Jayve Montgomery Interview: “Sounds find us when we are ready to hear them”

Combining the finest elements of ambient music and deep listening, it could be argued that Jayve Montgomery’s creations are the complete voyage of sound. The Tennessee-based multi-instrumentalist is the conjurer of sparkling sound baths that sound like nothing else. A lazy ear may conclude that Montgomery’s compositions are likened to Sun Ra in slow motion, and while the jazz touchstones have certainly influenced his works, there is something much deeper at play here.

Beyond that spiritual plane exposes a landscape where one is completely free to roam. This is the Jayve Montgomery sound world – a metropolis you can almost see if you close your eyes, and one constructed through a vast range of instruments, not limited to bowed bells, alto and soprano saxophones, and kalimba. The results, ghostly, meditative and transcendental.

Like recent releases, Only Forced Labor Can Make America Great Again! – a recognition of the country’s riches coming on the back of forced labor – and Suika – a direct response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza – Montgomery’s latest full-length, Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 4), is explicit in message and tone. His second for Chicago label Monastral, Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 4) is the fourth collection of remembrances of the sound at the bottom of a sunken slave ship. These compositions, hitting with emotional force as Montgomery shapes interpretations of epigenetic trauma over time.

By and large, this latest releases frames the Jayve Montgomery experience. An exponent of composition etched in history, profound in reflection, resistance and hope. Ultimately his compositions are the product of strength, and while Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 4) is the latest example, for those new to his body of work (which now spans over 20 releases), this forms as a bridge that leads to artist’s aforementioned sound world.

Last month, Montgomery answered a series of questions, from his earlier years and inspirations, to what led him to create the kind of compositions he does, including his latest release, Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 4).

Sun 13: What is your first memory of music, and do you remember the piece that inspired you to make ambient-based composition?

Jayve Montgomery: “My first memory of music seems to be Michael Jackson’s music video for Human Nature. But that’s memory for you. What would have been my memory if a moving picture had not accompanied that song? Is that memory of sound still there only washed out into a collective collage of life sonics? My parents playing music through home stereo systems for parties and Saturday cleaning also come to mind.

“Ambient music probably stems from a request by my mitochondrial DNA for sonic healing. Sonic Healing Ministries happens to be the name of the creative music session I developed within from 2004-2008. It was formed by Chicago saxophonist David Boykin, a progenitor of the younger exploratory sound of the city at the turn of the 21st century. Chicago is a city of Anthony Braxton’s youth, George Lewis’s youth, Roscoe Mitchell’s youth, Phil Cohran’s life and Sun Ra’s journey, the AACM and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This session saw university students playing with adult learners playing with the city’s dopest improvisers.

“Anyway, Chicago was a place for me to explore the array of Blackness and Black music outside of the segregated radio music I experienced as a child of the ’80s and ’90s. I first heard Anthony Braxton’s music on WNUR while driving a moving truck in 2005. I have melted while Tibetan Monks blew on horns and rattled large hand cymbals while chanting in the Harris Theater. But before Chicago opened the world of sound to me, I was a kid driving around central and western Kentucky listening to Echoes with John Derogottis late at night. R. Carlos Nakai and Paul Horn, the guy who played flute in the Taj Mahal come to mind from those moments between ’97-’01, when I didn’t make music outside of beatboxing and attempting to DJ.”

S13: Oh, wow…

JM: “Actually, one point of departure that has made me inclined to my path into ambient music was quitting clarinet in the fifth grade. I got a marble stuck in the lower part of the instrument and was way too timid to ask any adult for help fixing my instrument – an instrument my Jamaican mother was renting on her military salary. Not an ideal predicament for the child of an immigrant.

“Having experiences that led me to believe we become sound when we die reassured me that the sounds I was developing were going to be part of the universe one day. In 2003, I made this piece called Re: Source Sax. I played tenor saxophone in the 12 or 14 story stairwell of the School of the Art Institute’s 112 S. Michigan Ave. building for a few minutes and then through processes of convolution, I stretched the sound out to 45 minutes.

