Most Like Myself: A Conversation with Brian Marsella on the iMAGiNARiUM

When viewed in the abstract, imagination is a very strange thing. A world that emphasizes logical reasoning would seemingly make no use of visions of the nonexistent. And yet, there is something special and powerful about the fantastical. The ability to play make-believe is a critical step in a child’s development. And as Albert Einstein – one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest minds- noted, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” What gives? Why is imagination so important? Part of its significance lies in its unique role in marrying experience with learning. In this sense, the mythical provides a great reference point for a listener thrown into the wild scenery of MEDIETAS (Tzadik, 2024), a three-chapter work by Brian Marsella’s large ensemble, the iMAGiNARiUM.

MEDIETAS takes off from a space left by the immediately preceding work, chapter one: THE CLOCKS HAVE GONE MAD (Red Palace, 2016). Where the predecessor album’s cuckoo clocks of mayhem interspersed with peaceful tranquillity thrust a listener into a dizzying delirium, MEDIETAS’ opener “Time Floats Away” provides a much-needed exit from the chaotic living room of doom. But that escape comes through a sonic wormhole where traditional logic is often discarded. “Raindrops fall upside down” and “the future is an illusion” in this “no dimension for sound.” It starts a journey through the three chapters full of wonder, magic, amazement, horror, and confusion. Often, seemingly familiar thoughts visit, but they are presented in ways that seem nevertheless foreign. “Astral Atrocities Exorcised, Plum Sauce, and … Oh No!,” for instance, shifts between Zappa, Latin jazz, and what sounds like some lost 70s funk single ripe for sampling. Much later, “The Temporary Bliss of Paralysis” is somehow a noirish surf rock work. Even in moments of clarity, the future remains uncertain, and it is impossible to predict what will happen next.

But MEDIETAS does more than merely present places that both are and those that are never to be. Recall that imagination is a confluence of experience and learning. The iMAGiNARiUM was born out of the Downtown scene, where diverse influences lead music to novel and exciting terrain. The ensemble of Marsella, Jessica Lurie, Josh Lawrence, Itai Kriss, Meg Okura, Jon Irabagon, John Lee, Sae Hashimoto, Jason Fraticelli, Anwar Marshall, Rich Stein, and Cyro Baptista bring a wide range of inspirations to their collaborative efforts. In the case of the group’s bold leader, these come from his background in Western classical music, his deep explorations of the improvisational essence of jazz, and his grooviness in approaching surf-rock. He also brings his time with John Zorn, a frequent collaborator and the inspiration for his teaching future generations of musicians. In maintaining a wide range of artistic approaches, MEDIETAS is ultimately a gripping, compelling, and unique experience to behold. It will be fascinating to see the iMAGiNARiUM perform this music live, as they will do at Roulette on September 27, 2024.

PostGenre: Going back, what first inspired iMAGiNARiUM?

Brian Marsella: Well, the first album started in 2009 as a result of my being in several different bands at that time. I was in two groups with Cyro Baptista – Beat the Donkey and Banquet of the Spirits. I also had a band called Caveman, with guitarist John Lee and drummer Tim Keiper. Both John and Tim on the original iMAGiNARiUM album. John’s on this second one as well. I was also in a jazz quintet, The Flail. I had several groups I was involved with and started to write for, all to varying degrees. However, each band had very specific lenses of music. I loved all of them. But I don’t think I loved any enough to want to be exclusively in their area of music. 

So, I booked a studio in North[ern New] Jersey for a week. I brought each of my ensembles in for one or two days and recorded the entire week. By the end, I had a lot of music, and when I listened to it, I thought that if I released it the way it came out, it would sound too much like a compilation album of different bands. I didn’t want that and was in a quandary over what to do. Eventually, that became the first iMAGiNARiUM album.

To me, the iMAGiNARiUM is a collective formed out of the very large community of musicians I was involved with in many different bands. I wanted to incorporate all those groups and put them into one place. I think on the first album, there were something like twenty-one musicians who created that music. And then, on this last one, I haven’t counted, but it’s probably closer to thirteen or fourteen.

