some of the sort of the first music that you decided to listen to, as opposed to being stuck in the car with a parent or something like that. But piano wasn't even your first instrument if I understand correctly. Is that right?

Bill Anschell: It was kind of my first instrument because there was an upright piano in our basement. And I would just hear pop tunes on the radio and bang them out. Somebody gave me the book 10,000 Chords for All Occasions or something. So I could get sheet music. And even though I wasn't a great reader, I learned the chords and all that, but I didn't have a piano lesson until I was twenty. So, I was a very late starter in that way.

I played mostly clarinet and sax. Those were my two. Up until mid-college, I sold my saxophone, bought a synthesizer, and made the transition. The lessons I got were on clarinet, a little bit on trumpet, a little bit on guitar, and never on piano, which is kind of weird. But if I have some regrets, because I'm sure my technique would be a lot better, maybe I wouldn't be doing it because I wouldn't like it if I had been forced to take those lessons.

LP: I was going to ask you, did you have to unlearn much? Like, is your technique particularly quirky or poor?

Bill Anschell: I mean, it's something I've always thought I needed to make up for the fact that I didn't have a traditional classical upbringing. And I'm sure that my technique is not great. But I work on it hard and have been doing it for forty years. Hopefully, it's at least decent. I'm not a good judge of it. I do know that my hands hardly ever hurt, which is good.

LP: Yeah, that's something.

Bill Anschell: I can play pretty fast, but I wish my touch. Like many great classical players, I wish I had absolute control over my touch. Some jazz players like Brad Mehldau and Keith Jarrett make every note, and every inner voice sound exactly like they want to. I'm working on it, but that's an advantage I think the people who have serious classical upbringings have.

LP: Talk to me about some of that early music. What were you drawn to? What were you listening to when you were a kid?

Bill Anschell: I had open, moderately open-minded parents. They got us all the Beatles albums as they came out, so I was immersed in that, and I was immersed in Top 40 radio. And I wasn't particularly fussy until I got to high school, and everybody's got to find their thing and define themselves by the music they like. That kind of happens, and for me, that was progressive rock.

I was sort of a nerd and liked electronic sounds, so that was where I went—bands like Yes, Pink Floyd, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. I still like some of them, and I don't like others—like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. I can still enjoy listening to a lot of it, and even a few tunes on my new CD have been described as prog-ish. I don't mind that at all.

LP: For the ones you've left behind in your taste, can you articulate what it was, like what makes you, what made you stick with some of it and not others?

Bill Anschell: Yeah. Shameless technique, pyrotechnics, just how fast you can play kind of stuff and be astonished by people's technical abilities, but some of the things I like more compositionally, like some of Yes's stuff. It's pretty interesting how they put tunes together. I don't know if they knew what they were doing or not. I have no idea, but they weren't just top-forty tunes with hooks. They were almost symphonic sometimes.

From a compositional standpoint, I like that a lot. It's the soloing that I don't find very interesting anymore because they don't use any of the funny notes at all.

LP: Yeah, they're like running scales or whatever.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, arpeggios. I recently had not even a midlife crisis, but a late-life crisis, I think. After thirty-five years of not going to any, I finally went to a rock concert. I went because it was Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, although it was just Palmer because Lake and Emerson aren't around anymore. And Todd Rundgren was the third act. And I'd never been particularly into him, and then I wound up liking him way more than the others.

LP: That doesn't surprise me, right? He's very musical.

Bill Anschell: A friend of mine in Atlanta sang Todd's praises as a musical genius at me for decades, and I ignored him, but if you go back into his full catalog, it's amazing what he's done. He's just one of those guys that can do anything. Although he doesn't play jazz, within the rock and pop idioms, he can pretty much do whatever he wants, which is cool.

LP: Yeah, that's interesting. So, in retrospect, as someone who mentions having the Beatles records and then getting into prog, he almost seems like he'd be right in your taste. It doesn't surprise me to hear you say it resonated with you. He can span those worlds so interestingly.

