Quinsin Nachoff: The Science of the Sublime

New York-based tenor saxophonist and composer Quinsin Nachoff creates at the intersection of jazz and classical music—and his work history demonstrates he is equally at home in both worlds.

From saxophone concertos, chamber music and string quartet to his stellar group Flux—featuring David Binney, Matt Mitchell, Kenny Wollesen and Nate Wood—Nachoff is obliterating genre divides.

It is in the context of two projects, his multimedia live work Patterns from Nature and album Stars and Constellations (Adyhâropa Records, 2023), that Nachoff sat down for this talk.

Patterns from Nature manifests Nachoff's long-term work with physicist Dr. Stephen Morris of the University of Toronto, whose experiments into emergent patterns in nature have provided unconventional source prompts for Nachoff and a team of filmmakers to use in the multimedia piece.

Stars and Constellations marks his return to the jazz trio-meets-string quartet format of his first recordings, from nearly 20 years ago, with Mark Helias on bass and Dan Weiss on drums—now with the addition of the Bergamot Quartet on strings.

Quinsin again used Morris' work as inspiration for Stars and Constellations, whose 3D models of objects in the night sky, "shaped the ensuing compositions in ways that aren't obvious to the listener but lead the music in compellingly unconventional directions."

All About Jazz: Please tell us about the Patterns from Nature show.

Quinsin Nachoff: It's a big project that's been a couple of years in the works. I've been working with physicist Stephen Morris, Dr. Stephen Morris, from the University of Toronto. His team's research focuses on patterns in nature, or emergent patterns in nature. He's particularly interested in the mathematical and physical aspects of things we see around us in nature. One of his last research projects involved designing an icicle. He built an icicle-making machine, and they took high-definition photographs in three dimensions and analyzed the data of how icicles form. We used one of those icicles in the final movement of the piece that I wrote based on that.

AAJ: What does that mean in practical terms? How does the work of a physicist and the insights he's gaining manifest in your work?

QN: I've worked on several projects with him, but this was the first one where we really focused on integrating his research outputs. The whole project is based on the four general areas of his research. So, the first movement is branches, the second is flow, the third is cracks, and the fourth is ripples.

Those are very overarching descriptions. I should also add, I was working with four filmmakers, a different filmmaker for each movement. We would have meetings and collaborate, and he would give us ideas to explore. We're not dealing at the same level of advanced mathematics that he's working with, but he could point us in the direction of things that exemplify what he was researching, like the icicles in the last movement that we worked on.

I worked with Udo Prinsen, a filmmaker from the Netherlands, and we both got interested in working with computer software that would let us take data and manipulate it and then output results in our own areas. I started working with this software called Opus Modus. It allows me to take data and spit it out in music notation. I took one of the beautiful rippling structures, and I decided that's going to be over the 10-minute piece. We're going to start off with a wide range in the orchestra, and it's going to slowly descend to a single point by the end of the movement.

The software lets me do something like that, whereas before, I would have to laboriously sit there by hand, making all the math calculations and making sure it all works and fits within the range of the orchestra and has something artistically interesting. I don't strictly adhere to what the data gives me. I'll manipulate it to get a good artistic result for me. He was able to take one of the 3D models, and we take this cinematic view through the icicle, not something a physicist would do, but we were able to take his data and come up with this cinematic approach to it.

So, there's this connection between the music and the film aspect. The aim is to have it be a piece of art that you could experience without knowing any of that.

AAJ: Something that strikes me about your description of how that process unfolded is that it sounds somewhat like the more hopeful, idealized versions of what an artist might be able to do with AI, as opposed to the fears people have of it replacing artists or workers. It's more about the prompt dealing with things like the advanced math, where it might be too much of a burden for an individual to do manually, and there's no harm in having the machine do it any more than it is having a sequencer keep time or anything like that.

QN: It's a tool, and it's how you use it. There's so much hype around AI, and there are fears. But any tool can be misused. It's just how you use it. I've been using a chat AI. It's great for coding. If I need to translate from one programming language to another, it's quite helpful. It's not amazing yet, but it certainly saves a lot of time. Try not to get caught up in the hype, because of course, the people who are pushing the AI are trying to hype it up as being some amazing, phenomenal thing that's going to change the world forever, but it's not quite there yet. It is amazing compared to what it was 30 years ago. Initially, I was interested in artificial intelligence, so having that background in cognitive psychology, programming, and math, it has been amazing to watch. This feels like a big step, but yeah, I find as a tool to work with, it has a lot of potential.

