Beautiful Imperfections: A Conversation with Aaron Parks on ‘Little Big III’

As artificial intelligence increasingly disrupts our ordinary lives, there is an ongoing concern about how the new technology will impact music. In an industry in which its chief creators are already economically suppressed, it is all too easy to envision a future in which algorithms supplant artists. However, as anyone who has listened to significant amounts of AI-generated music can attest, there is something not quite right about the output. Often, the results sound “too perfect.” Too flawless in their execution to the point that any emotional appeal is left sterile. It is in the flaws and imperfections that music develops its weight. It is the “errors” that resonate directly from the heart of the performer to that of the listener. This element of music is at the crux of pianist Aaron Parks’ Little Big III (Blue Note, 2024). 

Over the last three albums, Little Big has applied conceptually different stylistic layers in a sonic decoupage. Shades of jazz, indie rock, electronic music, and even the blues are evident if one looks at the pieces from afar. However, up close, these thoughts merge and blend into one another, making their edges indistinguishable. Part of this morphability comes directly from Parks’ mission with the group: taking highly structured ideas and stretching and pushing them to their breaking point. The idea is to break perfection in a way that only a natural artistic mind could. This approach has carried across all of Little Big’s output, but III steps aside from the thematics of its immediate predecessor is noticeable. Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man (Blue Note, 2020) explicitly drew upon robotic imagery to hone in on the intersectionality of structure and freedom and of logic and emotion. With III, the band steps away from science fiction. The message is clear – one need not look to fantasical metaphor. Instead, inward reflection reveals that we all internally find ways to balance control and chaos within our own realm. Parks even internalizes some of this by tying III to his personal experiences with bipolar disorder, where there can be significant swings in emotions between manic and depressive episodes.

Musically, these concepts result in songs like “Locked Down” which reflects upon the isolation of COVID-era lockdowns by drawing upon themes of desolation, melancholy, and a faint hint of an urgent desire to escape. Conversely, however, the piece is also very laid back and peaceful. It shifts between these emotional extremes while somehow simultaneously representing both. “Sports” is a piece that is somehow equally evocative of the danceability of Ethiojazz music, the fusionized world-funk of Weather Report’s Black Market (Sony, 1976), and the intimacy of chamber music. These different threads seem in the abstract as though they may be in conflict. However, the piece finds a way to somehow cogently represent them all at once.

Little Big’s best to date, III shows a continued evolution of a band that is both introspective and continually grasping for new inputs. Their music reflects an appreciation of tradition while striving to push beyond, which makes the iconic Blue Note Records the perfect label for this record. 

PostGenre: You have a different drummer  – Jongkuk Kim – on Little Big III than the last two Little Big records, which had Tommy Crane. How do you feel the group has changed the most from the change in drummer?

Aaron Parks: The drums can change so many things about a band. They are one of the crucial elements of any group. JK [Jongkuk] is a younger guy than the rest of us in the band. He’s from a different generation. And so he’s bringing a different generation’s perspectives and solutions to the strange question that I’m posing with this band of how we can take influences from the music that we love of other types of so-called genres and have it inhabit song structures and things that are as much about a sense of place and mood as they are about content. To find ways to improvise where other ideas do not feel like they are grafted on. I’m not interested in making something that is essentially jazz with a little production thrown in. 

That idea is something that this band has been seeking for a while. Even before the first two records came out, we made two other unreleased recordings of versions of some of the music. The music wasn’t ready yet. It’s been a slow process of us starting to get a little closer to the idea I have in my head to some degree. Once we get close to that idea, the band itself starts to tell me where we are headed. The music starts to become alive rather than a conscious reach for something that I hadn’t heard before. 

PG: Do you think you will ever release those two recordings that you haven’t released yet? 

AP: I might. Maybe as part of a special edition box set of the first two records. Those unreleased recordings have slightly different personnel than what we ultimately released, but there was some overlap. 

But as for your question about JK though, he has his own arsenal of tools and explosive creativity. But he is also similar to Tommy, who formed so much of the sound of this band, in terms of finding ideas for how to take highly specific and highly structured ideas for drums and inhabit them in a way. You have the feeling of a drum beat and the specificity of it but it never feels like something locked into drum machine territory. It is always threatening to break free. There’s a lot of specificity, but if any of it starts becoming “too perfect,” something has gone incredibly wrong. The beat needs to have a grit or sloppiness to it and feel alive. 

PG: You are looking for something imperfect because it brings more humanity to the music.

AP: Yeah, imperfection. Without that, the music doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. That’s why the band is a very tricky thing; we’re looking after something specific but don’t want to perfectly get the thing that we’re looking for. 

