Taking the Journey: Rich Ruth Previews his 2025 Newport Jazz Festival Performance

The journeys in life can be just as important – if not more so – than the destinations. Music, inherently a mirror of our existence, is no different. In the words of Phillip Glass, “Every piece of music is a journey, a path that winds through the listener’s mind and spirit.” In the right hands, this emphasis on the voyage rather than the outcome can produce an art that transcends internally and externally imposed boundaries and limitations to provide a freer sound than a more structured course ever could. That is certainly the case with multi-instrumentalist (Michael) Rich Ruth and his album Water Still Flows (Third Man, 2024). Lucky audience members at the Newport Jazz Festival on Saturday, August 2, 2025, will be invited along for the ride.

Throughout, Water Still Flows often deliciously defies definition. On face value, it is perhaps even a music of contradictions. The album has an aura of ambience, but with edge and aggressiveness. Avant-garde, though approachable. The music fuses jazz and rock; however, it is not fusion as most understand that term. It has a foot in the jam band world without fully joining that scene. Otherworldly yet weirdly grounded. Tracks like “God Won’t Speak” – where the wild interplay of harp, pedal steel guitar, and violin, somehow sounds like it could come equally from Appalachian steel guitar music, Indian carnatic music, and contemporary Western classical music – minimize cultural divides. Or on “No Muscle, No Memory,” where a minimalist gamelan effect meets electric blues guitar riffs. Yet, it all works. In large part, its success comes from how none of these elements are thrust together for the mere sake of combining them. Instead, they organically evolve and grow across forty-three minutes. 

To fully appreciate the album, one is forced to treat it all as a singular whole. The theme from “Crying in the Trees,” for instance, unavoidably informs “Aspiring to the Sky.” Ruth’s slow sonic evolution is a breath of fresh air in a time driven by short attention spans. It is also a necessary byproduct of Ruth’s fairly unique approach to composition, in which he takes a simple skeletal outline and adds, layer by layer, waves and patches of sound with minimal preconception. 

The result is a work that more richly represents not only the deluge of musical styles that inform Ruth’s music but also a pouring of his life experiences into the art. The Nashville-based artist’s immediately preceding studio album, I Survived, It’s Over (Third Man, 2022), served as a cathartic release following his experiences being held up at gunpoint and carjacked, and the aftermath of such a stress-inducing event. Water Still Flows reflects a renewed strength. A survival. Maintaining buoyancy in a turbulent and tempestuous sea. The power to continue and persevere.  

We sat down with Rich Ruth to discuss his upcoming performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Water Still Flows – including the font of creativity from which it spouts, and John Coltrane’s proto-metal masterpiece.

PostGenre: This is your first time at Newport, correct?

Rich Ruth: It is my first time at the Newport Jazz Festival, but I’ve been to the Folk Festival twice now. I used to tour with the great artist S.G. Goodman. With her, we played at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022. Then, in 2023, we played an after-show there. So, I have been able to hang out at the Folk Festival, but I’ve never been to the Jazz Festival. I’m very excited to go to Jazz. I imagine the energy is slightly different than at Folk, but it will be a lot of fun. 

PG: The energy does differ slightly between the two festivals, but both are great fun. Did you enjoy your time at the Folk Festival?

RR:  Oh, my God, yes. It was incredible. In 2022, we were there the day Joni Mitchell did her comeback performance. There were very quiet whisperings that it might happen. Though the Festival team kept it under wraps incredibly well, the rumor had gotten out and we were pretty sure it was gonna happen.

PG: So, were you able to see her performance?

RR: No. We were scheduled to play at an afterparty and had to board a water taxi right as she was taking the stage. So, we missed it.

PG: That sucks.

RR: Yeah, but I did get to see so many other cool things. The smallish size of the festival is amazing given the level of artists they get. The year I was there, they had Los Lobos, Paul Simon, Billy Strings, and so many other incredible people, but it’s all in a pretty intimate setting compared to most festivals.

PG: Plus, Fort Adams, being right next to Newport Harbor with a clear view of the Pell Bridge, is gorgeous.

RR: Yeah, there are not too many festival grounds that are that beautiful. Especially since it is the middle of the summer, getting to go up there and be right on the ocean feels pretty good.