PG: Why did the band get smaller with MEDIETAS?

BM: Part of it is that when I write music, I am ultimately writing with specific musicians in mind. I hear those specific people in my head as I write. One of the things that happened with the first iMAGiNARiUM album was that I decided on a certain set of songs. In putting together the first recording, I probably had close to forty or fifty hours worth of music from that week in the studio. I decided to make it smaller, into the number of songs that ultimately ended up on that first album. I realized that I could orchestrate and arrange around the basic tracks that were laid in the studio. Up to that point in my life, I never had much of the mindset of a producer who could create in ways beyond the music as it was performed live. 

On the first album, I started to imagine a children’s chorus. So, I had a bunch of kids come in and record. Something similar happened with how  Meg Okura wound up in the ensemble. I started hearing strings, and I thought of her on the violin. We had met through another band I was in at that time. While I do write for specific people, I also hear certain sounds. I know a large enough community of musicians that could let me do anything on the first album. There’s even tap dance and body percussion on it. 

PG: So, the group’s unique instrumentation comes down to what you hear for the parts?

BM: Yeah, yeah. Honestly, having a group larger than four or five people is impractical. Especially when working with musicians in the New York scene who are involved in so many things. Trying to schedule people for tours and things is difficult. But I figured if we could get a group of seven people together for several years, we could create most of the music. And now, the current iteration is somewhere between eleven and fifteen people in the ensemble. 

PG: As the group’s size has changed, so has how much time it has taken you to produce records for the group. The first one took five years, and now you produced three parts over a year. What allowed you to be quicker in releasing new chapters?

BM: You’re constantly growing. From 2012 to now is twelve years of growth. I’ve recorded many other albums, both under my name and with other musicians during that time. I’ve recorded about twenty-five albums now with John Zorn, for instance. That has meant spending significant time in the studio, and you learn a lot from that. 

The first time was also a matter of money. I didn’t have the money to finish it. I didn’t even know what I was doing with it. It took a long time because the whole concept wasn’t fully there. I became a much more organized person, too. The pandemic gave me a lot of time to both compose and organize that music. So when we went into the studio to record this new album, most of it was recorded in a day and a half, which is kind of crazy for that much music. We recorded at Guilford Sound in Vermont. And then we needed another day at Bunker Studio in Brooklyn to finish overdubs and fix a few tracks that weren’t quite right. But most of it was recorded in a lot less time. Plus, I have a home studio and could do a lot of the editing myself. 

PG: How many chapters do you see there being of iMAGiNARiUM? 

BM: That’s a very good question. I don’t know. I know there is at least a little bit more after these four. I know what the next album will be, but whether that is the last, I’m not sure. I thought that this could even end after four chapters, but to say something’s the final chapter becomes kind of fatalistic. But I know there’s at least one more. I named the album MEDIETAS because I know it’s the middle and there’s at least one more after it.

PG: So – especially since you work with [John] Zorn often, you do not see iMAGiNARiUM turning into something similar to his Masada works in terms of output, where there are volumes and volumes of recordings?

BM: No. It’s hard for me to see that. I’ve been a very close collaborator with Zorn and know his world well. But we’re different composers in the sense that, to some extent, I feel like when I’m in a musical world, there’s only so much that I want to express within that world before I need to move on to something else. So, I don’t imagine iMAGiNARiUM will result in many volumes of recordings. 

I would much rather focus on my other groups. I have a band called the Modulators, which started as a trio and is now a quartet. It mixes surf rock with psychedelia, film music, and punk. Its music also has an indie, low-fi quality. I’ve been writing music for that group and plan to release a record. I have a solo piano album that may be out next year. I have another one, a duo of piano and vibraphone, a suite of mine that I wrote for me and my wife, that we will record next year. 

PG: As far as Masada, you teach a course on it at The New School. Does the fact that the project is so voluminous make teaching it difficult? 

