Tone Glow 139: Seymour Wright
The third in a series of five interviews with jazz quartet [Ahmed]. Saxophonist Seymour Wright talks about his childhood, "situated learning," and Eddie Prévost’s influential workshop.
All week, Tone Glow is hosting five different interviews in celebration of [Ahmed]’s two new albums, Giant Beauty and Wood Blues. The series will feature individual interviews with all four members and conclude with a group interview. The other interviews can be found here: Joel Grip, Pat Thomas, Antonin Gerbal, [Ahmed].
Seymour Wright
Seymour Wright (b. 1976) is a UK-based saxophonist who has released numerous solo albums and collaborative releases with groups such as [Ahmed], @xcrswx, GUO, XT, and lll人. Growing up as the son of a concert organizer, he spent much of his child enmeshed in music and other artforms, and the various practices he has spent his life engaging in—improvisatory performances, his writing about music, his work in teaching the English language—are all bound by his curiosity and desire to learn. Recently, he has released two albums with XT, his duo with Paul Abbott: Our/s Bouture(s) with Anne Gillis, and YESYESPEAKERSYES with Kavain Wayne Space (aka RP Boo). Last month, he released VICTOR as part of lll人, a trio with Abbott and Daichi Yoshikawa. His most recent solo album is titled RITES, and features music from throughout the past two decades.
Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Wright on March 4th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss the memories he has of Evan Parker, the similarities between Eddie Prévost’s workshop and his job as an English language teacher, Jean Lave’s idea of “situated learning,” and more.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: When you think about your childhood, what sort of things come to mind for you? Can you paint a picture for me?
Seymour Wright: I was happy and I liked it. I was born in Derby in 1976. It’s right in the middle of the UK and it’s where Rolls-Royce engines are made. It’s the central hub of the UK train network, basically. And it also has an older industrial legacy of mills and textiles—early Industrial Revolution things. But it’s also quite small so you can get to the countryside in the Peak District.
What sort of things occupied your time as a child?
Drawing pictures and looking at books and walking. My parents are retired now but they were both art teachers. My dad also organized concerts. The house was full of pictures and drawings and records and books, so it was great. There was also music and musicians, too.
Are there specific things you did that helped you fall in love with the arts back then? Are there any key memories that come to mind?
It was just there, it was present in our domestic living space. There was John Coltrane and Miles Davis. There was Evan Parker. I remember there was an amazing mime, Nola Rae. And then there was the countryside and the mountains. It was just how things fit together. It’s only in retrospect with my children too that I can reflect on how it was made present but not really presented. So, they made a space and I’m eternally grateful for them. My mom is Welsh so I spent a lot of summers by the sea in Wales, actually. I’m very lucky to have been able to do that. There was always music in the house and then there was always the sound of the city and the sound of people, and that never felt like a binary thing. There was always this flow.
What was it like to visit Wales?
It was South Wales, and it’s a fantastic place—the landscape, the people there, the way they speak. We would visit there a lot because my grandparents were there. My parents are not originally from Derby so we ended up there. My brother and parents now live in the countryside outside Derbyshire, on the edge of the Peak District.
Do you mind sharing any of the earliest memories you have of playing an instrument?
I had a trumpet when I was like six or seven, and my brother had a saxophone. I played trumpet at school, and my brother couldn’t play his saxophone because he had eczema and his lip would get aggravated. Playing the trumpet and hearing all this stuff, I somehow just decided to switch to the saxophone. Well, I wanted to play like Evan Parker, and I couldn’t imagine that as a thing on the trumpet. Maybe I should have persisted, but I switched. So trumpet came first and then the saxophone. I did things at school but I didn’t really enjoy the musical aspects in primary school. It wasn’t music to me, it was more formal… a more school-y thing. I kept the trumpet for a long time and eventually gave it to one of my nieces.
What’s the age difference between you and your brother?
23 months. We were one school year apart but nearly two years apart—he’s younger than me.
Was music a big way for you and your brother to bond?
I suppose, because it was part of our life world. And we both love music and are deeply committed to it. He’s a DJ and he sings and music infuses his life in different ways.
You mentioned Evan Parker—do you remember the first record of his that struck you?
