Artist Interview by: Gerard W. O'Brien
Tierney Sutton is a happy person. She has just released ON THE OTHER SIDE on Telarc, which may be the best work she and the band she sings with, have yet done. Tierney Sutton is a very happy vocalist because she and the band she sings with, having completed the foundation, have erected a musical temple that is as unique as it is beautiful. It is through this temple that they step up from the ranks of elite players to the higher level of musicianship where their music is immediately recognizable, their sound iconic.
Tierney Sutton is humble about her art and her talent. She does not feign humility, rather she embodies it so no ego gets in the way of her music. For those who are watching, this is the point where saying Tierney now evokes a sound and feeling, much the same way saying Miles or Ella does.
Jazz Review: I just turned off ON THE OTHER SIDE. I was listening to it again. Reading the press, I see that Jonathan Schwartz of WNYC compared it to Sketches of Spain and the White Album. ON THE OTHER SIDE is terrific, yet it differs from what you’ve done before. How did you come to this album’s concept?
Tierney: The way the band works is pretty organic; things percolate and grow in a very gradual fashion, through talking, through playing things on the road, through playing each other’s things.
When we get set to do a new project, what we usually do is just throw around different ideas--I would say in terms of the idea of taking “happy songs” or a Bill Evans or a Frank Sinatra ballad record or the things that we’ve done in the past. The thing that comes from me is the idea. I’ll have an idea and I’ll float it around. Then everybody will bat the idea around and it will work into what it’s supposed to be.
I was fascinated by the idea that so many songs address the idea of happiness in the Great American Songbook. I also felt that we were ready to do an album where we had more than one arrangement of the same song. I didn’t know whether we’d have just a few of those or whether we’d have a whole album of them, but we started to address the material based on the idea of happiness and what it really means and what it doesn’t mean. All the rest of it and just sort of jumped off from there.
Jazz Review: I want to address how this is more of a vocal album than your past work; how your voice is more instrumental sharing the same volume and intensity as the piano, the drums, the bass. At the same time, I feel that it makes the instrumental music come forward more. You have changed the normal frequency of the standard arrangement and it seems as if everything has been brought forward.
Tierney: That’s really interesting. So you think it’s the mix, how it's mixed and stuff is different. In what way do you think my voice is more out front a little bit?
Jazz Review: I think the voice stays either equal to or is out front, but it’s not where the vocalist sings and then the music surges. You really get the feeling that there are two things happening; one leading and the other supporting. This is much more of a weave. It’s more of a whole cloth than two different things happening.
Tierney: I would say that if there is one thing we strive for, it is a band that creates something that, I like the way you put it, that’s a weave. I try to explain this when we’re on the road to sound engineers when we’re sound checking. There are going to be times when I intentionally want to melt into the band. If my voice is too out front and I can’t melt into the band, then that is a problem, so those things are really important to us sonically. I think that if there’s one thing that we really strive for it is having a unity and a oneness of the band sound. That’s important to me philosophically and musically.
Jazz Review: This is your seventh album and the band has been together for about 14 years. So the Tierney Sutton band is a teenage band.
Tierney: Yes, it’s a teenage band. Yes, there you go.
Jazz Review: But the maturity is precocious. ON THE OTHER SIDE is a growth album. I particularly dig the way Ray Brinker plays the drums. This album seems to have a whole different dynamic than your former work.
Tierney: Well, that’s true. Before we were working from the standpoint of wanting creative arrangements, but we were more wedded to form in terms of having the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted on everything. This was a much riskier project and the contrast between this and our last album I’M WITH THE BAND is really enormous. I’M WITH THE BAND was the first time we recorded live and we recorded music that we’d been playing for a long time. We had just done 28 shows in a month in New York and there wasn’t risk. We knew we where going to get reasonable live renditions of these things because we’d just done them so much.
ON THE OTHER SIDE was a totally different experience. There is the freedom of the form. We invented ways of communicating that were different than it’s eight bars of this and four bars of that--a retro modulation and a re-harmonization. We did a different thing, which mandated a lot more listening, a lot more dynamics and from my standpoint, it demanded a different kind of singing than I had ever done on a record, or live, and it was scary, it was really scary.
Jazz Review: How did you arrive at this type of singing and why would you take a risk doing something that is radically different from what your fans have come to enjoy?
Tierney: Well, some of it is radically different, some of it is the logical progression, and some of it echoes music we have done in the past. There is a sense of quiet meditation in a lot of our previous work. I can point out different arrangements that we continue to do live, where this exists. It’s an esthetic that the band has created: a very long tone over ostinatos, re-harmonized chords and Ray doing the magical stuff that he does on the drums. We wanted to take that esthetic to its logical next step.
On “You are My Sunshine” it was to take an arrangement started with a few ideas from me, taken up by the band and made into something far more wonderful than the ideas themselves. I didn’t know the dynamics when I gave those little ideas to them, but we wanted the form that we were using to be fresher and freer than anything that we had done before. We wanted the dynamics new. The band, especially Ray, they really pushed the envelope on this and it’s one of those things that can only come from years of trust. When you’ve made seven albums together and everyone wants it to be good, they’re not going to force me to do something I can’t handle. They’re sensitive enough to say, we had better do this a different way because Tierney doesn’t sound comfortable.