Bill Anschell: I don't want to harp on this concert too much. It opened with them. It's like a Palmer tribute, which is just dumb. And then Todd Rundgren played second, I think. And he started with an EDM piece, electronic dance music. He had a synthesizer player, which was much better than the other stuff we'd heard. And then Yes came on, and they were okay. Yes factioned, you know, they split in half, and you only get either half of the band if you hear them now.

LP: They didn't do any justice to that brand. You'd have to pay attention to know who's in Yes and which version you're getting. And I don't have the energy for that.

Bill Anschell: Yeah. I got the wrong version, unfortunately.

LP: What prompted you to pick up the clarinet? It was this sort of era of band instruments in school.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, very much. That was it. It was weird because I wasn't that into it. I think I practiced for half an hour to 45 minutes a day and studied with a symphony player, but I was never going to be a classical clarinetist because they have to take it a lot more seriously than that.

Yeah, that was how I learned to play. And I'm good at reading single lines because of that on piano. The vertical reading on piano, which I didn't grow up doing, is another challenge—having to see five notes at once. And then I just played saxophone and stage band. That was another high school thing.

And I wound up even recording a little on saxophone. And then I decided to make up my mind, pick one instrument, try to get good on it. And really, I chose piano because I knew that, or at least I expected, it would be much more fun to be in a practice room playing piano than playing a saxophone. After all, you can do it all. You can hear what it will sound like and not have to imagine a band with you. The piano has been the only thing I've played since then.

LP: Did you have a facility for it pretty quickly?

Bill Anschell: No, I wouldn't say that. I had good ears. I had really good ears but didn't know how to play a major scale when I was twenty. So, I had a long way to go from a technical standpoint.

LP: Wow. That's incredible. What were your guys? Did you have piano inspirations?

Bill Anschell: What helped me turn the corner from progressive rock to jazz? A couple of things. One was that I started studying jazz. That was the biggest thing. It was suddenly like being aware of what a jazz musician is dealing with, thinking about, responding to, and reacting to in real-time; it's incredible. It's a whole different world from rock. That was what got me going.

But from a progressive rock, I checked out Return to Forever, Chick Corea's band. The Romantic Warrior album was the one that I kind of wore out. And then there are tunes that you could call progressive rock if you wanted to. And then I saw Pat Metheny with his early band, Mark Egan and Danny Gottlieb. I don't know if you know that record, but it's the white one. I saw that band and that one I really liked.

So I sort of got into fusion as a gateway to jazz, but then through my piano lessons, I was only working on the stuff that serious jazz players work on, which isn't to say fusion players aren't serious because they are. But that's not where my lessons were pointed.

LP: Yeah. And I think it is overly broad on the spectrum, like a lot of the fusion stuff. If it's, if you're not careful, it butts into that area that you were talking about before, where it's a lot of soloing and just the flash.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, some of it is, but you know, good fusion is pretty thoughtful and just as good as anything else. I still like it a lot. What do you go back to? If I want to listen to fusion stuff, it's probably mainly Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, and Herbie Hancock. Those would be the main ones. I remember I was into the Dixie Dregs for a while. They were another kind of gateway band for me. But I don't listen to fusion much anymore, even though some people have been calling my new CD fusion. I listen to it straight-ahead or in modern or electronic stuff.

LP: You mentioned the Dixie Dregs. I saw Steve Morse open for Rush once, and that was pretty good. On the Venn diagram, I think whoever programmed that tour was pretty smart. I think they expanded both audiences that night.

Bill Anschell: I once hitchhiked hundreds of miles to hear Rush in Montreal. That was just an obligatory college experience. If you were a deadhead—it's the same kind of thing.

LP: I grew up on the East Coast outside New Haven. So, when I saw in your biography that you were at Wesleyan, It reminded me we used to go up there in the fall for Navaratri. They used to have a big celebration, and I remember you could get a boxed meal. There'd be biryani or something, and then sit outside and see shows and Indian classical musicians.

Bill Anschell: Oh, really? Wow.

LP: Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember enough about it specifically because this was the early mid-nineties. Still, I always remember looking forward to it and being like mind-blowing music and a great night.