PG: Do you remember when you first heard about the Newport Jazz Festival?

RR: If I had to clock it, I would guess it was probably when I was in high school. Probably from watching the Ken Burns documentary,  Jazz (PBS, 2001).  But the Newport Jazz Festival is one of those things that just creeps into your subconscious as a music lover. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty familiar through watching many old videos, and it is very cool to be able to perform there. 

PG: As far as your own music, one thing that is interesting about Water Still Flows is that on it you combine rock and jazz elements, but do so in a way that does not seem too tied to what has been labeled over the years as “fusion.”

RR: Yes, my tastes and personality lean more towards the avant-garde side of the music. Don’t get me wrong, I love fusion. I love Chick Corea and Return to Forever. I love all of the music Miles [Davis] made in the 1970s. Jaco [Pastorius] too. But that music starts to get a little too technical. It is the same with prog[ressive rock]. I like a lot of technical music. I’ll listen to it, but it’s not something I’m too interested in trying to make. I think the avant-garde side of the music feels like a truer expression of who I am.

PG: Of course, avant-garde music can also be very technical.

RR: Of course. But I feel the freedom in avant-garde music better reflects my personality than trying to write music that is primarily athletic.

PG: It’s also intriguing how you incorporate influences from avant-garde music. While your music doesn’t necessarily adhere to what many might mischaracterize as avant-garde elements, such as screeching instruments, it incorporates avant-garde ideas in a manner that aligns with ambient music.

RR: Yeah. It all gets lumped into this mountain of music that I love. I don’t think too much about where exactly ideas come from before I get in there and start experimenting with stuff. So, I don’t set out with the mindset of things like “what if I combine guitars that sound like Sleep’s Dopesmoker (Rise Above,1999) with Pharaoh Sanders’ style of sax playing?” It all comes together naturally from all the different music that I love. Because I’m not a trained jazz musician, sometimes when I play jazz, it feels like I am impersonating it. I guess, in my own weird way, combining it with the more experimental or rock-based elements that I grew up around makes me more comfortable. I also feel like there’s always a palette where all kinds of musical ideas can coexist if you approach them with enough care and are a true student and fan of the music you are using. 

PG: Will the moments of quiet more difficult to present at a place like Newport, where you are outside, in the middle of the day, with people moving around?

RR: It can be a little more challenging at an outdoor stage at 1:00 PM than it is in a more intimate space where everybody there is tuned into what you’re doing. But I think we always build a solid foundation of pleasantness before we start challenging people. We’ve done this music enough times now that I trust the process, and it rarely feels like it’s not connecting with whoever’s watching and listening. 

PG: Do you find that audiences are receptive to adopting the more experimental concepts? A lot of people who dig more ambient music may not like sounds that are a bit more “out.”

RR: Yeah. We’ve been sculpting our live show for a couple of years now and have found that people are receptive if you put them in the right context. I think people are much more open to freer concepts if you catch them at the beginning of the set and ease them in. I don’t come out swinging with stuff that’s abrasive or in that zone. I try to coax people along and build their trust a little. Only once I have built it will I try to take them on a journey where things get darker and heavier, a little scarier, and probably pretty loud. And after I do, I consciously try to bring them back to a more gentle place. I think the Grateful Dead did a fair bit of that themselves, with drums going into weird dark improvisational stuff that, especially to a listener on substances, would probably seem a little menacing. But then they would follow it up with a gentle ballad to calm things down. 

I always try to remain conscious of the path the listener is on. I’m not out here trying to prove anything, or aiming to do something to shatter people’s expectations. I want each of my performances to be like a journey that people go on with me. One where they trust where we are going, and if it goes somewhere a little freaky, that they’re all for it. 

PG: Since you mentioned the Grateful Dead, do you see your music as connected to the jam scene that the Dead is so heavily tied to? 

RR: That’s a good question. While I don’t think our music sounds like what you would think of with most jam bands, I think what we do with this band fits in the context of how jam music approaches its audience. We’ve toured with some jam-adjacent bands. 

PG: Like your recent tour with Mikaela [Davis], who is also on Water Still Flows.