“I did this six months after first playing the instrument and I played near the twelfth floor while recording on the second or vice versa. And it was the first time that I started to experience sound as a physics material available to me for experimentation. Where particles became waves and waves became particles. I entered SAIC as a first-year student because my self-taught darkroom photography experiments were not good enough for their graduate program in visual studies. I did not take one art class in undergrad at Centre College so I got it. I couldn’t stand critiques of my visual work, anyway. And sound was always calling, viscerally, but I had a hard time believing it was speaking to me. So at SAIC I took as many sound classes as I could in that solitary school year; Intro to Sound with Eric Leonardson, Text and Sound with Lou Mallozzi, and max / msp performance with Shawn Decker. They all helped me grasp the freedom of sound work and sound practice.

“That last one though helped me develop a max/ msp process I called granular digiphoresis. In the process I would send a different random number to each of a delay vst’s 21 parameters. So every 10ms a clock was telling a range of numbers to send a random value to a parameter, so the sound manipulation is speeding by but at any time, that clock can be stopped, leaving me with a randomised set of parameters that leave me in a sound world I that only chance could provide, like life.

“My source material would usually consist of flute, sax, ebowed zither, small percussion, gongs and rubber chicken while my bandmates Joel Wanek was on bass and Ben Boye on harmonium. Ben and I would be processed while Joel’s sound would be his own most of the time. That was run on a windows computer I still have in storage but everything I do in the realm of granular synthesis, drone and stochasticity can be credited to that discovery pushing max/ msp to do wonderful things with me. One gets new operating systems and computer fatigue so even in the world of pedal effects like the ones I use from Chase Bliss and the sculpting sampler S-4 by Torso, I am interested in using the random presentation of my technology to interact with sounds that surprise me even though I am making them.

“Playing bamboo didgeridoo in Japan will lead you to ambient music. The high school I taught at there is called Hibiki Koto Gakko. Hibiki means ‘home of the reverberation’. Maybe playing shehnai in the dark hours, from the covered outside workout area at the school led me to ambient music.

“Breathing into a tenor saxophone inside Richard Serra’s Reading Cones sculpture in Grant Park, making resonant bubbles led me to ambient music. Teaching myself to circular breath in the Chicago winter, on the lakefront, led me to ambient music. Breathing continuously into an instrument surpasses any of the religious meditations I have attempted as a young seeker. Once I found and developed my circular breathing, the proclivity to slow down in front of audiences as well as for pure personal pleasure blossomed before. One young lady after our trio of Randy Hunt on bass and either John Westberry or Scott Mattingly played in a hot as balls garage show, said ‘It felt like forced meditation’.

“The fact that the sun uses audio feedback that evolves (feeds back) for 20,000 years before it comes to the surface and gets sent to us as heat and light is probably what also led me to ambient music.”

S13: History has a vital role in your work. Was this something you gravitated to before you began playing and producing music?

JM: “Indeed history has always attracted me. How we got here to this point in any time is a fascination of mine. From lying in my bed contemplating the origin of the universe as a child to deciphering the hidden truths of history’s propaganda champions, how time is told from both directions of now is a map of the human will to conceal and reveal.

“In high school, I was team captain of our Black History Academic Bowl team. A handful of schools in our district in Christian County, KY organised a librarian-led Black History trivia circuit where we would study a collected book of facts and on weekends, we would compete in game show style multiple choice trivia competitions complete with buzzers and Black nerds. The librarians that ran the program from my school, Ft. Campbell High School, were two Black women doing this out of their love for our culture and our knowing. Those women took us on my first trip to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN spring 1997. It was just beginning or about to begin and housed in the Lorraine Motel, where Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. His room was preserved behind glass and just thinking about that moment has me welling up in the same tears I had then when I was 17. But the result of the museum coming to being also kicked out the boarders who had been living in the motel since 1968 – a woman still protests her eviction from the motel as of my last visit a few years ago.

“The places I lived as a child were all a product of history and specifically the result of the Second World War. I was a department of defense dependent, meaning my mother served in the US Army as a supply and logistics soldier for 22 years. This took us to live in Berlin 1985-88 and 1992-94, when the installation was closed by the Clinton administration. During our first stay, my Jamaican grandmother lived with us, and we would take walks around our neighborhood of Düppel, a set of mid-rise apartment buildings built for American soldier families and still standing as repurposed apartments today. The Berlin Wall was a walk away. We would visit the wooden perches and look over under the eye of guard towers that were rhythmically placed along the wall. At the time I thought the wall separated the east side of Berlin from the Russian controlled east Germany, but recently I was watching a documentary about Nam Jun Paik and was blown away by the image of Berlin being a fortified city on all sides well into the middle of East Germany. We weren’t in Berlin when the wall fell, but Putin was.

