Jamie Baum: a flutist sets poetry in motion
Through her latest project with Septet+, the accomplished flutist transforms works by Adrienne Rich, Naomi Shihab Nye, and other poets into conversations between words and improvised music.
Today, the Spotlight shines On flutist Jamie Baum.
When COVID hit, Jamie found inspiration and solace in poetry. What started as daily readings of women poets became something much bigger: an album blending jazz and spoken word.
As leader of her long-running Septet+, Jamie has crafted wide-ranging music for over twenty years. She has played everywhere, from major jazz festivals to tiny clubs in 35 countries, bringing her distinctive sound to collaborations with artists like Paul Motian, Randy Brecker, and Kenny Barron.
Now, she's channeling the power of poetry through her ensemble, creating music that speaks to this moment while honoring timeless artistic traditions. Jamie's here to share how verses and melodies came together to tell these stories.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from the Jamie Baum Septet+'s album What Times Are These)
Dig Deeper
• Purchase the Jamie Baum Septet+'s What Times Are These from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Follow Jamie Baum on Facebook and YouTube
• Flutist Jamie Baum Works with Poetry and Dynamic Voice
• Bill Moyers' A Poet a Day
• Concert: Jamie Baum Septet+
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I wonder if maybe we could start at the beginning of the current Septet+ project. What sparked the concept for the album? What led you to explore the integration of poetry and specifically these female poets with this project?
Jamie Baum: Up until this point, I really hadn't done any work with voice, except for a couple of things here and there. On my CD before the recent one, I had Amir El Saffar sing wordlessly on "Song Without Words." But other than that, not so much.
I was on tour in March 2020, supposed to be for the month, and of course in the middle of the tour, COVID hit and everything shut down. I remember the last gig before the tour stopped was at Keystone Corner on March 13th or so. There were like two tables of people, and the next day, the ordinance was everything had to shut. So I came back to New York.
I live at Manhattan Plaza—artists housing in Midtown Manhattan. By New York standards, it's not that small, but anywhere else it's small—a one-bedroom with my husband. We've been here a long time and we've made it work because one of us is always out doing a gig or rehearsing or on tour. That leaves a lot of time for the other person to practice or do their thing. Manhattan Plaza has practice rooms and I had a studio, so it was not really a problem. But then COVID hit and everything closed—the practice rooms closed, my rehearsal studio closed, there was no teaching. I teach at Manhattan School of Music but nothing was in person, and all the gigs, festivals, and tours were just gone.
I was home, like everybody. Luckily, I love to perform and I love to compose. I thought, okay, what am I going to do now? Well, I can write—I've got a keyboard and I can write. I had come out with my last Septet recording maybe a year before that, so I thought I could start another project, but I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do.
I was spending entirely too much time at the computer and on the web, looking at things and perusing. I don't exactly remember how I found it—it could have been posted on Facebook or something—but I stumbled on this website called "A Poet a Day," which was put up by Bill Moyers.
Lawrence: Oh yeah.
Jamie: I've been a really huge fan of his. I just love his interviews with all sorts of people. He put that website up with this pithy saying that went something like, "We're here to give you solace in these frightening times and hope that the right words in the right order will give you comfort."
Every day Bill Moyers would post a poem. He would post a video of the poet reading the poem, and if he had interviewed that person about that poem or just interviewed them, he would put that up as well. Honestly, kind of embarrassingly, I'd never really been a poetry person. The first time I got it was when I was very lucky to go to MacDowell, the artist colony in New Hampshire—the oldest really—and they have a lot of different people there.
One of the things they would do is, at the end of the day after everybody had their own space, you could present something. One night they had a couple of guys there who were poets, Pulitzer Prize winners, and they read their poetry. A light bulb went off in my head. It was like, "Oh, now I get it," because hearing somebody actually read it with the intent and phrasing and sort of musicality of the rhyming, I got it more than just reading on a page.
To be honest, I didn't really delve into it until I found this website. As I started reading and checking it out, I started thinking to myself, well, I'm the kind of person that doesn't really want to repeat myself with my projects. It's like, okay, I did that, now I want to do something else. I might do it for a couple of CDs, but then I'm sort of ready to delve into something else.