RR: Yes, exactly. We also toured with the band, Circles Around the Sun, a few years ago. I met Mikaela through them. That band is definitely more in that world. We’ve had this weird luxury of touring with a pretty diverse range of bands that you wouldn’t necessarily put us with, but it works. 

As far as the jam band culture, we have also started to have tapers come out to our shows, which I think is very cool. I feel like we’re absorbing a little bit of the jam world, and the people in that world seem to respond well to us. I also think there’s a side of that jam world with groups like Phish and King Gizzard [& the Lizard Wizard] that ultimately make adventurous music for people who are obsessed with music. We get some of those people to follow us as well, and I’m grateful for that. 

PG: As far as Water Still Flows specifically, how did you determine the instrumentation for that record?

RR: The journey is always the destination for me. Nothing fully reveals itself until I start casting the net with collaborators. I came up with some loose ideas, some motifs, or a chord progression. Then I send them to either my friend Sammy [Que], who plays sax on most of the record, or my friend Ruben [Gingrich], who plays drums. And we start imagining what else I could put on each piece. I guess the good thing about having put myself out there more with this music and with being involved with Third Man [Records] is that there is a little more visibility, and it’s easier to convince people to come by and record stuff. 

The uniqueness of our scene here in Nashville also helps. We have such a healthy community of people experimenting and improvising. The more traditional side of the music world, for a lot of really good musicians, is rolling into a studio or a gig with charts and doing exactly what you’re expected to do. But that’s not necessarily what they love to do; it is a way for them to make a living. I’ve towed that line too. 

But I think a lot of these people feel very liberated to work on this music with me. I never have strict parameters about what I want or don’t. I’m not having them play specific parts. The music is mostly a product of improvisation. Things evolve from what I’ve already written. I tinker with the recorded material for months on end, and I have to keep coming back to it and revisiting it constantly. I listen to it many times before I can sign off on it as being finished.

In that process of revisiting the recorded material, I start thinking about how things will sound if we add things like a violin, harp, or pedal steel in certain places. Luckily, all of the musicians I work with are pretty trusted friends and collaborators. It’s easy to just have them over, drink a couple of beers together, and track stuff for a few hours in my shed.

PG: So, the music starts with a pre-written composition and just organically develops.

RR: For the most part. I wouldn’t say I am using a pre-written composition, as that makes it sound a little loftier than what it actually is. But that is the idea. Every day, I try to work on assembling a rough collection of weird sounds and ideas that I’ve conjured up. But they rarely make it to the next step until someone else has put their voice on them. 

PG: You mentioned the Nashville scene a minute ago. It has a really interesting improvised music community with Zoh Amba, Belà Fleck, Jeff Coffin, and the saxophonist Bill Evans, to name a few, living in the city. Why do you feel Nashville’s improvised music scene is less discussed than many other cities?

RR: I honestly don’t know. There is a larger current of that stuff here. And I often even forget about people like Jeff Coffin being here even though he has been making music for a long time and is a mentor to many of the horn players around town. Here in Nashville, you have a concentration of amazing musicians in a relatively small town compared to New York or Los Angeles and I don’t know why it is not discussed more.

PG: The pieces on Water Still Flows were based on ideas you wrote while you were on the road. You have toured since then as well. Do you have any sense of how the music has grown or changed as you’ve continued to perform it live? 

RR: It’s changed a lot. There’s this whole translation process of figuring out how to play it live because of how, as I’ve described, it’s made in a laboratory. As much as it may at times sound like a band in a room playing together on the record, it never is. There’s rarely, if ever, more than one musician at a time playing with the music that’s already been recorded. I also tend to throw everything at the wall and slowly peel it back. But that approach leaves me with things –  like eight synth tracks on one song – that I can’t replicate live even if I had the capabilities to do so. 

Live, we use the record primarily as a jumping-off point. In many ways, we approach the music similarly to jazz musicians playing the head and then improving a lot before getting back to the head again eventually. Inevitably, through doing that for years on end with these tunes, they change a lot and sound very different than how they did a couple of years ago. Because we improvise a lot, we’ll often accidentally stumble upon new corners of the music that then become a touchstone of how we play it. The songs morph.

PG: You can also hear those changes when comparing your album I Survived, It’s Over (Third Man, 2022) to the live recording of those songs on Live at Third Man Records (Third Man, 2023).

