Honoring the Feeling: A Conversation with Mocean Worker (Adam Dorn) and Joe Alterman on ‘Keep the Line Open’

Tribute albums have been an ubiquitous part of modern music. They generally fall into two categories. Some honor a specific recording, with artists hoping to put their own spin on a landmark work of years past, whether the George Benson covering the Beatles [The Other Side of Abbey Road (A&M, 1970)] or Nels Cline and Gregg Bendian’s Interstellar Space Revisited (Atavistic, 1999). Others honor a predecessor’s life’s work, or at least a substantial portion of it. Consider everything from  Thelonious Monk’s Plays Duke Ellington (Fantasy, 1955) to John Zorn’s The Big Gundown (Nonesuch/Icon, 1986). Such tribute albums are essential because, in the words of Dave Grohl, they are  “a chance to say ‘thank you’ in the language of music.” It is easy to write off Keep the Line Open (MOWO!, 2025) – the collaboration of Mocean Worker, the nom de plume of Adam Dorn, and Joe Alterman – as simply dedicated to the late Les McCann. It is so much more. 

At its core, Keep the Line Open reflects upon a generation of artists who created music that took what was then identified as jazz and stretched such conceptions to incorporate the rhythmic buoyancy of funk or the emotive lyricism of soul. They produced a warm sound that pulled in listeners with its raw energy. The music created a space for people to dance, drink, and party. That, however, is not to say the music lacked complexity or creative boldness. Les McCann was at the forefront of adopting electronic keyboards. Eddie Harris even electrified his saxophone with the Varitone. They pushed sonic boundaries but never at the cost of losing their audience. And the listeners bought it up, purchasing records at rates now unheard of for instrumental music. But as the years flew by, the vibe created by people like McCann, Harris, Cannonball Adderley, Ramsey Lewis, and Ahmad Jamal largely disappeared due to the simultaneous demands of the market and artists increasingly adopting Milton Babbitt’s view that serious music should progress unconcerned with public accessibility.

McCann does serve as an entry point to Keep the Line Open. In part, this is because of the late keyboardist’s role as a shared connection between both artists. Dorn, the son of legendary Atlantic producer Joel Dorn, was a small child when he met McCann and ultimately wound up playing bass in his band. Alterman had daily phone calls with McCann for over a decade and also recorded a tribute to his elder, Joe Alterman Plays Les McCann: Big Mo & little joe (self-release, 2023). Clips of McCann’s voice also appear throughout Keep the Line Open. 

But the album – except for “Burnin’ Coal” – consists entirely of original pieces that try to capture the environment in which McCann and his colleagues thrived. Through Alterman’s hot keys and Dorn’s inventive use of samples, the duo masterfully transports listeners to smoky clubs with dancing patrons. Spaces where feeling the music is as important as rationalizing it. “Yay Yay Yay” brings the listener to a dynamic gospel service, while “Moses Gonzalez” brings out the surprising connections between Latin groove and electronic dance music. Paramount is the album’s call for a balanced treatment of pathos  – emotion – and logos – logic. 

Keep the Line Open is more than just an homage to a late friend. More than a historical recreation. The album is a serious call to return creative expression to an arena that is accessible to the average audience. Artists can still use cutting-edge techniques and technology. McCann certainly did. But never forget, there are also ears experiencing the exploration. Stressed souls seeking solace in sound. Disillusioned dreamers desperately dying to dance.  Keep the Line Open is as much a proclamation to producers and promulgators as it is to the purchasing public. 

PostGenre: Keep the Line Open does a great job of not only reflecting Les’ music but also a scene that was bigger than only him. It sounds like a live recording and captures a vibe that does not really exist anymore.

Adam Dorn: Man, then you get it. We’re done. Write the article; you just explained the entire thing. [laughing]. I love that. Thank you for getting it, man. The whole point of the record was to invoke a feeling of an era that has sadly vanished. It’s one of the best periods of music, I think. I know Joe thinks that too.

Joe Alterman: Oh, yeah. Back then, you could have fun at a jazz show, right? Jazz shouldn’t feel like homework.

PG: So, why has the vibe of that era disappeared? What changed so people are not making that kind of music anymore?

AD: Do you want to start, Joe? I might go too long explaining it.