Bill Anschell: Yeah. At Wesleyan, the best thing I did was study Indian music with a great master mridangam player, and I learned a lot about rhythm. Their rhythmic concept is so incredibly evolved and difficult that I always tell people how I use it in my music or my playing. It is the tip of the iceberg, and I would never claim to be accomplished at it. It's amazing music. I'm glad I studied it.

LP: Is there a 'why' to the rhythmic concept in that music? Did it serve a purpose? Why is that rabbit hole so deep?

Bill Anschell: I'm not the best-qualified person to answer that, but I will say that if you go to a traditional classical Indian music concert, you watch the people, mainly people who are of Indian descent, who, who know how to keep tala with their hands. The things that happen rhythmically within it are large-scale, and they're pieces that can condense and expand. The rhythmic pieces go through different speeds, but through all those things, they create tension. The resolution is as gratifying as any other kind of musical resolution there is.

So the reason for me is that it's incredible tension and release and an amazing intellectual exercise.

LP: Tell me a little bit about Atlanta. I know it was a big part of your life for a while. I don't want to ask for the Reader's Digest version solely, but I'm fascinated with Atlanta as a place. What role did it play in your musical development? Things of that nature. Like, what's the Atlanta you walked into as a player?

Bill Anschell: When I arrived, it was a booming, vital scene. And I was really lucky because the best player in Atlanta had just left, the best piano player. So, bands needed a piano player, and I just got there. I was good at hanging out and meeting as many people as possible. And I was working like crazy there. I guess there are people in Seattle working this much, but I was doing twenty to twenty-five gigs a month. Probably most of them were jazz gigs. Some were private parties, which was also great because you could make a viable living there.

I think it's still just in terms of being able to make a living. I think it's still better than Seattle is. Both musical scenes are great. It's easy to generalize about the difference. Seattle, to me, is a more ethereal, heady approach to jazz, and Atlanta was a more physical, try-to-swing-hard thing. Of course, there are people in either city that do the other, but I've just found that the thrust of those jazz scenes differed in that way.

People played really hard in Atlanta. You'd just get worn out by the end of a gig. It was good for me. I'm glad I was young when I was doing that. I went back there about five years ago and played a few nights at the best jazz club there. I played in one when I lived there, and those guys just wore me out. By the time I left, I was ready to sleep.

LP: Who were the names that maybe had a national audience coming out of Atlanta then? I don't have a big connection to Atlanta in my head, like Philadelphia or elsewhere, but I'm curious.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, many great players there might start in Atlanta and end up in New York. Regarding the guys that stayed there, Russell Gunn is still there. He's a great trumpet player. Terreon Gully was there when I was there. Great drummer. I wish I played with him more. Freddy Cole was there. I'm just trying to think of names that people might recognize. I know David Sánchez lives there now. There's been some turnaround.

More than national names, there was a much more active pipeline between Atlanta and New York. So Atlanta guys would play in better-known bands and New York-based bands sometimes. My favorite musician in Atlanta was a drummer that nobody's heard of because he has never sought the limelight in any way. His name is Kinah Boto, and he and I toured with Nnenna Freelon for six years together. So I knew him well. Incredible player. And he's on my Atlanta CDs.

LP: So as it relates to Improbable Solutions, so it wasn't like you weren't interested in electronic music or blending electro-acoustic or, but you sort of kept the, you kept the chocolate out of the peanut butter to a large extent.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, no, totally.

LP: Tell me about that. Was it an ethos thing? Was it a purist thing? Was it a time and opportunity? Like why now? And why not before?

Bill Anschell: the main reason is that, in this computer age, it's much easier to have electronics at your disposal than it was back then. When I studied at Oberlin, we had a big wall of synth banks and patch bays. Yeah, that was the analog era. And I think that was probably too unwieldy to incorporate into a performance or even recording.