“Also, I lived on and in military installations supported by the imperialist endeavors of the Unites States. I was born on one, Ft. Hood, TX – the largest of those military bases. And then to become an artist and learn the word installation – I am still coming to terms with Uncle Sam as cruel artist.

“Also, I have a global learning disposition and often can hear where two parties are miscommunicating so I jump at the chance to help someone with the other puzzle pieces I can see they have not been provided with. Just now, I was sitting at a Cracker Barrel eating breakfast and this table of Black folks ranging in age from young adult to middle age was talking about Elon Musk and the only man, a middle-aged man, was a big Elon supporter while the women were questioning his unwavering machismo-based support. As I got up, I turned to them and said, ‘Elon Musk’s grandparents moved to South Africa to benefit from Apartheid’. I figured he and they should know that before he continued to blindly support a white supremacist billionaire who only feels comfy in states of Apartheid and so they would have credible information on Musk’s background motives for the counter argument.

“When discussing why I no longer drink alcohol, a young white co-worker tried to infer that because I am Black, my gout symptoms from drinking two pints of Guinness nightly, were genetically more probable. The look on his face when I said ‘race is not genetic’ was priceless. History can free us of our most ridiculous ideas.”

S13: With historic themes and futuristic soundscapes, it got me thinking about outer worlds… do you consider your creations as something to escape the present?

JM: “There is no escaping the present. I would say my music is a passport to now, the hardest destination to visit. I think in the coming decades we will have a better understanding of the quantum mechanics of the present and how it is informed by the past and future and how the future can reinform the past to bring along a new present.

“Also in the creation of my works, now is flexible. I am creating one take moments which took a lifetime or thousands to create. But practically speaking, making music in a world where we should be organising revolution is an escape. I would rather other humans gain a heart towards justice before I have to put down music and get serious about food and energy equity, but I am afraid that the cultural efforts to ask for empathy from the empire are proving naught. The Christian Fascists in America are now spouting that empathy is the greatest human weakness, from a pulpit, in the name of Jesus. You all should read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.”

S13: The methods you employ are so unique that you can clearly distinguish a Jayve Montgomery piece from the first note. Is that something you set out to achieve when you first started composing?

JM: “I like the food I cook. And maybe that’s it – I am offering sounds that I have made that I enjoy others hearing but if they never heard those sounds, they would still be sounds that I loved making. When I was working with youth and people with disabilities running a mobile recording studio with the Chicago Park District, I quickly understood how much sound recording and playback can be an acoustic mirror, a technology that outside of nature and architecture, is new to humans.

“We are also the sounds we make. And I am the only Jayve Montgomery alive. The one before me is no longer.”

S13: Thematically, do you have an album mapped about before writing the music or do you think your improvisations dictate what the themes become?

JM: “Abstract Black absorbs all and emits all. Much of what I have out is grounded in play, and learning and mourning. Breathing With Each Ear was several days during the early part of January 2023, of permutative experiments. This with that until an idea seemed to be exhausted for the moment. But at the same time, I am reading Frank Wilderson III and his theory of afro-pessimism. Six months prior I had been playing at a music festival in DC by the invite of Luke Stewart. I was in duo with my Freddie Douggie partner, Ben Lamar Gay, and I was singing about my newly found knowledge I had learned on a music composition trip to Africatown and Mobile with a stop in Montgomery, AL to see the Legacy Museum, housed on the site of a former slave auction house. There I learned that white slave ship captains would drown boatloads of human cargo to avoid violating laws after the 1808 law that made the Atlantic slave trade illegal. It was on that trip that learned the owner of the Clotilda, America’s last slave ship, Timothy Maher, went to grab a boat load of humans on a bet. So I say that to say these ideas are where I live. The struggle of Black folk is my business.

“But with a project like Suika I set out to turn Theodore Herzl’s book The Jewish State (English language audio boom version) into drones. I picked the chapter titles that stood out to me for their content and then proceeded to run those words through Lossy by chase bliss which is creating amplitude based freezing and a spectral loss sound. I found it appropriate seeing as the state of Israel is using drones to colonise Gaza and police violence and surveillance to colonise us here in America.

