Evolution of Seeds: A Conversation with Peter Evans on ‘Ars Ludicra’

The popular perception of time is linear. One thing leads to another and then to another. But the passage of time is better viewed as a cyclical path, with shadows of the past and hints of the future emerging throughout. As Marcus Aurelius notes in Book VI of Meditations, “Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.” This conception of time emerges in the work of trumpeter Peter Evans, particularly on Ars Ludicra (More is More, 2025).

Ars Ludicra is the third studio album by Evans’ quartet, Being and Becoming. The ensemble’s name itself suggests a progression of time, reflecting both the present and the future. But the group’s instrumentation does as well. Originally envisioned as a primarily acoustic project, one can hear the remnants of a classic ’60s sound throughout the group’s latest recording. The decision to record Ars Ludicra at the historic Van Gelder Studios, where so many critically significant recordings of the era were first put to wax, certainly helps. However, the band is also moving to a more futuristic territory with almost the entire group – the leader, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and bassist Nick Jozwiak – incorporating electronics as well. The sole acoustic stalwart is the drummer, Michael Shekwoaga Ode. But even here, the concept of time is not what it seems. Better known for his elegantly subtle strokes and masterfully powerful strikes, Ode isn’t a stereotypical timekeeper. Further, Being and Becoming’s drum seat is a revolving one in an ensemble of otherwise static roles, with Savannah Harris serving the role before Ode and Tyshawn Sorey since. And, even when unmodified in its original incarnation, the entirety of Ars Ludicra underwent significant post-production modifications by engineer Mike Pride.

But there is another element to Ars Ludicra which is far more subtle. The incorporation of electronic elements is hardly new to Evans, whose quintet previously explored the space extensively. However, one of the trumpeter’s more recent fascinations has been that of music from the Renaissance era. Again, while it is easy to try to divide sounds from generations ago from those of the twenty-first century, our conversation suggests they may be more connected than they first appear. Some of the repetition and building of lines of individualized improvisatory expression draws a clear musical throughline from Early Music to Beethoven to Duke Ellington to John Coltrane to electronic experimentation.

All these influences converge on Ars Ludicra, an album that feels familiar yet radically unconventional.  A piece like “Pulsar” speaks as much of the splicing and looping of musique concrete as it does the Blue Note labeled ancestors who used the same recording space, with a splash of Afro-Cuban rhythms. “My Sorrow Luminous” pulls equally from 70’s Miles Davis and Weather Report as it does punk rock. Ars Ludicra is an album that boldly pays no heed to division, whether of time, culture, style,or scene. Even for Evans, who has long shown a valiance in attacking sonic ideas, it is an incredibly bold outing.

We sat down with Evans – a Guggenheim Fellow and educator who has collaborated with such artistic heavyweights as John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Braxton, and George Lewis –  to discuss the seeds from which his creativity grows. 

PostGenre: You recorded Ars Ludicra at the historic Van Gelder Studio. Do you feel something unique to that venue can be heard on the recording?

Peter Evans: I’ve done some other recordings there before; sidemen recordings for other people. Today, it is run by Don and Maureen Sickler. I’m pretty sure Maureen worked with Rudy Van Gelder during his life and took over the studio after he died. Don is a trumpet player, composer, and arranger. So, they’re both way into music, and Don’s way into the trumpet specifically. When I’ve been at the studio before, I’ve noticed that the trumpet sounds particularly amazing in that room.

For the recording, I knew I wanted to do an isolation booth-type recording with tons of editing. They have iso booths at the studio, but I also wanted to make use of how well the main room works with the trumpet. So, I put myself in the main room, and the rest of the band members were each in the booths. 

The Sicklers are extremely efficient and were ready to go within about half an hour of when we first showed up at the studio. It was not like most times, where you go to a studio, and it takes two hours to get everything set up. 

PG: What do you feel most sets Ars Ludicra apart from the prior two albums by Being and Becoming? 

PE: The other two were recorded at a place called Seizure’s Palace, which is a rock studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. It’s a big, cavernous basement, which you can hear on those records. There was no isolation. 

But I think what most sets Ars Ludicra apart is the amount of post-production and editing. I didn’t really do much in post-production on the other two albums. Ars Memoria had some, but on the first one, there was almost nothing. For Ars Ludicra, I wanted to have pieces like “Pulsar” that are constructed in post-production mixed in with those like “Malibu” that sound largely the same on record as they would live.

PG: While the vibraphone uses electricity, much of the press materials for the group’s first album discuss how it was born as an acoustic group. Was it always your intention to incorporate more electronics as Being and Becoming has continued to grow, or is that just how things naturally developed?

