Traveling the Sound World : A Conversation with Brandon Ross on Phantom Station

Borrowed from the ancient Greek φαντάζω, the idea of a phantom evokes a shadowy force that someone cannot precisely locate. The term suggests something seen or heard but which is not actually present. The power of a phantom comes from the perceiver’s inability to fully understand their surroundings. In this sense, Phantom Station is an excellent moniker for guitarist Brandon Ross’ “individual-directed” ensemble, a group with nebulous membership that steps away from preordained plans in favor of creating entirely in the moment. The live recording of the band’s latest version – with cornetist Graham Haynes, electronic musician Hardedge, pianist David Virelles, and drummer JT Lewis – has an equally murky title in Off the End (Sunnyside, 2024).

The album’s title begs questions. The end of what? How does one get “off”? Perhaps the titular ambiguity refers solely to the sounds contained therein. The music is not even on the edges of preconceived concepts of genres. No labels fit. This aesthetic of openness is derived partly from the way in which Phantom Station similarly pushes, to its furthest extremities, notions of how a particular instrument “should” sound. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to identify the instrumental origin of sounds which recur throughout the record. The album’s crumbling of a distinguishing line between acoustic and electric further obfuscates the proceedings.

Or maybe one should read the title more literally. Phantom Station moves beyond the concept of the song itself. Discarded is any 8 ½” by 11” marked guidance and structure. In its place, the band follows an approach of free improvisation, allowing the group to live in the moment. The result is not some raucous blowing session. Instead,  Off the End frequently makes nuanced use of silence and hushed – almost secretive –  tones.

Phantom Station is an effusively mysterious force. The band rarely lays out clear tracks for listeners to follow to their destination. With Off the End, the group does not hold anyone’s hand to guide them through the music. Instead, it leaves some things in the dark. The lack of clarity, the absence of certainty, and leaving open the possibility that anything could happen makes Off the End an incredibly wild ride. The band sends you through a vibrant sonic world of their own creation, one unlike any other.

We sat down with Ross to discuss the band, the album, his work with Butch Morris and Henry Threadgill, and the avant-garde musical culture of Amherst, Massachusetts.  

PostGenre: You have collaborated for a long time with the other members of Phantom Station in other groups. You have known Graham Haynes since the early 1980s. JT Lewis has been in Harriet Tubman with you for twenty years now. The newest relationship is with David Virelles, but even that goes back a decade. How important are trust and those longstanding relationships to the group, given it does not rehearse or support a predetermined direction?

Brandon Ross: Trust and independence are both incredibly important. Our music is not predetermined in terms of musical direction. It’s also not confined by genre. I like to say that there is no musical apartheid going on in Phantom Station. The only directive we have is to listen and create.

The other aspect of Phantom Station is that I wanted to add a digital sound design or electronic aspect to the music and see how that interacts with acoustic instrumentation. It’s kind of like the old Mission: Impossible show. Are you familiar with that?

PG: The TV show from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

BR: Yeah, the original show with Peter Graves. On the show, when he is given an assignment, he goes to the dossier to see who he needs to call up for the gig. That’s kind of how it was putting together this group. I would think about some instrumentation and then see who’s available and who can do this. The responsibility is one of self-direction, self-orchestration, and collective composition.

PG: What was your thought process in terms of selecting the instrumentation? 

BR: I’ve done Phantom Station with different combinations, and sometimes I feel I get a little more out of the instrumentation we have in the current group. The performance on Off the End might have been the first time I had David Virelles, Graham [Haynes], J.T. Lewis, and Hardedge with me as a quintet. 

I’ve done the group as a quintet with Stomu Takeishi on electric bass ukulele and acoustic bass guitar. But before this iteration of the group, I had never had a keyboard in the group. One version a few years back was only David, JT, and myself. I’ve recently started working more with piano. I’ve been doing duets with David and a trio [Br-An-Ch] with Angelica Sanchez and Chad Taylor.

Adding a piano to Phantom Station is interesting because it means we can operate without a bass since the piano can cover that register. And for that to work, you have the right kind of pianist in terms of thinking about how to play with guitar. Combining piano with my guitar is one of those situations that could go either very well or very badly.

PG: Why is that?

BR: It’s just about the ways that people communicate musical information. Things like how much information is in the space and how much activity is occurring at any particular time. It’s that kind of discernment and a range of openness as well, so-called stylistic openness. 