I never really wrote using words or for vocalists' lyrics. So maybe this was a good opportunity, especially since I had all this time ahead of me. God knows how long it was going to last, but I could really focus on this. As I started to read the poems, I was looking for ones that spoke to me, that I could relate to or that had meaning to me. Also, if I thought it was something I could work with—I could envision a groove, a sound, a concept of how I would set that to music.
The interesting thing about modern poetry is, of course, they don't always rhyme like older poetry with its symmetry. As I started to pick, I noticed that I was choosing women poets. I didn't actually go in there saying, "Oh, this is what I want to do," but I started noticing that, and then I just kind of went with it because it was really what I found.
I've always been somewhat political. We've been going through some pretty crazy times for quite a while now. A lot of the things that were being communicated in these poems had meaning for me in relationship to that as well. It just felt like an opportunity for me to do something I hadn't done and express some of the feelings I've been having about what's been going on and find a way to set that to music.
Each one of the poems actually does have different kinds of meanings. For example, there's a piece that was written by Adrienne Rich, which is called "What Kinds of Times Are These?" She based her poem on a poem by Bertolt Brecht, who wrote his poem right around the time of the Nazi invasion. What he was basically saying was, it's too dangerous to even talk about trees, like you have to be really careful about what you say. And of course, there has been a lot of book banning and discussion about what's happening with the kinds of news that we're getting. Unfortunately, a lot of these themes—when you're working with them, certainly the ones I was working with in 2020 and 2021, which was sort of before a lot of things have been happening—you never know as an artist if what you're going to do is going to still be relevant by the time you actually get it out. You hope it is, but on the other hand, you hope it isn't.
Lawrence: In some cases, you don't want it to be. (laughter)
Jamie: In some cases you want it to be. But unfortunately, now I'm even wondering whether this recording is going to get banned.
"My Grandmother and the Stars," which was by Naomi Shihab Nye, is interesting on a number of levels. I was going through a period where I was sharing in the caretaking of my mother who lived in Connecticut who had dementia, Alzheimer's, and then she finally passed last February. I couldn't see her for like a year because she was elderly, until I was able to get the vaccine and she could. Then I was going out there almost every week or every other week sharing in her caretaking. It was really helpful for me to have a place to sort of put my emotions and feelings about it.
I actually ended up talking with Naomi through email. The interesting thing was that she wrote it about her grandmother in Palestine, because that's where her family is from. That's her heritage, even though she lives in San Antonio. She wrote it about her grandmother, and I wrote it for my mother, who was at a point where she couldn't really understand it or listen to it or have interest. It's very similar because it starts out "Is possible we will not meet again on earth to think this fills my throat with dust," and then "there is only this sky tying the universe together." It was really interesting because she's talking about her grandmother in Palestine—she's Palestinian and I'm Jewish. And of course this was before the Gaza war, but now that even is more interesting that in a more sort of symbolic way, we wrote this piece together.
Lawrence: That's very humanizing, right? It makes you realize that regardless of where you're from, we have these shared experiences with our family and our parents and through the generations. Like none of us are immune to those sufferings. We all have them in our unique ways, but very few of us manage to skirt dealing with that stuff.
Jamie: Absolutely. Each piece held a different kind of meaning for me. As I would work with the poem, it would sort of become clear to me what I wanted to do with it musically. So like Lucille Clifton's piece, "Sorrow Song," when I saw that, the way the phrases were really reminded me kind of a rap piece. I'd always really wanted to work with Kokai, and I was lucky that he was interested. That's kind of how it came about.
Lawrence: First of all, before I ask my follow-up, I just want to say, any opportunity to be reminded about Bill Moyers always makes my day a little. It reminds me of this time where we actually had public intellectuals and we didn't hate them. (laughter)
Jamie: I know. I have to tell you, being a kid who grew up and really listened to him on PBS and just missed that as well. I hadn't really even thought about connecting with him. Then this summer, somebody said, "What did he think of your recording?" And I'm like, "I don't know. I didn't send it to him." They said, "You didn't send it to him? You should send it to him." So I was like, yeah, maybe I should.
I had no idea how to get in touch with him. But I went to the website. Of course, his information wasn't on there, but there was information you could email. So I emailed and said, "I'm a musician and I just did this recording based on this website, and I thought it would be nice if I could send him the CD." Two hours later, I got an email back—nothing, didn't say "dear so-and-so," no "thank you, blah, blah, blah." It just said, "Please send to Bill Moyers" and an address on Central Park South.