PE: When I did the first album, I already had a group in place, my quintet. We didn’t get a ton of hype, but we did tour a fair amount and made three records. We got to do a lot, but I felt that group had run its course. I had done so much work with electronics with the quintet, which was amazing, and I couldn’t think of improving upon that group. So, I decided to strip things down, and that is where the first Being and Becoming came from. That album was made after one day of rehearsal. I don’t think we played any of that material from that album live. 

[Ars Ludicra] was really more of something that we built up to in 2023 and, especially, in 2024. That version of the group played a lot. It takes a lot of work to get a band out there to play, but we played on the West Coast, had several dates in Europe, and a few one-off performances. We played a really nice gig at Nublu, which was the first time we tried some of the tunes that ended up on the album. 

The other thing was that [bassist] Nick [Jozwiak] started bringing in the Moog Sub 37 synthesizer. The way that he plays it and incorporates it into his own practice, even separate from the band, is very unusual. It’s hard to describe, but he’s dovetailing that instrument and his bass seamlessly. He even plays them simultaneously. He’ll have the attack turned way down, then come in on top of it, with an arco note on the upright. In doing so, he creates a blended sound. 

Other times, he plays against arpeggiator-type sounds. One piece we plan on recording for the next album uses the arpeggiations themselves as chord changes, and we map melodies and bass notes around that. Anyway, Nick’s use of a synthesizer just became a huge part of the sound of the group. Especially when working with a drummer as powerful as Michael [Shekwoaga Ode], having the sub bass frequencies really cranked in the PA created a whole different sound for the band. It was a very extreme sonic projection for the group. And as we incorporated synthesizer, [vibraphonist] Joel [Ross] changed what he did too. But the main impetus for incorporating more electronics was really Nick’s bringing the Moog Sub 37 and our encouraging him to further develop his use of it in the group.

PG: In terms of generally working with electronics and acoustic instruments, do you feel there is anything you learned from being in Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble that you feel may have influenced your work in this area? 

PE: That’s interesting. I was in Evan’s Electric-Acoustic Ensemble when I was really young, and it greatly influenced my quintet. When I was initially invited to join Evan’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble for a few performances in 2007 or 2008, I already knew about the group and their albums. I was super psyched to play with the group. I’d probably been in New York for only about five years or so at the time. I would go over to the UK, and everybody in the group was new to me and much older than me. They were coming from a very different space, culturally and musically, than I was. So, when I got back from some of those gigs, I was already thinking to myself from a bandleading perspective of how it would be very interesting to incorporate electronics, especially live processing, into a group where we’re playing pieces. I coincidentally met Sam Pluta around that same time, and that’s how the quintet started. 

But the extent to which there is a connection between my music more generally and the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble is an interesting question. Different kinds of electronic music, in general, have greatly shaped how I even approach the trumpet. It has shaped how I compose for groups and arrange music. It has even changed how I interact with my instrument. Those influences have been there in my music for a long time now, but lately I’m especially thinking a lot about them. I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music. I’ve also been working on some new solo music.

When you introduce certain electronic music processes into a sound, even something as simple as a delay, you’re already introducing a horizontal time element, and that influences the form and way the music unfolds. You are not simply modifying a sound in a small instant. The change in time element impacts the structure of the entire piece. Lately, I have been trying to think more about how to reverse engineer that and introduce elements that come from electronic manipulations of sound into an acoustic composed or improvised context. 

PE: For solo music, I primarily look at how objects can be filtered through the instrumental palette. You need repetition on some level, but while the repetition is happening, you’re looking at light reflecting through a prism in different ways. The thing that’s influencing me is that aspect of electronic music. I’m checking out a lot of music by Rian Treanor, an electronic musician from the UK, and others associated with him. His music has this quality; it’s not exactly repetitive, but he does use simple sonic elements in quick rotation. His stuff is at the limit of what could be called club music. There are little elements in rotation and also a whole other layer of development, in the way these things are being filtered, delayed, or modified. It is done so you’re really hearing two things simultaneously. You need a constant stream of material happening first for the other process to be audible and to happen. It’s a very different way of generating material than the note-to-note improvised instrumental approach or using a pattern or cyclical approach. 

PG: So, for a piece like “Pulsar,” you are not initially sitting down and deciding to borrow from musique concrete. Or, for “Images,” to add sounds from Brazilian music?  

PE: No, all that stuff happens later. 

“Pulsar” is a piece that I have been working on in many different ways for several years. There are many different versions of it, and the one on the album has almost nothing to do with the other versions. There’s a shared rhythmic ostinato at the beginning, but other than that, the piece developed in so many different directions that when we played it live, each would be a different version we constructed before each set. Each night, before playing, we would decide which version to do. It’s more of an episodic piece that makes me think of someone like [Charles] Mingus or even Duke [Ellington] who had pieces that evolved from improvisation, where big blocks move from one to the next, and you’re not going back. For “Pulsar,” we had recorded all the blocks but didn’t actually know how they would all fit together. In that sense, the actual composition of the piece came much later. Actually, the very last section of “Pulsar” takes improvised material and maps it onto some other material that was happening in a totally different section before. 