AAJ: The two technologies that have always seemed to be 'five years in the future' are AI and VR. It's going to be interesting to see if AI evolves in a manner like the last five or ten years of VR, where it felt like it was just about to break into the mainstream, whether it was in gaming or telehealth or whatever it was, and then it didn't quite break the barrier.

QN: Yeah, it's the hype thing. Even 30 years ago, they were hyping how AI was going to be amazing in five years, but I do have to say this feels like a really big step forward, especially the fact that it can interact with natural language communication.

AAJ: That's a huge step up from what we've seen before. It does seem to have a lot of potential.

QN: Just the fact that you could communicate with it in a much more organic, human way. I see that becoming a lot more common in society, for sure, in the next five to ten years.

AAJ: When we talk about the fears around it, the ease of use is what seems the scariest in the short term because we don't teach technology hygiene very well to people. The fact that you think you're conversing with it is basically the equivalent of you're conversing with it. I'm much more concerned about AI managing advanced weapon systems than I am about it putting a creative being out of work. To your point, a creative artist will figure out the fun and interesting things and the way to make it serve the art, whereas an industrialist or a military industrialist will simply seek to use it for efficiency or scale, and that's where it gets scarier to me.

QN: I'm with you on that, yes.

AAJ: You are an example of an artist who is part of the world and influenced by the world and interacting with other disciplines and forms.

QN: Somewhat, I think it's always easy in hindsight to look back and see it. I was always interested in the arts as a kid. I liked animation courses and nature drawing, like very detailed drawing of animals and nature sketching. I was interested in those things. Then as I progressed, I got more interested in abstract art. But then I left it to move into really focusing on music. So, art and technology have always been there in the back of my mind. The pandemic kind of helped shift things in a little different direction because I had a lot more time. Suddenly I'm not performing as much, and I have time to explore some ideas that I've been sitting on for a while. I finally had months on end that I could dig into some new courses and check out this computer software. I just didn't have time to really spend six months learning software until trying to take advantage of the pandemic and learn some new things. I realized I'm a very visual person, even when I'm writing music, I'm thinking about these visual gestures. That was something interesting to explore.

I had also started commissioning filmmakers to make short films for some of my pieces. It felt like a good fit, and I really enjoyed working with filmmakers. For Patterns for Nature, I wanted it to be on more equal footing, where the roles were a bit more ambiguous, making the performance very enjoyable because we had the films on stage alongside all the musicians. It felt like a nice equal position, which seems rare in the industry.

AAJ: Is it correct to say that the complete work is entitled Patterns from Nature and it is a multimedia piece? Or is it a music concert consisting of film and music? Can you talk about that a little?

QN: The project is labeled as Patterns from Nature. It's inspired somewhat by Philip Ball's series of books called Patterns in Nature. Dr. Morris recommended we all read these books, which are written for a general audience with many beautiful pictures and descriptions. We're building on that idea. This piece really is about the connection between the films and the music, how they were developed together, working with Dr. Morris, as well, which was a key part. What's unique to the project for me is that I haven't done anything where it's been such equal footing for each person but still allowed a lot of creative freedom for the artists. I gave overall guidance on how I wanted the project to go and how we were going to interact with Dr. Morris and his work, but then I let everyone be themselves and express themselves, which is very jazz-like.

AAJ: Is Dr. Morris a collaborator on the creative side, or is he more of a source of inspiration?

QN: More of an inspiration and directional. He's had a long career teaching not only physicists but also courses for people who don't know very much about physics. He's very good at explaining some of these more heady concepts to us. Some of us, like I said, took math classes to be able to understand a bit better some of the things he's dealing with. And I know, as I mentioned, Udo got into some software that would help him deal with the data, but the other filmmakers didn't go that route. And that was fine. We were still able to use their expressions and use it as inspiration and something as a jumping-off point.

AAJ: It seems like this opens an almost limitless vista of opportunities to explore artistically. On one extreme, some of these concepts and discussions are just useful prompts to get the creative process going, but on the other extreme, it's almost a new genre or form. It's fascinating.

