Earlier this year, I took a journey to the city of Glendale, CA to again meet up with the great Los Angeles vibraphonist and educator, Mr. Nick Mancini. If this name is unfamiliar to you, I highly recommend that you 1) listen in awe to the videos below, 2) visit his website (disregard the intimidating photos, he really is quite nice) and 3) willingly fall victim to the beautiful complexity that fills his music.
At the end of last
summer, I worked up the courage to e-mail Nick asking for a lesson, and quickly
found that my preconceived notion was entirely false. One look into his vibrantly
decorated and eccentric apartment (complete with a one-octave red toy piano) is
proof enough that this master musician is anything but intimidating. In
actuality, he must be one of the most paradoxical people I know: undeniably
goofy, yet fiercely focused; extraordinarily creative, yet simultaneously analytical;
consistently energetic yet intimately observant. Amidst the many things I have
learned from my lessons with Nick, the most obvious, and perhaps most important,
is the idea that music is truly an internal, personalized expression—a concept
that is more than apparent in all of his album work.
“In from New York
City is the Nick Mancini Collective, led by an exploratory young vibraphonist
with two toes dipped in tradition who splashes a gentle swing, understatedly
bent shoogabooga and exotic undersea layerings of filtered light. Original and
good." - Greg Burke, LA Weekly.
Nick grew up in Amsterdam, NY, attended Amsterdam High School, received an Associate’s Degree from Schenectady County Community College and went on to study at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam from ’91-96. He later received his Master’s from the Manhattan School of Music.
He has played with Arturo Sandoval, Charles Fambrough, Harvy Mason, Marvin “Smitty” Smith, Peter Erskine, Poncho Sanchez, Tim Werner, and many others. He was an honoree at the XVIII Annual Vibes Summit, and is a faculty member at both California State Universities at Northridge and Longbeach. He currently has an endorsement contract with Majestic and Innovative Percussion.
What were some of your early influences
growing up in New York?
My older brother and my older sister, actually. My older brother Frank, who is ten years older than me, played guitar and bass. He was the one who turned me on to bands like Rush, Yes, ProgRock stuff and metal. My sister Joyce, who is eight years older than me, used to sit me down at the piano and make me accompany her on tunes that she wrote. They provided me with my earliest musical experiences. When I started middle school, I met a guy by the name of Mark Orapallo who got me back into drums after I had stopped playing for a number of years. I then started taking lessons from this guy Phil Carlson, who is fantastic, and began working constantly. In terms of professional musicians, I was heavily influenced by Rush, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Steve Vai—and then I started listening to jazz. Dave Weckl’s Master Plan was my first “jazz” record, and then Kind of Blue. Oh man, I listened to that album every day for a year.
Best selling jazz album of all time.
That’s right! I used to listen to Phish a lot, as well. I went to a lot of their concerts in college. They’re great live because they improvise constantly. Their songs are fifteen minutes long because they have these big long epic jams in the middle. And they’re good players. Really good players.
Speaking of jazz musicians specifically, I listened to Milt Jackson, Miles Davis, Hank Mobley a lot. I’ve studied with Joe Locke, who was a huge influence on me for a long time. I studied with him at the Manhattan School of Music. I love Steve Nelson, in terms of vibes players. Victor Feldman, Milt Jackson—I already said that—Stan Getz made a huge impression on me, especially his swinging jazz stuff. They made of record out of one of his last concerts called Serenity, with Victor Lewis, Kenny Baron and Rufus Reid. It’s an amazing concert. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just thinking about it.
I’m a big Stan Getz fan myself. I remember listening to Getz Meets Mulligan in Hi-Fi as a little kid. You can’t help but let out a smile when listening to the two of them.
Oh, absolutely. There’s also a great record with the Oscar Peterson Trio, but it’s the Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson Trio. Just them—no drums—and Stan. Man, so good! And you can tell they’re in a room the size of my [tiny] living room, it’s that intimate.
What got you into the vibraphone?
