Ahead of the release of the record “Global Prayers” on Friday, The Independent talked about music, faith and mentors with Chase Morrin, the San Diego-born pianist of the Boston jazz outfit Ize Trio. The trio also includes Cypriot percussionist George Lernis and Palestinian cellist Naseem Alatrash. The three met at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, where their diverse musical inheritances found common touchpoints through the lexicon of jazz. The album release show for “Global Prayers” is at Regattabar in Harvard Square on Sunday.
The conversation with Chase Morrin has been edited and condensed.
Your trio focuses on combining the American art form of jazz with classical, maqam and Middle Eastern traditions. I was hoping you could help out listeners who were new to maqam, and maybe to classical and jazz. Can you provide a few examples from the trio’s work and let us know how to listen to the music to hear some of these combinations of influences at work?
Yeah, good question. And first, before that, it’s not like we chose, “Oh, we want to put these together for fun as an experiment.” It really is just an amalgamation of our backgrounds and traditions of music. It really was just something that came about of us three particular people getting together with our backgrounds in music and wondering, “How on earth are we going to actually play together and make something that is harmonious?” That’s where it comes from.
We released an album two years ago called “The Global Suites.” You can hear a lot of examples of these influences mixed together, and on the new album as well. For example, Naseem – he’s a cello player and he comes from a background of playing Arabic music, Arabic maqam. He brings those elements to the table at all times when he’s playing.
He’s also super well versed in classical music as well as jazz. Sometimes he’s playing pizzicato bass lines like a bass player would play in a jazz context. Sometimes he’s playing melodies or improvisations that you would hear more in the Arabic world, like in the maqam world. We kind of move in and out of these different avenues. I do the same thing.
We studied together and have played for many years together. I’ve been inspired by them and my own influences and all these harmonic and melodic [aspects] and the blues and all this stuff that’s inside of that jazz tradition. How do I then connect with Nassim, for example? I’ve had to find new types of voicings, new types of approaches to harmony and melody to be sympathetic with what he’s doing.
Then George … he’s not playing a traditional jazz drum set, although he’s a great jazz drum player. He’s playing all these Eastern Mediterranean instruments like the rik, the darbuka, the bendir. He’s found his own way of making this hybrid kit with these instruments and playing repertoire that’s native for those instruments, then adapting it in a jazz improvised context.
You hear that with every song that we play. You’ll hear melodies influenced by Arabic culture, rhythms that are influenced by the jazz tradition and also by Eastern Mediterranean rhythms.
I’m asking for something like a specific moment or a song in which these influences collide in a really visible way. But has the lexicon of global jazz progressed so far in hybridizing these various forms that to ask about that “collision” between influences is, you know, a question that comes too late?
We think about jazz as concentrated in the United States. But jazz is actually a tradition that developed throughout all of the Americas. The idea here is simply of inclusion, like, “Can we embrace people coming from all over the world, from different backgrounds and finding some way to be part of this tradition?”
Like you said, there are so many historical precedents for this already. Jazz has been global from the very beginning. You can name so many different things from Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite” to some of the stuff that Bill Evans was doing, Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain.” I mean, there are so many examples of influences from all over the world inspiring jazz musicians. It’s part of the tradition already, but of course, not exactly quite like what we’re doing. Any group of musicians now that comes from different areas and different traditions, they’re going to have to really make their own version of that story.
We can look at the past and be influenced by great artists. But we also have to look ahead in the future because there aren’t specific examples for a trio exactly like ours with our particular backgrounds.
I absolutely get what you were saying about the history of jazz already including this global perspective. It’s getting harder and harder to go to a club and find meat-and-potatoes classical jazz in the North American vernacular. It’s awesome. It’s opening up the tradition in so many different ways.
“Global Prayer” has been described as more inwardly focused. A lot of the music is dedicated to your mentors and hits a more spiritual register. Are you particularly religious? Is formal religious observance a necessary component of producing spiritually rich music?
Not for me specifically, not a specific religion. But definitely, there’s an element of mystery and faith in spirituality. That’s what it means for me. And the last album was very outwardly focused in terms of thinking about certain social causes that we’re advocating for and creating stories related to that. This album is asking questions like, “What do we do, us as humans, while the whole world around us is crazy and going places we couldn’t have expected. How do we take care of ourselves in our community?”