QN: Exactly. I like to find different ways to challenge myself and come up with something different. So, this is a way to put me in a situation where I must improvise with new materials in a way. Even if I'm sitting there composing laboriously for months on end, this still prompts me to go in a direction I very unlikely would have thought of on my own. It's more fun or improvisatory or jazz-like in how it turns into a piece that has some coherence and a narrative. It feels very improvisatory in a way, like I'm just improvising with the other people around me. We're going to have a conversation about things that interest us, and then we're going to come up with something together that's hopefully interesting, different, and inspires us all to step a bit out of our comfort zones.

AAJ: Have you ever experienced, or could you talk a little about, those wonderful moments in your creative pursuits, especially when using math as a tool or prompt in the compositional process, where the math and music align in such a way that it feels magical?

QN: Absolutely. To me, that sounds very similar to improvising with other musicians. There are always moments when something surprising happens, and you're interacting in a certain way. It's very similar, where sometimes, if you're setting up something generative, something unexpected will suddenly coalesce in a way that's surprising and magical, or where we're suddenly outside of the math. It's exciting for me.

AAJ: I get the sense that, at your core, you're rational, but it's fascinating when those moments occur. It's almost like the universe's way of communicating. And I'm not ascribing consciousness to any of this, but it's amazing because we know it's a form of language with complex systems and rules, much like what we use to communicate. When those sparkly moments happen, it's as if, in an improvisation, a person did it, we'd be completely comfortable ascribing a mystical notion to it.

QN: But we also must remember that it's a human who set it in motion. So, it does have that consciousness, in a way. We're making choices and guiding it. Then we're the ones surprised by it. It's our reaction to it that's exciting or interesting, and our interaction with it.

AAJ: In reading your remarks elsewhere about your work, you talk about myth. There's this Venn diagram of music, science, and myth, which all seem like different languages or methods for describing our condition, our place, and you are using music to sort through this crazy life.

QN: Of course. I try to pursue it like an artist, being of the time we're in. That's why I feel comfortable infusing some of the technology. I also feel connected to humanity, drawing on history at different points. Speaking to the myth element, narrative seems so important to human interaction. It's a strong force in storytelling, and that's an important throughline in all my music.

AAJ: Can you talk a bit about your history or relationships with Mark Helias and Dan Weiss and the Stars and Constellations project?

QN: Absolutely. With Mark, I worked on one of my first records, Magic Numbers (Songlines Recordings, 2006). Now, we've revisited that format of string quartet and jazz trio. Mark is extremely versatile, bridging classical and improv worlds. Dan is an amazing musician, bringing a lot of taste and finesse, especially in balancing the dynamic range with a string quartet.

AAJ: The huge dynamic range was super important for this type of music, and Dan's drumming really stands out on this album.

QN: Exactly. Dan's versatility, including playing tabla, allowed us to explore a wide range of musical expressions. He's fantastic, able to quickly adapt to through-composed music.

AAJ: For this project, how important was it to have conversations around the themes and narratives informing the music?

QN: There's a push and pull on that. I generally try not to give too much information to the band. The amazing thing about working in New York is the level of musicianship. They intuitively know the direction to go in based on the written parts, which have evolved to convey the intended feel more clearly over the years.

AAJ: It would be interesting to see this work performed by another ensemble where you were just an audience member, to see if the strength of the score conveyed your intention.

QN: When I wrote my first string quartet for the Molinari String Quartet, we had very little rehearsal time. The surprises in how they interpreted things made the music feel even more alive than what I had imagined. With the right players, I believe the music should work as intended.

AAJ: Have you worked in the saxophone trio and strings format at all since Magic Numbers?

QN: No, Stars and Constellations is a return to that format. The three of us also did an album called Ethereal Trio (Whirlwind Recordings, 2017). It was more jazz-oriented, focusing on the traditional saxophone trio.

AAJ: Your work, especially Stars and Constellations, reminds me a bit of John Zorn's chamber jazz sound, which has a similar emotional resonance.

QN: Thank you. I'm a fan of John Zorn, so that comparison is fitting. The engineering was crucial for achieving the sound we wanted, making both classical musicians and the jazz trio feel comfortable.

AAJ: And now?

QN: I'm working on several projects, including editing and mixing the Patterns from Nature recordings and preparing for upcoming performances and commissions. It's nice to be busy again after the pandemic slowdown.

AAJ: Thank you so much for your time. It's been fascinating speaking with you.

QN: Thanks for having me.

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