For the longest time I had this thought in my head that I would study music in college and go back to playing drums. I never saw myself playing an orchestral instrument for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to move to New York and become a Broadway pit player. But then I started listening to jazz. There was a jam session on Thursdays around the corner of my old school, and I began to take the vibes out of the school—which I wasn’t supposed to do, so shhh—and playing at this session. I barely knew what the hell I was doing, but I was just stoked to be there! That’s when I started thinking to myself, this is a style of music that allows me to be as virtuosic as possible. The whole idea is to be as virtuosic as you can while still making music. So I started getting into it. I formed a band, and—this is really funny actually—our bass player’s name was Lou, and of course my name is Nick, and our piano player’s whole name was Nick Lue. So the trio was Nick, Lou and Nick Lue! I’d mostly play drums, but I’d also bring my vibes to rehearsals.
That’s a lot of stuff to lug around!
Oh, you have no idea (chuckles).
That’s a lot of stuff. Eventually my
buddies started coming and sitting in on our performances. I had a friend who
played drums, so he’d do that while I played vibes. It worked, it worked really
well. Besides, I was always the band leader, and it made more sense to lead the
band from the front rather than the back. We became a quintet with sax and
guitar, and those two guys loved trading fours. And I loved watching them! But
I was just there going ding ding da ding,
and it was a little boring, you know? I was already composing at that
point, so I thought, alright, this is
going to happen. I’m gonna play the
vibes. It didn’t fit at first, it was really confusing. But then I started
practicing and got comfortable on the instrument.
Funny that you should mention
that. I first stood in front of a vibraphone when I was 11—mind you, I had been
taking classical piano for years at this point—I looked down and went, “What
the?” The keyboard was suddenly a foreign concept. I remember my band director
coming over to me in the middle of rehearsal and going, “This is an A”—you know how the A is marked, A=442—so
I hit it and thought, well this can’t be
that bad.
Ha! Yes, I had a similar experience. I think you know all the notes now,
though.
Most of them (laughs). So, you’ve released
several albums in the past few years—NO:W,
Psychobabble, Storyteller, and most recently the co-lead album West Coast Cool. After completing each
album, did you feel a greater sense of understanding or arrival in your music?
That is a great question, first of all.
I nabbed it from an old
Downbeat issue.
Well you didn’t have to tell me that!
Just being honest!
(Laughs) Well the answer is yes, hugely. I think
that if you talk to anybody who has made a record, they’ll tell you that by the
time they’re done—and it’s a long process, let me tell you—they’re already on
to something else. They’re in a new stage of musical development. In the
process of recording, hearing yourself back, editing and all that, you hear
things you did that you never want to do again, you hear things you did that
you wish you had done better, and you hear things you did that you liked. But
for me, I don’t make a record from the standpoint of “I’m a vibraphone player
and I want to make a record where I’m heard playing the vibraphone.” My first
record was like that, and then none were like that afterwards, because I don’t interpret
music that way anymore. I engage myself in
music from a much more global perspective. The compositions have to be good and
the flow from one tune to the next has to be good. The tonal palette of the
record, is it going to be constant throughout or is it going to vary
considerably? Light songs, dark songs, easygoing, heavy, you know? Am I going
to draw from grooves and sounds that are apropos, or am I going to reference
something from past? Or I could do something that’s completely new and
personalized. These are all things you
must reevaluate when starting a new project, so your understanding is always
shifting.
I definitely did arrive in a new place musically after having gone
through the process of recording. I can only speak for myself, but many of my
friends have reported feeling a similar thing. If you can imagine this, making
a record is like an hourglass. You have all these ideas, so you start writing
music and your original scope narrows a little bit. You start to realize that these songs are in the vein of what you
want to do and not those songs, so it
trickles down even more. It gets tighter and tighter and tighter until the day that
you actually record. Then you edit it, master it, make it sound the way you
want it to sound until you’re left with a single grain of sand dropping
through—boink! And that’s your
record. It’s like a bottleneck of sorts. An energetic bottleneck, because
everything suddenly becomes one-hundred percent focused on that project.
There’s a point in time when it has to be that way. And when you’re done, you’re
playing the music from the CD eight months after you started writing it. You’ve
done a ton of gigs and you’re doing a ton of gigs to promote that music.