Jazz Review: Now how many times did that happen on doing this album? I imagine not many.
Tierney: What, how many?
Jazz Review: That the band says wait a second, Tierney’s in trouble here.
Tierney: I said it all the time, but the band wasn’t having it. I frequently said, “I don’t know what to do.” However, once we got into the studio, it was a matter of getting a live tape and the first three tracks on the record needed, basically one take. They’re risky; they’re so different every time we play them. We are not in our comfort zone, but the interesting thing about us doing something that was a big departure from our other work is that we all knew where we were going without even saying it. That’s the part when I look back, seems a little odd.
This was more personal to us, adding something to the scene that wasn’t there that we felt we can do after 14 years together. So that’s what we did, we saw there were new ways we could communicate in addition to the traditional ones.
Jazz Review: You brought a lot of this out of your comfort zone, but you decided your path to happiness lay out of your comfort zone. This is a fairly mystical album then?
Tierney: Yes, I would say it is. From my perspective, there’s no coincidence that we settled with the title ON THE OTHER SIDE, because as I say in the liner notes, the idea of happiness is a pretty odd idea. I think that most people in our society walk around believing they’re supposed to be happy in some way that they’re not; and there’s this perception that everyone else is happy and feeling what’s wrong with me? The only way to deal with those feelings is through mysticism. The only way to conquer that stuff is by changing your entire outlook. I think that my whole career has been about altering and questioning the traditional ideas of things like happiness and success and, what is success?
Jazz Review: What do you think success is?
Tierney: Success, for me, is being part of a process that makes me happy and makes me feel fulfilled, that’s what makes me happy and that’s what makes me feel successful, so I remember some of my favorite arrangements on this record we created during a rehearsal that happened on my birthday. And, I remember leaving the rehearsal and saying I got exactly what I wanted for my birthday, I got two new arrangements. And so, the idea of 'I’m really happy right now,' not because this record is done and because I’m proud of it, I’m happy right now because I’m looking at the next record and I’m really excited about it. I’m excited about being in the process of looking for new material and figuring out the next thing we’re going to do and feeling that I’m in that process. So if I just sort of sat down and started the poisonous process of kind of looking back at this record and saying wow--we’ve just--this is really cool, or its not, or I’m really disappointed that we didn’t do that or I wish we’d done that. Both of those things are not conducive to me being happy.
What is conducive to me being happy is to get my butt on the treadmill and I’m feeling physically good, to do my prayer and meditation and to be a part of the process of doing what it seems like I’m supposed to be doing, which is making music with my band and taking care of my kids. When we’re engaged in things that make us feel youthful, that’s success. Whatever those things are, those things might be taking care of a relative who is ill, those things might be going to work so that you can support your family. If you’re mindfully engaged in those things, I think you become happy and satisfied and if you have expectations about what those things are supposed to lead to, that’s when the trouble comes up. That’s how I see it.
Jazz Review: Yours is a very non-materialistic view of happiness.
Tierney: Well, I mean, it's easy for me to say because I’m comfortable and have my nice house. and my coffee this morning and my car to get into. I don’t want to under-estimate the pain that people go through when their basic material needs are not met, that’s a horrible thing. That is something that we all need to be thinking about and taking responsibility for.
I think they’ve done studies that the biggest difference in happiness is like when people’s needs aren’t met. Once their needs are met, their happiness does not increase the richer they become and going from middleclass to really wealthy does not make you happier. Studies have been done on this, it just doesn’t make anyone happier, so besides having our needs met, wealth doesn’t make us happier.
Jazz Review: So success is feeling happy. What you’re saying basically is making art is where your happiness is.
Tierney: Well I think that, I’m a B’hai and in my religion there’s a writing that says that work that’s done in the service of humanity is considered worship. If you’re engaged in what you believe is of service to someone else, there’s a feedback lift that can make one happy to a certain degree. This is something that I’ve really struggled with. It took me a good ten years to believe that doing music was a service to other people. I knew that I enjoyed doing it...I knew that I enjoyed the doing of it, but I just really wasn’t sure it really had any use at all. I really had to be convinced by people writing me letters and fortunately having very articulate fans that were able to say things to me that made me say okay, I guess there’s something to this that has a function in our culture that’s of service to people on some level. But, it was something that I struggled with for a long time. Even now, I struggle with it to a certain extent. Doing art is no more or no less important than any of the gazillions things that people do to serve one another and probably less importantly, definitely less important than many of the things that people do. So that, sort of, just feeling that you have a little place in the world to do something that is of some service to others, and that you can actually enjoy. There’s probably only one idea in all that we just talked about.
Jazz Review: Oh no, it’s all good. I thank you so much for speaking with me.
Tierney: No problem and thank you for taking the time to do it because these things make a lot of difference.
Jazz Review: Thanks for the album, you’ve given me joy and I will be listening to this quite a bit. I think I will be hearing different things in it every time I listen to it. I have so far.
Tierney: Well, that’s the idea, we hope so. Thanks so much, Jerry.
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