JA: Well, one interesting take on it was something Houston Person had shared with me before. It’s a perspective that I find really fascinating. Houston said he noticed things starting to shift when the DUI was instituted. Basically, before people would get arrested for driving under the influence, they would go to the club, listen to music, drink, and party. Houston noticed that once the DUI laws were instituted, people stopped drinking as much. And that’s when he noticed that the people who were still coming to listen to the music were sitting and thinking about the music, compared to dancing or enjoying the music. And he felt that was when musicians most shifted their focus from wanting to play for the people to wanting to play for the critics and other musicians. Obviously, I’m not saying that DUI laws should be repealed or anything. But I do think that may have been the point where musicians started playing less for the audience than trying to impress other musicians.

AD: I have a slightly different take on it. Honestly, if you think about it, DUI laws wouldn’t really impact performances in cities like Chicago or New York that have a more robust public transit system.

PG: So, what caused the disappearance of this kind of music, then?

AD: I feel the scene started to disappear in the early ‘70s when many labels were purchased by major conglomerates and their jazz divisions were basically slowly shut down over the course of the next fifteen to twenty years. That greatly changed the way that America gets jazz music, particularly certain types of jazz music. Fusion really got a lot of attention starting in the early ‘70s, and that left a scenario where people like Les McCann, Eddie Harris, or Ramsey Lewis, who once were major economic draws – Eddie Harris’s first recording [Exodus to Jazz (Vee-Jay, 2021)] sold a million copies, for one – were left behind. People loved their music, but it wasn’t being presented to them in a major way anymore. And if it is not presented to the audience, they likely don’t find it.

Record labels don’t have jazz departments anymore. They just don’t. I know Blue Note still exists, for example, but it is a shadow of its former self. Atlantic Records still exists, too. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Atlantic would have Les alongside Aretha [Franklin]. You’d have Max Roach but also Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and the Allman Brothers. I think the music people like Les made has been economically aged out. I think most people don’t even know that it can and should exist. The music brings such great joy, but it was on the chopping block of the economics of the label system.

JA: I definitely agree. But I want to add that the critics were at least partly to blame, too. Back when they were alive, I had talked to both Les and Ramsey specifically about this issue, and they told me there were so many times back in the day that they would get like five standing ovations on a night. But then the next day, a review would come out of the performance that would say “Ramsey Lewis played the blues all night” and trash him. I feel like that disconnect with critics somehow made an impression on a lot of the music so that musicians were paying more attention to the critics than the people who just wanted five encores.

Adam and I are fifteen to twenty years apart in age. But one thing I noticed with many people in my generation [, the Millennial generation,] is that when they were eighteen to twenty-two years old, they took away the wrong things from people they idolized. With someone like [John] Coltrane, they often tried to copy his famous recordings like A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965), but never went back to when he made R&B music or whatever. Or for Miles [Davis], they might do their first gig playing with their back to the audience, like he did. That was cool, I guess, when Miles did it. But now, when a college-age kid begins doing it, it just creates a distance between them and the audience. Students overwhelmingly do not focus enough on connecting with listeners.

AD: Yeah, that’s a great point. It reminds me of a very funny story that Marcus Miller told me.  While in Miles’ band, Marcus went to Miles and asked why he plays with his back to the audience. Miles’ answer was “I don’t know them. I know you.” And that’s possibly the best thing I’ve ever heard. I think about every musician who tried to craft a myth out of Miles putting his back to the audience. But it was just the simple desire to interact with his band more.

But I think you’re right, Joe. There is a lack of balance somewhere in there where the critics and the business side of things took this music away. And think about who those people were who gave those five encores. The people who came to these clubs in the ‘60s had their work week culminate in going to see that show. The audiences were made up of working-class folks who, more than anything else, wanted to be entertained. They spent their hard-earned money to be entertained. And, also, it’s not carbohydrates. It’s like it’s nutrition. There’s value in the music entertaining them. And the goal of Keep the Line Open is to capture that ethos. We want you to listen to the record and feel like you’re entertained, but also to hear something new every time you hear it.  

I also think the disappearance of this music is at least partly tied to how the country changed going into that part of the ‘70s, with certain kinds of funk and then disco coming out, and then in the ‘80s with new wave. The music by people like Les just kind of aged out.

PG: Adam, you were in Les’ band for a while, right?

