Fear, Resilience, and Reflection: A Conversation with Adam O’Farrill on ‘For These Streets’

Mired by poverty and the global rise of fascism, the 1930s is far too often seen as a wholly bleak era stuck after the Roaring ‘20s and leading into a tumultuous global war. But, in reality, the era was also full of bright spots of optimism enveloped in a world of morosity. One need look no further than the beauty of the art of the decade to see the hopefulness of the time. Firebrands like Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, and Dmitri Shostakovich continued to stretch concepts of Western classical composition to new terrain, sensing there was more out there than what was before them. The most popular music of the decade by artists like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Benny Goodman was built upon the personal expression inherent in improvisation- an individualistic yearning for something beyond the status quo. But such hopefulness also only came by tackling the perils of the moment head-on. With The Grapes of Wrath (Viking, 1939), for instance, John Steinbeck pulled no punches in his counterattack against discrimination and Dust Bowl famine. The glimmers of promise are particularly well seen in film. 1939 was the golden year of cinema – a moment artistically akin to that experienced twenty years later in jazz- and one of its standouts was The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939), which overtly contrasted the dreary black and white of the moment with a colorized fantastical alternate reality. In light of the incredible levels of global disorder faced ninety years later, the 1930s provides a great reference point for Adam O’Farrill’s For These Streets (Out of Your Head, 2025).

First, it is probably best to address what For These Streets is not. It is not a return to hits of a generation past. Nor does the record aim to provide a soundtrack to a singular work or series of them from the 1930s. Given the visionary perspectives of the trumpeter bandleader and his octet’s assemblage of sonically progressive compatriots – guitarist Mary Halvorson, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, woodwindists David Leon and Kevin Sun, trombonist/euphoniumist Kalun Leung, bassist Tyrone Allen II, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara – neither approach was ever really in the cards. Instead, sound chemist O’Farrill takes a dropper to the decade’s output to extract their essence in their purest form: feelings of despair and dreams, of resignation and resilience and drips them into a new petri dish from which the entirety of the ensemble forges new compounds. 

The results are intoxicating. The opener, “Swimmers,” finds a trumpet-guitar duet that presents an elegant ballroom dance evocative of both the ballads of the preeminent swing bands and the recently ended age of opulence. But, over time, the grandeur morphs into a demanding march. “Nocturno, 1932” raises thorny questions of the afterlife and whether one must wait until death to find the solace they seek. David Leon’s cryptic flute solo gives way to a mournfully reflective funeral-like dirge. But the procession ultimately turns left onto another roadway where it hits a dead-end street facing a sea of melancholy but in which waves of undeniable curiosity keep hitting the shore. Is this the end of the road? Or is there a boat waiting to take us to a better place? The noteless horn screeches and sputters that dig and scrape over sparse dreamily hypnotic guitar riffs on  “Scratching the Surface of a Dream” provide no clear answer to the enigma. Nor do the shimmering horns on “Rose” or the folk anthemic guitar-vibes duo on “The Break Had Not Come.” Like some of the best works of art, For These Streets presents weighty questions for its listeners and trusts them to figure out the answers on their own. 

Along the throughways of For These Streets, one continually encounters the richness of 1930s orchestral music by an ensemble that rightfully refuses to sand off its edges of contemporary experimental avant-garde expressionism. The record steadily straddles the past and present, undefined by either. It’s the type of work only someone like O’Farrill – guided by tradition and lineage but continually pushing towards new horizons- can pull off. And in so doing, the bandleader and his all-star colleagues not only reflect on avenues passed but provide new trajectories for us to continue to march forward.

PostGenre: What led you to form an octet? 

Adam O’Farrill: That’s a good question. There are a few different reasons I started the octet. I had specific people in mind for this music before I even started writing it and had some loose ideas about what I wanted to explore. This project was always going to have many different people involved. It needed a lot of people to properly find the colors and tones that I wanted to reflect musically. There’s a lot of sound and texture that I wanted to explore. 

There was also the part of me that wanted to do something a little different than my usual quartet. I’ve done projects with larger groups before. Many years ago, I had a Jazz Gallery commission with a large group. I did another large ensemble project after that, as well. But I never recorded either of them. I wanted to finally be able to record a large ensemble project.

