Tone Glow 140: Antonin Gerbal
The fourth in a series of five interviews with jazz quartet [Ahmed]. Drummer Antonin Gerbal talks about playing with Roy Haynes as a teenager, finding joy in who you are, and his musical inspirations.
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, Seymour Wright, [Ahmed].
Antonin Gerbal
Antonin Gerbal (b. 1986) is a Paris-based drummer, improviser, and composer. Throughout his career, he has explored different facets of jazz and free improvisation, understanding the importance of “traditions and modernities” to find a singular style. He plays solo and in various groups such as [Ahmed], [ISM], Sbatax, Vaka, the Umlaut Big Bang, and ONCEIM. He has written several pieces for small and large ensembles, and has collaborated with musicians and composers such as Éliane Radigue, Peter Ablinger, John Tilbury, Alexander Von Schlippenbach, and Evan Parker. His works appear on over 40 albums on labels such as Umlaut Records, Astral Spirits, Otoroku, 577 Records, Confront Recordings, and Shiin.
Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with Gerbal on March 6th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss differences in listening depending on the musical context, the American and European artists who influenced him, and the importance of playing an instrument other than your own.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: You’re based in Paris, were you born there too?
Antonin Gerbal: No, I was born in Toulouse in the South of France. I grew up there and then when I was 17 years old, I moved to Paris to study at the conservatory. It was quite natural, as a young musician, to move here. I’m still playing with people I met at the conservatory.
What was it like growing up in the South of France? It’s a really beautiful area.
It was very joyful. Toulouse isn’t far from Spain and the Pyrenees mountains, and it’s less stressful in smaller cities—people are more relaxed. At the time, the music scene was quite active. There was a great classical orchestra playing great European repertoire. Music school in Toulouse was at a very high level. I was also at a drum school, and this drum school is very particular because it was run by great drummers and drum-lovers. I was lucky because when I was eight, I saw Elvin Jones play live. I was backstage, and I enjoyed it as much as a kid could. When I was 14 or 15, they invited Jack DeJohnette and Roy Haynes. I got to play with Roy Haynes! It was incredible meeting these people.
You were able to do all this because you were at the drum school in Toulouse?
Yes, in Toulouse.
What was it like to play with Roy Haynes?
I have a very clear memory of this meeting with Roy Haynes. I remember him moving on the drums and that the sound was something unique, something special, something different. It wasn’t this dry sound that you would hear during the ’80s on the drum kit. He did a master class before the show and there were a lot of students, and then I had to play (laughter). I had to play a jazz standard and, after this, he came to me and took the stick and played the ride cymbal (mimics the sound of a steady rhythm created on a ride cymbal). He took my stick, and the sound was totally different from what I did. It was a different world. At this specific moment, I realized that there was something so powerful—even magical—in the production of acoustic sound when you hear someone like Roy Haynes play. And you can find this with all the masters. A master piano player can see a piano and touch it and the sound will be totally changed.
What year were you born? I’m trying to get a sense of the time.
1986. My grandmother was a classical piano player and teacher, so I grew up with this background. My parents had this one recording that had Sonny Rollins with Coleman Hawkins and Paul Bley on the piano. Herbie, too. It was a compilation. It just blew my mind. Even at eight, I realized that they played very freely. I don’t know if I realized what improvisation was but I understood that something was different.
Did you end up playing piano because your grandma played piano?
Yeah, a bit. With the piano, I’m more of an autodidact—I rejected the academic ways of playing it. I played the piano all the time in my life, but at seven or eight, I started to take lessons. I loved the drums. Since I was four or five years old, I said I wanted to play it. I had seen big bands early in my life, in the South of France, and I was amazed by the drummers. At seven, my grandmom said, “Buy him the drums!” (laughter). Sometimes, there is this error in the academic musical system where the drums are not really considered an instrument, so when you sometimes come from so-called “serious music,” you don’t have proper scores or proper repertoire and you think it’s easy to play the drums, but my grandmom took it very seriously.
Was that when you started going to the drum school?
Actually, I had a drum set by the time I started the drum school. And plus, I was a classical percussion player at the conservatory. And then at the Paris Conservatory, when I was 17, I was in the jazz department. You learn traditional jazz there, but they were open to improvisation and contemporary music.
Do you remember the first time that you participated in improvisation with a group of people?