The title track, “Global Prayer,” was a piece that I wrote … actually, now going on six years ago. It was the very first song we ever played as a trio, but we didn’t play it together. We played it because I wrote it four days after everyone went home when the pandemic hit and we were all in our bedrooms wondering what on earth is going to happen to this world.
I remember all of us feeling a lot of doubt and uncertainty, having to rely in some ways on faith, spirituality. Everyone has their own ways of dealing with hard times. For us music is a healing force, and hopefully for others too. That was the basis of this track, which became a sort of motto or theme for this album.
I was thinking about the Alice Coltrane types – she composed devotional music that has sometimes been called “spiritual jazz” – where you go really deep into the religion and it structurally figures into the kind of music you write. Is it somehow more spiritually authentic if the musician is situated in actual religious observance? Are we past the moment of vision quests in jazz?
It’s an interesting question. You know, I think of conversations with my mentors – two people in particular, Danilo Pérez, a good friend and colleague at Berklee, as well as Patitucci, who is on this album. They talked to me about spirituality a lot with the Wayne Shorter Quartet, which they played with for 20 years.
One of the beautiful things about that quartet was that all members of that quartet were deeply spiritual – religious in some way, but all different. Wayne was Buddhist, John was devoutly Catholic, Danilo kind of somewhere Catholic, but also kind of interested in Buddhism. Brian Blade was also a Christian, but a different denomination. It didn’t get in the way of the music. In fact, it enhanced it, that they came from different perspectives about who we are as people, what is our relationship to the earth, to a higher power potentially, that sort of thing.
What does that do for the music? I think for them a lot of it was like, “Okay, the music is only so much here, but what is it about? What is the most important thing about being a human being, about being a good friend, a good companion to people first?” The music comes after that. My thoughts on it have to do with what they’ve really taught me in terms of values. We all have our different places, related to spirituality or whatever words you want to use, right? But in music, it’s how those things come together as a group. We might come from different places, but if we have a joined mission and we think about that higher calling. Sometimes that’s one of the most beautiful aspects. Not everyone agrees on the specifics. But as long as we don’t fight about them … that to me is one of the powers of music.
“Global Prayer” has a lot of shoutouts, inclusions, even collaborations with mentors and some of your teachers from the Berklee years. Let me invite you to go back even further in time. I’m a former K-12 teacher. What K-12 teacher made an impact on your music education?
I first think about all my teachers for piano when I was a kid. I started with a local Russian classical piano teacher, Svetlana Pilots. Then Kenny Ard, my mentor for many, many years throughout middle school and high school. And such a caring, compassionate guy. I just owe a lot to him. I am in touch with him every time I go back to San Diego.
I can think of so many. It’s not one person who gets you there. That’s beautiful to hear that you’ve taught. I’ve also taught young students for many years, still do, and it’s both difficult, demanding work but the most important work in the world.
Shoutout to the teachers.
Yes, please, shoutout to the teachers. That’s why I’m a teacher as well now. When I was in high school, I got to participate at the Vail Jazz Festival. At the festival, there was John Clayton, the great bass player. We’re there and so excited to study with him during this two-week experience. The very first day he comes up to us, wow, John Clayton, and we’re expecting he’s going to start playing with us, talking about the blues. I don’t know, who knows? And the first thing out of his mouth is, “Remember all of you, it’s your duty and responsibility to teach.”
We were all little kids there, [thinking to ourselves], “What? What are you talking about? We can’t teach. We’re little kids. What are you talking about?” But he goes on, he said, “Listen, my teacher was Ray Brown. He taught me all this stuff. I’m going to be teaching you this week and I’m going to be passing along information. And one day it’s going to be your turn to pass it along next. That’s part of this tradition.” And, wow, that made a huge impact.
That’s beautiful. I totally get that. All right. Tell me about Sunday.
We’re playing all new music that’s on the new record. And we’re going to be joined by a special guest, Gregory Groover Jr., a good friend of ours who was a student at the Global Jazz Institute, and now we’re colleagues at Berklee. It’s going to be a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration. We’ve never played with them together with the trio and Greg, so it’s going to be very exciting.
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