One thing I love about the large ensemble setting – whether it is under my name or my being a part of someone else’s band – is that it forces you to put away your ego. The musicians all have to come together in a way in which everybody is important. Everybody’s just as important as anyone else in the band. This is a bit of a tangent, but it is a shame that there are a lot of people who haven’t had that type of experience, that they haven’t had a strong big band experience. The large ensemble is often much less prioritized in most educational settings compared to the small group experience. But looking back at the 1930s, you have all these Big Bands like Duke Ellington’s Orchestra or Count Basie’s band. 

PG: And those bands were the popular mainstream music of that era, too.

AO’F: Yeah, they often were. I wonder if a big part of their popularity came partly from audiences appreciating seeing so many people on stage, working together to create a unified picture and unified message. I mean, sometimes I tear up when I watch a big band play because it’s so powerful to be a part of something larger. Not to sound too cliché, but with a big band, you are tapping into something bigger than yourself. 

PG: Obviously, large ensembles continue to exist, and people keep making interesting music for them. However, they are certainly not as prominent in the larger public consciousness as they were in the 1930s or 1940s. A large part of that decline was due to economics. There is the story about how Duke Ellington was playing to empty ice skating rinks and struggling to keep his band together before his legendary “rebirth” at Newport in 1956. It seems, today, you would still have those same pressures but also need to face forces of technology that can often leave people more alienated from one another. With academia generally deemphasizing the large ensemble and the other forces against that setting, how do you find that unity of which you were speaking?

AO’F: Well, I think there is a lot you can learn from that context that you can apply to smaller settings. The unity is more of an ethos than anything and you can find it in smaller contexts, as well. Consider somebody like Anna Webber. I’ve played her music in a big band. I’ve played it in a quintet. I’ve played it in a more chamber-like setting. In each, there’s something truly humbling about playing her music because every musician needs to be fully aware of each other to make the music work. Everyone needs to be on their toes and not in a way that feels restrictive, or like you can’t be yourself. You have to be with each other in a very deep way to play it. Her music is a very special example of the ethos I’m referring to. There’s a lot of other peoples’ music, where I don’t feel that unity as either a player or a listener. Instead, the music leaves space for one person to play twenty choruses so they alone can sound amazing. That gets old after a while. 

PG: Although there is the collective element, you also mentioned you had specific people in mind for this project. Did you write the parts with more of a focus on the particular musicians than their specific instruments?

AO’F: Yes and no. When I started writing the music, I realized that certain arrangements of instruments would provide the registers and sounds I wanted. And after reflecting on those sounds, I thought about who would be the right fit to make it happen. And figuring out who could do that was based on who I would want to work with. So, it was a mix of what I heard and who I wanted to work with in this capacity. 

PG: In terms of the specific musicians, about half the group are also with you in Mary [Halvorson]’s band, including Mary herself. Do you feel you communicate differently in her group than in yours?

AO’F: It’s totally different. It’s interesting because I remember being on the road with Mary’s band, not the Amaryllis band, but Code Girl. I was on stage and thought about how it felt like I was developing a powerful connection with Mary and Tomas [Fujiwara]. And then, later, with the Amaryllis group, Patricia [Brennan], too. It made sense with this project to lean into these things that are already well established and to turn them into something different. To rely on a chemistry already there, that has been there for a while, and utilize it differently. 

So, yeah, I would say it was very different. The groups serve very different purposes as well. Code Girl, for instance, is very structured around the song, the voice, and the words. Not to the point where the rest of us are a backing band or anything like that, but those things do take prominence. I think the music for this project is more focused on everyone in the group on a more equal basis. I wrote in the mindset where every part is a leading voice on some level. As a result, the music for this project is a bit more knotty and intricate. I think, generally, Mary’s music leaves a lot more space and room for input, improvisation, and openness. Whereas my stuff has some pretty concrete built-in structural things that aren’t as fluid. My goal was to take the fluidity we had built with each other in Mary’s band and put it in a situation that has a much more boxed-in structure while retaining those moments where things are incredibly open. 

PG: In terms of the music being more structured, do you feel your compositional approach with this project is similar to the one you take with your quartet, Stranger Days?

AO’F: Some rhythmic elements and ideas span the two groups. With all of my music, I take a very basic geometric approach to the way rhythms fit together but try to extrapolate as many possibilities and combinations from those types of rhythms. When something is like a tuplet rhythm or just feels more elastic, it sticks out more. Some rhythmic ideas carry across the two ensembles. 

There are moments with this octet that, to me, feel very much like Stranger Days, just for a larger setting. The biggest difference is the amount of instruments. But I tried hard not to look at this project as an opportunity, given the group’s size, to make everything from Stranger Days bigger and richer and have everyone playing all at the same time. With Stranger Days, in some ways, I have always tried to maximize the instrumentation and push it to its limits; to try to create an almost orchestral sound out of just the four of us. With the octet, there are moments, where the music reaches that deep density, but I also greatly wanted to explore more of the inter-ensemble relationships in a way that Stranger Days does not. I greatly wanted to explore different pairings within the ensemble. So, there are some tracks on the album where it’s just a duo or trio performing instead of the entire ensemble. I wanted there to be a wide breadth of configurations within one piece so that when all eight of us played, it felt purposeful. It felt like the culmination of the tension of lots of moments where there are smaller numbers of musicians performing in the group.  

Instead of having big chords on every measure of every piece, this group focuses more on personalities and how they interact. There is a place for focusing on just sounding big, but if you’re relying on that, you are working at a very surface level. I see far too many large ensembles that essentially treat horns as wallpaper. I didn’t want to take that approach. I wanted the music to feel like it was much more complicated. 

PG: Is that also why the group includes some instruments – flute, clarinet, euphonium, perhaps even flugelhorn – that are less common in most improvised music groups? 

AO’F: Yeah, definitely. Interestingly, the euphonium came by accident. When I reached out to Kalun [Leong] to ask if he wanted to work on the project, I was initially thinking of him solely as a trombonist. I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that he also played euphonium. As a trombone player, he’s such a powerful voice. But then I started thinking about the euphonium and asked him if he played it. He did, and adding the instrument opened up a whole new world for us. That’s different from David [Leon] or Kevin [Sun], where part of my consideration in asking them to join the group was how good they are on flute and clarinet, respectively, as well as saxophone. 

PG: Presumably, with those instrumental choices, you also had chamber music in mind

AO’F: Yes. Chamber music is such a big influence on this music. The particular era if chamber music – the 1930s- that I wanted to work with had the sounds of those instruments, and it was definitely an aspect I wanted reflected on the record. 

PG: The entire project is built around artistic expression, in its various forms, that came out in the 1930s. What drew you to that era?

AO’F: Well, deep in the early years of the pandemic, everyone was home and digging into a bunch of different things. They were reading books, watching movies, and going into those deep rabbit holes. I was reading Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (Obelisk, 1934) and was struck by it. Around that same time, I also watched the Charlie Chaplin movie City Lights (United Artists, 1931). I realized that they both came out within a few years of each other in the early 1930s. I was very curious about how only a few years separated them, but they had such different worldviews and artistic purposes from each other. Chaplin’s movie felt almost medicinal. It was a big-hearted slapstick film that came out at a time when people needed something like that to get through such a hard time in history. By contrast, Tropic of Cancer’s protagonist wanders around the streets, drinking, taking drugs, having sex, and missing his ex-wife. The disparity between the two works was very striking to me. And, so, I started a deep dive into what else was going on during that time. I looked at some of the other emotional currents at the time, as expressed through not only music but also film and some literature. I ended up creating a Google Document that was a ten to twenty-page long list of different things that came out each year during the 1930s. I added to the list every day and scoured YouTube for things, and read a ton. The Grapes of Wrath was also a big influence on this music, as was The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931).

As far as film, I’ve always loved film and particularly appreciate directors who use history as a launchpad for their artistic expressions. It is a bit reductive to call a project a period piece, but I guess there was a part of me that wanted to make this album a period piece on some level. But I wanted it to be less like a Downton Abbey kind of period piece and more like how Paul Thomas Anderson looks at an era in terms of focusing on overarching themes.

PG: What are those themes, and what do you feel, almost a century later, we can learn from them?

AO’F: Well, I think there was a lot of fear, resilience, and reflection. 

Charlie Chaplin’s works make you consider how artists should look at the time we’re in and try to offer something to people. I wouldn’t say his work is entirely escapist, either. I think there are parts of his work that fully acknowledge the Great Depression and wealth disparities. His work transports, captivates, and entertains without completely ignoring reality.

Woolf’s Waves was a very deep acknowledgment of both mortality and the importance of human connection. It emphasizes valuing friendship, family, camaraderie, and emotional vulnerability. 

The Grapes of Wrath is a very rough book to read. It emphasizes death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. But the ending is bizarre in a way because it is meant to be seen as a light. I think there is something to be said for fully acknowledging the despair and peril that we feel in whatever time we’re in. It shows we can’t give up, and what carries us is a determination to live. 

PG: So, your mindset was more global themes and never to write a soundtrack to a particular piece of work or series of works from the 1930s?

AO’F: Yes. A lot of the music did grab things from other pieces. “Nocturno 1932” has a big flute feature for David, and my entryway into that piece was [Maurice] Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, which premiered in the first couple of years of the ’30s. Ravel’s piece, particularly the adagio, is a devastatingly beautiful piece of music. So beautiful, yet so sad. So aching and so mournful. Ravel died a few years after he wrote it, and it feels like a late-life reflection. It’s so heavy and so devastating. And yet, the piece’s ending feels very hopeful. 

My thinking about “Nocturno 1932” has several layers to it. One was the Ravel piece; What if that had its own story and its own universe that it came from? That’s the basis of my piece, in a way. And then the title comes from a poem by Octavio Paz called “Nocturno,” which is also from the 1930s. I was looking at that poem and the language a bit and trying to transmediate the words to music.

Another big part of this project was that I met with each if the other musicians individually as I wrote the music, to show them some of the sketches and some of the melodies. We also played through things with and improvised over them to get a feeling for each piece. I had David read a poem before showing him his melody. 

Also, I believe my mother’s piano was made in 1932, and I spent some time writing this piece on that piano. So, there is a personal connection as well.

PG: One of your big influences growing up was hearing your mom play [George] Gerswhin’s piano preludes. Gershwin wrote them in 1926 but did not come out in full until the 1940s. So, they straddled the 1930s a little. Do you feel the influence of these preludes can be heard on this project at all?

AO’F: No, I hadn’t considered that. That’s interesting, but I didn’t know about the timeline of those pieces. 

PG: And what about [Igor] Stravinsky? The press materials for For These Streets mention Stravinsky. 

AO’F: Stravinsky is an interesting influence on the record. He was one of my grandfather [Chico O’Farrill]’s biggest influences and heroes. Because of that connection, it felt very exciting to dig deeper into his work and to feel like I was acknowledging my grandfather. Taking inspiration from Stravinsky felt like a nice way to continue some of my grandfather’s findings, observations, or lessons learned from Stravinsky. 

Overall, throughout this project, I would say that my grandfather was a huge presence. He’s always been a big influence on my music, particularly this project, in the sense of finding the balance between written material and improvised material. There are very overt influences from him, but also many things that come more directly from my heart; from my soul. 

PG: Given how prominent of figures your grandfather and father [Arturo O’Farrill] are in the music, do you ever feel any pressure being tied to that lineage, or is it solely a blessing?

AO’F: I feel a responsibility more than pressure. A pressure feels uncomfortable and like I’m doing something that I don’t want to do. Whereas responsibility is something very empowering. I’m not making music out of pressure. I’m doing it because it feels important. People have paved the way for me to be here and to do this work. It feels very empowering to be a part of the legacy and history. This is what I chose to do and I chose to do it with the implications of a lot of history behind me.

‘For These Streets’ is out now on Out of Your Head Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information about Adam O’Farrill is available on his website.

Photo credit: Alice Plati