Will Barnes: jazz impressions of the Welsh landscape

(This transcript has been edited for clarity.)

LP: All right, thanks for making time.

Will Barnes: Yeah, thank you very much for having me.

LP: Given how unique your collaboration or your band's collaboration with Erin is, I have two questions to start off. One is if you could talk a little bit about the roots of your collaboration, how you got to know each other and each other's work, and whether there were any precedents that you had in mind as you started to work together as to what you might aspire for your collaboration to be.

Will Barnes: The first part was kind of simpler than you might imagine. Erin's actually my neighbor, but I only have three neighbors where I live in the darkest depths of mid-Wales. By pure chance, she happens to be one of them. We just got to know each other a little bit, and I was planning on making this record with my quartet. I really wanted to get her involved, just as a very small part, to maybe do the cover artwork or something like that.

So I popped around to see her, and a couple of bottles of wine later, we started to concoct this idea of a full collaboration. It built up a bit of momentum on its own. In terms of, did we have any benchmark for it or inspiration for it? Initially, no. But then, when we started talking about creating a live element of this, as well as just the art and the recording, we started referencing old psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead. We thought how cool it would be to have that visual thing happening live. But for the initial thing, it was more just us getting a little bit excited over a glass of Rioja or two.

LP: Am I correct in my understanding that the live show is more performative on her part as well? Like she's creating in real-time, as you mentioned, with some of the psychedelic light shows?

Will Barnes: That's right. She's using the same liquid light techniques that those guys were using in the late sixties and seventies to react to the music as it happened live.

LP: Did she have any experience with any media like that before?

Will Barnes: A small amount, I think, but it was certainly a learning curve for everybody. She went on a bit of a quest to gain more knowledge from it. It was a good experience for us all.

LP: What did you and the other musicians have to learn or adapt to? How did it impact your part of the show?

Will Barnes: For starters, we have to remember that we had a fifth person there who was also improvising with us, although she is located generally behind the audience, towards the back of the performance space, purely so she gets a full visual look at what's going on at all times. That's quite an interesting thing because there's this slight feeling of separation between her and us.

We have to try to bring her in somehow to what we're doing and also just be aware that there's this big visual thing happening behind us that we can't see. We have to remember to take a glance every now and again and see what sort of mood she's creating so we can react to that a little as well.

LP: So you did have some intention around it being more than just set dressing. There was an interaction between the stage artists and the visual art.

Will Barnes: Yeah, absolutely. We always bill it as the Will Barnes Quartet featuring Erin Hughes, as you would if we had a guest horn player or a guest singer. She definitely is a fifth member of the band.

LP: That's fascinating. When did she get involved in the album process? I don't mean necessarily from the relationship point of view, but more specifically, was the music all written, or was it all recorded? How collaborative was that, or was she more reactive at that point?

Will Barnes: That was more of a reactive process, purely from the way that the timeline ran in creating this project. The original conception was that I wanted to write a suite of compositions that reflected the landscape in mid-Wales, where we live, right very close to the border between England and Wales. It has its own sort of magic.

It is a very different kind of person that lives on the borders versus in the depths of either of those countries. The landscape's very different as well. So, that was the original conception. It was just going to be music. I just forged ahead and did that.

Then, obviously, after speaking to Erin, we came up with the idea of her creating a bespoke piece of art for each track that helped to visually tie in the concept that I had for the music. It was always vinyl that we had in mind, so we had something big that you could open and look at while you're listening to the record. Hopefully, it would try to ignite people's imaginations and transport them into the landscape as they're listening to the tracks.

So, in this instance, she reacted to the already-written compositions, although she didn't hear the final takes from the studio. I just made some rough demos to give her a flavor of what was going to happen.

LP: You alluded to the difference in the people who live in that border area versus the heartland of either territory. What does that mean to you in practical terms?

Will Barnes: You grow up having a bit of a mixed identity, I suppose, because a lot of people, a lot of my friends, maybe born of both English or both Welsh parents but have lived themselves on the other side of the border or maybe have one parent English and one parent Welsh.