The first things weren’t records, it was just him in our house. I would come downstairs and there’d be some guy sleeping on the floor and it was Evan Parker. It was living people making music, and I think that was important. They would sleep over and then leave these transactional objects, these traces, these records. I can’t remember how old I was when I knew I saw him play. I remember this conversation I had with my brother in the car, when we were very small and going to a concert. Evan was telling us about this two-finger insult sign that we have in the UK. He was telling us that it had something to do with [Norman] Archers. We thought this was utterly hilarious. He also broke my Transformer toy one time when I was sleeping—it was a grasshopper that turned into a car. I also remember that Eddie Prévost had this long green parka with strings dangling from the bottom, and me and my brother would try to tie his legs with them.
So, I have those memories, and then later, I have memories of the music. And then later, through records, I have a way back in. I suppose I started listening to the records when I was 11 or 12. And then suddenly there was a world of music, from AMM to Louis Armstrong. And it’s all there. I suppose the internet makes it all there now for people.
Was there a particular moment when you realized that music was something you wanted to pursue, or was it just the natural outcome of you growing up in this environment?
The second. It never occurred to me that I could be a musician. I do music now but I don’t think of myself as… it’s just what I’m doing now because it fits, but in a precarious and complicated way. I always played saxophone and did other work. I haven’t studied music formally. But yeah, there was always music; it’s part of who I am. And I’ve always known these musicians because they were real people who were always present in my life. There was a massive picture of Miles Davis on our living room wall. I feel like saying they were my friends (laughs) but of course I never met them. And now it’s funny talking to my daughter and my son. I’ll talk about Ahmed Abdul-Malik or Anthony Braxton as if they know those people, too.
How old are they now?
My daughter is five and my son is ten.
Do you see similarities between how you’re fostering a musical environment with your kids and how your parents did it for you?
Yeah, I think it’s pretty similar. Crystabel [Riley], my partner, is also a musician, among other things. My parents are not musicians, so they didn’t play music, but there always was music present, just like how there were always paintings or drawings or clothing present, even though they weren’t fashion designers. So maybe it’s different because me and Crystabel are practicing musicians—that sounds very grand but I don’t mean it to. Our life practice includes a creative practice, and it’s imbricated in our domestic life and in a different way than our parents’. So that’s different. But in terms of making things available and open to my children, I think history repeats itself.
Do you remember when you first played saxophone in front of people and when and where that was?
No. I remember the first concerts I went to, and I remember the first concert I did in London, but I don’t remember the first time I played in public. That’s funny.
What was the first concert you played in London?
It was in 1999 and it was with friends who I’d met at a workshop that many of us used to go to in a different space. The workshop started in November 1999 by Eddie Prévost, the drummer. The concert took place a few months after the workshop began. I played in a duo and then a trio with Eddie. The concert was upstairs in a pub, like so many spaces were in the ’90s. It was a smoky room filled with quite sour-looking people (laughter) who probably didn’t enjoy what we were doing. On the night, I reconnected with a few people who knew who I was because of my dad. The drummer Steve Noble was there, and he’s someone I’ve played with a lot over the past 20 years. I don’t remember the music at all, but I remember the feeling, the feeling of the space. And it was so smoky because you could smoke indoors back then. There was carpet, too. It was a slightly stale energy.
What was it like to play with Eddie after having known him as a presence beforehand?
When I moved to London for university, we would see each other every week through the workshop he started. He’s brilliant. He’s one of the people who has had a profound influence on my life. There are a lot of things I wouldn’t have been able to do without things he’s done and has directly and indirectly made possible. He made a space. I keep coming back to that as I get older. I’m trying to write something now about it. Do you know Mattin?
Yes, of course.
He’s an old friend of mine and we met through the workshop. He asked me to write something so this has been present in my mind. Eddie made a space—a physical and conceptual one. Right at the end of the 20th century, he created a space for me and my peers to meet. It’s hard to explain how important that was. November 1999, on that Friday night when that workshop started… it wasn’t a pedagogic space. It was an interestingly complicated space, and he made it so we could come together and really listen to each other. We worked, weekly, on listening and thinking about who we were and what we were doing. Some people have been going there for two decades. I went there nearly every Friday for more than 10 years. And through that space, I met so many people who have made me who I am, who have helped me be a human being—and hopefully a reasonable one. And I learned to play as well. So he set that first workshop up and he kept it going. Do you know a writer named Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing? She had a book on the matsutake mushroom, which many people read.
Oh, yes.
It’s a fascinating book. The one she wrote before that was about friction. It’s like a global ethnography of fiction. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the space that Eddie made allowed for all these subjectivities, peoples, and ideas to pour in. And it was a really global space—London in the late ’90s was a very global city in many ways. There was this amazing energy of simultaneously slowing down and speeding up.