I discovered this in Paris. In Toulouse it was more typical. In Paris I had a great professor who was a student of Olivier Messiaen, Alain Savouret. He was a conductor, an electroacoustic composer, theoretician, and a great composer. He had a class about improvisation and when I was 19, I participated in his workshop. It was very new to me. The workshop was open to any student. You would find yourself with people from the classical department and the jazz department, so it broke aesthetic borders. We had total freedom. We could choose musical concepts and ideas that were formalized but it was, most of the time, very open. I played solo before, but at the time, I really understood what listening meant. I was reading a lot of philosophy, so I had to put music into specific historical and political perspectives.
What did that look like?
I had to think about what to make in the present day. I was conscious that Elvin and Roy Haynes were not my “granddads,” but I was in love with their music. Improvisation showed me the path. I could love this jazz music, this Afro-American music, and I could mix it with this other background and these other practices. Very soon in this workshop, the German trumpet player Axel Dörner came to do a master class. Him and others made me realize that they had found something as jazz lovers who were not in this direct tradition. It opened up new sounds and new aesthetics. Axel is a marvelous musician and human being.
Do you remember the first time you played with Axel?
It was in this workshop. When I heard him, he used a time chronometer with us to make us feel what objective time is when you improvise. The music he loved was the music I loved—and I discovered a new way to practice and think musically from him. At that time, Archie Shepp did a masterclass too and said that Cecil Taylor was one of his heroes, and this was first time I heard about Cecil. Archie Shepp talked a lot about political implications and musical spirit. And philosophy was like a compass for me. Nowadays, you can get lost in the music industry and how it works—it’s difficult to find your way and to be conscious about long time traditions. Axel brought something unique because I understood that, okay, as an improviser I can live happily while playing different musics and playing solo. When you play solo, you definitely can’t lie. And Axel, when he played solo in this workshop, it was like, wow, I never saw anyone playing like this and formalizing this language on the trumpet. I was a jazz fan, an electroacoustic music fan, a European music tradition fan, an extra-European music tradition fan (laughter), and it was like, okay, where does it stop? And I understood that there did not have to be a limit to your love for music in this polysemic way.
That actually reminds me of Roy Haynes, actually, since he played a lot of different styles of music. I’m also thinking of your own work. You have the Peeping Tom bebop album, you have Umlaut Big Band album where you’re playing Mary Lou Williams’ songs, and you of course have the more free improvised stuff, too. You mentioned this notion of how when playing solo, you can’t lie. You released the album Sound of Drums in 2016. I’m wondering if you could talk about that album and playing solo in general, and how that relates to the music you’ve made with others.
This album was at a turning point in my life because when I was 19 and 20, at the conservatory, I was a little bit lost. There were so many directions I could go in—so many that you could have vertigo. When you’re young, you have to make choices and you don’t want to make them between doing the things you love. My dear colleague, the saxophone player Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, arrived at the conservatory at the same time as me. He was literally in the room right next to mine. He’s very particular and has an exceptional mind—his knowledge is just insane. Sven-Åke Johansson was also very important for me. It’s all these grandads, but in Europe and who grew up in the ’60s. They created a junction. Alexander von Schlippenbach, too, and Axel played with him. Axel did this, playing jazz and playing in a duo with Kevin Drumm.
Firstly, we played as bands. We did concerts in Paris and when I was 22 or 23, I remember with Joel [Grip], we did a session in trio with Pierre-Antoine. It was strange because we didn’t plan anything; we just played freely. And suddenly, Charlie Parker’s themes came out. It came from an unconscious brain—an unconscious motor. And that was the beginning of Peeping Tom. We loved this fastness, and when you improvise it’s an open canvas, but suddenly you’d have some fragments of bebop and we changed the speed, we deconstructed things, we included some unconventional playing that wasn’t bebop, and that has been very important for me.
You’ve played songs by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie—these are all American jazz musicians. You mentioned how these European artists were important to you. I’m wondering two things: what is the significance of these European musicians to you, and how do you feel they are different from the American musicians you love? And what is it like to play these American pieces by Europeans?
The first official Peeping Tom release [2009’s File Under Bebop] had its cover made by Sven-Åke. I think Joel was already in contact with him. When he heard our music he said, “It’s strange, I have this feeling that it comes from the ’60s.” We were very lucky because he got it, and supported it a lot. He did the cover for the first [Ahmed] album, New Jazz Imagination (2017), too. So spiritually, he’s around. Sven-Åke’s Schlingerland (1972) album was historical to me. It’s fabulous.