PG: Off the End often – atmospheric is not the right word – creates a sound world that is not necessarily as melody-driven as a more thoroughly composed piece. Do you feel that the fact the record is freely improvised is what makes you get into more textures than you would with a through-composed piece?

BR: Yeah, that potential is there. I think that’s keen listening on your part. This group is very much about sound world engagement. But again, it’s also who the people are in the setting and what they’re gonna do with that. I think it’s really about an openness to creativity. Can the other musicians handle a sound world? That is my primary focus on it.

PG: Do you feel the fact that this recording was made live plays into that sound world creation as well? Could you have generated the same environments in the studio?

BR: Yes, I think we could have done the same in the studio. There were some sonic issues with the recording that caused me to address it in a more atmospheric way in terms of mixing. But I knew – and the others in the ensemble also felt – that something particularly special happened at that night’s concert.

I thought about the way the record begins with Hardedge and JT and how we were asking a lot from listeners for us to open our record the way we did. But then I thought, “Well, yeah, that’s who I need to listen to this.” We need people who can listen and will take the ride.

PG: In terms of improvisation, more broadly, someone recently asked you if you are a composer or improviser. You responded that you consider yourself a creator. You have worked with Wadada Leo Smith, who avoids the term “improvisation.” Do you see a significant difference between improvisation and pre-composition?

BR: Yeah, I use the word improvisation only to help people who may not have a reference point for anything else because the difference between composition and improvisation is still an ongoing conversation in the field. Some people have said, “Well, the difference is a question of time and refinement.” That’s true to some extent. 

When composing, you have the independence to command as you feel. With improvisation, there’s a collective creation. There are a lot of elements that are not in my control when we improvise. I’m really in the moment with whatever we’re doing and how it relates to what else is going on. There’s no time to stop and say something like, “Well, the collective result of this interaction right now between the guitar, cornet, and drums wasn’t necessarily what I was intending.” It’s about letting go of control and using the only thing I can control, which is me. 

PG: If the entire album was improvised, how did you determine track beginnings and endings?

BR: They were just places to enter into. They could have been called chapters. Or, at one point, I considered calling them stations since they’re kind of like that in the sense of, “Oh, where are we now? Okay, we’re here.” Then we’re in a – I hesitate to call it interstitial space – but another space occurs. The track definitions were a way to give listeners a reference point. 

PG: Where do you get the titles for the songs? They are all very creative.

BR: Well, they’re from a letter written to me many years ago by a woman who has since passed. Shortly after she wrote that letter, we dated for a while. She was majoring in poetry and painting.

PG: To ask you about a specific song, at certain points on “Your Shows Point Like Arrows,” there is a repeated siren sound that seems to be made by Hardedge.

BR: Oh, that arpeggiated siren sound was actually made by David, not Hardedge. 

PG: Wow. 

BR: Yeah, one of the things I like about Phantom Station is that a lot of things happen, and you really don’t know who did what after the fact. There are also things that I do on the guitar that people think are Hardedge’s part. And there are things that Hardedge does that people think might be David. 

PG: David’s siren sound is not something you typically hear on a recorded album. Do you usually take inspiration from “non-musical” sounds like that?

BR: I take inspiration from all sounds when trying to create – and you used absolutely the correct term- a sound world. The composer Tōru Takemitsu used to talk about starting an orchestral work or a composition of some kind from a single sound. When your consciousness is clear enough – I think of it as being in a place of balance- there is no such thing as noise. There are just elements to orchestrate.

If you can relinquish the demand to have something be something, whether a person, a musical sound, or a so-called “non-musical” sound, then there’s a freedom to find new territory and to illustrate different kinds of relationships in the context of a musical experience, whether we call it a concert or a performance.  

PG: You dedicated Off the End to Butch Morris and have also previously worked with him. You also borrowed the name Phantom Station from him.

BR: Yeah. I borrowed the name of the ensemble from a piece of music Butch wrote that he titled “Phantom Station”.

PG: Where do you see Butch’s influence on this project besides the group’s name? Butch’s conduction seems much more structured than this group’s approach to free improvisation. 

BR: Right. With Phantom Station, it’s not conduction; it’s managing. There are times in my head when I’m thinking about how long a particular thing I’m doing needs to last and how I can move beyond it to a place where I can get another perspective on it. And hopefully, I can find something that’s fresh in the moment. That was always, for me, a precondition for participating in a conduction. Even if you relinquished ultimately in a conduction.