I’ve heard from numerous people about the importance of Eddie’s workshop. You mentioned how he had you listen intently. What did that look like?
The workshops were three hours long. You’d be listening to other people playing more than you would play yourself. The playing then became dialogic in that you would have the opportunity to respond or expand upon the things you had heard. We were mostly in our early 20s, so there was this young energy. And to just sit and listen to other people—people you didn’t know, and people whose energies and sounds you may or may not enjoy—and then for you to play, it became a chance to be a part of this work. It wasn’t like, “I’m here to show you my stuff.” In a way, there was no real distinction to making sound and listening to sound.
The other important thing to say about the workshop was that it was a complicatedly public place. Anyone could go, but everybody who was there was a participant. So it was not a performance in this sense, but it also wasn’t private, either. There was a responsibility, or a commitment required from everybody, and that was interesting. It was shared and it was powerful. You’re a teacher, right?
I’m a science teacher, yes.
So you spend a lot of your time in shared social spaces with ideas and knowledge and emotions swelling around (laughter). So that’s happening, and to not have people directing that but to allow for the flow and the friction to come is special. There’s an emergence. The listening that takes place is not just to sound—it’s a very emotional, human thing. The other unusual aspect was that you never knew who would be there each week. As it grew, this was often happening with people you never met before, and so your first interaction with someone was this sonic music-making thing, and it was only afterwards that you’d have a chance to talk. I think that’s different from any typical classroom, and this still exists—it’s there for anyone who wants to find it. It was a very, very powerful thing for so many of us. And then the other important space was [Cafe] OTO. The workshop and OTO are the spaces where I’ve met most of the people who have shaped my life.
What about OTO stands out for you?
It’s very different, but again the important thing is that it’s a space. It’s a nighttime space and a daytime space. It’s open more than it’s closed. It opens at 9am—I was there this morning—and it closes at midnight or 1 depending on what is happening there. So there is this incredible flow of ideas and that’s a really special, powerful thing. And in some ways, it’s not dissimilar from the workshop because there is this context for engagement and encounter.
Speaking of spaces, the first time I ever heard your music was on Toshimaru Nakamura & Tetuzi Akiyama’s Meeting at Off Site (2002). I was really into all the Improvised Music From Japan stuff growing up. Do you have any recollection of performing there and Off Site in general?
I lived in Japan for two years, and this was 2001-2002, I think. My first degree at university was Modern Classical Chinese, so I lived in China, and when I finished I was in London working in a bookshop doing music. The workshop started then. And I was also really compelled and fascinated by onkyo—Toshimaru, Tetuzi, Sachiko, all that stuff. It was possible to go and work in Japan as a teacher and I ended up teaching English in Shinbashi. I went to lots of concerts, and I was very quickly introduced to Toshimaru and Tetuzi and they were incredibly, profoundly generous. I played with them, and [the track on the album] is a 4-minute, 33-second snippet of a long, long concert. Off Site was fantastic, and there were other amazing spaces around that time too. I also got to meet people from my generation like Ami Yoshida. I played with them as well and it was great. I sometimes think that I could have easily stayed in Tokyo, well, forever. It was a great time to be there.
What sort of things do you feel like you learned in having played with these musicians? What would you not have learned if you had not been there?
The first thing that comes to mind is climate and temperature and this different sensual manifestation of sound. In many ways, the UK and Japan are very similar—that’s a long, different conversation—but the climate is not similar. The kind of wet London energy is different from the wet Tokyo energy (laughter). And it’s in the way sounds move and work in that different air. The spaces are already different, just from the way they are engineered, but the way hot and cold and wet and dry work… sound moves differently. Time feels different too.
I remember standing on a railway platform and having trains whiz by super fast. They were at an almost terrifying proximity to your face. I was thinking about that too, and how that worked and how that might connect to some older sounds like Abe Kaoru and others. It’s this micro-analogy of how a city and sounds in space can be different, and how that might connect with common tools like a saxophone.
When did you go to China?
I first went when I was 18. I studied Chinese in London and then I studied in Beijing for a year and then I studied in London for two more. So it was the late ’90s.
Why’d you decide to embark on studying it?
It seemed like an important thing to do. I’ve ended up more focused on studying how language and knowledge move, actually. That’s what I ended up doing. I think that was a time of very profound change in China, too.