RR: Yeah, and if you listen to a 2025 recording of us playing those songs, they’re completely different from both recordings as well. 

PG: How much, if any, of those changes come from approaching the music with different musicians? Presumably, not all of the musicians you are touring with are the same as on the record.

RR: The change in musicians is part of it as well. The touring group is a mix of some who are on Water Still Flows and some who are not. The touring band members are all very good friends of mine. Sammy Que, the sax player on the record, is my closest collaborator with all this stuff live and on the record, and an important part of my touring band. On the recordings, I usually play all of the bass parts myself unless it needs an upright bass. And, for drums, my friend Reuben Gingrich has an amazing home studio setup where I can work very quickly. So, for live performances, we need both a bassist and a drummer, and have my friends Taro [Yamazaki] and Taylor [Floreth] playing those parts respectively. 

For the Newport run, I’ll have my friend Patrick [M’Gonigle] on fiddle, who also played it on the last record. We’re also flying in my friend Parker James, who’s an incredible vibraphonist. I wish we could tour with him, but we don’t have room for a vibraphone in the van. But he plays with us often when we’re in town or if it’s something nearby like at [the] Big Ears [Festival]. And for Newport, we decided to rent a vibraphone and fly him in. We want to present our music in as “jazzy” a way as we can. 

PG: Even without emphasizing the more jazz-leaning elements of your music, you will likely find a pretty warm reception at Newport. The festival has always presented more than solely jazz, with people like Led Zeppelin or Mos Def performing over the years.   

RR: Yeah, I get a sense the audience trusts the curation of the festival because something like De La Soul at first feels like a stretch for a jazz festival, but when you think about all the music that they sampled – a lot of jazz and Maceo Parker recordings – it often comes from the jazz world. There’s a side of me where I recognize that Newport is a Jazz Festival in this modern age with bookings like De La Soul or Janelle Monáe and is not just Capital J Jazz, 

But at the same time, we’re not a jazz band. It is a little nerve-wracking to see your name on a flyer near someone like Ron Carter. That can be intimidating and make you feel like an impostor. I hope nobody asks me to play “Autumn Leaves” with them. [laughing]. And there is also the history of the festival, with people like John Coltrane or Miles Davis that can make playing there seem a little intimidating at times. 

PG: Since you mentioned Coltrane, in another interview, you stated that you view his album Ascension (Impulse!,1966) as connected to death metal. Why do you think people don’t examine those connections more often?

RR: I think those worlds are in their own orbits, and the majority of the people that are gonna get really into Morbid Angel aren’t the same people exploring John Coltrane’s later work. 

But I do think there’s a parallel. I listen to metal all the time. But, to me, Ascension is more abrasive, intense, and extreme than even the gnarliest metal album. When you listen to Ascension, there’s something especially abrasive about it. Screaming in a group that literally murdered their own members still isn’t as intense sounding, to me, as John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and McCoy Tyner all reaching as far out as they can go, all at the same time. 

But I do think there’s a through line of people who are drawn to the appeal of both of those things. One thing I hope with younger listeners is that genre is becoming less of a border and prohibitive factor. I think the world of music, for listening at least, is becoming a lot more inclusive. Hopefully, in the next generation, there will be a lot more kids who like John Coltrane as much as they do the band Carcass. 

Ascension is not the type of music you put on while driving your car or grocery shopping. You need to prepare yourself for it and I can listen to it only a few times a year. When I was making I Survived, I sat with Ascension. While I was aware of the album, I had never just sat with it and made the intention to just listen to the entire thing. Sitting with it was a very liberating experience. 

PG: How so?

RR: Well, if the greatest jazz musician ever could get away with this and put this out. Why should I have any reservations about taking particular risks on my recording? Maybe someone won’t like it. But who gives a shit?  Coltrane probably alienated three-quarters of his entire audience with Ascension, and he didn’t let that stop him. Why should I let a musical idea stop me?

Catch Rich Ruth at the Newport Jazz Festival on Saturday, August 2, 2025. More information on the Festival can be found here. We will be providing live coverage of the event. ‘Water Still Flows’ is out now on Third Man Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp.