Roberto Di Gioia + Max Herre: Web Web’s experiments in electronic jazz

The Creative Process: Listening to Your Own Work

LP: So I spent the weekend immersed in the new album, and it's so good. It's so good. It's right in the target of What I like to listen to, but also new and fresh enough that it doesn't feel like something I've heard before. I'm so eager to spend more time with it. I'm looking forward to buying it on vinyl because it's going to sound terrific.

Max: Thanks a lot. We appreciate. Yeah. It's so good to hear.

LP: Do you listen to it? Do you listen to your own work?

Max: While we were doing it, we listened to it a lot. It went through a lot of phases. Like we had, some of the songs had 24 versions or so to it. It was like this kind of album that really evolved. It was really a lot of trial and error this time. It was. Other than the album before, it's more like a producer's album. They really tried out different things to explore different paths and angles for each song. So they really grew, not all of them. Some of them, like "Perrenial Journey," for instance, were pretty much what they are now from a very early stage, but some other songs really went through phases, and they are also different, like soundscapes. Yeah. We tried out a lot of things.

LP: So I'll go back and ask, do you ever put on your own music for the enjoyment of listening to it? Or can you not do that?

Roberto: I've listened today because I had to decide what we are going to play live. Believe it or not, I have to learn the songs from scratch because when you do it, when you record it, and when you find it, it's instantly there or not. And then it disappears. It's like a child you feed. It has nothing to do with oneself any longer.

So it's really like a second person right in front of you, and you look at it. Today, actually, I listened. And I had to listen to it, and I liked it. But you, it's just, it's strange. You know it, like your kid, like your son, you know it, you know him and, but still, there are surprises, "Oh, wow, this was happening. Oh, I can't remember this color." Or, this happens. Yeah. It's really like a child, at least to me, to myself.

Max: Sometimes, yeah. When albums are really new, I like to listen back, and then, like, they disappear for a while. And then sometimes a couple of years later, or just like Roberto said, and you're rehearsing for a show, so you listen back to it. And it's really interesting for me. Like with these like the Web Web and Web Max albums, I'm not a performer like that on these albums. I do albums where I'm writing lyrics, and then I'm performing. So, I really have to deal with myself and my persona as an artist on these albums.

And it's way different than listening to Web Max, where I'm producing, and I'm really playing little bits and pieces. Still, I'm not like, like, a major performer on the album, which is easier for me to listen to it as just as music and with a certain distance that, that, that's way more enjoyable for me than to ask myself, who am IWhat did I tell what I did? I talk about how did I sound? And yeah. So yeah, at this phase, at least, I really love listening back to the album. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot.

The Producer's Perspective: Max Herre on Album Creation

LP: When you said earlier, Max, and it's something I also read in the press release about the record, that it's a producer's album or more of a producer's album. I wasn't sure how to interpret that. When I think about a producer in the context of any music, but specifically instrumental music and jazz, There are different poles of types of producer. I think of a Teo Macero, who's like a wizard and cuts up tape and copies and pastes. And I would imagine he'd be very comfortable in the modern age if he were around with computers and digital capabilities. And then someone like Rudy van Gelder, who's almost more of an engineer, and it's just searching for the sound. So I wonder, and I'm sure there's a spectrum in between, what does it mean for you that it's a producer's album?

Max: Different things. All of what you said, like sound, finding the right sounds, and playing around with it. What I mean is in comparison to the last album, where we went to the studio with the band and played takes on music that Roberto and I had written before. So it was really about that, sitting there and discussing what to play on the songs and what instruments should play on it.

And with this, it was more like, as we were evolving it in the studio, a lot of the times the musicians were not around, but Roberto was playing a lot of the stuff, bringing different people in at different times and stages. That's what I mean, on the one hand, and then also produces an album in the quest of finding a narrative to it.

Like with the last one, we really had a certain idea of what the album as a whole should sound like. And now we had different paths to explore, and then we needed a narrative that would hold it together. And it was more like thinking of, okay, what do we want for the album? Which paths do we want to explore? But also, where do we not go this time? What we need in order to still be at an album and hold it together and give it a certain overall idea or meaning.

The Narrative of Munich: Roberto di Gioia's Musical Journey

LP: Roberto, was the narrative for this record Munich?

Roberto: We initially planned three albums, which all came together in this one album. We thought we could make three albums with different focuses, like a drum album, a Kraut-jazz album, like Embryo Amon Düül, the 60s and 70s German Munich bands. I am familiar with this because I'm from Munich and I know some people, I met them.

