I first met Nick Millevoi a couple of years ago when we played on the same
night at Neptune’s Parlour in Raleigh, NC, me with one of Eugene
Chadbourne’s projects and Nick with the Desertion Trio, an ear splittingly
loud project, refracting the history of electric guitar over the throbbing
bass of Johnny DeBlase and the shattered beats of Kevin Shea. Millevoi has
also participated in numerous other musical projects including the Many
Arms trio, the Hollenberg-Millevoi Quartet, which was part of John Zorn’s
ongoing Bagatelles project, Chris Forsyth & the Solar Motel Band, and
has performed with Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Mostly Other People Do the Killing,
Nels Cline, and many more.
Nick’s newest solo album,
Streets of Philadelphia, is being issued as a collection of sheet music dedicated to his home town. I
caught up with Nick to ask a couple of questions about his new release.
DM:
Prior to the advent of sound recording, all collections of songs were
released as sheet music. More recently this idea has begun to pop up
occasionally, perhaps most notably with Beck’s Song Reader, which
were performed by groups all over the country. Why release an album like
this in 2019? How does this work for you as a musician and a composer
that’s different from releasing a sound recording? Does it satisfy the same
itch for you or does it float your boat in an entirely different way?
NM:
The biggest thing that gets me excited about releasing a book of sheet
music as a record of material is how open-ended it is. I love the idea of
this being music I can play with anyone who has a copy of the book and that
anyone can play on their own and do whatever they want with it. At first, I
wrote all of this music without being sure what I was going to do with it.
I started posting some videos of myself playing some of the compositions
with pictures of the charts on social media and immediately people began
reaching out to me and asking to see the charts, so I started by actively
sharing them with people. I’m not really sure at this point how many I’ve
sent out, but it’s a bunch, and some people have posted videos of
themselves playing the music too, which is the coolest. I’ve written a lot
of music that nobody has ever seen the charts for except the musicians
playing it, so it’s fun to let the blueprints out there and see what
happens. It’s an experiment to see who wants to play it and how I feel
about it, really. Because of that, I felt like it was worthwhile to see how
it feels to release this music this way, at least initially.
As soon as I decided that, I decided to make a physical book. I had the
idea of how it could look from day one, with my good friend Erik Ruin
designing it.
So, in that way, this music is working for me in a totally different way
than a sound recording and it’s a cool experiment to see who is drawn to
this and, I’m learning, it does get me excited in a similar way to making a
record, but it’s still very different. In a lot of ways, I haven’t
committed to anything other than notes and rhythms, unlike a record, where
you commit to those things plus the arrangement, the performance, the
production, all of that stuff. In this way, I now feel really open to
perform this music however I want. I already have six different kind of
groups with live performances planned in Philly and New York and I’m going
to keep building on that.
There’s also a super pragmatic side of things which is that making records
in 2019 might be cheaper than it’s essentially ever been before, but it’s
still really expensive and now there’s not only little incentive to buy
recorded music at this point – since we all have basically every sound
recording ever made available to listen to on our phones and there’s such a
glut of new music and everyone is busier than they’ve ever been before and
nobody has time to listen to it. I just feel like this is another way to
get music out there that is worth a try. It requires more time and
attention than a sound recording, but it’s going to reach people in a more
interactive way, which is cool. And, it’s also just a thing I want to see
more of in the world. I wish more of my favorite artists would release
books of their music.
Another thing is that I looked at these 25 pieces when they were all
finished and realized I was already waiting on a record to come out that
I’d spent months working on (Desertion Trio’s Twilight Time) and,
with one more getting ready to be made and all of this music written, it’d
take me years to get the record together and I was excited about it now and
wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so to speak. Knowing I didn’t have
to wait long and could go this alternative route felt really, really,
exciting, so I went for it.
DM:
You’ve positioned this album as a kind of love letter to the city of
Philadelphia. For those of is that don’t live in Philly, can you take us
through a few of the neighborhoods you write about? Perhaps tell us what
you feel about these areas and how that translates into the pieces you
wrote? And what living in Philly has meant for your development as a
player?
NM
: The street names here were taken from as many neighborhoods across the
whole city as I could and then matched up with songs I thought they fit. So
pieces like “Opal” and “Silver” have a sound that are thematically similar
and very different from those of “Hazzard” and “Shunk.” Hopefully, there’s
some description in those names.
Philadelphia is my hometown and, like anyone, I have a complicated
relationship to my hometown, developed over the course of my lifetime.
There are things I love and things I hate. Those things are hard to
describe without rambling, but really come down to there being things this
city gives me that nowhere else can give me. The vibe is different in a way
that is really hard to explain, but people here know what I’m talking
about.
I will say that living in Philadelphia allows artists a lot of freedom and
creativity for a million reasons that have to do with there just being a
lot of resources as well as an affordable way of life. That said, for me,
at this point, I actually play more in New York and with New York-based
musicians (in my main band, Desertion Trio, I’m the only person who lives
here!) and like to travel a lot, so I’m always leaving, which gives me a
nice balance and lots of perspective.
Ultimately, figuring out how to live a creative life in Philadelphia means
figuring out a lot of things on your own, but there can be a lot of freedom
in it. It’s like jazz or experimental music, once you get into the crazy
stuff, there’s really no turning back and I feel like that about
Philadelphia – if you find something you love here, it’s going to be hard
to scratch that itch somewhere else.
This music is really different than my most recent releases with Desertion
Trio, for example, because I decided to really think about what I feel like
Philadelphia inspires in me and this is what happened. There’s a lot of
tight dissonance, maybe even some aggression in the melodies, but there’s
also a lot of space and harmony. In order to play this music, you’ve gotta
get with all of that and figure out a way to do it and, to me, that
represents my experience here.