There can be a strong sense of identity, and there can be people who are quite patriotic, especially when it comes to sporting events like rugby. However, there's also this mixed feeling that you get, where it's like, well, just to travel to work, I have to cross the border four times in and out of each country.

So we have all the identities and none of them all at once.

LP: Has that element of life gotten more complicated as a result of Brexit, or is that considered within the United Kingdom? I'm sorry, I'm a bit of an ignorant American on this topic.

Will Barnes: No, that's fine. We've got the devolved nations over here in the UK, and there's a strong camp that would like to see more of an independent Wales and a strong camp that would like to keep the United Kingdom Union going.

It hasn't caused any practical problems post-Brexit for Wales in particular. But there certainly are some interesting things when we're living and working on the border. Rules are ever so slightly different. I'm not sure whether you find the same when you cross state lines, where you have these slightly different rules in force that you have to adapt to quite quickly.

LP: Yeah, I think as Americans, it's a bit more subtle, although increasingly less subtle because of the bifurcation or the tensions we're having more and more at the state level between states' social policies. Things of that nature.

In the old days, it used just to be things like the speed limit might be different. In some states you drive into, you could carry a gun on your person, while you wouldn't get that in other states. So it's very jarring and noticeable that way. It often feels like you're going into a different country, even though it's people who speak the same language and everything else is the same. The differences are getting highlighted, I guess, would be the way to say it.

I noticed in many of your other conversations and references that Oscar Peterson seems to be an important figure or musician to you. Given that you play a different instrument, I'm curious specifically about Peterson. More broadly, what other music did you cut your teeth on growing up?

Will Barnes: Oscar Peterson's been there for me from the get-go. My aunt is a music teacher. When I was quite young, she gifted me records for birthdays and Christmas and stuff. Oscar Peterson would be a frequent guest at those gift-givings. She was a big fan herself.

The bluesy side of jazz always resonates with me. Players who have really got that old tradition of jazz coming from the blues still have that in their play. I mean, I love modern stuff. I love conceptual stuff as well, but I'm always a sucker for your Wes Montgomerys and your Oscar Petersons and your Herb Ellises and Hank Mobleys, the guys and girls that can really hone in on the core blues element of jazz. I think that's it with Oscar Peterson. The other thing is his trio swings, man. They just swing. That excited me as a young man, and it still does.

LP: Mobley's a great one to name-drop as well. I came late to his work through my interest in McCoy Tyner, and then I saw that he was on a bunch of the Blue Note records in the '60s. Just like this muscular, solid playing, just really tough almost, you know what I mean? Beautiful, but strong.

Will Barnes: Yeah, definitely. I think that's the blues coming out of him. It's like BB King. He's got the same thing going on. It's really from the soul.

LP: Is your guitar pantheon filled with blues players? I think I read that an important record for you was Jim Hall and Pat Metheny. Where do guitar players fit in your world?

Will Barnes: Pat Metheny and Jim Hall were another really early ones, particularly Pat Metheny. Then, when I was a teenager, I just became an absolute Django nut.

I couldn't believe I was hearing recordings of a guitarist from so long ago, recordings from the late '30s, with a guitar player who could play with that speed, ferocity, and dexterity. Then, when I found out he only had two fingers, I thought maybe it was game over for me. I was like, I've just got to study this guy.

So, I spent a big chunk of my study time listening to Django's music alongside listening to lots of other things—loads of different styles of music as well. I mean, I'm a big heavy metal fan as well. My record collection consists of, I suppose, the biggest three genres: jazz, heavy metal, and reggae. Those are the ones I've got the most records on, so they must be my favorites.

LP: Honestly, I don't think I realized that coming into the call, but I think if we were to sit down if you were to come into my record room, we might have some significant overlap. Those are three very important genres for me as well.

All right. Maybe play a game with me then. Let's pretend your records are segregated by genre. You walk into the heavy metal section; what are you drawn to? What's your go-to?

Will Barnes: The first stuff I really listened to, thanks to my mum, was Black Sabbath, the early albums with Ozzy. A lot of that Midlands, British heavy metal scene, Judas Priest, things like that.