I figured it was like an office, you know, and his office person would get it. So I quickly ran to the post office and wrote him a letter just saying that I was a fan. Three days later, he emailed me. And he just loved it. He said, "My only regret is that I'm no longer doing interviews or I'd schedule you for one." He did give me a quote, which he said I could use on the CD. So that was very cool. One of the highlights.
Lawrence: Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. That's really beautiful. That's really beautiful.
Jamie: I mean, he's ninety or something, retired and—know, but it was meaningful. I forget I have it on my thing, but it said something like "a masterpiece of sound and spirit" or something like that. Like, ah, okay, I'll take that.
Lawrence: Yeah, that's amazing. You talked about how each poem sort of elicited the musical direction you were going to go in or gave you direction about where to go. I'm really curious, at the risk of boiling this down to process, could you peel back a layer on that a little bit? Could you articulate how something went from you consuming a piece of poetry, connecting with it, and it translating into music? Do you have a meditative process? Do you just channel it? Do you think? Do you not think? I'm really curious, because there's a bit of alchemy going on there, right?
Jamie: Oh, totally alchemy. Sometimes I feel like it's channeling because I'm like, "Did I write that?" For someone who got my undergrad and master's in jazz composition, I'm a very intuitive writer. I know so many people that map things out and they're going to work with these chord changes and then blah, blah, blah. I don't often do that. I usually just sit at the piano and noodle till I come up with something.
I've been asked this question kind of a lot, particularly for this group, which has been, I like to say, my compositional muse for a long time, because this is our fifth recording I've done with that instrumentation. I tend to work the last few years well with a concept much better than just whatever, which is why I like CDs because I see an arc or I see a concept or direction or a thread.
Sometimes, every time is different, and that's what I try to communicate to my students as well. I don't think there's one way of doing things and I don't have one way of doing things. I use a program called Digital Performer, which is a sequencing program. That's been hugely helpful for me because while I play enough piano to get around with ideas, I don't play well enough to play things in time, and certainly not with so many voices and things going on. So having the ability to come up with some ideas and then put them in there and then hear it back in real time is hugely helpful.
Because I like to try to have things progress organically, invariably the first ideas are inspirational—they come from somewhere. And then of course, there's always like it stops and then, okay, now what? That's where I think skill and patience come in, in terms of getting out of your own way of wanting something to be something, but trying to see what it wants to be.
When I was younger and not as experienced a composer, I might have an idea of what I want this to be—an up-tempo burning tune. And then I'm newly around, I come up with a melody, I'm forcing it into a tempo that it doesn't want to be. So sometimes you have to write, put down what your initial idea is and stand back and allow yourself to see what it is and what it wants to be. Sometimes, you know, I'll play something back fifty times until I hear what needs to happen next. Or I'll sing it in the shower, when I'm walking, until I hear what needs to happen next.
I'll play something and bring it to a rehearsal or a session and then see that this needs that, this needs that. I mean, some pieces come fast, other pieces like "An Old Story," I think by the time I recorded those, I was on the fifteenth version. So you have to be flexible enough to hear and see what something needs.
With this particular project, to be honest, I'm not sure if I will be successful again because I feel very good about this project. The silver lining to COVID was that I actually had uninterrupted time where I was able to actually organically develop these ideas and come back to them on a daily basis and work with them, which is really unusual. I think for most musicians that are not just solely composers, because you've got to go teach or you've got a gig or you go on tour and then you come back to it and you're kind of in a different place.
That was a really wonderful thing. Another thing that I did was I sometimes set up little challenges for myself because I was home. I find that you really screw yourself—people talk about writer's block and I don't really believe in writer's block. Writer's block is kind of like a name for all these questions you put on yourself. So like if you say, "Oh, I've got to write the best thing I ever wrote," of course you can have writer's block. Or if you are trying to do better than you did, or you're trying to do this, you're trying to do that, then you're going to not like it and you're going to get stuck.
So I try to just look at it as an exercise, that I'm working on it and then go back and erase it or change it or fix it. In some cases, there were certain things that I wanted to set up for myself. Whenever I do that, the music always kind of has to win out, in terms of what needs to happen.