But my dedicating the album to Butch was also to acknowledge my friend, who I miss very much. His contribution to creative music and music making more generally has still to be recognized fully. But I think that will come in time.

PG: In terms of recognizing Butch’s contributions, you were even in the first conduction, correct?

BR: Yes, I was in ‘Conduction #1.’

PG: Do you have a sense of how conduction developed and changed over time?

BR: The lexicon became very detailed and very specific. [Butch] extended the work or language to spoken language, with poets, writers, actors, and dancers who might choose to do it. He went beyond instrumentalists and vocalists. The approach of conduction and the language of conduction is very mutable and very mobile in that way.

Butch’s skill in the art of conduction made it easy to see, over time, that he was not merely conducting. He was following a very demanding and very specific discipline. I discovered that aspect of his work when I was in Japan doing a recording session with several Japanese musicians. They were looking for a way to create music spontaneously in the context of a composition. I asked one of them if they had ever heard of conduction because I knew Butch had worked in Japan. They were a little familiar with it but hadn’t used it. So, I said, “Okay, well, I’ll conduct this.” After many years of being conducted by Butch, it was my first time conducting. And it was not easy. It’s very challenging because you can only work with what people are giving you. It’s all about organizing musical elements and then thinking about where you’re going to go. You need a plan. But you also need to be very open to having that plan usurped or changed. The process we use in Phantom Station is akin to that for me.

PG: Of course, Butch is hardly the only legendary artist you have worked with. For one, you have recorded with Archie Shepp. You met Shepp while you were working at UMASS Amherst. Other than meeting him, how do you feel your time in Amherst shaped your appreciation of, or approach to, creative music?

BR: My time in Amherst was very significant. It was a good place to go to try to figure out what I wanted to do. Archie Shepp heard me and asked me to record with him. While I was up there, Marion Brown came through and heard this ensemble that I had. He asked me and the drummer Steve McCraven – Makaya McCraven’s father – to go to Europe with him on tour. While I was in Marion’s band with Steve, I met Michael Gregory Jackson and got to know him. Steve was from New Haven and was friends with Michael, so Steve introduced us.

At that time, Michael was playing with Oliver Lake, Wadada Leo Smith, and David Murray [this group can be heard on Jackson’s Clarity (1976)]. Michael brought me one of Wadada’s books, ‘notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music.’ Reading that book and connecting with what Michael was doing and what Waddada was talking about was a big change and pulled me toward an awareness of the AACM. My older brother was also listening to many different things at the time.

Hampshire College also had a series of concerts called the Loft Jazz Series. All those guys doing the Loft Jazz thing at that time came through Amherst for it. Air, Michael’s Clarity group, and Michael’s trio with Anthony Davis and Pheeroan akLaff all came to Amherst. I think Oliver [Lake] and Julius [Hemphill] also came up as a duo. That or I went down to New York to see them during that period because I was aware of who they were and was listening a lot to Julius Hemphill at that time.

And so all of that happened when I was in Amherst. The Revolutionary Ensemble with Leroy [Jenkins] was also in Amherst. I remember hearing a duo record of Leroy with Rashied Ali [Swift are the Winds of Life (Survival, 1976)]. I loved that record and decided I wanted to meet Leroy and play with him. And I did.

So, my time in Amherst is when I became aware of this world of creative music. I became aware of sound and the dynamics of timbre and instrumentation. And the idea that an ensemble was never missing anything. If you didn’t have a bass but did have a guitar and drum set, nothing’s missing. That period of my life involved me shaking off a lot of standard stuff about music that often people don’t question. We inherit things and often don’t necessarily question them. In some contexts, people don’t want you to question them. But that wasn’t the case for me, fortunately.

PG: The concert captured on Off the End took place in December 2021. Given that spontaneity is such an important part of the music and that the group has played together since the recording date, do you feel like the spontaneity aspect is ever diminished as you continue to play together as a group and are more likely to predict what each other is going to do next?

BR: No, and I would say that why it works is because of the people in the group. It’s very demanding to ask people to step outside their comfort zone. If someone spent many years trying to be, say, a jazz trumpet player, a jazz piano player, a rock something, or a classical something, they’re navigating the pedagogy that’s appropriate for the field that they’re focused in, which is fine. But I’m not asking that of people. I’m also not denying them of it. But what I am questioning is how relevant that pedagogy is to what they’re trying to do right now. Is it merely history in the sense of everything you’ve ever practiced, played and thought about and all the records you ever listened to? If it is just historicity showing up, do we need to do this now? Or are you still seeking? Are you open? Are you reaching for something? And that’s a big ask of anyone.