But I've probably been doing electronic stuff alone for at least ten years. If you go to my website, there's an 'electro' tab. And it's got four or five projects I did, so I was doing it all along, but I didn't. I hadn't gotten to the point where I could merge it with jazz very well. I hadn't incorporated real instruments—like I used real drums and bass on Improbable Solutions. So, it was a big jump, and I was also learning how to mix and use effects. And it's just something I enjoy doing.

And so I had fun doing it just on my own. And then I thought I was ready to try maybe more jazz-like compositions, use real players, and combine it all. I wrote all the tunes during the pandemic. I was just kind of holed up in my brother's house, and I think I wrote a lot of it in the basement. And although it's not apparent when you listen to the CD, in almost every tune, there are sections where the electronics come forward. They're just pretty subtle layers behind everything, but there are four-measure chunks where I suddenly get to play with sounds. And it goes in that direction.

And I didn't think the project would be very well received because I felt it was too weird. But it didn't sound that weird when I mixed it. And then it's been pretty well embraced by jazz critics, and our local radio station, which never played any of my other stuff, has had it in rotation for quite a while. It was a really happy experience for me.

Replicating it live is a different thing because I obviously don't have those sounds. I don't even have a good synth keyboard or anything, but I have a guitar player who uses a lot of textures. Tomorrow, we're playing at the Seattle Jazz Fellowship and doing five of the tunes from Improbable Solutions. I thought we could do the five tunes without having all the electronics behind it. They seem to work pretty well in a quartet.

LP: Have you played electronics live at all?

Bill Anschell: I did a little bit back when I was at Oberlin. No, I would say I haven't. I got into studying jazz piano, and that is a lifetime challenge. It's only when I reached a certain age that I thought this was about as good as I would get, so why not try some other stuff?

LP: Some of the things that were striking to me were certainly related to the mix, and in reading the liner notes, seeing that you did the mixing was interesting to me because it's an element of the musicianship, right? It would be very easy to use the electronics in this context with a heavy hand. It's quite the opposite. I wouldn't call it tentative. But it's so atmospheric and tasteful, and it adds a sort of lushness.

Hearing you talk about the live presentation, you can even imagine a lot of it being picked up by a guitar player that sounds like E-bows and just sustains and just these like pad type sounds that I can see why people are drawn to it because it's different. If you read about all a jazz combo incorporating electronics, it might conjure up all kinds of things, but I don't think it conjures up something like this.

Bill Anschell: I think you're right. Yeah. Many people are using electronics now, but it tends to be that they overdub a keyboard or have an auxiliary keyboardist playing synth sounds. I almost describe it as being more like electronic sound design. After we had recorded, I did many of the electronic parts. Although the bassist and drummer were listening to them while they recorded, many of them changed a lot once I heard what the band sounded like, and they were just there to enhance. And there are a lot of effects. I'm a plugin addict. Yeah, I'm just really into creating textures and timbres that sound kind of unique but also good to my ear.

LP: How could the rest of the band hear the synth parts? When recording the tracks, did you record as a piano trio and then add a synthesizer? Or does this imply that there were synth lines already? Could you peel back the curtain briefly about how the recording went?

Bill Anschell: Yeah. Yeah, I'm happy to. It's shameful, but not really. The secret is I didn't even play piano. That's all keyboard. It's a sampled piano.

LP: Wow.

Bill Anschell: Yeah. I have a friend who's a very successful movie soundtrack guy, and he used his piano libraries all the time and couldn't tell. So, for me, that was the ultimate. Nobody can tell, which is just great. This is not jazz-like because I tweaked my solos until I liked it. Every note I played. You'll notice there isn't a lot of fast playing because I'm on my keyboard at home. It doesn't allow that. I tried to make everything I did melodic and spent much time redoing, correcting, and whatever it took.

So the bass player and drummer were not hearing me live, but they were hearing a pre-recorded piano part, which I altered somewhat after the fact but gave them something to respond to. The way I justified in my head, from a jazz perspective, there are a lot of jazz artists, especially horn players—and I won't name any names—who will record with the band and then go back and just do all new parts. They didn't like any of their solos and just totally redo them. And it makes it sound like the piano, bass, and drummer are not listening to him.