For example, with that tune "What Times Are These," one of the challenges I wanted to give myself was—I grew up not only loving jazz, but I loved singer-songwriter stuff, like James Taylor or Carole King or Stevie Wonder, or, of course, the Beatles and these different things. And it was like, okay, wonder if I could write something that is singer-songwriter-ish, like with an intro and a refrain and a chorus and coming back.
There were certain things that are very typical of what I learned when I was going to school and I had to take film scoring—like certain very predictable things elicit different kinds of emotional responses. So, if you're watching a movie and you hear a diminished chord, it's like, "Oh, I'm afraid now."
With "My Grandmother and the Stars," I was thinking about this. It starts out, "It is possible"—so it goes up with the word "possible" because it's hopeful. "We will not meet again on earth"—so that's kind of sad and it goes down. I was just setting up little challenges for myself to see if I could think that way and how that would bring me and how that would change my compositional skills or technique.
Lawrence: That point segs really well into what I wanted to ask you next, which concerns the musical terrain you cover, whether it's incorporating or exploring Qawwali or Maqam, or now poetry in spoken word. I'm really curious, how do these explorations impact your composing style? I would imagine there's an accumulation that happens over time, like influences come in and they get metabolized. But I'm really curious, can you feel it happening?
Jamie: So many things like that are in retrospect, you know what I mean? When I'm working on things, I'm not necessarily thinking about that. But at source, when I look at things that I do, I can see that. It's really a combination of everything.
I spent a lot of time in my younger years playing and listening to classical music, as well as jazz and Brazilian music. Both my downfall and my positive side are that I have very eclectic tastes. Some people are very focused—"I just do this"—and then they become really successful because they're so focused on that one thing. And I just always loved playing classical music, jazz, Brazilian music. I really have a lot of different interests in music and culture.
I started out learning and playing classical and jazz and different kinds of music. When I was studying composition, my first couple of CDs with the band were focused on Stravinsky, Ives, Bartók, and all that. One of the really important influences for me very early on was I just loved Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Stravinsky and Bach.
When I first started writing and playing the flute, I was doing a lot of classical gigs to make money when I moved to New York. I was playing with really great string players from Juilliard, doing private functions or weddings or whatever. And we were playing a lot of chamber music, Bach chamber music, where the counterpoint meant I was a line. There were all these lines going on. And especially with Bach, you might be playing for like five minutes and you don't feel like you're together. And then all of a sudden you cadence or you come together and then diverge. I really enjoyed that.
During that time, I was doing some traveling. I was a jazz ambassador for the State Department. I did a couple of really long tours, five-week tours, and then they sent me out again to South Asia—India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal. I'd always loved Indian music. Even as far back as my first Septet CD, I was using a piece from Triloka that I sort of connected with the Stravinsky piece.
When you tour, you get to play with people from there and they turn you on to stuff. I got really interested in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. His music really touched me. I felt like it was kind of like Pavarotti or Coltrane—there's something very amazing about it. And also, having traveled a lot and been in those countries, it's a no-brainer for a composer. I mean, Indian music and South Asian music has no harmony. So it's wide open, like a kid in a candy store.
Lawrence: There's something in your story that strikes me, and for lack of a better way to say it, you even alluded to the fact that when you were coming up, the flute was sort of—if it was thought of at all—it was thought of differently in the context of especially jazz and creative music. It strikes me then that you had a commitment to that instrument. Who were you looking to? Did you have flautists that were inspirational to you, or were you charting the unknown? Could you talk about your relationship with the instrument and if there was lineage you could draw on?
Jamie: Yeah, it's kind of weird. I look at really amazing flute players like Nicole Mitchell, who were obviously just completely enamored with the instrument. I don't know if I had that same passion—it was kind of more a vehicle for me.
Lawrence: Hmm.
Jamie: I started playing piano when I was a kid, when I was like three, because my mom had played piano and trombone, so I studied piano. I actually wasn't serious—I never thought of being a musician. I had other interests and things, but I did like jazz and there was a guy who lived in town near me who taught jazz piano. I took lessons with him, I think for about a year when I was like maybe twelve or thirteen. But I won't mention his name, but he was really a bad alcoholic. And I always had my lesson at like 9 a.m. on Monday morning when he wasn't in a very good mood. That didn't go very well. So I quit piano and then I took up flute.
Lawrence: Was it that classic situation of like the kid wants to be in band, they put the instruments out and like some kids gravitate towards the cello and you're like, you know, it's "go find the one that's calling you" kind of thing?