Can you talk more about this notion of language and the way it changes over time and across countries? What is your relationship with studying language in that way?
Really interesting question. The way semantic and emotional meaning and sound and space all fit together is often bound up in language. I think language is one of the spaces where so many things can come together in these frictional encounters. Language moves through lots of different spaces and ties them together. Like, here we are talking. You’re in Chicago and this conversation is mediated through these complex technological tools that are connected with many other spaces and histories. And the reason we’re talking in the first place is because of someone [Ahmed Abdul-Malik] in another space from the ’50s. The way Pat [Thomas], for example, can access some of the stuff that Ahmed Abdul-Malik was getting into in the ’50s that generations of writers in between haven’t, it’s to do with language but it’s also to do with all sorts of cultural and spatial stuff.
Did you move back to London straight after being in Japan?
Yes, and I started working in London teaching language with adults—it was adult literacy. London is an extraordinarily cosmopolitan city so I was lucky to work with people every day from all over the world. Teaching became about improvising. When you see the same group of people every day, and there isn’t really any content aside from the people and the ideas they bring, you try to make a space for people to reflect on the shapes and formalities of language. And the content is their lifeworld—they have all these questions. It was very intense and hard work; the days were long. I realized, ultimately, that I was enabling them to improvise together to have conversations, and I created space for reflection.
This was analogous to the workshops, and this was happening during the same time as the workshops, so it didn’t leave me much time to play. The reason I had time in the naughties to play was… well, if you don’t have much time to play, one way to do it is to make music that isn’t loud and the technique is more conceptual. It was a domestic-friendly—space-wise—practice, too. I did that for a long time. I did it for years, and then I did an MA in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, which allowed me to formally reflect on what I had been doing. And then I did a different version of that in university, and then I did a PhD.
This was the PhD where you wrote about AMM?
Yeah, I only did one PhD (laughter). The PhD is actually about how people learn together to do something new. How do new creative practices emerge? That’s what I was really interested in, but I also wanted to know where AMM came from, so they became a case study for me. Like, where did that come from in the mid-60s in London? That’s the idea behind that research.
What are some big things you learned in your research? What did AMM do that allowed for this creative practice to emerge? And do you feel like those are easily applicable today?
I think what I learned has really helped me see how practices generally work. It comes down to the fact that you need a space for all sorts of stuff to flow into. It’s not “Music A + Music B = Music C.” It doesn’t work like that. It’s a set of subjectivities and histories and emotions that encounter each other and generate something, that is sometimes an aggregate of those things but is often more than that. With [Ahmed], it’s actually a very similar thing. What we’ve been doing is creating a space. It’s not just music; it’s a set of energies and philosophies that are different and shared. We come together and work on them, and we learn from it and it shapes us as well.
There’s a brilliant thinker named Jean Lave. It’s this idea of “situated learning,” that how most people learn to do things in the world is not in a classroom—it’s in some kind of situated practical space with what she calls old-timers. And people gradually become more legitimate at any practice, and ultimately, because the old-timers are dead, the novice practitioners on the periphery become more core to the practice. But if the practice is a completely new and radical one, there are no old-timers. I find her books fantastic. They’re gripping; they’re almost like detective books.
Throughout your career, you’ve collaborated with so many different people. Some have stayed consistent, like Paul Abbott. You have solo records too, like Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), that collects recordings from the mid-to-late 2000s. And then you have Seymour Writes Back (2015), which came a little later. You’ve talked about learning in communities. What is the significance, then, for you to release these solo albums?
With Seymour of Derby, I just wanted to share some of that stuff, really. And it was free—I didn’t sell it. It was just 100 copies and I gave them to my friends, mostly. And when I didn’t have any I put the album online. With Seymour Writes Back, it was more about this idea of sharing things and opening up a dialogue. There’s a weird sort of tension because the objects are important—the text and the way it looks and unfolds and fits together—but there aren’t many of them. And it was not because I wanted them to be exclusive; I just couldn’t afford to make more. The new one, RITES (2023), has 20 years of music, and I made a few more copies of that.
I like the idea of sharing and it’s nice when it generates versions of a dialogue, not just around the sounds but the references. I suppose there’s a whiff of research as well—you publish what you’ve done—but that’s just a way to share it and communicate. The ideal response is dialogue, not just, “all right, that’s cool.” (laughter).
What sort of dialogues have emerged from these releases?
People get in touch in different ways, people listen to them. Do you know the saxophone player Jean-Luc Guionnet?
Yeah, he’s great.
