Jaimie Branch writes music that strays. The core signifier for the New York-based trumpeter is jazz, but her 2017 album Fly Or Die and the work that she and drummer Jason Nazary create under the name Anteloper (all of it released through Chicago/Portland label International Anthem) doesn’t rest easy under that umbrella. The former project felt smooth and blasted, like a running your hand over a jagged cluster of amethysts, with the sharp influences of hip-hop and experimental electronics cutting through the tightly-wound grooves. The latter fucks with the formula even more. Kudu, the duo’s cassette release from last year, put a greater emphasis on synthesizers, effects pedals, and improvisations that dip into the waters of post-rock and ambient.
The ballast for all of this material is Branch’s pugnacious trumpet playing. Even when muted or in more restrained moments, the instrument sounds like it’s pleading, demanding, straining to stay aloft in a tornado. And to hear some of Branch’s backstory, the sound could even serve to push back a little harder. She was booted out of Chicago by her parents in her teen years after she accidentally started a fire that burned down their home. And though she found her way back into the city and became a fixture of its jazz scene, she decided to leave for New York in 2015, in part to seek treatment for an addiction to heroin.
The move was a fortuitous one. “Everything started falling into place for me,” Branch says, speaking on the phone from her apartment in Brooklyn. She started playing regularly and connecting with some legends of the jazz game. And, after meeting the gents behind International Anthem, released Fly, an album that landed on many a critic’s Best of 2017 list.
With Branch arriving in town this week to perform with Nazary at Killingsworth Dynasty, it opened up the perfect opportunity to talk with her about Anteloper, how the misdeeds of her past have impacted the way she performs, and the development of the music on her releases to date.
MERCURY: Let’s talk about Anteloper first off. You and Jason have been playing together under this name for a little while now. What drew the two of you together?
JAIMIE BRANCH: We started playing together in Jason Ajemian’s band High Life. We went to school together way back in 2002 and we knew each other but it was through playing with [Ajemian]. I have always been a big fan of Nazary’s playing, so when I moved to New York, it made sense for us start playing together. Anteloper quickly developed from that. Originally, we wanted to have a trio but when we started playing together and using synths, we realized this is a band. This is it.
What can you tell me about using technology and synthesizers the way you do? Was that an easy thing to adapt to?
Yeah, absolutely. Going back to 2002 again, that’s when I bought my [Roland] Juno-106, which I still play to this day. I’ve played with synthesis on the computer with Max/MSP but I don’t bring that into my performing practice. The idea of manipulating sound and the ways to do it have always been intriguing to me.
That really comes across on your album Fly Or Die, where you were playing around with the recordings in post-production. Was there a lot of that happening on the Anteloper album?
That was mostly performed live. There’d be a couple of sections where we were, like, it would be cool if we added a bassline to it or something. And there was one section where it was, like, the trumpet was cool, but it needed something. So, I ran the trumpet stem out through my Line 6 Looper Delay pedal. That’s kind of telling you how the sausage was made. Different ways of getting to the sounds that you can’t hear yet, but you know the possibility of.
I’ve read that with Fly Or Die, you wrote the music in a very open-ended fashion so the other players on it had a lot of room to make their own statements. Was that the same process with Anteloper or were you mostly improvising and seeing where things went?
Anteloper is mostly improvised, although on the record, we play a few of Jason’s tunes. But, I just did this performance with Anteloper where I wrote a piece and as I was writing it, I was really concerned with all these different textures and colors, so instead of writing it in a linear fashion, I was writing in chunks of vibe if that makes sense. Something that we’ve talked about is taking a little tiny bit of music—a piece, a pebble—and turning over and over in our hands, again and again. Seeing the pebble from every different angle. And then deconstructing the groove or whatever it is.
Before Fly Or Die, you had released a bit of your own music and done some recording, and you had certainly been playing for a long time, but Fly was the first release that came out under your own name. Was that something you did on purpose—waiting until you were ready to put out bunch of music that you felt good attaching your name to?
The records that I had been on before were really all sidemen records. I worked on a couple of records myself that never really saw the light of day because I ran out of cash. But throughout my whole career, I just kept steadily playing and putting bands together. It was kind of a right time, right place thing with Fly Or Die. I put the band together for a Nick Mazzarella show, an alto saxophonist in Chicago who was working with International Anthem. We put the show together and it felt really good. A couple of months later, Scottie [McNiece, co-owner of International Anthem] called me up about making a record. That was the first time anyone had every broached the idea of making a record with me. Everybody does it themselves these days. There’s a lot of reasons to stay independent. But International Anthem wanted to do this with me. And they could. And it was great. It was real.
Reading other interviews with you, it’s clear that you’ve been through some heavy shit in your life. How do you think that affected your writing and your playing?
They’re really one in the same. The way I write music is that I really try to listen to the music in my head. I think a lot of us have music running through our heads all day and we just don’t really notice it unless you’re a musician. It takes me a long time to actually get anything down on paper, but I spend a lot of time trying to understand what I’m hearing in my head. Fly Or Die was really a journey record in a lot of ways. I have a tune on there called “The Storm.” That’s not that coded. It feels pretty aggressive and it feels pretty chaotic. I think that going through heavy shit and making it out alive… you gain a lot of perspective when everything’s going wrong and you don’t have people around you. You learn who the true people are in your life. And you learn that you can do a lot of things by yourself.
How did moving to New York affect you?
I’m from New York originally and I spent my childhood wanting to get back here really badly. But once I started playing the Chicago scene and understanding the history of free jazz in Chicago, it just seemed like I needed to be there. I needed to be close to that music. So I stayed. And I think that was the right decision for the time. I had to time to grow and find my sound. New York, though… there’s so much energy in the city. You get high off it; you catch that vibe. And coming here and being surrounded by so many incredible musicians—young people and elders all over the city. It just got me really hyped.
Anteloper, Thurs June 27, 8 pm, Killingsworth Dynasty, 832 N Killingsworth, $8, w/Omari Jazz, Gamble/Rossi/Simpson, DJ Derek Smith