For Storyteller specifically, the way I felt playing the music after we
made the record was how I wish I felt when we recorded it. A good producer will
create the kind of objectivity the artist needs. While recording, you almost
have to back away from the material. You can get too close. I produced Storyteller, so there wasn’t another set
of ears in the booth, which I probably should have considered. But see, I
learned from that and that’s all it is—it’s all a learning experience, really. And
I’m already diving into new material for another project. You release from your
old material in a way that leaves you bounding with new artistic energy.
You’re a producer, composer,
and player on many of your albums. What is it like wearing all of these hats?
I used to love it! I used to not want any feedback from anyone about
anything! I just wanted to do the project completely in my own vision. But then
when I moved to LA, I started getting hired independently as a producer for
other people’s records. Once that started happening, the role of the producer
on my own projects changed. I knew better how to manage musicians, I knew
better how to conduct the flow of the session, and I had a better idea of when
a take was a take. I became much more open-minded about the input from other
musicians, which I guess is just an age thing as well. Age and experience do
that to you—well, I guess some people become more closed-minded as they age.
I was going to say! That’s a
very pleasant view of the aging process—everyone becoming more accepting.
Well, I became more open-minded,
I can say that at least. It can be incredibly stressful at times, wearing all
of those different hats. Incredibly stressful, because you’re not always sure
what hat you’re supposed to wear. Sometimes you put on the wrong hat! Say we’re
in the live room and we’re playing a tune when somebody asks me a question
about how they should approach part of the music. I may respond as the producer
when really I need to respond as the player, because at that moment I’m playing. I’m not producing. But even
though switching gears can be stressful, it can also be kind of exhilarating.
Has your love for managing all
of these different positions diminished at all?
At this point in time, I would like to relinquish some of those roles so
I can focus more on what I really want to say. Before it was kind of like,
“Look Ma, no hands! I can do all these different things! Isn’t that amazing!” I
feel like I’ve done a decent job at proving my ability to do a bunch of
different things well, but now I want to do one thing great. Relinquishing control can be tough, however. If you’re not
tied to a record label that’s telling you who your producer is going to be, you
have to pick your own producer. It means that you have to have a real
connection with a person and it becomes more of a collaborative effort. This
person needs to know your playing, they need to know your intent, they need to
know your ultimate goal. They need to be able to conduct a session in a way
that’s productive so that you can sit back and have a fun time playing the
vibes. But the other thing is that I’m the executive producer, which sounds
nice at first, but it means that it’s all my money. So you’re stressing out
like crazy over that too! I’d like to finally find someone else to pay for it. I’d
like to find someone else to provide the final say. I’d like to just be the
vibes player! But I haven’t been able to capture my intentions fully on a
record yet.
Can you articulate what
exactly you’re aiming to capture?
I don’t exactly know! And that’s why it’s been so difficult to express
it. That’s why I’ve hidden behind so many different hats. I think that a lot of
musicians have a much clearer view of their artistic development. I just really
love playing, so I don’t always have a clear view of what I’m trying to
communicate, and that’s the difficult part to capture on a record.
I’ll be honest, when I got into the studio for Storyteller, I didn’t want to be playing that music. I loved
writing it, I loved arranging it, I love hearing it! I think it’s great music.
But I didn’t necessarily want to be the vibes player on that date. But it would
have been strange to have hired a vibes player on my own record! So the goal
for the next record is to write material that is a pure representation of who I
am as a composer, as well as who I am as a player. I don’t feel like I’ve done
that yet. I’ve written music that I’m very proud of as a composer but that I’m
not necessarily inspired to perform, and then there’s music that I love to play
that doesn’t say anything about me as a composer. I’m trying to make the two
connect.
When composing, do you look
for a happy medium between your personal expression and what you think the
audience wants to hear?
Yes, absolutely. I always take the audience into consideration. You
can’t please everyone you’ll ever perform for, there’s no doubt about that. But
I do consider the audience often when I’m writing new tunes. I definitely have
complex musical ideas, and it’s important to me that those ideas get
communicated. I’ve never been able to just sit down and write. Maybe I can get
a few ideas down that way, but there comes a point when I go, “Alright, where’s
the golden nugget in this thing?” I’m usually thinking about playing a live set
when I’m writing, so I ask myself, “Where would this fit in the set?” And
whatever song I’m writing at that moment, well, there can’t be six other songs
like that! They need to be offset from each other.