When I was about ten years old, I became an absolute Metallica nut. I just couldn't get enough of them. My parents were, God bless them, brilliant. They took me to see Metallica when I was like twelve years old. I keep trying to say, "You should take me again," but they don't want to know these days. They did their time. (laughter)

Then it goes right through. I mean, I'm listening to a lot of modern stuff as well. I like stuff from Scandinavia, some of the darker stuff from over there. American stuff, as well. Six months ago, I went to see Cannibal Corpse. It was quite an interesting deviation from jazz, but I like all kinds of metal.

LP: Scandinavia has always had that weird sort of, going way back, certainly to the '80s when I was growing up, I think about King Diamond and Mercyful Fate and all that. It must be the dark nights or the months of darkness that generate that stuff.

Will Barnes: Absolutely. Ihsahn, the singer from Emperor, has just released a phenomenal record. He's written a whole orchestral score to accompany it. You can buy the two versions of the album: the rocking heavy version and the orchestral version. It's very cinematic. It's an incredible album.

LP: It's really interesting to talk about some of those artists in the context of the blues influence in metal and where that actually dropped off. Do you hear the blues at all as a lineage in a band like Metallica?

Will Barnes: Maybe in Metallica, still a little bit because Kirk Hammett, he's all about Jimi Hendrix and all of the British blues invasion guitarists, Eric Clapton and all that Blues Breakers stuff. He loves all that. Jeff Beck. So I think you can hear it when it comes to the solos because he just lets rip on his pentatonic blues stuff, and it's great. But maybe some of the other stuff I listen to, more of the death and black metal stuff, probably less in there.

It comes in some of the Black Sabbath sort of stuff; there's a spin-off genre of that, the stoner rock. They're very bluesy. Perhaps not so much the Scandinavian stuff.

LP: And is it because that stuff came from more of a Western European classical or modern composition tradition? What do you think the drop-off is about there?

Will Barnes: I don't know. I always find it hard to write in a bluesy style when you're also trying to sound very dark as well. You end up going more toward the classical things. If I'm trying to write a piece of music that's much more dark in its feel, it's not gonna be as bluesy. Whereas if I'm trying to write something that's a bit cooler and a bit more swinging and happening, I'm gonna gravitate more towards the blues there.

LP: All right, what about the reggae section? What's in the reggae section?

Will Barnes: Obviously, lots of classics, Wailers, Tosh, all that kind of stuff, the dub guys, King Tubby, Burning Spear. But I'm quite interested in the contemporary scene as well.

Some of my favorite artists at the moment are Protoje, Chronixx, Koffee—she's great—and Kabaka Pyramid. Then, there's a really cool scene bubbling away in the UK. We've got Mungo's Hi Fi, Gentleman's Dub Club, and Prince Fatty, who's producing all sorts of artists and making some fantastic records.

I'm quite interested in trying to find a lot of the new stuff and then the stuff from the Southern Hemisphere as well - Fat Freddy's Drop, Black Seeds.

LP: I have not stayed current on reggae in several years, but coming out of the lockdowns, I think it was the summer of '22, Burning Spear toured here, and he hadn't toured in a long time.

My teenage son and I went, and it was just perfect to be in a room full of people like that. For the last four or five songs of the set, he took his shirt off, and he was like the Mighty Spear. It was so great. It was the real deal.

How and if do these other elements and interests sneak their way into your compositions and music?

Will Barnes: I can definitely see how metal would. It's quite closely related to classical music in my mind. With heavy metal, it's all about composition and execution. whereas, obviously, with jazz, it's much more about improvising and being very much in the moment.

So I think that the sections of my music that I want to arrange heavily to create a certain vibe, whatever the night, are where I pull more from my heavy metal roots. Then the improvising section, obviously that's when I guess I'd be pulling more from my blues side.

LP: What was your musical education? Did you have formal training?

Will Barnes: My education was in and out of my life. I wasn't the greatest student when I was in school. I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could, and I managed to land a job at a local recording studio, much to my parent's dismay.