I met Mel Waldron, the John Coltrane piano player in Munich, in 86. I said hello to him once, which was the greatest honor. And he was playing around with the Embryo guys then, and the other was the songwriting album. And by working on the albums, we made a distillation of the best moments and put it together. It tells the story to answer your question with a narrative of Munich. It's out of our handwriting, our feather; we wrote the music, and that's what keeps the album together.

There are so many different styles on this album, which is a very contemporary and modern way of thinking and listening to music. On the other hand, it's a total concept album for ourselves because the songs move from classic songwriting. It's like the first song, then to a free jazz type, then to an African 1974 type of beatbox with two guitars and an organ.

So the styles are totally different, but the development made this possible so that we don't feel we put together meaningless tunes. Every song has its meaning and keeps the story with which we are in line. It tells the story in a certain way of 'Reihenfolge,' in a certain way of sequence.

LP: That's very helpful to hear you articulate it that way because, as a listener, I got that, but I don't think I would have been able to say it the way you did, and something that strikes me is the notion of lineage. Not only the physical lineage of being from a place but also the way that's expressed through the different styles.

On this record, you were saying something that what it brought up for me was that the risk of something like that is it could be chaotic and not fit together and be disjointed. And somehow, maybe we'll credit some Max here or something from wearing a producer's hat or both of you to be able to navigate that to make it a coherent whole that touches on all those things.

Outside of the playing itself, one of the triumphs of this record is the ground it's able to cover and what it's able to convey through those styles. And let's get the name out of the way. You brought up Coltrane. You said that you said the words Coltrane when you mentioned Mel Waldron.

It's a funny aside; I know on the last record, you had Charles Tolliver on it. I am trying to remember if I told you this the last time we spoke, Roberto, but years ago, I saw Charles Tolliver with McCoy Tyner. They did two nights of the music of Africa Brass with a big band. They did it in New York for two or three nights at the Blue Note. But one of the tracks on the record, I think it's "The 6th Dimension," really hearkened back to the early 60s, such as Dolphy and Coltrane, when they were taking in some of the Eastern sounds, getting very modal. But the beginnings of the spiritual jazz, that to me was the birth of all of this.

Roberto: The song "The 6th Dimension" was a funny moment. Actually, all the horns, may I show you, the horns are this Mellotron. These are all the horns. So, this was an improvisation with saxophone sounds and clarinet sounds. I found this weird saxophone sound, which I didn't remember I had.

The old Mellotron has banks, sound banks with, yeah, with real tapes in it. You have to change the tapes. And I found this saxophone, which is in the middle of the songs. And this could be any cool tenor player, Pharoah Sanders type of, and I immediately recorded this. And then after this, I played this drum set, which it was, it's a total, it sounds like a band, but it isn't.

And that's what Max put, he puts together, the different elements. How do you say, of putting these elements together in one-to-one?

LP: He's an alchemist.

Roberto: Yeah. He definitely is! Yeah.

Max: Yeah, but the gold is there already.

LP: I'm absorbing what you just told me because after spending so much time with the record, I didn't guess that. I didn't know that was the Mellotron, and it's all the horn in there on this one in this song.

Roberto: All the horns are really this Mellotron—also a very modern and very antique and early 70s. The Mellotron is the Krautrock instrument, a Munich instrument that I bought from a guy in Munich. Somehow, history is also involved in this record, in these songs.

Also, although this is from 1974, the Mellotron, the original, is a very modern approach, not to fake but to simulate with modern techniques, using computer multi-track recording to simulate an ancient, a 60s, or a 70s. This recording and this all happens by a vision, or this originates in a vision of how it could have been then.

And it comes together how I interpret with my tools the music of then together with Max. That's the basic principle of "Perennial Journey." It sounds like a bigger band, but it's all recorded in this tiny little 14-square-meter room. This took 50 versions, and the composition is one part.

The beginning of the record is this bass and drums part, the bassline. And this originally came in the middle of the song. We had a different beginning when Max came and said, that's not the beginning. That's the middle part. This is the beginning. And so he arranges things in a different way than I hear it.

That's where I can respond to him and his ideas and follow this in a certain way. And that's why we work together on actually many projects now. It's really great because the other one knows things which the other one doesn't know. So it's really four heads and four ears, one person or so. And I'm very thankful to you, Max, that you are around and bear my Ideas, which are terrible sometimes, most of the time.

Max: That's not true. Thank you. Thank you for saying so, but that's not true at all.