But they listened to me in this case because it had already been recorded. The only thing you don't get is me reacting to them. And even to an extent, I could do that after the fact by fixing some of my parts. From a piano perspective, it's not exactly a jazz project, but in every other way, it is. Those guys recorded in real-time. They had my piano solo and all the electronic parts in their headphone mix, which was part of my challenge. I put all that together, too.

LP: Did you record to a metronome?

Bill Anschell: Yeah, click track. We had to.

LP: In some of those obvious ways, or in addition to some of those obvious ways, how else was the making of this project different for you? Did you approach composition differently? It sounds like your process in terms of recording was different, but what made it fresh and different for you?

Bill Anschell: I did approach it differently compositionally. I mean, one thing is, like I told you, there are always built-in sections where the electronics can have their moment. The tunes I wrote were more open, and they also were harmonically relatively simple. Not all of them, but most were not much more harmonically intricate than a rock tune would be. It's just that the lines that we played over those harmonies were jazz lines. It's a pretty open sound. They're pretty open compositions and were written with the electronics in mind.

LP: Is this a vein for you to continue mining? Are you like a serial creator when you get into a mode or zone or find a modality you like to create in? Is it on to the next thing, or will you stay in this area for a while? What's your self-conception? Do you not let yourself dwell because you must keep moving, or are you an explorer?

Bill Anschell: I would call myself an explorer, but I also feel like there's still much exploring in that realm of this most recent CD. I'd like to keep doing that kind of stuff. Everything in today's jazz world has changed because nobody has CD players anymore, right? So you can't make CDs and put them out traditionally. It changes the way you think about future projects. I doubt I'm going to put out any more CDs, honestly. Because fewer and fewer people can listen to them. People put out EPs, or you can just do it all digitally.

I will keep doing this kind of music, whether I want to hire a drummer or a studio and all that stuff to make it fully realized like I did on this project. I don't know if I'll be doing that, but as soon as my computer starts behaving again, I just updated my OS and Logic, and everything's going wrong. And so I'm trying to make all that stuff right. And I'm looking forward to being able to do electronics at night like I've done for the last five years.

As a pianist, I'm extremely hard on myself and hardly ever happy with how I play. But when I'm doing electronic stuff, I can just make it how I want it to be. Maybe if I got to a certain level in it, I wouldn't be happy with that either. I don't know. Hopefully, I'm not just an unhappy artist.

LP: It's interesting to hear you talk about it. I guess it harkens back to the beginning of our conversation. You even commented that even from the piano's point of view, it's not really a jazz album. It's hard to hear that because, on the one hand, you also said nobody would know. It's a fascinating cul-de-sac to drive around in, you know? It's like, where does it matter? Why does it matter? Are you even right? It gets filed under jazz. It certainly sounds like jazz.

Bill Anschell: It sounds like jazz to me. I didn't think it was going to. If I sent you the pre-bass and drums version—where I programmed the drums and bass—you wouldn't think it was jazz. But having acoustic instruments and having them react in real-time to a soloist makes it sound like jazz.

The CD I did before this one was the exact opposite. We did a whole CD in the studio for three and a half hours. Didn't fix anything. It was all live piano and every single note. So that's my justification for being able to do one where I instead fuss over every note I played. And when I listen to it, I just totally like it. I listen to my old CDs, and it's like, "God, I wish I hadn't played that there." But on this one, there's nothing I don't like except minor mixing issues, which I would change, but it just sounds the way I wanted it to because I could take the time and make it that way.

And the guys who played on it played great. I should mention them. Chris Symer was the bassist. José Martínez, who lives in Chicago now, played drums, Brian Monroney played guitar, Jeff Busch played percussion, and I had K.J. Sawka play on one of the tunes. He's this insane drum and bass guy who used to live in Seattle and lives in Vegas now/ He's kind of a rockstar guy.

LP: It's kind of a rockstar track too. It's good you put it at the end. Otherwise, it would have blown up. Putting it in the middle of the disc would take it out of rotation for the wine and cheese crowd.