And getting back to the idea being communicated, I always aim to
maintain the complexity of the idea. That is one of the beautiful things about
being a jazz composer; complexity is expected. You’re dealing with a complex
genre of music. Even on its most simplified level, it’s still fairly complicated,
relatively speaking. I want to embrace that. For my taste, amidst any level of
complexity, there still needs to be a song at the center of it. A great example
of this would be Kurt Rosenwinkle. I mean, who doesn’t love Kurt Rosenwinkle?
He’s an amazing guitar player. I love his writing, I love his playing, I feel
like there’s a seamless connection between his writing and his playing. He is
able to consolidate the complexity of his music down to a couple of key points
that the listener can grab on to. It seems as though the musicians that play
his music also embody that same concept. Now for all I know, he could be absolutely
dogmatic in his rehearsal strategies, but from the look of him he seems to be
fairly laid back. I’m certain that there are times for him, just like there are
for me and almost all other band leaders, when he needs to step in and dictate
how something needs to go.
That’s true for any person
attempting to lead or collaborate on a project. If you have an idea in mind,
it’s your responsibility to communicate that idea to your partners. There’s a
balance between teamwork and team-leading, of course, but for the most part,
someone needs to lay down the founding concept.
And that’s completely true. Sometimes—and this is rare—the music will
dictate that itself. And that’s when you know you’ve got something good.
But let me tell you, I used to be a kaiser. It was bad—it was really
bad. I micromanaged to the point of where I think people didn’t like playing
with me. The only reason they did like playing with me is because I booked gigs
and my compositions were always sound. But I doubt that people were like, “Oh
man I love playing with Nick!” I think they were more like, “Oh Jesus I’ve got
this gig with Nick and he’s such a pain in the ass!”
But then there was this gig in New York a long while back, where I
gathered the rhythm section together and we just played free. I can remember
pointing at my drummer and saying, “Go!” and then we based an entire tune off
of that. That became my laboratory for letting go of the music. I learned to
let the song evolve. I had to completely stop giving directions to come back to
center. We were in the car driving back from that gig one night and I asked our
drummer, “How was it, Mark?” And he said, “It was good man. You let us play
tonight.” That was the turning point.
Your website states that the
title of the album Storyteller begs
the question, what is a storyteller? How would you answer that question?
I think a better question would be what makes a good storyteller?
Alright, what makes a good storyteller?
What a good question! I think that what makes a good storyteller is
someone who recognizes that the listening to a story being told is more
important that what the story is about. When I recount events, I have a
tendency to focus intently on certain aspects of the plot that I thought were
funny or entertaining. I will sometimes interject things that didn’t actually
happen.
We’re all a little guilty of
that.
Yes, but I do it intentionally.
In that case, you may be
pushing your innocence a bit.
But these fabrications (he holds up air quotes) are meant to be an aside! See, they’re meant to broaden the experience for the listener. They’re not meant to be taken seriously. Very literal people have a very hard time listening to my stories. They’ll interject and go, “No way! That didn’t happen!” And I’m thinking, “No! Of course that didn’t happen! But imagine if it did.” Because for me, if I went through life only accounting for what goes on in front of my face, I’d be so bored!
And I think a lot of people forget to use their imagination on a regular basis. I use my imagination all the time. Everything around us is here because at some point in time, someone imagined it to be. Certainly technological advancements were imagined before they made them. But also, I believe the things we see in nature are a composite of all of the sub-conscious vibrations of all the brains on this planet. Imagination is the spark of everything that is real and unreal in life.
To get back to your question, a great story has to have moments that may not even be true to the events. Sort of an implied narrative. Beyond that, a good story needs space to develop, and a good storyteller is able to recognize and emphasize that. There is not one person in my life who has a story that is remarkable enough to listen to for fifteen minutes! I do, however, know some people who can tell really great stories about some really mundane stuff and go on for hours and be entirely entertaining.
Do you have any current
projects?
I have this project called the Nick Mancini Chamber Trio. It’s me,
Artyom Manukyam and Vardan Ovsepian. It’s somewhere between 20th
century classical music and jazz. It’s really quite beautiful. Sometimes we’ll
add a percussionist, Zach Harmon. He plays a hybrid percussion drum kit that
has everything from a cajón to tablas to
a duck that has a shaker in it. He’s incredibly musical.