He’s an old friend of mine and we’ve talked at great length about the stuff of the saxophone. I saw Edward George a couple of days ago and we were talking about Frances A. Yates, and there’s a picture of her in the top left-hand corner of my most recent [album]. We weren’t talking about my solo music, we were talking about that… and it’s connected. Her work is amazing. And very strange.
In having made these albums and looking back on the past couple decades, how do you feel like you’ve grown as a musician? And maybe “grow” is the wrong word, maybe we should say something like “expand.”
I’m able to play the saxophone differently now, and that’s partly to do with the things I’ve been doing with it and the people I’m playing with it. I could never imagine that I could begin to do anything that I’m doing in [Ahmed] or XT or with Crystabel. This was all just music I would’ve wanted to listen to. When I made RITES and listened back to those old recordings… if someone asked me to show them how to do this, I wouldn’t remember how to play like that anymore. It comes from a different way of living and a different set of needs.
Evolution has to do with spaces and relationships and feelings and what is engendered by all that. That’s what I’m interested in; the sound is not an afterthought, it’s just what it sounds like. The way I play the saxophone is… I’m looking for the word… it’s not teleological, but it just is about the feelings, and it is the sound that follows. I’m not sure if what I see is growth, but it is certainly change. I always try to chronologize my solo releases, and that’s just in the tradition. There’s a tradition of alto saxophone solo music. There’s a Chicagoan tradition, a UK tradition, a global tradition. And it’s like, why not? It’s absurd for me to connect with that, in a way, but why not?
I love this notion of you looking back on an older work and not knowing how to play what you were able to back then.
That’s what happens to us. You used the word career, and it never occurred to me that I had a career in music or anything like that, but there is this idea of a trajectory in the way that 21st-century London, for example, has a certain set of expectations. Everything in the city is built around these axes of age, career—all this stuff. We move and we grow and we change and the stuff that I like and the stuff that really compels me is about a constant evolution, and not just for the sake of it. Coltrane, for example. He was always on the edge of the next thing. But at the same time, it was always profoundly him, and instantly too. I struggle to work out what it is that I like and value, and why I like certain things and others leave me struggling, but I think it is about that willingness to look and learn and seek. And then how that balances with deep, lifelong commitments to people or relationships or spaces. “Traditions” is maybe the word, complicated as it is. To see these two things in friction and balance are fascinating.
I wanted to ask about your recent albums in XT with Paul. The first I heard was definitely the one on Empty Editions with the watermelon cover. You had the recordings with Anne Gillis, Our/s Bouture(s) (2023), and some with RP Boo at Cafe OTO as well as those on the newer album, YESYESPEAKERSYES (2024). What’s it like to play with Paul and to then work with artists like these two? Anne and RP Boo come from two different spheres of music, in particular. And then you had lll人 with Daichi Yoshikawa as well.
With Kavain [aka RP Boo], the first time we played was in 2018. And we’ve done that trio five times, I think. We’re gonna do it again in Canada, in a couple months. With Anne, we were working together without having met. We were going to do something but it was COVID times, but we carried on making this record, and we did eventually meet and spend some time together and have these performances.
Kavain and Anne are two of the most incredible human beings. They are brilliant creative forces and amazing people to spend time with working. It’s very difficult to quantify. To me, the way the both of them work with time and the fabric of life in order to generate patterns is not so dissimilar. When I see Kavain and other footwork people DJ, there is a bass frequency that is instantly present throughout. It strikes me as a zone, like a carpet almost. The first time I saw Jana Rush she did a similar thing. And even when transitioning from one person’s set to another person’s set, you can tell because there’s suddenly a whole layer that wasn’t there before. To me it has always felt like a deliberate transposition of one environment into another on which, and in which, something can happen.
When Anne came, she brought leaves and things from her garden. It was a different kind of manifestation of traces of space and place and environment and reflection. This is just one very small example of how the work begins and how we share, and then how we work out what we can do together. Not wishing to speak for Paul, I feel like the opportunities we’ve had to work with Anne and Kavain were incredibly powerful for the both of us. And it is important for us to work with them and to develop something together. And then another strand of the XT collaboration was the Cecil thing, “Akisakila” / Attitudes of Preparation (2022), with Pat [Thomas].