With “Images,” there is a deliberate – not  plagiarism – homage to a [Antonio Carlos] Jobim called “Image.” I took the first melodic cell – three or four notes – of Jobim’s piece and wrote a whole new tune based on it. So, I’m using Jobim’s idea but writing a different version of it. I’m taking the seed material and growing another piece out of it. The idea of adding flutes came much later as I was listening to the piece. I had worked with [the track’s flautist] Alice [Teyssier] quite a bit and thought it would be very interesting to add her to the piece to tie it all together. 

PG: Is that something you normally do, take seeds of another piece and build something else out of it?

PE: No, but I really love the idea of seeds of pieces. Recently, I was asked to propose something for Beethovenfest, in Bonn, Germany, the largest [Ludwig von] Beethoven festival. You don’t have to play Beethoven. That’s hard for a trumpet. But I liked the idea of growing complex structures or engaging in an unending invention of material out of a very small amount of music. That is a very widespread technique, and you find it used by different composers and different traditions to some extent. Beethoven, certainly later on in his life, was doing that. [Anton] Webern did too.  

I’ve been on a big early music kick, and often the Flemish counterpoint composers like [Johannes] Ockeghem –  and Heinrich Isaac, who Webern was really into and wrote his dissertation about – were doing stuff like that back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They would have a song that could form the basis of a composition, and then chop up the song into different durations, reorder them, and build pieces out of them. Imitative counterpoint out of very small – two, three, or four note – motifs. 

I got into that type of improvisation from two directions. One was from learning about Webern and pre-twelve-tone serialist techniques. And the other was from [John] Coltrane’s music. To me, it has remained a bit of a blind spot in people analyzing Coltrane’s work in taking one motif, one small interval group, and work it over for minutes and minutes on end. As influential as Coltrane was, that particular quality of his work is definitely not discussed enough, even though you hear a lot of it in his music, especially his later music. You can even hear it in the opening moments of A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965), though he got way deeper into it than that. 

PG: Do you have any sense as to why people don’t talk about that element of Coltrane’s work more? 

PE: People’s appreciation of many things in music can be pretty superficial, musicians included. Some of the figures like Miles [Davis] and Coltrane, as famous as they are, are weirdly underrated. A lot of that is because there is not really a collective language to talk about this stuff. About ten or fifteen years ago, Steve Coleman wrote an article about Charlie Parker that discussed how many of the most interesting things about Bird’s music are rhythmic, and we lack a codified language to adequately discuss it. So, it rarely comes up. As far as Coltrane, his music is now at the point where there are so many imitators of imitators of imitators of Coltrane. It’s become pretty cringe, honestly. Same with the idea that there is a style of music called spiritual jazz, distinct from other music. Similarly, how we approach the influence of his music is pretty watered down. When people talk about Coltrane, they generally focus on some more nerdy technical aspect of his music.

But the approach of using seed material is an important part of Coltrane’s work, even if it goes underrecognized. The seed approach provides a vastly different way to improvise. It doesn’t use bebop language. It also has nothing to do with lines because, instead, it focuses on permutations. That’s really interesting to me. It’s a fun way to create stuff, too.

The reason people use these techniques is that it’s easier to have something to start with and from which to work. So even on “My Sorrow is Luminous,” there is an orchestral section with synth in the second half of the tune. The sequence of melodies in it grew out of the original melody. I took a couple of intervals, let them proliferate, and let my imagination take off with them. 

PG: To go back to your interest in early music, that music is pretty removed from the electronics and synthesizers we were discussing earlier. 

PE: Yeah, it’s a totally different interest. What got me into early music over the last two years or so. First, I became interested in vocal music, especially Ockeghem, Nicolas Gombert, Heinrich Isaac, and Jacob Obrecht. I was listening to a ton of Obrecht’s works and had read a book about him. 

PG: So, that took you into playing older instruments as well?

PE: No, but I have been exploring some of the music written for older instruments on more modern ones. There is an instrument from the Renaissance period called the cornetto, which is like a recorder but with a mouthpiece that you buzz into like a trumpet. It was a flashy, shredding type of instrument before the violin really took off. Italy was a center of virtuosi for the instrument, and tons of music was written for it. Back then, there was also a significant emphasis on ornamentation and improvisation, but more in the sense of the player being responsible for building mosaics of extra material on top of whatever was called for by the basic song. 