PG: Does that aspect make it more difficult to compose for this band? 

AP: In some ways, yes. Composing for the band can be difficult. It requires me to have greater maturity to not grow attached to the demo as I’m writing a piece. Often, when I’m writing pieces for the band, I can hear at least a version of how all the pieces come together. And a lot of the time, what it needs for some of those songs is the drum beat. We can play around with it, but we need at least a basic idea.

That’s one of those things that I love about both Tommy and JK. They are both musicians who listen to all kinds of music. A lot of people do, but they are also able to understand playing parts and don’t mind being given just a basic idea and then figuring out for themselves how to inhabit it in a way where it starts to not feel like a prison for them. Some musicians get offended if you give them specific parameters to follow. I would agree with them in many contexts. 

But with a band like Little Big, I’m only interested in working with people who like the challenge of working with a set form and trying to find ways to kick out of it. I do that for my own parts as well. I will write myself into a corner with this band and try to find ways to break off of it. 

PG: In terms of getting ideas from other genres, are you consciously considering genre norms when you extract certain ideas, or do you only later realize where a particular idea came from?

AP: More often than not, it’s the latter. I’ll hear something, and then it takes me a while to figure out where I’m copying it from; where all that information is coming from. Very rarely, but not never, there might be a drum beat or a little harmonic device that I’m drawn to in something I listen to and then I try to figure out how I can make a version of it.

On this record, there’s a tune called “The Machines Say No,” which was written by our guitarist and co-leader, Greg [Tuohey]. He’s fundamental to this band. I gave him the parameters for that song. I had come across a song by Sia Grey that has an arpeggiated vibe with a bass and drums freak-out thing. I played the track for Greg and asked if he could write his own version of it; an arpeggio that then creates a feature for JK.

Sometimes, our process can be that explicit. But more often than not, I think the different genre ideas just come from us all listening to many different kinds of music. We listen to everything and work with the music that speaks to us.  I do, however, try to make sure that when I put together ideas they feel integrated. I don’t want to see the stitches. 

PG: In terms of the album in a broader sense, the notes to Little Big III discuss your struggles with bipolar disorder. There are incredible statistics about the propensity of artists, in particular, to have mental illness. Do you feel there is a link between creativity and mental illness? 

AP: There’s a lot of clear documentation over the years linking mental illness and creativity. Books like Kay Redfield Jamison’s Exuberance: The Passion for Life (Knopf, 2004) get into these issues. When you have someone with an artistic temperament, there is a good chance they have an imbalance.

For me, I know the transportive feeling of transcending this plane that you get from being in a manic state.  You feel like you have a glimpse of something that can carry you a long way, even if that feeling is completely deluded. Inside that space, there is an insane divine creative spark that’s available. The downside of things is that depressive spells can also be periods for profound reflection. They can also be generative times. My journey has been to try to allow myself to surf that wave in a way that doesn’t destroy me. It’s a difficult thing.

PG: Do you feel these issues are still under-discussed in the improvised music community despite the statistics?

AP: That’s such a good question. I’m always happy to talk about it. It doesn’t doesn’t scare me to talk about these things. But I still feel like there’s so much that I don’t understand about it. Maybe people being willing to talk about things that they don’t completely understand is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, people don’t even know where to begin. I think one way you could also choose to think about mental illnesses is just that it’s a very high degree of sensitivity. With the traditions of life, there’s a sensitivity that can send us way up high or way down low. Some of it is biology. Some of it is our own conditioning and the ways that we’ve chosen to respond to those patterns. Most of the time, it’s an intersection of those two things.

Many people have talked to me about their struggles but are afraid they are to come forward publicly with them. It’s scary. I get it. It’s always a little tricky to talk about these things in a way where we can talk about it, while not becoming identified with the stories we tell about it; to not perform a version of ourselves.

PG: The second Little Big album – Little Big II: Dreams of a Mechanical Man, had a subtitle, while this third one does not. Is there a reason you dropped the use of a subtitle for this record?

AP: Yes. We didn’t use one because the subtitle on the second album made it sound like some B-movie. “Dreams of a Mechanical Man coming soon to a theater near you.” It was a great name for a song – I love it as a song title – but not for the entire album. At some point, I will probably reissue the second record with a different mix because we did that mix in a rush. I think the different mix we have sounds better than the one we released. The one that came out we did very hurriedly, and I titled it very hurriedly as well. From here on out, all of our Little Big records are going to only have numbers for their titles. Led Zeppelin style. 

PG: Do you have a sense of how many Little Big records you will make?

