My Page: Sam Evian ‘Music Is A Language’

photo credit: Josh Goleman

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When I’m working on my music, I try not to listen to records in the studio, just so I don’t end up accidentally taking too many ideas for myself. I do listen to a lot of music in the kitchen while I’m cooking. That’s my listening space. When I’m not working on music, the kitchen and the car are still my favorite places to listen to music.

I find myself listening to a lot of music from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—just 20th-century music. I find it really rewarding to chase those techniques in a modern space; the ethos of working on magnetic tape or recording without starting and stopping a whole lot. I’ve always been drawn to that workflow.

Recently, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On has been a constant reference for me. With the protests that were occurring last year—and the social, political climate—it now seems more relevant than ever. I take a lot of inspiration from the back end of that album, which was self-produced. I love how Marvin was empowered to be experimental. It’s fun to read through these stories about how weird they got. Everybody was smoking and drinking, and he still managed to make this record. It sounds like a party. And if you weren’t listening too intently to the lyrics, then you could just assume it was a casual, beautiful soul record. But, of course, it’s really a lament about systemic racism and violence. The Funk Brothers were the studio band, and it was recorded at Hitsville. I look toward that studio for production inspiration because I also have a studio in a house. It’s like, “Well, if they can get those sounds there, then I can do my thing.”  

For me, as a producer, it’s so valuable to study those old recordings, and I take those techniques along with me when I’m working with bands like Big Thief. The ‘60s and ‘70s were such sweet spots for recording technology and aesthetics. Producers were constantly pushing up against the impossibilities that were inherent in their workflow and thriving in that space. Imagine, in 1968, being in the studio with The Beatles, trying to squeeze everything onto four tracks. A year later, technology develops, four more tracks come along, and you can do so much more. But, you really don’t need much more than that. It’s been fun for me to impose those analog limitations on a modern digital space.

There are stories about how Marvin experimented with all those vocal layers on What’s Going On. I love how you can trace these techniques through all of these great records, but everyone was doing it in such a unique way because they were creating in their own little vacuum. There wasn’t a lot of information sharing between these studios. In ‘73, Stevie Wonder released Innervisions, where he played everything and did all this multi-tracking. And you can trace that to Animal Collective.

I also have a pretty particular relationship with jazz music— my parents are gigging jazz musicians. This used to be more of a thing, but restaurants and bars would hire local people to come in and play music. So there was this huge middle-to-lower class of musicians who were not hitting it big, playing big shows or getting any critical reception. They were just general business musicians, gigging all weekend and playing lounges.

That breed of musician is kind of disappearing, and DJs have taken up that space. We lived in Syracuse, N.Y., when I was a kid. So they were just gigging every night. At the same time, my dad went to Woodstock and saw The Beatles at Shea Stadium. As soon as I was old enough to not cry too loudly, I would just go with them. In middle school, I picked up the saxophone and got extremely serious about it. My parents, of course, encouraged it, but their encouragement also came with a warning: “You should study in school because it’s hard to be a musician and you’re going to be poor.” But I didn’t heed their advice; I caught the bug and, before too long, I started playing gigs with them. Eventually, I got cycled into the institutionalized jazz-education network and ended up at the Berklee College of Music. Unfortunately, the modern jazz-education world is so far from its origins. Jazz is Black music; it’s an oral  tradition. It is entertainment. It is full of expression and sorrow and beauty and all of that. But when you throw that into a very wealthy institution, such as Berklee, the exact opposite thing actually happens. So I dropped out, quit playing the saxophone and started playing guitar and writing songs.

I started rediscovering everything that I had missed during this period when I had stopped listening to modern music from when I was 12 until I was 22. I circled back on the old stuff that I used to love, like The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and I also got into bands like Deerhoof and the Dirty Projectors—experimental, DIY, early 2000s music. So I left the jazz train pretty far behind.

After some time away, I’ve come to love and appreciate jazz for the art form that it is, separate from the institution of jazz education. I carry it with me in everything that I do. It’s had a huge effect on my ear—the way I hear and write harmony and melody. And I started playing the horn again. I went on tour with Cass McCombs, and he was like, “I know you played saxophone; you gotta play that thing, man.” And I thought, “If I’m going to do it for anyone, I’ll do it for Cass.”

The way I work with people in my world is very similar to the way that jazz musicians communicate. When I have a band in—and we’re talking about a certain drum part—everybody’s just scatting rhythms at one another, like the way that jazz musicians talk. Music is a language— the more you listen to it and speak it, the better you are at it. It is also fun to play these different jazz records for the different bands that I’ll have come up to my studio. I’ll get them stoned and put on Ahmad Jamal or something, and be like, “Check this out.” People are always totally floored. It’s not as intimidating as they imagined. It’s been really fun to share and celebrate that with my community.

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Sam Evian is a musician, producer and engineer who has worked with Big Thief, Blonde Redhead, Widowspeak, Cass McCombs, Hannah Cohen, Cassandra Jenkins, Okkervil River and many others. He released his third LP, Time to Melt, via Fat Possum.

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