Bill Anschell: Exactly. Yeah. I didn't want anybody to stop listening to the CD because it was too far outside their comfort zone, but I thought ending it was a nice way.

LP: Do you ever foresee a version of the world where you go out with a piano bass trio but add another keyboard player to have an electronic person, or you be the electronic person?

Bill Anschell: That would be pretty cool. There are so many layers going on on the CD. The only way you could replicate something like this in real-time would be to play with tracks, have the drummer wearing headphones, and have a click track going. I could do it right now by just replacing the piano, bass, and drums live and having this going with a click track. And it would sound pretty much like the CD.

But from a technical standpoint, that's a major challenge. And bands that do that tend to have to travel with their engineers to make everything sound right because it's so timbre-based, and the sound is so important that if it's not right, it's pointless.

LP: Did you hear the Kris Davis live CD? I think it was from late last year from Village Vanguard. She put together a group that had somebody billed as playing electronics, and I think she had Ben Monder on guitar—a really exciting record.

Bill Anschell: I've heard about her for so long but hardly checked out any of her music. I need to do that.

LP: Yeah. Have a listen. It's, it's really good.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, I appreciate that. I will.

LP: She's a great piano player, too. And a great person.

I've read in your bio that you've had some music placed on TV and in film. Is that right?

Bill Anschell: Oh, a lot. Yeah. By now, it's probably about 80 different placements.

LP: Wow. How did that come about? Do you have an agent for that? Do you work with a sync person?

Bill Anschell: Yeah, I guess you would call him an agent, but it's a guy with what originally started as a record label, and it's turned into a library. All he does is go to music supervisors and pitch the music. It happened randomly. He was a piano student of mine when I was at Wesleyan. He was just a beginner student, and he was pretty aggressive. So he's good at beating down the music supervisors, I think, and convincing them to use my music, which I appreciate. I'm really lucky. I'll never say who he is because I'm the only straight-ahead jazz artist he's got right now. (laughter) So that's been helpful to me.

LP: Yeah, that's great. I would imagine that's mailbox money.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, it's a considerable part of my life, just the royalty checks. I don't even try to listen anymore because he told me an episode my song's in, and I listened as closely as possible. A lot of times, you don't even hear it, and you still get paid, but they buried it so low in the mix that you can't find it, or sometimes you hear a few notes, and there was one time that it was front and center, but they were making fun of the music, and that's why it was front and center.

I wrote a bleak piece called "Forsaken," and they used it on Key and Peele. Do you know that show?

LP: Yeah!

Bill Anschell: And they were cutting back and forth between this really hip barbershop scene and this bleak laundromat. And whenever they cut to the laundromat, they would have my music front and center, which is pretty funny, but sometimes I can hear a few notes. I've had a couple of tunes on Yellowstone, and a guy I played with claims that he actually heard it and knew it was me without even knowing the tune. I didn't hear it. So I don't know.

LP: That's amazing. When do you start the next project? Or are you still in the mode of gigging this? When I go to your site and see the list of tour dates, you're busy as hell. You're playing throughout our region all the time. Is it this configuration, or how many ensembles are you juggling? What's Bill's life like as a working musician?

Bill Anschell: More than anything, I work as a sideman, but the percentage of my gigs that are as a leader has been going up, or you could say the sideman percentage has been going down. I got three bands. One of them is my quartet, which has Brian Monroney on guitar. At times, he has as many as 19 effects pedals lined up. So this is the band that can do music for my new CD. That's the quartet, and I've got a couple of trios.

One is my previous CD, which we recorded in three and a half hours. It's because that's what we do. We just go, and we fake tunes without any plans. And they're all standards. That's what Jeff Johnson and D'Vonne Lewis did. And then I've been to South America a bunch of times. I have used a bass player and a drummer from here the last couple of times. And I have a trio with them. That's Chris Symer and Jeff Busch. And we played some of my arrangements of South American tunes and then a bunch of originals that fit the trio format.