How have you gone about fusing
jazz with other periods of music?
I’m no purist. I do appreciate pure art forms, and I don’t like all
fusions. If I can easily point out the different elements, well, then they’re
not fused! Then it’s just a bunch of things lying on the table next to each
other. A good fusion should be like a chop salad. So I’m a fan of it as long as
it’s well balanced, and as long as it’s not done tongue-in-cheek. Also, I think
there should always be an element of arrangement that goes into it, so that it’s
not like, “Let’s play ‘So What’ with a backbeat.” That doesn’t work for me.
There are other elements of pop music that you can infuse other than just a
backbeat. That’s like jazz musicians on a casual that are bored; it sounds like
a good idea that wasn’t fully thought out.
So when I say that this chamber trio is jazz and classical mixed
together, it truly is. Nothing we do sounds strictly classical and nothing
sounds strictly jazz. A lot of what we do has a Chorro element to it. Chorro is
like Brazilian Bach, you could say. You
have these long, baroque lines with a Brazilian rhythm backing it (sings
rhythm).
What new elements of
expression are you trying to create through this combination?
I like the clarity that is required on behalf of the musicians to play in
that style. Just the elimination of the jazz drummer—and I love jazz drums, don’t
get me wrong—serves to provide the music with a certain lack of definition.
There are some drummers that are incredibly articulate and very sensitive. When
I think of Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, that’s
a very articulated but intense, burning record. That’s brilliant. But there
aren’t that many drummers that play that way. I feel that when drummers are contributing,
they are either contributing too loudly or too washy. So with this chamber
trio, our percussionist doesn’t play with big cymbals. He’s got two little
splash cymbals he uses on a high-hat stand. All the sounds are tight and dry,
and what that does is it makes you more aware of the space within the music.
That affects me as an improviser, of course, because my development as a
jazz vibraphone player happened through fronting intense jazz bands with jazz
drummers going for it and lighting my hair on fire! I can’t perform that way in
this setting because it sounds silly! It’s cello, piano and vibes, and I’m
ripping up and down the instrument? That just doesn’t work. I like the way it’s
affecting me as an improviser, and it’s affecting me very deeply as a composer
as well. Now I have to remove any energy I could have relied upon that came
from the drums. Now I need to derive energy and tension from different places.
It’s not as simple as, “Play louder here!” I want people to feel like they’re
listening to utter stillness, like they are sitting in a room with nothing but space
around them. I want my music to be the sound of complete silence.
Now I ask this question at
every interview, and you have to take it seriously.
I’m scared now.
What two fruits represent your
playing style, and why?
What two fruits? What two fruits represent my playing style…that’s
amazing.
What is?
Attempting to equate music to fruit—I love it! To answer your question,
I must say the pomegranate and the avocado. In the avocado, I think I like the
clean definition between the skin, the beautiful, serene fruit and this hard
thing in the center that—boop!—pops
right out. And the pomegranate because I feel like half the time I’m a complete
mess when I’m playing. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to cut open a
pomegranate?
I have, actually. I believe it
got on the ceiling.
It goes everywhere! And not only that, but you have this huge red mess
and the stuff that you eat is the miniscule, squirty stuff that’s in the
middle. Most of it isn’t even edible! Plus, I like to explore a range of
different styles, so the different textures of the pomegranate parallel that in
a sense.
Those are good answers. I’ve
gotten six different fruits so far. When people start repeating fruits, I’ll
have to come up with a new question. Last thing—why did you move out west from
New York?
I got called here for a gig in 2004. It was gorgeous out here, and I had
started to become very disenchanted with my life in New York. I lost the energy
that is required to make your life happen in New York. I came out here and was
immediately accepted. People liked what I brought to the music, and I felt like
I was a clean slate. I could build a life in California, whereas in New York, I
felt like I was trying to fit in to a strict mold. Not artistically—I felt very
free artistically—there was just a certain way you have to live your life in
order to simply stay there. I didn’t
want that. In LA, I felt like I could choose from a myriad of places to live,
all of which in a fifteen mile radius of one another offer completely different
atmospheres. I felt like the scene was a little bit more open, transparent and
penetrable, like I could be in there and make a little bit of a difference. Be
heard.