The Intersection of Hip-Hop and Spiritual Jazz

LP: Something that Roberto said that I'll also grab onto, and I wanted to say it to you through my filter, which is something that I always loved about not only the spiritual jazz era of the late '60s and early 70s, but what I would call post spiritual jazz, but where some of those artists went next in their innovations really struck me as being more about arranging and instrumentation.

I've had this conversation with a few artists about how a lot of the jazz artists went electric and embraced sort of the path that Miles trailblazed. Still, other artists, like McCoy Tyner, never really went electric but were just as innovative. Because he started to incorporate the African instruments and his use of arrangement is just, it's stunning.

Something that really struck me on this record is that in the midst of all this improvisation, there's incredible arrangement work. And what did your background in hip-hop bring to the table? Or how did it inform, how does it inform your work as a producer and an arranger in these other musical contexts, if at all?

Max: It does. Totally. It has a huge impact because coming from digging and sampling, it's like you always look for these parts that really have this repetitive moment as that give you something that's of a mantra of a song. That's what your whole search is about to find.

And of course, if you play with bands and you work with bands, that's also something that you're. I'm always into having a foundation, that is, rhythm and bass line, on which everything else can unfold. And that's something that we really explored. With this record, as with the last one, I like to have something that is really based on a foundation that holds it together in a way.

And that's what I also like about the improvisation. If you have something that is underneath that is really mantric and stable and repetitive, it's spiritual in its way because doing it over and over again and finding groove together within a room and a group of people evolving through repetition with a lot of the spiritual jazz stuff. I love that's the base. Suppose you listen to a lot of the Yusef Lateef stuff, for instance. It's very repetitive in the sense that it lays a foundation on which you can, as a musician and as a spirit, like to unfold and start exploring, and I think that's something that we really thought of.

If you bring it back to hip hop, that's what we call, what's the beat, what's the bass line. But also, like hip hop producers understood that, in a way, this is appealing. We also came from playing live a lot with the last record. We ended up playing a lot of the songs on the last record faster live than they were in the record because we thought and saw that people were responding to it physically.

You really had the feeling that people are not just, in jazz audiences in Germany, they're often very stiff and sophisticated and intellectual. And you could feel, all right, this is, I know from hip hop context, this is something, okay, that really gets in the bodies, the groove, the bloodline of listeners.

And that was something that we were really aware of with the record that we wanted, which was the foundation of a lot of the songs.

LP: That's the thing that was so attractive going all the way back to the early mid-70s to a lot of artists who were influenced by what was happening in Germany.

It has been something that the German artists and musicians really uncovered and perfected, which was this notion of using technology but still creating music with soul. I can recall years ago arguing with a friend of mine who hates Kraftwerk. He thinks it's the most sterile music ever.

And I listen to Kraftwerk, and I feel like it's soul music. Several years ago, through a completely different situation, I had an opportunity to meet Ralf. I was working for Warner Music at the time. And when I was introduced to him, he said, "Atlantic Records! Aretha Franklin!" And that, to me, completely validated my theory that it was about soul.

Roberto: It was always about soul. These very early beginnings with the flute, the sessions can be on YouTube, and there are really very good musicians to it. They always found the best drum sound and the best vocoder sound. And that's why it sets standards so early, so high that the whole world in electronic music still sees them as the gods of electronic pioneers because of the highest standards without words.

LP: Something else they did that's very interesting is when they went back in the, I guess, 80s and digitized their catalog. To a large extent, they rebuilt a lot of what we would call stems. They really rebuilt a lot of the tracks. And so when we hear the music now and when younger people are coming to it, they sonically, I don't want to say they enhanced it, but they modernized it.

And basically, like the preservation or restoration work they did with the catalog then, it made them ideally suited for the digital age. It's really interesting how intentional they were about their catalog as a body of work. But another interesting intersection that I wanted to ask you about, Max, is that another intersection of hip hop and spiritual jazz or jazz in general is the idea of consciousness. Your work is associated with conscious lyrics and message music, if you don't mind me saying it that way. While we were talking about lineage, there's also this lineage of consciousness, of spirituality, of awareness that runs through both of these musics as well. Is that a valid connection or interpretation, and is that something that you're meaningfully aware of and participating in?

Max: I think so. Yes. The concept of or the idea or the knowing about that we all stand on the shoulders of people that came before, that sort of sentiment. I was taught in hip hop in a way, but that goes back to all the music that came before.

