Subliminal Input: A Conversation with Jon Irabagon on ‘Server Farm’

Computer scientist Alan Kay once noted, “Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.” Despite consistently recurring alarmist narratives, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will never truly supplant humanity. While the emerging technology will present new challenges, it will augment and make lives easier, not obsolete. The continued resilience of humanity is due largely to an inescapable, ineffable, and essential element of the human condition that cannot be put into codes and algorithms: emotions and the lived experience. As powerful as our toys become, they can never truly replicate our strength through frailty and the irrational sanity outside of logical reasoning. These elements lie at the heart of Jon Irabagon’s Server Farm (Irabbagast, 2025). 

On the recording by his large ensemble – 10 musicians, the size itself perhaps a nod to binary code? – the saxophonist brazenly takes on artificial intelligence by emulating a computer in his compositional process. Instead of blanketly writing parts for particular instruments’ generalized timbres, Irabagon digs into the sonic code that makes up each artist’s essence. He does this primarily by writing each part after a long and deep dive into the discographies of his bandmates. Given the diversity of the voices involved – the leader, Mazz Swift, Peter Evans, Miles Okazaki, Wendy Eisenberg, Matt Mitchell, Michael Formanek, Chris Lightcap, Dan Weiss, and Levy Lorenzo – and the improvisational opportunities provided to them, it’s natural to assume AI would also tap into their prior works to better craft specific parts for each. But Irabagon’s reference point is more than what has been pressed to wax, burned to polycarbonate, or ripped to a cloud. Having previously worked with each of his collaborators, he inevitably brings in the emotions, memories, and sensibilities of those times together. Subtly or otherwise, these facets inevitably change the shape of the pieces, as even the most advanced computer will have no frame of reference. 

Adding a further wrinkle to the affair is Irabagon’s intentional interjection of what would appear as aberrations in the precedential record. Never before has he recorded with pedals on his horn or recitations of his poetry. How can predictive programming forecast the inherent unpredictability of seeking new sonic terrain? How can the machine follow its logical progressions when such surprises get thrown in its way? It helps that – from his solo saxophone records to his time in Mostly Other People Do the Killing to his trio with Barry Altschul and Mark Helias- Irabagon thrives on the unexpected. In creating a program designed to evoke mechanical error, Server Farm reminds us that while computers will exceed our capacity to some degree, we ultimately speak in more than just zeroes and ones.

PostGenre: Server Farm features your quintet with five additional musicians added. What interested you in essentially doubling the size of your quintet?

Jon Irabagon: Well, I looked back at my catalog and saw that while I have recorded solo saxophone records, a bunch of duos, several trios, and some quartet and quintet works, I had been avoiding writing for a larger ensemble.

PG: Why the hesitancy?

JI: Mostly, I wasn’t sure about the instrumentation for a larger group and the timbre and texture I would want. But, having put out several records by now, I felt it was time to tackle a larger ensemble recording. At that time, I was also listening to many larger group recordings by Carla Bley, Darcy James Argue, Kenny Wheeler, and others. I felt drawn to recording with a larger ensemble. 

PG: Since you have not written for a group this large before, was it particularly difficult to compose for this project?

JI: I’ve done some big band arrangements and things like that before. But for something so individually creative, I haven’t written for this many people. It was psychologically daunting for me to do so. It took me a long time and a lot of hours sitting at the piano aching over one measure or another for hours and hours. It was a great process for me but it took a long time.  I’m really glad to have the record finally coming out because that means I can stop thinking about it so much. [laughing].

PG: How did you select the musicians to be part of the project?

JI:  I wanted to make sure that I composed for people that I knew very well. People that I was friends with who I also loved hanging out with off the bandstand. I had asked some other people to join us as well to have a slightly larger ensemble. But the other people I asked were on tour or otherwise out of town. So, we settled on ten people, and it turned out to be kind of a double quintet in a way.  

Peter [Evans] and I have played together for decades.  But if we split up the quintet, there are two guitar players and two bass players. I viewed Matt Mitchell’s piano as the inverse of what Mazz Swift does on violin and voice in terms of timbre. Dan [Weiss] plays traditional drums, and Levi Lorenzo plays electronics and vibraphone. The fact that it is a double quintet affected how I distributed things and determined each part.

PG: When composing for the record, you built the other musicians’ parts around other music they had made previously. Did digging into their other works guide the membership of this band at all, or did you consider their other work only after you had selected the other musicians?

JI: No, listening to their music came later. After we settled on who would be in the group,  I started listening to their other recordings nonstop. The concept of the record having to do with AI, computer technology, and computer server farms made me want to see if I could find a way to approximate how a computer would make music for them based on other things they had done while also adding some ideas of my own. I wanted it to still be my record and my compositions, but the concept was to connect those musicians and treat them as more than improvisers and instrumentalists. I wanted them to have some subliminal input into what happens in the compositions because I think that’s what’s happening with the AI-human merger these days.