We bargained for a couple of years, and I am going and doing a slight further education thing that you can do, similar to college. My heart wasn't really in it. I wanted to be at the studio. So I'd be at the studio till two, three o'clock in the morning, sitting in on sessions, helping, making teas, rolling up cables or whatever, and then drive myself home and try and get up at seven o'clock in the morning to sleep through whatever lectures I had until I could get back to the studio again. I guess that's what college is.

Then, I went on a quest for self-knowledge. Once I was finally allowed out-of-state education by my parents, I got a job, and then I used money from that job to find private tutors. I found a jazz tutor and I found a guitar tutor and almost built my own education.

I think it was also in part from the fact that I'm very much a country bumpkin at heart. I've grown up around farms, in farming, and in the hills, and the thought of going into the big city terrified me as a young man. So, I wondered if I could build my own education and university around me. It was very much more that route and playing with people.

I was lucky to meet some fantastic musicians along the way who gave me a lot of time, in particular, a phenomenal gypsy jazz guitarist from the UK called Gary Potter, who I really cut my teeth with for a couple of years. He took me under his wing and really showed me a lot of the stuff I needed to learn.

LP: When you first played guitar, did that imply you were largely self-taught or playing to records, or something similar?

Will Barnes: Yeah, absolutely. My parents were kind enough to give me small pockets of tuition here and there just to teach me a bit of technique and things like that. But overall, I just wanted to learn the things that I was hearing, so from records and other players.

LP: Did you find that when you started to work with an actual tutor or enter into more formal work with a teacher, did you have to unlearn anything? Did you pick up bad habits or bad techniques?

Will Barnes: I think on technique, definitely. A good tutor kind of whips you into shape. But I was lucky. I had some really good tutors, and they really embraced where I was coming from and what I wanted to do. They never tried to shape me into their version of what they thought a good player would be.

They were very encouraging. It was through those tutors that I heard some of the music that really took me in different paths and different directions. I remember I had a great guitar teacher called Tim when I was really young, and he used to make me mix tapes. I'd listen to a little bit of Cream from my dad, then he'd make me a mixtape of Buddy Guy and BB King and other blues players. He was expanding and teaching me music history and things like that without me even knowing it. I just thought, "Oh, this is cool. I've got a tape to listen to."

LP: That's phenomenal. I think the algorithm tries to do that today. (laughter)

Will Barnes: Yeah, right.

LP: What axe do you play? What's your main equipment?

Will Barnes: Oh, I wish I had it here to hand. I don't. I've got a beautiful guitar that's made just a few miles down the road from where I live. It's made here in mid-Wales by a luthier called Rob Williams.

I've known about Rob for a long, long time. I used to fawn over his guitars in the local music shop, but I could never afford one. This must've been 20-odd years ago. I remember saying—I was a precocious little 18-year-old—and I was like, "Look, listen, Rob, you need to make me a guitar and endorse me, man." And he was like, "Nah, I don't even like working for money. So I'm not giving you a guitar." I was like, "Okay, okay."

But I've chipped away at him over the years, and eventually, he agreed to build me a guitar. I've been playing that guitar for the last two years.

LP: So you informed a lot of the specifications. You really built it for what you wanted.

Will Barnes: It was definitely a collaboration. I mean, Rob's the genius behind all this. He is an incredible craftsman and artist. I just sort of pop in and go, "Yeah, I fancy something that's going to be a bit like this or a bit like that." And then he really brought the whole thing to life. But he's incredible. I thoroughly recommend checking out his guitars at robwilliamsguitars.co.uk.

LP: Excellent. Well, we'll link to that from the show notes too.

Something you said earlier about trying to create your own universe without necessarily having to leave the place that you either felt comfortable with or that was important to you. Where you're at now in your life, do you feel as though you've done that? You've created the universe in the place you want to be. Has that been a successful venture for you?

Will Barnes: I don't know how much of it I can take credit for myself, but things do seem to have worked out in a very small radius around me, particularly in the last few years. A lot of it seems almost freaky by chance.