BM: No, no. Masada is one of the performance ensembles at The New School. I’ve now experienced-  in playing with Electric Masada, the new Masada quartet, Banquet of the Spirits, and a set of piano trios – that music now in many different settings. I also recorded two albums of the music with Zion 80. I’ve played through and know a lot of that music. When I see the students audition for the ensemble, I get a vibe for which ones they might be more interested in or better equipped to perform. And then, sometimes,  I’ll choose songs I don’t even know or I haven’t heard. It’s cool to experience those for the first time too. But even with Zorn, through the years he has established particular songs that always come out in performance, even out of the hundreds of compositions he has written for Masada. There’s a smaller chunk of songs that he often likes to go back to. 

PG: Compositions like “Karaim” or “Hath Arob.” 

BM: Right, right. Yeah. And sometimes I’ll do those. “Hath Arob,” is always a particularly good one to do with the students. It easily opens up to teaching them about conduction, what his signs mean, and all that. 

PG: How did you first get connected with Zorn anyway? 

BM: I came to New York in 1998 to go to The New School. There was a scene of musicians at The New School who were very into the downtown scene. They were into not just Zorn but a lot of the music happening at the Knitting Factory and Tonic at that time. I was tangentially interested in that scene but also came from being mainly a classical pianist. There were so many great straight-ahead jazz players there, and I was interested more in getting that side together. So, my journey to meeting Zorn was much later than many of my friends who were already involved in the downtown scene. Some even moved to New York specifically to get it to get involved with that scene. 

But for me, connecting with Zorn came through my band, Caveman. The drummer in that band, Tim Keiper, was also in Cyro Baptista’s Beat the Donkey. I got to know Cyro and started to play with him. It was really through playing with Cyro that I met Zorn since they are such close collaborators. With Cyro’s band, we recorded a Masada album. And, then, there were other Tzadik [Records] artists and bands that I started to work with. And ultimately, in 2011, I went into the studio with Zorn for the first time for an album he was doing called Mount Analogue (Tzadik, 2012). It was with the Banquet of the Spirits group – Cyro, Tim, Shanir Blumenkrantz, Kenny Wolleson, and myself. That was the first time I had met and worked with Zorn, and it went very well. It’s been a steady progression since. 

PG: You also teach another Zorn-related class at The New School on Cobra, his game piece for improvisors and a prompter in which there are very detailed rules but no preconceived sequence of events. Is it difficult to teach something like that?

BM: No. It’s actually an amazing thing to teach. Again, when I teach courses, they’re performance-based. I teach the students how to perform Cobra, and then we perform it. In the case of something like Cobra, it’s very easy and great to teach because there is a very clear score and very clear guidelines and rules for performing it. 

The hardest challenges of doing Cobra in a school setting are logistical ones. It takes a lot of room to perform it, and the rooms at The New School aren’t that large. Having twelve musicians who need to be in a semi-circle in which they can see each other and me is logistically difficult. It also gets very loud in those rooms when you have two drummers, two keyboardists, and three electric guitarists. But the students at The New School who take Cobra love it. It blows their minds that something like that even exists. It is a lot of fun and something you learn by performing. I’m very grateful to both Zorn and Richard Kessler, the dean of The New School, for not only bringing Cobra there but also trusting me to teach it. 

PG: The new iMAGiNARiUM album, MEDIETAS will be released on Zorn’s Tzadik Records. To ask you about one of the other albums you have done for that label, with Outspoken – The Music of the Legendary Hasaan (Tzadik, 2018), you have a trio – with Christian McBride on bass and Anwar Marshall on drums – approaching the somewhat obscure music of Hasaan Ibn Ali. How did that project come together?

BM: To be completely honest, Zorn approached me to do that project. He was very interested in Hasaan’s music. Zorn has endless amounts of curiosity and interest in all mediums of art and all kinds of artists, philosophers, and thinkers. He has an art collection. He has a collection of movies. And he has a crazy music collection, which includes many recordings by Hasaan that have never been released to the rest of the world. When we recorded Outspoken, there had been only one album released to the public with him; The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan (Atlantic, 1965). Zorn wanted to do an album of Hasaan’s music. Years before he asked me to do it, he was involved with a guitarist to try to make an album of Hasaan’s music, but the project never really took off, and I guess he let it go. Once Zorn and I started to get close, he thought about it again. 