PG: In terms of that pedagogy you reference, do you see genre categorizations as an inhibitor of being open?

BR: All I’ve ever said about this group is that it’s a genre-free engagement. People will always try to put a label on it, both listeners and players. But we are not pushing for any. And that’s what I think is so beautiful about this group. It’s an opportunity to look beyond labels. 

That freedom comes in large part from moving away from composition. Composition makes things very safe in a lot of ways. Parameters are set up for what’s coming and what relationships you choose to illustrate or illuminate within that context. But when you don’t know what’s coming, or you cannot necessarily predetermine everything coming, you need to be in the moment and create rather than improvise. That creation lets us move beyond labels in what we do. 

PG: Going back to the importance of who is in Phantom Station, JT Lewis is on drums. You, JT, and Melvin Gibbs have operated as the trio Harriet Tubman for over twenty-five years now; a long time for a group. What do you think is behind the trio’s longevity?

BR: Well, we’ve just never gotten sick of each other, for one thing. And we always find this way to operate as a triangular pyramid. Our conversations are never lopsided. That’s true for both our musical conversations and our spoken conversations. We just always keep moving. I think the trio tends to be an active vibration. There’s some actual science of spirituality and vibration and rhythm that goes along with the number three, as well. But I think, more than anything, we continue to find a creative space with each other.

PG: Phantom Station will perform on March 22nd at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee for Big Ears. Big Ears will also host several performances by Henry Threadgill. Threadgill is, probably, first and foremost a composer. He provides much more of a structure compared to the complete openness of Phantom Station. You will be part of his Very Very Circus group. 

BR: Yeah, I will also be a part of Henry’s Make a Move group, as well.  

PG: Right. Henry first formed both groups many years ago and they have been defunct for a long time. The versions of performing at Big Ears will have slightly different members than past versions. Besides personnel changes, do you have a sense of how these groups will sound differently today?

BR: Since they haven’t been performing for years, it is hard to tell how different it’s gonna be. But now, both groups are repertory ensembles. So, we’re playing Henry’s music from the period of Very Very Circus. Make a Move will be doing the same, but that’s a different period of Henry’s writing and a different instrumentation.

Very early this morning, I was looking at some of the music and thinking about how I was relating to this music at the time we first did it and how I look at it now. I think there’s a benefit to being able to realize things differently and in a way that, when one is in it, is a little more elusive.  

Henry doesn’t go back very much, if at all. Once he’s played a body of work to his satisfaction, he moves on to the next thing. So someone might ask him, “Oh, can you play ‘Hope a Hope A’ or ‘Drivin’ You Slow and Crazy’?” He’ll just grin from the stage and keep doing what he’s doing. His message is clear: if you want to hear that music, go buy the record. 

And so, us going back to these songs is interesting. For one thing, I don’t play the same way as I did back then. I don’t even think in the same way. In some sense, dealing with this artifact of a frozen in time of the recording is kind of funny. I’m not chaining myself to the representation previously out there and instead coming at it fresh. We’ll see what happens.

My appreciation for what made those bands unique has also increased by understanding some things that, at that time, many years ago, I saw differently. Looking at those things now, I realized that was the thing that made it work.

PG: You mentioned earlier that it is usually easier to play composed music. But it sounds like it is also a little more difficult than free improvisation because you are not playing like you once did, and you still want your voice in there, but it’s not necessarily written that way.

BR: I guess what I’m saying is just not to fall at the altar of what was recorded. Instead, you must see the composition as if it were new. Find the core elements of the piece, but come to the music with new ideas and let it breathe.

‘Off the End’ by Brandon Ross Phantom Station will be released on Sunnyside Records on April 19, 2024 It is available for pre-order on Bandcamp. More information on Ross can be found on his website. Phantom Station will perform at the Jazz Gallery in New York City on Saturday, March 16 and at Big Ears in Knoxville, Tennessee. At Big Ears, Ross will also be part of Henry Threadgill’s Make a Move and Very Very Circus. You can also read more about his forthcoming performances at Big Ears on the festival’s website.