AP: I don’t know, man. It feels like this is a project that I’m going to keep turning to throughout the years. All of us in the band have a feeling of fellowship that we’ve started to build that is very special. The band also feels like an outlet for something I’m after creatively. I feel there’s something here with this particular intersection of different styles of music in the music we’re making. There’s still a lot more to find. 

But it’s a funny thing because last year, I made two records that will be coming out on Blue Note [Records]. One is an acoustic quartet record that will come out late next year. And the other is this Little Big record. It’s going to be at least another two years before we release another Little Big album. 

PG: What got you back to Blue Note [ed. Note: the last two Little Big albums came out on Ropeadope]?

AP: Well, it started with the acoustic record I mentioned. I recorded it in July of last year. Once we made it, there was something about the whole vibe of the record that feels like it should be a Blue Note record. To me, it sounds like a twenty-first-century version of a classic Blue Note record in terms of some of the swinging, though with a different harmonic vocabulary.  But we ended up putting out Little Big III first.

PG: Your last record for Blue Note was Invisible Cinema (Blue Note, 2008). How do you feel your compositional skills have developed the most over the past sixteen years?

AP: Well, I noticed something very funny about those early Little Big records that I mentioned I may release one day. They included a song that ended up becoming “Dreams of a Mechanical Man.” There are at least two other versions of that song that I recorded over the years before the version that was ultimately released. And I noticed that I take almost the same solo on all three versions of the song. At first, I was horrified to discover that because I call myself an improviser, and I’m just playing the same old shit. But then I listened to it, and I started to question what improvisation even is. 

Long story short, I wasn’t necessarily coming up with new ideas but was getting better at achieving what I was seeking. The earlier versions felt a little more crude and ham-handed. But, over time, even while playing a very similar solo, the music started to feel more three-dimensional and lived-in, so that even something improvised turned into something composed.

PG: Do you typically see much of a difference between improvisation and composition? Some musicians think improvisation is solely a term we apply to composing in the moment.

AP: In an ideal world, yes, they are the same thing. But, for better or worse, I often do see a distinction. As a composer, I tend to like creating little puzzle boxes where, compositionally, the idea that is not essential to the piece has been removed, and what is essential remains to hold it all together. 

For me, writing simple music that sounds interesting is much more difficult than writing complicated music that sounds interesting. I’m very drawn to that challenge and to that feeling of distillation of the essence of each piece. But thank God that as an improviser, I don’t abide by those same principles because I think it’s really important for me to not be too focused on them when I’m in the actual act of playing. It’s like that saying, “The only thing that’s perfect is death because it doesn’t change.”

PG: You do, however, revisit an older piece on the album. You first recorded your song “Ashé” for Terence Blanchard’s A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina) (Blue Note, 2007). What was behind your decision to revisit the piece on Little Big III instead of writing a new one?

AP: Well, I’ve gotten into the habit on my last few records of including at least one song from the past on them. I’ll probably do that for the foreseeable future as well because I find myself interested in seeing how the music I compose continues to evolve instead of having it frozen to a particular moment in time. 

As for  “Ashé” specifically, there is a beautiful version with Terence Blanchard on A Tale of God’s Will, but I have never recorded it on one of my own records. There is another piece that is in many ways quite similar to “Ashé.” I considered recording that piece, but when we were ultimately putting together the song list, it felt like  “Ashé” lived exactly where it needed to be. I’m very glad we did a version of that song. 

PG: It came out beautifully. As far as working with Blanchard, what do you feel you learned the most from working with him? 

AP: Sometimes it takes me a long time to learn things. So, I’m still learning lessons from him.  Sometimes you have to step away to understand the wisdom of what somebody else was doing. Particularly Blanchard, who is a man of few words as a bandleader. Instead of trying to shape the music to make sure that it adhered to his idea of what he had in mind, he left a lot to the group. He let go of the wheel a little to see where we all went together. I don’t know precisely how old he was when we were doing our records. For Bounce (Blue Note, 2003) and Flow (Blue Note, 2005), he must have been in his forties. He was coming off of albums like Wandering Moon (Sony Classical, 2000) and had all these accolades pouring in. It would have been very easy for someone in that position to sit back and coast.

PG: Sure.

AP: And that is not at all what he did. Instead, he put together a crew of young folks and decided to throw caution to the wind. In a very different way, I’ve started to take some of those lessons to heart much more with this band. Rather than telling the band how to sound, we’ve created our own sound together. 

Little Big III is out now on Blue Note Records. You can purchase it directly from the label. More information about Aaron Parks can be found on his website.

Photo credit: Anna Yatskevich