Jamie: I wish I could say it was even that—it was more like my parents had this beach house for the summer and there were these two cute guys that were next door and they would always get sit out and play guitar. So I got my parents to get me a flute so I could go meet them. (laughter) And the rest is history.
I think the thing that kept me sticking with the flute was that it was a very versatile instrument. It allowed me to play a lot of different kinds of music. Because I was toying a little bit with saxophone and of course, in those days, my parents were not—I mean, they let me do anything I wanted, but they were not particularly pushing me toward the saxophone because it wasn't really a girl's instrument.
The thing about the flute was that I could play classical music—to saxophone, it's like an oxymoron, like flute in classical. I could play classical music. I could play jazz. I could play Brazilian, Latin, you know, it was very versatile and I think always the music was more what interested me than the actual instrument. I mean, I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. It was challenging to get a good sound and I liked that it was mobile after playing piano, and it just stuck. I don't know. (laughter)
Lawrence: I wanted to ask you the stylistic choice, or maybe the narrative choice to open and close the record with two instrumentals, despite the fact that this is the record of really, truly introducing vocals and lyrics. What are you saying there? What are you putting across?
Jamie: I wrote the first piece before the other pieces, and it was really, in some ways, part of the Shiva Suite, the suite for Nepal in my last recording. I wrote this suite as a tribute to Nepal after the earthquake, because I had just come back from there my fourth time, and I just really loved the place, and it was just so painful to see what happened. I put together a fundraiser and we did it at Le Poisson Rouge.
Anyway, that was in 2015. So I sort of was thinking like a prequel almost, you know? What was it like before that when you go there? It's just crazy, like cacophony. I mean, they don't have any encampment. They have no stoplights or stop signs and five million motorcycles and cars from the '50s, and people are just—you know, they have one-way streets, but nobody pays attention, and there's no sidewalks. It's just crazy, but really wonderful at the same time, but just this intensity. And same within India, like so many people, there's no sense of personal space. It's just like a whole different thing.
I had this piece that I had written, and it has the singing bowls and it just really was trying to give a sense of this manic pace. In context of COVID and how that just shut everything down, and the things that I was trying to convey with the pieces and the order of the pieces, it just seemed like it really fit. Even with those years, where we're thinking of "I" instead of "we," it's just like this intense where we're going along, we're going along and just craziness, New York City, you know, it's like everybody's into themselves and their own aggressive, me, me, me, getting further and further.
And then all of a sudden, boom, like COVID was like a plague, you know, it just stopped us in our tracks. Those people who made use of it to contemplate did, and those people who didn't—but it sort of felt like it was a precursor, it was like this intensity and now we're stuck in our tracks and now we have to understand what happened through these poems.
And so you go through the poems and they're ordered—at first, what happened, and then these different reflections of different sides of it. As you get toward the end of the recording, you have "Dreams," which is a little more hopeful. And then you have some of these other things. And then what I wanted to do was I took elements from the first piece "In the Light of Day" and I used them for "In the Day of Light." What I wanted to do was have each line, sometimes be separate, sometimes come together and be harmonious. Sort of signifying that we can all live side by side, not having to be the same. Hopefully it gives that kind of feeling through the writing.
Jamie Baum
Musician
NYC jazz flutist/composer/bandleader and Sunnyside Records artist Jamie Baum has toured the US and 35 countries performing at major festivals and venues, and has worked with several renown artists as diverse as Paul Motian, Randy Brecker, Tom Harrell, Dave Douglas, Kenny Barron, Fred Hersch, Louis Cole, Roy Hargrove, Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith. Her several awards and honors include a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Jazz Journalists Association nominations (13 times) and annual listings in DownBeat Critics Polls (since ’98), in addition to being included in Huffington Post’s “Twenty-five Great Jazz Flute Performances” and JazzTimes’ 10: Essential Jazz Flute Albums. She’s received praise for 7 CDs as a leader, and her most recent fifth recording with Septet+ of 20 years received the coveted 5-star review., An in-demand flutist, she’s appeared on over 50 recordings as a sidewoman. Jamie toured as a US State Department - Kennedy Center Jazz Ambassador (’99-’03), and has since been sponsored frequently by the State Department while on her own overseas tours. Baum is on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music jazz department (since ’06), and a clinician for Altus Flutes/KHS America (since ’95).