I have to mention Evan Parker. We received an invitation to play in London as the Peeping Tom Trio. We could invite someone and so we invited Evan. He is very particular. To me, he’s one of the greatest saxophone players alive. When we warmed up, he played some Monk tunes, and you can directly feel all his knowledge about the artist. And this could be with Monk or Coltrane, all these masters. And he’s not Afro-American, he’s not American; he’s deeply a part of the British scene. It was strange because I already met Elvin and Roy Haynes, but after that, my big mentors and figures were European musicians. Even though I’m French and Axel is German and Evan is British and Sven-Åke is Swedish, there is this common history, this European background, as well as this deep love for Afro-American music.
You’ve played in very large groups like Ensemble Hodos, Umlaut Big Band, ONCEIM, which played on the one Éliane Radigue recording. What’s it like to play in those versus solo or in smaller groups?
When you play solo, I’m trying to update something and am using all my tools—traditional and anti-traditional—and I can work in different fields and unify them. What I love about the Umlaut Big Band, for example, is the power of a band playing together. There’s percussion and a sax section and a rhythm section, and it’s also about revisiting the past as an interpreter, it’s like archaeology. With a very large band like ONCEIM, we were initially figuring out how to improvise with 30 people. You have very little space. You hear and produce something and maybe someone will take it into consideration, but it’s a more anarchist way to play. When we worked with Éliane, it was more about interpretation; it was a meeting with a composer—a conceptualist—so it was very precise work. With ONCEIM, it’s powerful because we have these two aspects. For a composer, it’s interesting to meet improvisers who can interpret, and it’s interesting for improvisers to meet a composer. Eventually, we will work with Chris Marclay and I’m very excited to meet and talk with him.
You mentioned that when you were going to conservatory that a lot of it was about listening. I’m wondering what it’s like when you’re in a smaller group like [Ahmed] versus the bigger groups. Do you feel yourself listening differently?
Yeah, it’s another type of listening. In a very large band, there’s always a profusion of events. It’s impossible to have a strong awareness of what’s happening in real time. And sometimes, it’s for physical reasons. I can’t hear the guy who’s playing very softly, 15 meters from me. In the Big Band, I experienced it a different way because of dynamic precision. It’s also extraordinary to play swing music. Pierre-Antoine makes transcriptions, and has been doing this for years now, and the project isn’t to rearrange the material—it is to play live and in a real space so the music could be heard in an archival sense, hearing the acoustic sound in a room and with people dancing. It was big work to find solutions in terms of dynamics. I really understood what those drummers experienced. If you don’t play it live, you can’t really figure it out, you can’t really know what it is—it’s different when it’s on tape.
Why do you think that’s the case? Is it because when you’re playing live, you’re playing for the audience?
The physicality of sound is very precise. It’s not by accident that, for example, big symphonic orchestras put musicians in particular arrangements in a space. You didn’t have microphones or speakers back then, and for big bands, they had to deal with the same physical constraints. You didn’t put speakers on stage, so you had to think about where to put instruments in a room; you had to consider instruments as the speakers themselves. The acoustic bass in a big band is something you can spend your whole life thinking about. And for sure, this transforms the musician himself. That’s one of the most passionate problems I thought about in the Big Band. I remembered the first years in the Big Band, I played very loud all the time. I feel like I forced it. I would use the cymbal a lot. But now, it’s more about doing less. You have to be more precise, you have to be efficient. It is not with theory that you can arrive at this consideration; it’s practical.
With [Ahmed], the sound is coming from a quartet. I think we consider ourselves as improvisers first and then we have a lot of space. Think about the Thelonious Monk Quartet or the John Coltrane Quartet. They created the foundation of this format, and we come from this tradition. But yeah, the more people you put in a band… with two people it can be difficult but it can work, and the more people you add, you have more voices and dissonances. With [Ahmed], it’s a very intimate band.
You have the duo with Bertrand Denzler, Sbatax, and you two had the album last year, Spires (2023). Can you compare what it’s like playing in a duo like this compared to being in a quartet? Do you feel like you have to try hard to fill in the sound in a duo?
It depends on the music I’m playing and what we’re actually doing, or wanting to do. Sometimes it’s very clear. With Bertrand, we started playing more minimalist improvised music with lots of silences and small events. At some point, we decided to try and work on a flow, one that’s quite extreme. The dynamics are very loud and in this flux, and we create motifs and repetitions of motifs. Physically, it’s very demanding. And then we developed this for a few years and I would say that the freedom we have and we feel depends on the context. The limitations are deliberately chosen.