“Ultimately, I am working with sound to investigate ideas. When I posted the project to Instagram in November 2023, using the streaming music feature, the music titled Argentina or Palestine was censored for a week or two. Before publishing I was going to call the work Israel, but I changed it to Suika, Japanese for watermelon, since somehow the free speech of Americans who reference watermelons and the colors red, black, green and white is now monitored by somebody who has no interest in freedom or justice.”

S13: Some artists say when they enter the writing process certain things are taken out of their hands. Would you agree with that?

JM: “I have more of a making process. There is this sound artist and teacher in Indonesia, Kamal Sabran, who says they are not compositions, but confrontations and I agree. So understanding that I have to let the piece write itself, become itself on its own accord, like the universe.

“I recently embarked on a grant funded project called Lake Black Town making a work sonifying the land around ‘drowned town’ sites, places where Black folks lived once and now their existence is covered by a lake. For several months I deliberated about the right time of day to make lake visits. How I would record and what I would record. That led to nothing being done the way I imagined until I got out of the way, had some months to play with water and resonance and then suddenly I have a process and methods to explore. After months and nearly a year, I let the piece develop itself from what was obviously in front of me. Record the air in stereo, record the water with a hydrophone, record the earth with a geophone and then also use plant MIDI to play the resonance of the air, the resonance of emptiness. The piece is now a playground of significant acknowledgement of the magic we cannot see and the mourning needed for Americans to heal from racial violence buried beneath progress.”

S13: Do you have strict routines when creating. For instance, is it something you work on every day, and do you need certain tools or need to be in a certain environment?

JM: “I like to do things in one sitting or one setting or one setup for a project. It will be all outside or all indoors. As a former leisure professional, I appreciate that I have an approach based in play, serious play, where there is a freedom that is mine. My project, Florida, was recorded with an iPhone and the basic wired headset with mic run through an app on my device. I made it while hanging out with my family in Florida on the Rainbow River in February of 2023 amidst talks of Florida book bans and cancelling of DEI programs and literal facts of Black History by Ron Desantis. But in the internet era, the citizen can publish a thought and attach it to the name of a politician who is against the people. It is the least we can do to fight fascism.

“But yeah, a cozy comfy place or anywhere a USB battery can go.”

S13: How much do you think Tennessee influences your art?

JM: “I have an amazing partner here. All praises due to her and her family. Nashville is the home of record company extraction of the Delta and plantation profits and the Trail of Tears. But it is also one of Sun Ra’s first stops outside of Birmingham. And my teen club nights in the mid-’90s. It is also the home of the foundational Fisk Jubilee Singers who gave Music City its name. Memphis is also where America told us how it really feels by killing MLK there. The last song he requested from saxophonist Ben Branch was Precious Lord, Take My Hand. I love to play that song or at least play with it during my sets from solo to quartet because all I might have is play and mourning. In the east the Free Will Baptists said no to slavery.”

S13: How did you come to work alongside Monastral. Do you remember what drew you to the label?

JM: “Sounds find us when we are ready to hear them. I was approached by P.M. Tummala about doing something with them while in Chicago sometime in ‘22 likely. Monastral was ready for the sounds when the sounds were ready. Chicago has a scene that I still call home. And actually, several months after meeting Tummala, I saw a post of a band he is in called Zelienople and then it hit me that we had hosted them at our storefront venue Brown Rice sometime between 2008-2012. I don’t think I was at the show but I handled the recording setup and computer, so the name stuck out from a decade prior then.”

S13: Are your compositions a reflection on your personality?

JM: “Absolutely. Like an elder Malcolm X after returning from Hajj, covered in bells and circular breathing into woodwinds while an ebow atop his lap steel guitar is providing a drone. I listen more than I speak.”

S13: Do you have any hope for a better future?

JM: “Absolutely. I have some grains of hope. The course will correct itself I suppose. As the propaganda of empire gets squeezed by citizen witnessing, may the planets have the people aligned to inherit the earth. There’s only so much range to the environmental likelihood of life. And if we let empire squander what we have on this planet it will have been too late to live anywhere in the universe.”

Breathing With Each Ear (Hour 4) is out now via Monastral. Purchase from Bandcamp.