Zorn knew that I was from [Philadelphia], like Hasaan. At the time, he had also been working with Christian, who is also from Philly. I think when Zorn met Christian, he was very surprised that Christian even knew who he was or wanted to work with him. Zorn was surprised by how much Christian loves this world [of freer music]. I think in Zorn’s mind, he saw me, a crazy piano player from Philly, as the right guy to do this Hasaan album with Christian. So, he called me and asked if I wanted to do it with Christian. Of course, I told him I wanted to. 

PG: It seems many people are surprised by Christian’s interest in avant-garde music, but between his trio with Laurie Anderson and Rubin Kodheli, his work with Zorn, and other projects, he has explored that space. He has done a little bit of everything musically. 

BM: Yeah. I mean, I can say that Christian is one of those musicians that doesn’t have boxes. He talks about this in other interviews too, where, at a certain point in his life, he was happy to take every gig that came his way. There’s something to learn from playing with everybody. He loves music. And that’s something that greatly resonates with me too. I love all music. 

Honestly, I don’t even like the term genre. It means nothing to me. Genre is something that exists after the fact. Nobody creating music, who is composing music, puts it into a genre. We just do what we do. 

PG: So, does the idea of genre come from the business side of music? 

BM: Largely, yes. When you needed to sell music, it needed to go into a bin at a place like Tower Records or Sam Goody, and that bin had to have a label on it. 

One thing I’ve seen that’s changed a lot with the music world, and this is one of the good things about the ease of getting music and streaming music –  there’s a lot of bad things about it – is that I see young students who have been exposed to so many genres and ideas early on. As a result, many young musicians today are not tied to one style and don’t want to be in one world. Music used to be very compartmentalized, and there was a certain culture around each type of music. If you played a certain kind of music, you did a certain drug, wore certain clothes, or spoke a certain language. There was a very specific aesthetic attributed to genres and the scenes of music. And I think all those things have broken down. People are now pulling things from all areas of music, and it is great to see that. I think Christian was an OG person of that in how he loved music and would play in every scene. I think that that’s great. And I think it’s great that he’s such a prolific and important voice in music today because his beautiful, generous spirit and openness are breaking down a lot of those boundaries. I’m very appreciative of Christian for that. 

PG: How did Anwar become a part of the trio for that project?

BM: After I agreed to do the album with Christian, Zorn asked me about who I thought should be on drums. He wanted to keep it as an all-Philly band. He thought of some people, and we discussed them. But I told him I knew the right guy for this project, and that is how Anwar became the drummer.

PG: Were you familiar with Hasaan before Zorn asked you to be a part of this project?

BM: No. When Zorn originally asked me to do the album, I did not know who Hasaan was. I had heard of the album with Max Roach and had probably even listened to it when I was studying at The New School. But, if I did, it probably didn’t make much of an impression on me at that time in my life. 

So, when Zorn asked me to do that project, I was very upfront with him. I told him I’d be happy to do it but needed to listen to the Max Roach album. So, I went and listened to it. But I was concerned that I would be recreating a piano trio album with no frame of reference, and I wasn’t interested in that. I told Zorn I was worried about doing that, and he shared much more of Hasaan’s music with me. He had CDs worth of Hasaan playing solo piano at Max Roach’s house. And one of the things that I heard was so crazy. Each time Hassan played these songs, they were all totally different. The structures and forms were different. The changes were different. He seemed like a certain kind of mad genius. And getting inside his world kind of felt like a character study. It took me several months to get super deep. I transcribed all the songs and put arrangements together. I rehearsed the music with Christian and Anwar for a couple of hours, we did a gig at the Stone, and then we recorded the album the next day. I think everything was done in one take, and we finished the album in an hour. 

PG: To go back to the iMAGiNARiUM, from the outside, the group’s music seems very unpredictable. Do you leave things open to chance as part of the pieces? 