Anyway, I’ve been working on some music originally for the cornetto and playing it on the piccolo trumpet and E-flat trumpet. I’ve been talking to some cornetto players, getting into that music, and trying to learn about ornamentation a little from them. And it’s funny because – from my totally outsider perspective – the people I’ve met very much remind me of those in the jazz community. You have two groups of people: dogmatic nerds and interesting idiosyncratic people that are the real shit. I’ve found that the people doing some of the deepest stuff are actually the idiosyncratic artists, not the dogmatic nerds.

Last year, I put together a program with Ron Stabinsky on piano and synth. We were invited to do a concert at the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania. We played there a few years earlier, doing music by people like Woody Shaw and Joe Henderson. But for this new one, we prepared an entire program of early music. We played Dario Castello’s First Sonata for violin, which is often performed on recorder or cornetto. We also performed some pieces that were arranged with flugelhorn and modular synths, but were based around early music. We took ballads for two voices, picked them apart, and did things that were a little unconventional. But the material is so strong that you can experiment with it in that way. And the audience seemed to be really into what we did with the music.

Often, people think that if you’re into early music, you’re automatically into the most harmonically out-there stuff. That music is great, but I love the unchanging blandness of stuff from the sixteenth century or earlier. I’m being glib, saying it’s bland, but there is a crazy quality to it, being a beautiful tapestry of constantly changing non-repeating music that sounds the same throughout a piece. That leaves not much to latch onto, which can often be so intimidating to people who are coming to the music from the outside. The idea goes back to cantus firmus.

PG: The idea of using a pre-existing melody as the core of a polyphonic composition.

PE: Right, it came from Gregorian chants. When the Gregorian monks wrote masses, they would take the melody for a four-part – soprano, alto, tenor, and bass – choir and bury it in the tenor part, then build the other voices, usually using some religious text in Latin, around it. The music was not built to be enjoyed in the current sense of the word.

It reminds me of something I read in a book about a church somewhere in Europe, where there’s an incredible statue hidden in a corner that someone would find only if they were deep in the church. They hid it because it was not there for people to be entertained by it. They put it there to honor God. I think with the musicians using cantus firmus, it is the same thing. They were trying to make music for God, not the people.

The idea of cantus firmus, of music constantly changing but also staying the same, to me, is a big thing that connects early music to a lot of the electronic music that I really enjoy. It’s a very difficult thing. It’s a pure musical sensation. I haven’t really achieved it that much, but I love that feeling so much. That feeling is what drew me to early music, and I’ve noticed that electronic music I like also reflects that sensation.  

PG: Do you plan on learning how to play the cornetto, or do you only plan on playing music for the instrument on a piccolo trumpet or other type of trumpet?

PE: I will probably learn how to play the cornetto at some point. But I feel like I can’t even get into it without first spending six years or so learning how to make a sound on it. I don’t have enough time on my hands.  It’s extremely difficult to play the cornetto. Unfortunately, it’s one of those instruments where when you don’t know how to play it, even for me as a trumpet player, it sounds terrible. It’s amazing to me the persistence that people who resurrected the instrument took to learn how to play it today. They couldn’t listen to recordings and definitively say how it should sound. There’s no reference point. 

PG: That also sounds freeing because you are not being forced to sound a particular way. 

PE: Totally. Just this past week, I was teaching about how people really struggle with the idea of having their own sound or making their own sound. It reminded me of when I started playing piccolo trumpet. It’s a normal professional development for someone once they get decent at classical trumpet, to learn how to play piccolo trumpet to play the music of people like [Johann Sebastian] Bach and [Antonio] Vivaldi. I love that music. I also loved the feeling of playing the piccolo and wanted to keep playing it. The piccolo trumpet is often looked at by most trumpet players as a bit of a punishment, but certain players just gravitate towards it. I liked it right away. 

At that time, I was also getting way deep into ‘Trane and also checking out other musicians, particularly soprano sax players like Steve Lacy, Wayne [Shorter], and Evan Parker. I thought it would be cool to use the piccolo trumpet similarly to how many tenor saxophonists use the soprano saxophone, as a second instrument. I started using the piccolo trumpet only for free music or stuff with electronics. I didn’t even bring it into bands with rhythm sections. It took at least ten years before I regularly played it in bands with rhythm sections. I just thought for a long time that it wouldn’t work with a rhythm section. 

But once I started bringing the piccolo into bands and doing line-based improvisation on it with rhythm, I found that there was nothing for me to go off of, which is interesting. There wasn’t a direct influence. No piccolo trumpet player had used the instrument in those contexts, who I could view as an influence on the instrument. That lack of precedent helped me a lot. That’s not to say that I don’t play stuff that comes from other people on the piccolo, but I was able to weave their ideas into my own without worrying about ever being stuck in their shadow. 

‘Ars Ludicra’ is out now on More is More Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Peter Evans can be found on his website.

Photo credit: Gannon Padgett