AD: Yeah, I played with Les in the late ‘80s, and I saw what a Les McCann show was like when he still had his fastball. I felt what the audience felt when we played for them. Les was smart and picked guys he knew were gonna go off into their own music, but who also knew how to play in a club. It was a wild band because it was myself, Bobby Sparks, Keith Anderson, and a drummer named Dave Cowan, who also played with Lalah Hathaway, and we all went off in our own directions ultimately. But throughout – even after Les had a stroke – as a group we were always emphasizing feeling.

PG: That element can be heard on Keep the Line Open, in that it captures the excitement and energy of a live performance, even while it was wholly recorded in the studio.

AD: Right, but the thing is – is it truly live, or not? The idea of the record is to convey a feeling, and the best way this music ever existed was in clubs. The idea is to try to capture the feeling of hearing this music live. Joe and I were deadset on that.

JA: But we also didn’t want to just limit ourselves to Les specifically. If this were an album that had nothing to do with Les at all, I think it would still sound the same because there’s something that runs through the music of people like not only Les but also people like Ahmad Jamal and Eddie Harris that deeply resonates with us.

I remember when I first heard Les’ music, I couldn’t play well at all. I remember his music sounded very personal. It made me feel like maybe if I kept practicing, I could sound like that someday, too. Keep the Line Open reflects a sound and idea that is bigger than only Les’ music. So, it’s not a tribute in the sense that we’re trying to be like Les. We’re just being ourselves, and we have so much in common with the sound he represented. That is part of why the album is all, except for one song, original compositions. Actually, I feel like if we told Les that we did a tribute to him, he’d say, “So you played your own shit, right?”

AD: I agree 100%. Les would have loved the fact that two people very close to him and who loved his work so much, chose to write their own music, to honor him. He also would have loved that we used different technology than he would have. Les was a tech freak. He loved synths. He loved samplers. He was into everything.

JA: Les would often tell me about how he progressed to the electric phase of his career. He was so proud of that part of his career. It came about because he was playing all these clubs that had out-of-tune pianos. One day, he complained about it to Joe Zawinul, who suggested he play a Fender Rhodes. Les didn’t even know what the Fender Rhodes was at the time. But once he started on it, he felt it was just what his music needed.

AD: Right. And, for me, from day one, Les has been a North Star in terms of honestly exploring; having an honest invitation to openness. It is great to be able to make a love letter to someone that you couldn’t respect more, but do so in a way that you are working under your own set of rules. When I started making my albums, he was so supportive and curious about how I made certain sounds. He would ask about samplers and what I was doing on the computer. I think he would love that this record is a love letter to an era, but uses newer technology.

Les knew our other work, too. But Joe’s never made a record like this. And I certainly, with my horrible piano playing, am excited to finally be able to make a Mocean Worker record that actually has a real musician on top of it. It’s an amazing feeling because I’m so in love with the music and celebrating Ramsey and Ahmad and Eddie and Les. Les happens to be the centerpiece because Joe and I were both very close with him, and we were connected through him. Joe talked to him every day for twelve years, and I was in his band.

PG: So, are the audio clips of Les on the record from voice messages he left for Joe over those twelve years?

AD: Yeah, all of that audio is phone messages from Les and shared audio messages. So, this project is also a really inside thing as well. This is not simply like, “Oh, we love Les McCann.” No, Joe spoke to him up until the day he died. And on my end, my dad [Joel Dorn] and Les were basically best friends. My dad produced some of Les’ most important recordings. So, it’s a real family, too.

PG: One of Les’ albums that your dad produced was Swiss Movement (Atlantic, 1969). Going back to what you were saying earlier about changes in the music industry, that record sold so many copies that it was certified Gold by the RIAA. It went as high as number 35 on the Billboard Top 200 when it came out, alongside Led Zeppelin and the Beatles. That is crazy compared to the kinds of numbers jazz or improvised music sees today.

AD: Right, and it goes to show you that when people hear something they enjoy, it does well. I always say that people think they hate jazz until they actually hear it. That is especially true for music like that album, where the music makes you feel good. And, listen, Les and Eddie didn’t really know each other before they played together for what ended up on the record. Atlantic just had the idea that if they were both going to be in Montreux, they should get together for a set. It all happened organically. And because they were both absolutely brilliant musicians, composers, and improvisers, that record is incredible.