So I met my now wife when we were both living in totally different areas, the other ends of the country. We met, and then it happened that we actually both came from this area, almost within miles of each other. Because of the age difference when we were younger, obviously, we wouldn't have known each other. I'm six years her elder.

The band I've got now—it still boggles my mind every time I say it. They all live within a stone's throw of where I am, and they're all incredible musicians and young guys in their own right. I think I'd struggle to find a band that good if I moved to the biggest city in the UK. For me, they're just perfect. They're fantastic.

There's now a scene sort of bubbling up. I mean, we're really rural where we are. We have to drive 11 miles to find the nearest shop and things like that. And we're a small country. I know that in America, that probably doesn't sound very far, but here, that may be the equivalent of 60 miles for you.

But there's more starting to happen. I think a lot of arty people have gotten bored of the hustle and bustle of the city, and the allure of the quietness of the hills and being in nature has drawn a lot of people to these areas. Because of that, they're all starting to create scenes, art scenes, music scenes, gigs, and venue openings. It feels good.

LP: That's incredible. What was the experience there during COVID?

Will Barnes: The lockdown and pandemics were terrible for everybody. It obviously brought down class systems. It took everything apart. Everybody was affected to some degree.

We were very fortunate where we lived because we were very rural. You make sacrifices on the one hand. There's no hospitals, there's nothing like that. We'd have to take a helicopter ride to get to our nearest seriously good-sized hospital if you were in an accident, something like that.

However, when the lockdown happened, we were blessed to be where we really were, with space, freedom, and air to breathe.

LP: The cities were awful. There's no other way around it. It was terrible. I'm originally from the East Coast of the United States. I live outside of Seattle now, but I was in New York for a long time. Seeing the news out of New York during the pandemic was heartbreaking. The height of it was really awful.

What's the state of the collaboration? Are you and Erin continuing to work together? Is there more work to be done, or was this a phase for you both? What do you think about it going forward?

Will Barnes: We're just getting going, I think.

LP: Nice.

Will Barnes: We've got a lot more to offer. Erin just opened a six-week exhibition. It opened yesterday, and she's displaying all of the originals she did for the album, as well as some large-scale interpretations and developments of those pieces.

She hosted a really successful opening yesterday, which was great. We all went along, and we spun the record for people to listen to as they walked around. The response to her work was great.

It was really nice to see her work getting exclusive attention and credit without a band getting in the way. It was great to just focus on what she'd done. It was lovely talking to everybody. They're really invested in everything that she's doing, and they seem pretty chuffed that she's got a band collaborating with her as well.

LP: It's a unique and interesting collaboration. Insomuch as you said before, there's a bit of a scene or an influx of art-minded people in your region. It must be very nice for people to see that it is possible to find collaborators and create new things. You don't have to necessarily be in a big city. I would imagine it's inspiring for people.

Will Barnes: Yeah, I hope so. It would certainly inspire me. Other collaborations I've seen have inspired me in the past. I think collaboration is crucial in this day and age.

The state of music and the arts in the UK is difficult at the moment. There are not that many outlets. There's not that much sustainable paying work. And there's a lot of incredibly talented people out there. As well as sharing creative ideas, collaboration can help you share audiences as well.

LP: Commercial aspirations aside, do you have a sense of the ideal room or venue in which to present what you and the band are doing with Erin? Is it like a room of a certain size or scale?

Will Barnes: It obviously is something we do think about and talk about in the long drives to gigs. I think it has to be large enough to accommodate the tech behind what we're doing. So, we need a large-scale projection screen for Erin's work to have the impact it deserves. Ideally, some good in-house technicians to handle lighting, sympathetic lighting, and things like that so that the experience is big enough to create an impact visually on the audience.

But then the room also has to be small enough that four guys improvising music on stage can interact with their audience and feel like we're all part of the same experience together. It's certainly not a stage show where we'd be up on a stage, and the audience is down there in the stalls. We like to be on a level with the audience and things to be very much like, almost audience within; we call it the splash zone.

LP: What's the feedback from the audience like? Do they know what they're getting when they buy a ticket and come in? What do you think the audience experience has been?