And I think the idea of seeing ourselves as Being a part of a tradition that is so profound, way older, and that also came to be in a certain context, like a social-political context, like in a spiritual context, and knowing about it and referring to it. Yeah, that's very important to our music.

On "Perennial Journey," my friend Sekou wrote this spoken word part that really brings together the idea that we really have a lot of gratitude towards the music that we grew up with and like the protagonists who were playing and crafting this music.

The Art of Creation: Rituals and Practices

LP: At the risk of deconstructing how you create, and I don't necessarily mean to do that, but do you have to create an environment for the music to come? Is there a ritual or practice around that? Or Are you more like a workman, and you go to work and start picking up the tools?

Roberto: The second one. The ritual is very early before your mind is awake. All the work has to be done. And I feel this when I bring my daughter to school at 7:30, and I come back at exactly 7:35. I'm sitting in this room, and I'm not really there. All I have to do is not wait for inspiration. It's just do it. And it works many times, but many times it doesn't work.

And it's okay. It's like usual work, which I like. It sounds very arrogant, but it's, to me, nothing special because I've been doing it for so long. And I have fun. Sometimes I don't have fun. Actually, many times you don't have fun when it's already there. And there's so much work. "Perennial Journey" took a year, almost, or maybe 10, 10 months, at least.

There were two different drum takes from two different. One session was on two different days, and there were two months in between the first part; then it switched to another cymbal, but it's the same cymbal recorded with a different mic two months later, although the song is there, and it's fun.

You are not satisfied, and you are not happy with the result because it doesn't sound like it should sound. That's the hard part, which is not fun, but it's okay.

LP: Something that's bringing up for me is because earlier Roberto made the joke to you, Max, that he has a lot of ideas, and they're not all good.

I can take that as just being self-effacing, but I could also understand that if you force yourself to work every day, you're going to generate a lot that you throw away, and you say, I'm just working to get to the good one. So I understand that, but there's got to be some that are right on the edge where you say this has potential if I keep working at it and sculpting it away and removing or adding.

The Evolution of a Track

Roberto: It's a very good example of one track, this number, I don't even know the title.

Max: We have so many titles too, as I told you, we have a lot of versions, and they get different titles, and then at the end, they ask us, okay, what's the record going to be like? And we come up with names that we can't recall in interviews.

Roberto: The tune with the drum beat, the organ, and the two guitars. It's like number eight or nine on the record. It's a very good example.

Max: We gave it a French name, something French.

Roberto: I have it. It's called "Zutuma". Okay. Yeah. Yeah. "Zutuma". The number nine on the record. We had at least five different versions, which did not resemble at all. It's totally different with saxophone and piano and with totally different tunes. And I gave up on this tune. We didn't come to the point where we said, Max and I said, this will make it onto the record.

So we lost it. And then Max came a few days later. What about this version? Number 15 out of 500. And he sent me an MP3. of this version, which is on the record. And I hardly could remember by first listening. And I immediately said, wow, this sounds great. What is that? After five, six, or seven seconds, I realized this was version number five of a very early origin of the song. And I immediately loved it, but I wouldn't say I liked it then. And Max didn't like it then, either. He said, no, we have to keep on doing; we have to.

The Magic of Revisiting Old Ideas

Roberto: And then you come back months later, seeing your work with a distant view. And then you decide this is, this has the potential. And what happened? We just took the MP3. There wasn't even a session. There weren't even files because I rejected them. I threw it away. I don't collect the failures. They only keep the ghost! And this is sometimes a really big mistake.

Max: going back to what we earlier talked about, like your narrative and context and what a record needs in order to be a record and sort of a journey, you listen to it, and you feel like, okay, now with this ten songs, we have the cosmos that we wanted to explore and share with the listeners. This song made total sense within that context, in a version that we thought was not a path we should further explore while we were working on it.

Roberto: And Lawrence, one more thing, this version, and now I, I remember it is a big assembly or a collection of mistakes because the organ with the drum beat really broke down after this version.

After this beat collapsed, I threw it away, the organ with the drum beat. And I remember I played two guitar solos on it. And I was not too fond of the first one, and I didn't like the second one either. So we had two guitars. And I pushed one knob by incident, which two guitars at the same time matched together so that I liked them. I liked the version. And that's why I was so insecure. And I sent it to Max, and he wasn't, he said in the beginning, but then after the decision was made, it was good with a different perspective.