I remember my father saying that when the tapes for that recording came back from Switzerland and were being edited, that his entire office staff was dancing and grooving. They knew they had a hit. A hit that transcends genre. That was the beauty of Atlantic Records back then. You mentioned Zeppelin, and he was on Atlantic too, along with the Allman Brothers and the Rolling Stones, all at the same time. That’s the beauty of the story of that label back then.

JA: Even just limiting things to “Compared to What,” it is wild compared to popular music today that the song found a following. It’s about eight minutes long.

AD: Yeah. Well, thank God for FM radio at that point. Stations would play longer songs. They would play also both sides of an album. And that is a large part of how the album exploded, too.

JA: What’s interesting to me is that I play a lot of that kind of music at my gigs. Truthfully, the people that I grew up with, in terms of music fans, are really more jam band people than jazz people. And often, they say that they don’t like jazz. But, bizarrely, they’ll take me to something like a Phish concert, and the moment there is like a twenty-two-second drum build that a jazz audience would normally go nuts for at one of Les’ performances, the thousands of people in the audience go nuts for that moment too. To me, in some ways, Les is like the first jam band. Back in the day, when Les would be on the road with Freddie Hubbard, Freddie would play hard bop, and Les would play his Les McCann music. But the reviews would often accuse Les of being a sellout or something. To me, he should have been on the road with the Grateful Dead. He was really like the first jam band before such a thing really existed.

PG: Which partly raises the question of why the vibe of music by people like Les has not returned. With the increase of artist-run labels and Bandcamp, why hasn’t it returned? Is it due to the rise of the academy institutionalizing certain perspectives on music?

JA: Well, a large part of the time I talked to Les was while I was in college. And being connected to him during that time was very interesting. When I would talk to Les after a long day at school and was heading to a gig, he would remind me that those in the audience were spending their hard-earned money to come to the performance and that I had a responsibility to make them feel good. That stood in stark contrast to what a lot of my teachers taught me. Many of my teachers taught because their music wasn’t reaching enough people for them to survive as solely performing musicians. They didn’t really want to teach. When Les would tell me to make sure to play for the audience, they would often be pushing me into something more technically difficult, which ran the risk of losing the audience. They always wanted something that would pique a musician’s interest, but not an average person’s. I found the difference between the two dichotomies to be so interesting.  

AD: Fifteen years before you, I had the same experience with music school. I remember the one thing that was never focused on in school was how to actually entertain people and present music to an audience. Everything was theoretical. Nothing was about connecting with the audience and the feeling of your music. If two generations of greatly accomplished musicians know tritone substitutions and every inversion of altered chords, but don’t know how to actually move people, it forms a void.

When I think about my peers who are viewed as the luminaries in the world of jazz, I find there is a very over-intellectualized sort of MacArthur Fellowship weird twist in the jazz world over the last thirty to thirty-five years. The music has become intellectually siloed. The music, proportionately, wasn’t about the feeling as much as about an emphasis on the intellectual high art aspect. I remember playing with certain musicians – I won’t name names – for whom the last thing they wanted to do was to groove. Don’t they understand that music should move people? If you make everything angular and complicated, you won’t reach many people. That’s not to say you ignore complicated things, but it all comes in balancing that with feeling. I think that when you overeducate and institutionally focus too much on certain things, you throw the balance off. I think we see it now in music.

Finding that balance is also tough, however. I realized at some point that when you’re so educated about something, sometimes you’re too strict about how you approach it. It’s like learning a language; you’re not speaking with slang if you fully learn the grammar of say, French or German. Also, because there is money in grants that favors the more complicated things. You’re constantly reacting to the realities of the marketplace.

JA: I also noticed very early on in school that teachers can only teach technique. They can’t teach emotion. We did a whole semester on Lennie Tristano. I enjoy listening to a lot of his stuff. But I remember calling Les, and he asked me what we were studying. I told him we were studying Lennie, and Les had no clue who that was. Les instead asked when they were going to teach us about Erroll Garner, but we weren’t going to talk about him at all. And it was interesting to me that we weren’t, because I would love to try to sound like Erroll Garner. I love his sound. And when I asked one of my teachers why we weren’t going to cover Erroll, I was told, “Man, that’s been done before.” And it was so funny how different that was from Les having no clue who Lennie Tristano was. He may have been screwing with me, since they were around at the same time, but who knows.