PG: Do you think that approach of creating parts based on the other musicians’ other works is something you will carry into other projects, or is that specific to this album because of that human-AI connection? 

JI: Man, it was great to spend months listening to nine of my favorite musicians on the planet. It was a great listening experience for me. But I’m not currently planning on using the approach outside of this context. I’m already working on a solo bass sax record and a new quintet with bass sax, trumpet, bass, and drums. I’m starting to write for that project, and we’re gonna record at the end of this year. But if I do another Server Farm project, I’ll probably continue with the same angle. 

PG: Since you have worked with these musicians before, it seems you would likely bring – intentionally or otherwise – some of your shared past experiences together. That is something AI would not be able to approximate in quite the same way by relying solely on past recorded output. 

JI: Definitely. I mean that’s one of the differences that the record explores. AI is vastly superior to most humans in terms of power, retention, and ability to incorporate a lot of things. But the human soul and the human vibrancy are something that can’t be replicated mechanically.  

PG: In terms of crafting parts, were you ever concerned that because you were studying the other musicians’ other works, the end result might sound too much like other stuff that had already been done? 

JI: No. I figured with ten people that was unlikely. I also didn’t want to overwrite these compositions. I wanted to give as much information as possible to get the structure of what I wanted, but a lot of the parts –  if you look at the scores –  are at least partially improvised. There’s a lot of freedom in the parts. I didn’t think that it was gonna sound like anything that had been done before, and I think we got there. 

PG: Do you think the way you wrote the parts made the other musicians feel like they had a little more freedom to improvise, or did it box them in a little more? It would seem that it might be easier to build off of a sound that is familiar to you. But, at the same time, you could also find yourself subconsciously trying to fight others’ perceptions of your music.

JI: Yeah, I don’t know. That would be a great question to ask the rest of the band. I’m hoping the other musicians felt more freedom. There were five compositions that we wanted to get to the meat of, and I think what was great about having these nine particular people along with myself is that while we all want freedom, we want it within a structure. I think a lot of the other musicians were incredibly grateful to have moments where they were free to do their thing. 

PG: To turn to a specific piece, “Spy” incorporated a poem you wrote. Do you see a connection between your poetry and your music? 

JI: Putting together the whole record was challenging in many ways. First, there was composing for so many people. The second was working with pedals on the saxophone. On a couple of tracks on the record, I put some effects on my saxophone, and on the last track, “Spy,”  I put effects on both my sax and my voice reading the poem along with Mazz singing the poem. I had never put words on any of my records before. I’m not much of a poet but I wrote this thing, it fit the album concept, and I wanted to see what we could do with it. 

PG: As far as incorporating pedals, many saxophonists – Joshua Redman, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Skerik, for instance- have used them in projects before. Did you take inspiration from these other musicians’ work in this area?

JI:  I’ve checked all that stuff out, along with guitar players who use pedals very well. Those worlds and effects are just part of my normal listening. I didn’t necessarily check out any of those artists you mentioned, or anyone in particular, as direct influences for the two tracks on this record where I used pedals. But all those people you mentioned, and many more, are definitely in my ears and part of my subconscious.

PG: It seems having those influences operating at a more subconscious level would also make the pieces different compared to if a machine had written them. When you were in Mostly Other People Do the Killing, you were on one of the band’s most controversial recordings, Blue (Hot Cup, 2014), a note-for-note recreation of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). The record always seemed mostly like a way to clap back at jazz purists. Do you feel AI runs the same risks of producing something that would be too repetitive of what already came before? 

JI: Huh. Perhaps so. We put up with a lot of crap for that record.  But it was its own thing, and I think, ultimately, even as a direct copy, there was a humanness to what we did. Even if we sounded as close as we could to the original, there was still a human element to how we did it, and AI would lack even that element. 

PG: Because of the importance of the human element, you were never tempted to more directly incorporate AI into this project?

JI: Yeah, I wasn’t. I’m also not quite ready, personally or musically, to hand over any side of the music. Using pedals is as close as I was gonna get to using electronics on this record. But maybe, in the future,  there might be a section where I bring in more computer elements and see what we can do with it. At some point, I wanna go down that road but to get there organically. This album was my first step towards something like that.

PG: In a broader sense, where do you see AI’s role in the future of music?

JI: It’s gonna take a while for AI to pick up on really subtle nuances.  Let’s talk again in twenty years, and maybe there will be an AI creation people will begrudgingly find kinda awesome. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly that happens, and it’ll also be interesting to see the repercussions of that. Ultimately, the acceptance of AI will all be up to how willing we are to admit if it does something really awesome twenty, thirty, or fifty years down the road. But to do that, we have to let our ego down and be open to the technology.

‘Server Farm’ will be released on February 21, 2025 on Irabbagast Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Jon Irabagon can be found on his website.

Photo credit: Chris Benham