With [Ahmed], it’s similar in a way. First, we chose Ahmed Abdul-Malik as the starting point, but for each concert, we don’t know what will happen. With Wood Blues (2024), we decided on that a few minutes before the show. So as improvisers, we take care of the music collectively and individually, and the collective is different when you’re in a duo or a quartet or with 14 people or 30 people, but it is a common responsibility. What changes is the level of consciousness you can have in real time. With 30 improvisers, to me it’s impossible. But in a quartet or a duo, it’s different.
You’ve done so many things throughout your career. You’ve played Philip Corner in Ensemble Hodos, and when I interviewed him he mentioned how he couldn’t live a life where he was doing the same thing. I look at your discography and I’m wondering if you feel the same thing.
The most important thing for me is to take enough risks and create encounters. I want to meet with people from different fields, to meet people who are very different. It’s a pure joy when our roads cross, when you have these encounters with unknown languages and music and thoughts. And this is continuing today—I’m working with musicians who come from very different backgrounds. This is an endless process, but this process has a logic. It’s where stimulation comes from. Yesterday, I discovered something Don Cherry said about Bud Powell. He said, “This guy could play the same thing several times and it would never be the same.” And for me, it’s strange because there are all these encounters where I see myself as an interpreter, as someone who wants to learn, but my idea may be more like this.
I want to find freshness each time I play. And it doesn’t depend on what I play. It could be an abstract piece like Philip Corner’s, or a Monk tune, or Wood Blues, which is a theme with no head. It’s all a pretext. That’s why interpreters are so important to me because they’ll play the same thing but it’ll never be the same, like Bud or Monk. And at the same time, you have Coltrane for example where it’s like, “Is it the same musician playing the saxophone?” and it’s because his playing is very transformative. To me, the world—the actual musical world in the present time—is not something you can understand if you only stay in one place, whether aesthetically, artistically, temporally, or culturally. It’s much more than this. The big issue is to be aware of diversity. And at the same time, pure joy is about singularity, about being who you are. And that’s how all creativity happens. The question is about how to stimulate this singularity. It’s through traditions and modernities.
Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?
I think it’s very important to be connected to your instrument as a musician. You want to have your basic practice. But it’s also important to be connected to another instrument. It’s related to your previous question about diversity, and is important to not having a closed mind as a musician and as a composer.
What other instruments do you feel close to besides the drums?
The piano. To be honest, I work more with the piano now than the drums. What’s great is when there’s a community of people who work together and try things with no limitations, and that’s what we do in [Ahmed].
How do you feel like playing the piano informs your understanding of the drums, and how does playing the drums inform your understanding of the piano?
I don’t really know because there are specific traditions to these two instruments. To me, the drums are something holistic, it’s both modern and archaic at the same time. My opinion is that any musician should play the drums or percussion. What’s strange is that everyone agrees with this, but in schools, they don’t do that. So that’s my proposal: the drums should be the basics for any kid. For the piano, my approach is more related to the European music tradition. Sometimes in dreams, I think about how if we could hear Beethoven play the piano, it would be fantastic because you would hear his concepts and his music live in real time. You would feel his work differently. So there are holistic approaches for certain types of music, but it can also be a trap.
How so?
Ahmed Abdul-Malik talked about it. He said, “You can’t play the sounds in between two notes,” but then he adds, “but Thelonious Monk can do it.” Pat Thomas can do it too. He’s one of the few who can do it. I think he can do it because he has a consciousness of how to do it. He’s not only a piano player, he’s a magician, and a conceptualist. That’s why he’s so important to open up the instrument. With the piano, you can go very far into history.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with that I wanted to ask you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Musically?
It doesn’t have to, it’s up to you.
What I like is that I don’t compromise myself, artistically. I believe in my loves and I love my beliefs. It’s been like that for a very long time. You may finish a gig and feel desperate because you don’t feel like you’re living at the right time at the right place with the right people—it’s very important to not have this feeling.
More information about Antonin Gerbal can be found at his website. Gerbal’s most recent album with [ISM], Maua, can be purchased at Bandcamp. Gerbal’s latest album with the Umlaut Chamber Orchestra, Zodiac Suite, can be purchased at Bandcamp. Gerbal’s duo with Bertrand Denzler, Sbatax, has a recent album titled Spires. [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, Seymour Wright, [Ahmed].
Thank you for reading the 140th issue of Tone Glow. Make sure you’re with the right people.
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Great interviews! Thank you.