Will Barnes: It's been mixed. We've been doing a lot of outreach gigs, if you like, into venues that wouldn't normally have jazz, wouldn't normally have something quite like this, or maybe some venues that wouldn't normally have anything, some places.

Then we've been doing a few jazz club gigs where they're having jazz seven nights a week. The response has been different for obvious reasons, but there's been a line through it as well, where I think because of the visual element, that's really woken people up. I think that's helped them to stay engaged with the show from start to finish.

LP: Given how open and excited your tone is and how I'm hearing you speak about the collaboration and your aspirations for the future, I take it you don't really have concerns about the music being lost or being secondary or have there been moments where you feel like you have to compete with another art form on your stage?

Will Barnes: No, not at all. I think that comes down to the people involved in the project. Six of us made this project work. We've got the four musicians in the band, Erin, and then my wife, Zoe, who handles all of the admin and everything.

Everybody's got each other. We're all holding each other up. I have no worry that Erin's going to do anything other than try and make the rest of us look and present great to the audience, just as she has no worry that we're there to hold her.

I think that with that kind of symbiotic relationship, everybody has their backs, there are no egos, and there is no hierarchy. It's - I know it's called the Will Barnes Quartet, but it doesn't mean that it's me and my backing band. And just because it's featuring Erin doesn't mean that she's separate from what we're doing.

I think because of that trust and that symbiotic thing we've got together with this group of people, it's never an issue.

LP: Does the quartet gig without her?

Will Barnes: Yeah, we do. We gigged a lot without her before. And now we still do some of our smaller gigs where sometimes the technology just isn't at a gig for us to be able to do it. They've just got nothing in place and not a big enough gig.

So we'll still go and do stuff without her, but we'll quite often deviate a bit from the show that we would do with her. So, there's a chance that we could try out new material and play a few jazz standards that might not be appropriate in the main show.

LP: So what's next for you musically? Is there another album project on the horizon, or are you still, for lack of a better way to say it, in cycle on the current project? How are you thinking about that? Is there another songbook ready to emerge?

Will Barnes: Yes, there's definitely material. There's always material. We are definitely in the cycle for the Source of the Severn. It's probably going to be an 18-month cycle that we're six months into at the moment. I'd say another 12 months.

Just to keep taking this out, it'll develop as it goes on. The second leg of the tour begins in May. So there'll be developments to the music, developments to the visual element. But there's certainly another concept and more ideas brewing for another album. I'm keen and excited.

LP: Wonderful. How far afield do you travel for the live shows? Are you primarily in the United Kingdom or are you getting onto the continent in other places? Or what do you think about that?

Will Barnes: To date with this project, we haven't ventured off the mainland UK. There's things in the pipeline. We certainly do want to takeit further afield. We'd love to.

LP: There are some beautiful opportunities for different types of venues as well when you start to think about throughout Europe, Western Europe. It's exciting.

Will Barnes: Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny you mentioned New York because that's the one that Erin's got her sights firmly fixed on. She really wants to get us there, as would I. It'd be making all my dreams come true. Let's do it!

LP: Yeah, that's wonderful. It's very interesting because there are so many - you said earlier about places that might not necessarily have jazz or have music at all. There are so many different ways to conceive of a venue now. The gallery is in a museum, or there are just so many places that if you start to look at space that way, you're like, "Oh, I could project on that wall and have the band here and the audience there." All of a sudden, lots of different types of places become options for venues.

Will Barnes: And I think sometimes those can be the magic ones as well. I love taking, let's say, the foyer of a museum and turning it into a Birdland for a night.

LP: Thank you so much for making time to do this. It's such a fascinating project, and the music is wonderful. That's all I have to do right now because I haven't been able to see the live show. But if you do make it to the States, maybe that'll be a good excuse to build a trip to New York for everybody. But thank you so much.

Will Barnes: Hey, it's been a real pleasure for me. Obviously, I just want to do a quick shout-out to my main guys - I never got to mention them. Jack, who's our piano player; Clovis, our fantastic double bass player; and James, our amazing drummer. Without those guys, none of this would be possible.