The Art of Deciding What's Good

Roberto: It's more a way of deciding what is good and what is not good, which sometimes doesn't happen at the moment where you create, which is strange with the emotional feelings you have while you're working. So with a different approach and with a distant view and a different point of view, you can decide that something was good, which wasn't good three months ago.

LP: So what's scary or interesting in that? Because I was originally going to ask you, how do you decide when to abandon an idea as opposed to continuing to really work at it and try to find it? But what seems like maybe happens more often than not is you might abandon ideas that actually are good, but you don't like them at the moment. It's so magical.

Roberto: Which is good.

Max: We've been collecting music, and it's not like Roberto's; he's throwing some of the stuff away. I keep a lot of the stuff in different stages. So we've been making music for 16, 16 years now, and it's happened so often that for a certain project or a certain phase, we remember saying, we recall things that we were doing maybe eight years ago, ten years ago, and we revisit them.

It was something that we enjoyed doing at the point, but it never really fit like a project we were working on. We find that within a new context, it starts, it makes sense. Of course, there's a lot of music sitting there that will never be released, but we are really happy with our own like I say, bibliothèque or so of music because sometimes we recall things or I have a lot of playlists, and I go through stuff that we were working on.

Roberto sent me at some point, some morning because he's sitting there at 7:35. By 8:15, I have one or two ideas. Very often, by 12 o'clock, he revisited a lot of these things and did other stuff. That's one thing I could say about him: the magic is in the work that he's putting in there, like constantly. There's a lot of magic in all of the stuff he's doing, but it's always about the story you want to tell.

And that's a mindset. And that's something that, you know, that, that comes with talking on the phone or meeting and listening to music or being inspired by some stuff. That was what this record was about. We've had the idea with the last record was like really to align ourselves within that beautiful musical history of spiritual jazz and really pay homage to the godfathers and mothers of this music and also asking Charles Tolliver to join in or get this beautiful poem by Yusuf Lateef and so on.

With this record, it was really like, okay, now we had opened ourselves to the world and invited the world to come in. Now we want to reverse the camera and say, okay, this is where we're from: Munich. This is what's from here. And with the record, it was mostly done there. 

This is like all the influences that we grew up with within that circle of musicians. Both of the Web Max albums are like these different perspectives of the same lens that is once turned into the world and then turned backward towards where we sit and where we work. That may be an overall idea to it.

The Beauty of Live Performances

LP: What will your role be, or what is your role when the band performs live?

Max: I call myself the rhythm piano player. There's a Rosen piano we share, and then there's some electronics. But it's mostly like what we talked about. I'm not a piano player. I'm a timekeeper in a way that I can play stuff and repeat it, so I think it's more like the drama and the bass player, and I work on the basis that Roberto and Tony Lakatos can really go crazy.

The Challenge of Translating Studio Work to Live Performances

LP: And Roberto, you mentioned earlier that some of the songs were constructed and how some of the sections I thought were organic instruments are simulated instruments. How does this impact the development of the live program? Are you bringing the Mellotron out, or is Tony going to duplicate those parts? How does that come together?

Roberto: It would be an enormous action to carry all these instruments from one place. And since you play in Switzerland and Hamburg, actually the bands, then they did it, and they were smoking, drinking, driving from Hamburg to Switzerland, and they lifted all their gear. But these days they're in first class eating schnitzel…

LP: Going to yoga… (laughter)

Roberto: Whatever! Then you go to soundcheck and drink still water, 39 degrees Celsius warm, to relax, and it's different. It's so different. And so is the music. The music live is a totally different thing for me. It has to work as a live group. We use the songs as a vehicle to express what we can do on a record. And I think I hope that many artists do this in jazz and pop music, like Prince, he plays a fucking guitar solo, which isn't on the song. He always did perform and did things live. And to be honest, it's very boring if you go to a concert and it's the same shit as on the record.

I would fall asleep immediately, especially with this music. Also, grabbing your idea with the arrangements earlier— to us, it's very important not to overload too many arrangements in a record. It makes the good arrangement, the one good arrangement weaker. So you decide, okay, "Perennial Journey" is the arrangement.

Then you have the sound, and a free jazz bass clarinet player called Johannes Anders on the second song, which I love his approach to music. Then, you have a ballad or a fast song called "The Source of All Things," where Biboul, a friend of mine from Cameroon, plays the main groove. He plays it on trees on the floor. And he plays this groove so hard and so great.