Those are the three bands I have right now. I don't know what I'm going to try next. There's a European label that releases music just for streaming, but they have real success at it. And they asked me if I could do a few EPs of all ballads. And I like playing ballads, so I will probably do that next.

LP: Nice. Do you have a preferred ensemble format? Are you a piano trio guy, or do you like having another chordal instrument? Given your druthers, what would you do?

Bill Anschell: I was always a trio guy. When I add a fourth instrument, it will tend to be the guitar because it can expand the palette more than any other instrument. I like not having the responsibility of carrying the band as much as a trio leader does. I like being able to sit back for a while and just be in a supportive role some of the time. I don't know if I prefer a trio or a quartet. I actually really like playing solo, too, which I never used to enjoy.

LP: Oh, interesting.

Bill Anschell: I paid 15 years of dues in a building lobby in Seattle. Five days a week for a while, three days a week for a while, I played thousands of hours of solo piano. Through that, I got both hands together and could play more orchestrally. The great thing about solo piano is you can go anywhere, anytime, and nobody will complain because nobody will complain to you. So I like that. I like duos where you can closely interact with the other person in a way you can't do as much in a larger band. So I don't enjoy playing in big bands very much.

LP: Not enough room?

Bill Anschell: As a piano player, you rarely hear yourself. And yeah, there's not much room for creativity. You might get out, do a 16-bar solo, and then you're just getting started thinking about what you'll play by the time it's over.

LP: Yeah, everybody going round robin or whatever and you're comping away.

Bill Anschell: Yeah.

LP: How about the lobby gig? That's fascinating to me. Like, were there constraints put on you? Were you improvising for hours a day, or was it a fake book kind of thing? Like, what were you doing?

Bill Anschell: That's funny because people just really ignored me, and that sounds bad, but it was actually good because I could practice, and that's basically what I did. I used it as a way to work on my two-hand playing. I use it as a way to learn more tunes. For the last at least five years, I would make myself for the first 30 minutes of the two-hour gig, play free, no tunes, no nothing, just try to create something, and nobody cared. They were on their cell phones. So it was all fine. You could say they were all accepting, but it was not because they wanted to be.

LP: You had a very open and interested audience. (laughter)

Bill Anschell: Yeah, well, open, you could say, but not interested. Yeah, a few people wanted to hear it, but not many.

LP: It's interesting because it beats paying for a rehearsal space. It's like the inverse of paying for a rehearsal space. And to the point about practicing, like most people in a public setting, if you hear somebody over there on the piano and it's filling the room or whatever, almost regardless of what they're doing, it sounds competent and interesting, like to a lay person, to somebody walking through a lobby, unless you're banging away and like getting all Cecil Taylor on them or something.

Bill Anschell: Yeah. I played free in the beginning, and I didn't have set chord progressions or anything like that. I would give myself different challenges, just conceptual ones, to work on. That was all good for my concept as a pianist in general.

LP: Bill, thank you for making time, and it's great to connect with you.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, no, you're a great interviewer. You obviously know how to listen to music. I appreciate that.

LP: I try! But yeah, the record's been fun to spend time with. You accomplished something unexpected.

Bill Anschell: Yeah, thank you. It's the thing I've done that I'm most proud of, even though most of my jazz friends would rather hear one of my jazz CDs. But for me, it was just, this is exactly what I wanted it to sound like, and that's how it sounds. So, you don't get that opportunity very much.

LP: That's something.

Bill Anschell: By the way, I should mention I will compile all my stories and Jazz Etiquette columns into a book. That's kind of my next big project, not a musical project. It's a writing project, and I will probably put that out next year.

LP: Oh, that's great.

Are you still writing?

Bill Anschell: Yeah. Oh yeah. I have the Jazz Etiquette column. I don't know if you've ever read it, but that's ongoing. And so I've been doing that. God, I must've written, you know, hundreds of columns by now. So I can just take the best ones and put them in a book, along with stories like The Jazz Critic and Careers In Jazz.

LP: Awesome. Awesome. Bill, thank you so much.

Bill Anschell: Thank you.