When you ask me what I’ve learned from collaboration, there is a lot but it is difficult to begin to explain that. I would love to read more interviews about that. What we’re doing when we play is learning. And what I would like to share or communicate with everyone who is present is that that’s what we’re doing. When me and Paul play with Kavain or Anne, it doesn’t already exist, and people can be ambivalent about it or reject it, which is all cool, but we are ultimately learning. We’re not necessarily learning a thing—the thing is the learning. It’s hard to explain. And this is true of when I play with anyone, including with Crystabel.
I wanted to ask about playing with Crystabel given you have a different dynamic as partners. What’s that like?
It’s about love, isn’t it? It’s rare that we get the opportunity to play together in public because we’re doing all these other things. It’s to do with love and making our world. I don’t see that there is a difference between when we play and are together otherwise—and this is true of all collaborative relationships. As I see it, things don’t just switch when you start to play. All creative practice, and really all practice, is a shared social, linguistic, sensual, evolving experience. Of course taxonomies are important to get any purchase on anything. Like language, for example, is something we need to help us. In the summer we played for a friend. They’re a wonderful person who helped us and spent a lot of time with our children, and they invited us to play at their leaving event. It was wonderful to play as part of this event that was full of friends. It was a very deep, shared moment of affection and love.
The other day, I was talking with someone about writing a book and it was maybe gonna be the PhD turned into a book. One thing that I’d like to do is talk a bit about the AMM stuff, a bit about the [Ahmed] stuff, and a bit about what Crystabel and I do. These are connected by ways of learning. It’s funny that we have ended up talking about these things.
That’s what I love about interviews, really. You end up learning things that you already knew; it’s just that you have found ways—and have had the chance—to verbalize them.
Playing is like that. Like with Wood Blues (2024), just as one example, and in [Ahmed] particularly because it has an intertextual mystery. In [Ahmed], we are thinking about this piece together, and when we do that, all this stuff emerges. And then it is or isn’t reified in the patterns that become shared. It’s a really rich thing. Music is like that. Making music is a process of reflection and change and transformation, and hopefully that’s a shared thing with people who come to listen, too. I recently wrote something about Tony Oxley.
Oh yeah, I read that. It was great.
I’m glad you saw it. My goal in doing that was partly because I think his work is interesting and I think some people don’t know about a lot of that stuff. The record cover that I referenced in that, the one with the lichen and the stones, in the back of my mind it was like… there’s something in this thing. And it was only when I sat down and wrestled it into shape that it became articulated into something I was comfortable sharing. It gave me a different purchase of his work. I was learning something and I’m hoping I was offering something to other people, too.
What do you feel like you are learning from being in [Ahmed]? Are there specific things you want people to learn or gain from the recordings or shows?
Me and Pat talk so much about why this incredible presence is so invisible. Why are people not talking about his work? And we talk about it with Joel and Antonin too. If people come and hear us and go away listening to his records, then great. Or maybe they’ll go and listen to the Thelonious Monk records with Ahmed Abdul-Malik and listen to them, that’s great too. But there’s so much more. People may listen to us and think, “What are these people doing?” And the same thing with the images and the text. When I write about [Ahmed], I try to surface some of those things and go back to language and politics. Wood Blues has an unpublished photo by Val Wilmer on the cover. Stuff like that.
It’s an opening up and an excavation. We’re asking questions through the music that people hopefully enjoy listening to. It has a visceral thing, but it also has a conceptual and cerebral thing, too. I’ve learned a huge amount about the saxophone and myself just from the joy of working with Pat, Joel, and Antonin. The stuff they make possible is amazing. I have to work out what I’m going to do. Like, “How am I going to participate in this practice? What’s my role in this?” And I can play the saxophone differently now than when I started, that’s for sure.
Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?
No, I’d just like to say thank you for this and for being interested. It’s a pleasure to talk like this. It’s a nice mode of investigating.
I always end my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Learning, I suppose. I’m optimistic. I always just try to keep learning.
Seymour Wright’s new solo album, RITES, can be found at Bandcamp. His new albums in XT with Paul Abbott, include the Anne Gillis collaboration Our/s Bouture(s) and the RP Boo collaboration YESYESPEAKERSYES. Wright and Abbott’s collaborative work with Daichi Yoshikawa can be found on Bandcamp, and their most recent album is called VICTOR. [Ahmed]’s new albums, Giant Beauty and Wood Blues, can be found at Bandcamp. The other interviews in the [Ahmed] series can be found here: Joel Grip, Pat Thomas, Antonin Gerbal, [Ahmed].
Thank you for reading the 139th issue of Tone Glow. Keep on learning.
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