BM: Somehow, I wish maybe there was even more room for chance. In terms of the live performances, there’s a lot more chance. When you have a larger ensemble, though there is generally less room for it. The more musicians you’re working with, the more structure that there needs to be. The thing that was new with this last iMAGiNARiUM album was that – and maybe it’s something that came from working with Zorn and how he has influenced my own ideas –  I had bare sketches almost as if it was a movie scene. I knew the feeling I was looking to create, but there was barely anything on the page. I think one thing too is that when working with improvising musicians, I know that whatever they play in the moment is the right choice. So, from that point of view, there’s a lot of chance. But it’s a very well-educated chance. 

I think the difference between the iMAGiNARiUM and my other groups is less about chance and more that the other groups are much more genre specific and fit more into a particular aesthetic. The iMAGiNARiUM is the place where I feel I can be the most like myself because its musical influences are anything and everything. The challenge with that approach is that the musicians you know can also speak many musical languages, so you have to have a very large group. 

PG: In terms of that focus on a broader scope beyond genres, you teach a course on cross-genre improvisation at The New School. How do you feel teaching that course may have shaped iMAGiNARiUM?

BM: Interesting question. Well, I didn’t set out to have music that crosses so many genre worlds. I think a lot of that is just the result of the musicians that I came in contact with and the things that they opened up in me. They showed me their colors in worlds that I love. 

But if I’m trying to tell a certain story through music, sometimes setting it in a genre context helps tell that story. Doing so can help relate people to the music because these are cultural references that people understand. It puts the listener in an environment where the story will communicate. But I’m also aware that you don’t want to have these things be too cliched. I’m not somebody who specifically likes to take certain genres and intentionally mix them to create something new. That’s not part of my process or my aesthetic. 

The cross-genre class that I teach at The New School wasn’t even started by me. It was started by Andy Milne about a year before I took it over. However, the original idea of that course was to mix the classical students with the jazz students. It’s a term I don’t like, but “New Music” has blurred the lines between modern jazz, improvised music, avant-garde music, and contemporary classical music. The idea for the course was basically to take classical musicians and jazz musicians together to try to get the classical musicians to improvise. 

To some extent, I think the course didn’t quite work as it was initially conceived, so I’ve been changing it over the years. It’s become an open thing. But I think the fact that I have been in many musical worlds that I understand the aesthetics of – particularly because I originally came from the classical world; all of my training from five years old through my first year at Peabody Conservatory was in classical music – gives me a broad background. I have improvised, composed, and played in all kinds of bands. Back when, I was trying to become a concert pianist. But I think that even from that mindset, I’ve always had a mix between the discipline of a classical musician and the creative spirit of a jazz musician. 

PG: For a few years, you could not play the piano due to tendonitis. Do you feel that experience has also shaped how you approach the instrument? 

BM: I don’t know if it necessarily changed how I approach the piano. But it changed everything within the course of my life. It took me several years to heal and even imagine that I would play music again. In hindsight and reflection, I realized that part of the tendonitis came from a deeper part of myself – one could say my spirit or my soul – shutting my body down.  At that point in my life, I would practice classical music for six to eight hours each day. I hadn’t lived a lot of life. I didn’t have a girlfriend. I never had a girlfriend. I lived my life in music from when I was two until that happened, whether practicing or performing. I think somewhere, a deeper part of myself knew I would not be happy just being an interpreter of European music of the past. I had a voice and a view. I knew there were things that I needed to express, but I had no idea what they were because I hadn’t lived life. I had to confront a lot of things. I couldn’t even play music for a long time. 

Having tendonitis and being unable to play piano led me on many paths. The ultimate irony, however, is that it led me closer to music. Especially the music that I wanted to create. It didn’t seem like a direct route to that because it took several years for my playing to recover, but that’s what happened.

Brian Marsella’s iMAGiNARiUM will be performing at Roulette Intermedium on September 26, 2024. Tickets are available here and there will also be a livestream on Youtube. ‘Medietas’ will be released on Tzadik Records on October 18, 2024. More information on Brian Marsella can be found on his website.