AD: You know, the great alto player Phil Woods threw such a great line. He said at a certain point, I think it was in the mid-‘90s, that we are graduating too many tenor players. I remember when he said it because I was no longer in school by then, and I realized he was right. A guy like Eddie Harris learned how to play in clubs and jam sessions.

Part of it is also just a generational difference. For Joe, it was probably expected that he go and study music in college. Everyone else probably was. I went to school kicking and screaming. I was already working and had nobody my own age that I actually spent time with who was in music school. I had left high school early, and everyone around me was in their thirties or forties when I was only eighteen. Those around me convinced me to go to music school to meet musicians my own age because those older folks were not going to be around forever. And even after I went to school, I followed one of my father’s best pieces of advice, which was to spend as little time in class as possible and instead do as much playing as I can, because that was how I would learn the most. That’s where the rubber hits the road.

There was an incredible teacher when I was at Berklee [College of Music] named Richard Evans. He was an upright bass player and had recorded on a bunch of albums for Chess Records.

JA: He worked with Ramsey [Lewis], right?

AD: Ramsey and Ahmad [Jamal], yeah. And my dad told me to just listen to what Richard said. Don’t listen to anybody else. And I did. I know that in my case, I had some very serious things already established, so I had a different music school experience than many people. But the bottom line is that music is about feeling and connecting with people. It’s not about over-intellectualizing something. That’s not to say there is no role for intellectualizing the music. With someone like Wayne Shorter, I’m there all day and forever to be blown away, intellectually. But at a certain point, there’s only so much room for it. People also want to tap their feet sometimes. What is so great about someone like Wayne is that you can also tap your feet to his music. That’s why I love him so much.

JA: When I was in college, I interned at the Blue Note, working in their office. That let me go to all the shows there for free, which was great. But if I’d bring dates there, I quickly learned that there’s music for musicians and then there’s music to share with a regular person. Sometimes I would take them to a performance I enjoyed, but, as a non-musician, they would ask, “Is this good?” But I loved it when I would bring them to see someone like Les, Ramsey, or Ahmad, and they either liked the music right away or they didn’t. They usually liked it. But there was never a question from them of “is this good?”

PG: Does focusing on things other than the intellectual side of music alienate other musicians?

AD: Well, Les was perhaps most proud of me when he found out from me that some musicians were shittalking me. He was like, “Man, hell yeah.  You get the haters. That’s when you know you’re being yourself.” He was so happy for me. It was bizarre. Les also loved bad reviews. He felt like it was good that some people didn’t get what you did.

JA: Les was a joking guy, but when we got into that kind of conversation, he was very serious. He said the thing about bad reviews is that they don’t understand this is your music and it has nothing to do with them. To him, above anything else, he played Les McCann music. I play Joe Alterman music.

AD: Amen. Amen.

PG: So, going back to how this album was always meant to be reflective of a sound larger than only Les, was it always your intent to reflect the broader vibe of those musicians instead of specifically honoring Les?

JA: Well, one important part of this is that when Les died in December 2023, Adam and I had never met. But Les had talked to me about Adam and Adam’s dad. After Les died, Adam and I really connected on Instagram as we were sharing memories of Les. Then, Adam came down here to Atlanta to prepare a film that he had been working on. We got together and had the best time, and decided to collaborate from there.

I think, initially, we only had Les in mind for the project because we were dealing with losing Les. But the more we started talking, we realized how much we had in common around other music, and how much that music has in common with Les. It’s not that we weren’t thinking about those other musicians – we always are – I think we were hyper-focused on Les at the beginning because he had just passed and we had just connected around that.

AD: Absolutely. And to add to that, when I was in Atlanta, I saw Joe perform at a performing arts center in front of four or five hundred people. I saw how his trio made a room. The audience loved his music. After seeing that, I thought, “Damn, we should make a record together.” When I came home, I was so moved by Joe’s show that I started sketching stuff out and sending it to him to react to.

JA: Yeah, you started sending me stuff within a week or so of our meeting. It was amazing.

AD: Amazing. I was worried Joe might hate what I was coming up with, but he really felt it. And the album came together quickly from there. We put the album together in a way that was so democratic and open. We really gelled, and putting it together felt great.

JA: Since I had spoken to Les literally every day for twelve years, his passing left a huge void in my life. Adam and I working on the album helped me better come to terms with the fact that Les had passed. But it also made it clear how much, even after death, he is still always here.

Another great thing about the music on the album is that all of the songs are playable live. They’re all tunes. The music is organic and easily played and recreated.

PG: So, do you plan on playing the music live?

AD: I certainly hope so. We have some feelers out about where we would want to perform. It has to come together and make sense. I don’t want to throw caution to the wind and suddenly be like, “yo, tonight in Boise…”  I want to do gigs that make sense for us.

PG: As far as the ideas you sent back and forth, did you use the voice recordings of Les as a starting point, or did you incorporate those into the pieces later?

AD: It was a combination of the two. Some things were sketched out, and I would send them to Joe as something for him to play on top of. Then he would send me what he did, and we would recontextualize what he played and build on it. Basically, I would make grooves that would then turn into arrangements, and Joe would inform me where it should go. It was a true, straight down the middle collaboration. We would text ideas to one another. We still text all the time. And some of those texts are of things like Les speaking at a club in Baltimore in 1971. Joe sent that one to me and it gave me the idea to write a track. There was another clip of Les joking that he wouldn’t introduce you at a gig unless you gave him fifty bucks first. And that became the beginning of a track, too. Other times, I created a groove but without any audio story yet, and Joe would send me the perfect clip of Les speaking to add to the track.

Generally, the way the record was made was that I would come up with a basis in rhythm and a cursory harmonic approach. And Joe would come up with melodies and make the harmonic aspect of the track denser and more Les-like. My favorite part of this is that I would sometimes send Joe something where the melody would be written, but he would fill in and solo and do other things to heighten any melodic idea I had. He would heighten it and support it. If there was something missing, he would fill in the blanks. That’s openness. That’s true collaboration.  Too many musicians get protective or possessive of their work. But with Joe, no ego. No bullshit. That’s a hundred percent the same as what Les would have done.

JA: Same with you. If anything, you gave me a little too much freedom  because I would basically send back to you five takes of my solos, and I totally trusted you to know what to cut. You were like the editor of my stuff. It’s been a pleasure to work together.

AD: Yeah, and hopefully, this album leads to more because the kind of collaboration we have is rare. It is entirely based on trust. I’ve been lucky in my career to have worked with some of these people, where you learn those lessons about how to collaborate. Working with Brian Eno, for instance, taught me how to listen to ideas, be open to them, react to them, and respect them. It’s so weird to say that Brian Eno and Les McCann sit in the same space. One’s music has nothing to do with the other’s. But they’re both all about emotion, respect, and trust in a musical context. I love that, and I love that it transcends genre. And I love how that also comes when working with Joe.

PG: So, is that where the title Keep the Line Open comes from, the focus on communicating openly?

JA:  When I used to speak to Les, he was in Los Angeles and I was on the East Coast, so our conversations over so many years were mostly by phone. Both mine and Adam’s relationships with Les were deeply tied to phone calls.

AD: It’s funny. I was raised by a man who was deaf in one ear. He lived on the phone with all the artists that he produced. Les and my father spoke on the phone probably five times a week. So, I grew up listening to Les over the phone. I didn’t meet him until I was about twelve or thirteen. But by the time I met him, we had been friends since I was five because, to me, he was Uncle Les from the phone. When I would answer the phone, Les would say, “Dummy, put on your father.” [laughing]. He would talk to me like Fred Sanford, you know? [laughing]. It was amazing. He was talking to me like I was an adult when I was only six.

JA: What’s also hilarious, too, I just have to say, is that though Les was a bit of an electronic forefather in the music, he was terrible at working his phone. I reconnected Les and Jeff Hamilton towards the end of Les’ life. And I had to tell Jeff that if Les didn’t answer the phone when he called, not to bother leaving him a voicemail. He didn’t know how to check voicemail. Just call him back again. Jeff said, “Are you telling me that one of the pioneers of electronics can’t work a phone?” [laughing]. Actually, yeah, he couldn’t. Just funny stuff.

But Keep the Line Open reflects a few things. It is arguing for continuing the tradition of the music by Les and others. It is about keeping our friendship with Les and each other going. It is about keeping conversations flowing too.

AD: Yeah, the title is a metaphor for the fact that Les might not be here physically anymore, but he’s always here. He’s always still there if you need him. There was something special about the phone and the connection and the analogness of that device, that sort of conveyance. Just keep it open. Pass it down.

‘Keep the Line Open’ is out now on MOWO!. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Dorn and Alterman are available on their respective websites.