So, every tune has a different focus on the record. And then comes the ballad, which almost sounds like a synaesthetic, like the intro to a seventies Polanski movie with Faye Dunnaway and Peter Fonda (I don't know if they were in a movie together), and then "The 6th Dimension" is a weird free black star type of darkness, which has to come out, and then you have this. So, the focus is always different on each of the songs, which is what I love to hear on a record.

Max: We're not going to play all the songs of the record. Some songs are really like "Perennial Journey," which is really like a composition you can play. It doesn't really matter if you have the strings playing or not. We can really do it well. Then, some songs are more like the vibe, and then we decide whether we play them. But the catalog now from Web Web, all the records and the Web Max, the first one, this is tremendous now. Yeah, there's a lot to pick from. So with the tour, we're playing now, we're going to play four or five songs from the record where we think that we can play it with a quintet, and it makes sense, and we can bring a new story, a life. And then with the other ones, we don't have to. We'd rather pick songs from the first Web Max record.

LP: Are the shows entirely the Web Web or Web Max music, or do standards ever creep their way in, or are you just, it's your music?

Max: No, it's only our music and the web, music of Web Web. Sometimes. Can we use it to play like a composition by the bass player? Christian Von Kaphengst. Tony Lakatos also had a song that we never played with you, but it is original music by the group. It's fun.

And then also with these guys, sometimes you have a set of one and a half hours, and you decide to play more like you want to show a lot of the composition. So he says, let's play 12 or 14 songs a day. And then there are other days where we say, okay, let's be freer about it. And then we play a song, and it's 15 minutes on the same theme, but the band has taken it somewhere. But also me, I love being part of this, and I learn every night. I learned so much, and it's. I get braver being with them, and it's a lot of fun.

LP: Something that Roberto said earlier, you use the live shows to do things that you can't necessarily do on record. It's so interesting because it's an inversion of what you hear a lot of other artists say, right? Like they, they do things on record that they can't do live because they have the tools and the technology and the studio. That's just such an interesting notion. And Prince was indeed a pop artist. He wasn't going to have a seven-minute guitar solo on his studio take because he wanted to be on the radio, and he had very specific pop goals. But then you see him live, and he had very specific artistic goals.

And the way he navigated the two of them, it's just fascinating that I've never quite heard it said that way. So many artists view the record as so precious and That's the expression of the song, whereas they almost have to apologize for live.

Roberto: Totally different story. One is the album which you want to listen to, which shouldn't be too long. But live, you have to give the people different things, different emotions. It's very simple.

LP: We need a Web Max live album. I think just for me personally.

Max: Yeah, we'd love to do it. We'd love to do it. There are several recordings now. The Leverkusener Jazztage was a pretty good recording we did. And there are two setups. I don't know if Roberto mentioned it, but. We played with orchestras, too. We have a friend, Magnus Lindgren, who wrote arrangements for the songs, and we performed them with different orchestras in Berlin with the Babelsberg Film Orchestra and in Stuttgart with the Opera Orchestra, which is quite a good orchestra.

When you're talking about McCoy Tyner, it's a bit like some of the stuff he explored where it gets really all the strings and everything. Yeah, orchestral, and I love doing it. It's formatted in a way that, of course, there are parts where this is solos now, and they wait for us until they come back in, but it's more of what we'd say, what you could compare to, okay, now we're going to play what was on the record.

Now, we're going to play what is written in comparison to when we play as a quintet, where it's like totally free. And, of course, some things repeat because we feel, okay, this worked on one occasion, one night. So we should do it again. It was fun doing it that way. But this is something that always comes with the shows, the concerts. And, like, when you play some shows in a row, then certain things grow through just doing it and feeling good about it.

The Importance of Spontaneity in Music

Roberto: But also, if we can improvise, why shouldn't we use this tool? It's like a conversation or telling a joke, this phenomenon, you're telling a joke, it's funny. And then a second person comes in, wants to hear the same joke, and you tell it differently, and it gets boring. And this third person comes in, and you say, this is not funny at all. And it's like music.

I get bored easily by playing always the same licks. And I know I played this, which worked great last night. And I want to avoid getting trapped and copying myself. It's like telling the joke the second time. It has to be spontaneous. That's my natural way of regarding our music as being interesting. If it's interesting for ourselves, it can be interesting for the audience.

LP: That might be a good place to end our time together. I know we're coming to the end of our hour. I'm just so excited to have the album come out and for the world to hear it because it's very exciting and satisfying music. And I thank you both for making time today and for making this beautiful album. Thank you.

Max: Thank you. Thanks a lot. Lawrence, bye.

Roberto: All the best. Bye bye.