Exhausting Possibilities (or, Anything Becomes Anything): Kate Gentile Speaks

From L to R: Jeremy Viner, Kim Cass, Kate Gentile, Matt Mitchell. Photo courtesy of the artist.

by Henry Mermer

This Saturday, drummer and composer Kate Gentile will be presenting two projects on The Jazz Gallery stage. First up is Find Letter X—featuring Matt Mitchell, Jeremy Viner, and Kim Cass—which will perform new music for quartet written by Kate. The second set will feature the same ensemble performing ‘one bar’ compositions from Kate and Matt’s collaborative project, Snark Horse. Recently, we caught up with Kate to talk about her practice as a composer-performer, as well as the unique challenges of composing and performing her music.

The Jazz Gallery: What have you been up to today?

Kate Gentile: Mainly I’ve just been practicing my quartet music.

TJG: Getting ready for the gig?

KG: Yeah. And I want to record all of this music, probably this year, so I’m getting ready for that too. There’s a lot more music than what we’re playing at The Jazz Gallery. We recorded a third of it remotely during the pandemic, but there’s still a lot more.

TJG: Did you compose all of this music during the pandemic?

KG: The music is from between 2017 and now, as recent as this year. There’s a new piece that I wrote a week ago.

TJG: What is you process like each time you go to compose a new piece? Does it change depending on the context, for example, writing for the two groups that will be performing at The Jazz Gallery—Find Letter X and Snark Horse?

KG: The process for me is really different every time I compose. Maybe there are some things that are always similar, but the starting point is often different. Sometimes I’ll imagine ideas in my head, and I maybe can’t imagine them exactly because they’re beyond what I can currently hear at that time, which is kind of the point. I like music that stretches my ears and that makes me hear stuff differently. So then it's just figuring out what exactly I’m hearing and hashing out the specifics. Sometimes the starting point will just be a form or a conceptual idea; sometimes it will be some chords or rhythms; sometimes I’m at a keyboard, sometimes I’m not—so, I don’t really have one process. Part of the fun of it for me are all the different ways you can go about making up music.

The Snark Horse music goes back to 2013, when Matt [Mitchell] and I challenged each other to write one bar each day. It actually came from Matt going on a rant that involved wanting certain musicians, whose playing was interesting to him, to compose more and to not be intimidated by it. He was like “just write a bar a day!”, just saying it theoretically to those people. I was already composing a lot at the time, but I was like, “That’s a really good idea. I’m going to do that also,” in addition to the composing I was already doing. We started sending the bars to each other, and it just became this back and forth thing that would get more and more ridiculous.

TJG: So, those Snark Horse tunes are usually finished within the span of one day?

KG: I would say 90-something percent of the time. There must have been at least one or two that I spent more time on. Some of them have conceptual ideas that took a little longer to become clear and were edited after more than a day. But yeah, most of the time it’s fast.

TJG: Are practicing and composing always kept separate from one another?

KG: There have been some times years ago where I tried to make them not separate, but it felt unnatural to me. I think of more interesting ideas to play at the drums when I’m not at the drums. I also compose at home and I practice at my practice space most of the time, so it’s also physically separate. 

When I’m composing, sometimes I’ll make a demo for the band with an idea of the type of thing I might play on the drums. There’s one tune that is entirely in 7:9, sometimes it’s 9:7—so they probably need to know what I’ll be doing on that. Playing this music often requires another level of thinking about the role of the drums and how to deal with some of the rhythmic territory, because there’s not a lot of precedent for certain kinds of rhythmic structures and how they’re handled.

TJG: Right, there’s no standard ‘beat’ for each polyrhythm, or something like that.

KG: Yeah. A lot of the time I’ll print out what I wrote for the demo and practice that. And it’s stuff that I never would play in the moment if I was making up a drum part at the drums. Sometimes I’ll even compose a drum part as an etude for myself, and then maybe I end up not playing it when its ‘for real,’ if we’re recording or on a gig, but sometimes it’s like, “that’s a really cool part,” and it ends up being a compositional addition to the piece. 

Every tune has different challenges. There’s a lot to be said for taste and basic choices. A lot of it is pretty simple—thinking about what I think the drums should be doing, and then working on playing that.

TJG: How do you approach writing drum parts that deal with all of the rhythmic information in your music. Is it important that the drums address all of it?

KG: My instinct is often to play something that relates to every layer, whether it is simultaneously or consecutively, because I feel like the drummer is the one that can make it clear to the listener “these are all of the things happening together.” If you have one person playing one thing, another person playing another thing, and they are two different sounding instruments, the relationship or composite of those parts is not always clearly perceived by the listener. But if you have one instrument, like a piano, playing both the parts, the composite is much more perceptible. I feel like drums do that too, so that’s often my instinct. Piano and drums can be like the “glue” in that way.

But I’m also into letting certain things be ignored by the drums. Maybe Jeremy is doing something, and it’s a more interesting vibe if I’m not playing with it. Or maybe just ignoring it in an abstract way, like I’m playing with it but not in a way that’s like “here’s how everything fits together and lines up.” Or maybe I’m just playing with one of the layers in a tune at a time, consecutively, instead of all of them at once, to exhaust the possibilities and hear all the different ways it could work.

TJG: This is reminding me of the list that you shared on Instagram.

Exhausting the possibilities. That’s actually something Gerald [Cleaver] said to me once that was really helpful—about exhausting possibilities rather than coming up with an idea. I don’t remember the context of what it was.

TJG: How important is the initial seed for one of your compositions, when also considering that you’re going to exhaust it these ways?

KG: As far as pitch and rhythmic material, you can kind of just start with anything. I wrote multiple Snark Horse bars just based on “dogmacile,” which is one of Matt’s bars, just as an exercise in how many different bars I could get that were somehow derived from that source material. Matt has etudes that are based on pitch and rhythmic material from other etudes, from other etudes—just like, recycled like crazy. I do a similar thing sometimes because the scope of what we’re working with is inherently limited—12 pitches, etc… If you’re manipulating everything a lot, then it’s not going to end up where it started, anyway, so why bother with new source material every time? Anything can become anything. Of course, I also just really like coming up with new source material, though, so I do end up making up more very often.

TJG: Listening to Mannequins, I’m always struck by pieces like “hammergaze” and “xenomorphic,” for example, which seem to present a totally unique side of your rhythmic palate, or at the very least, seem to suggest a new approach to dealing with these rhythms.

KG: “hammergaze” is actually in the same rhythmic world as the track before it, “unreasonable optimism,” which is entirely in 7:6. But unlike “unreasonable optimism,” “hammergaze” is played in a very ‘breathing’ way. It’s interesting playing polyrhythms rubato, though, because the amount of time that you’re breathing or sort of adding ‘feel’, that micro-bit of time is the difference between correct and incorrect. But if you’re still phrasing in a way that internally references the exact rhythm, even if it sounds loose, the essence of it is still in there.

By the way, “xenomorphic” is entirely improvised. That’s Adam Hopkins overdubbing 10 layers of bass improvisation. I had some guidelines and a concept of each of the lines being in a different register, starting very spread out to create something really dense and full and messy and gradually coming together into the bassline to the next track, “wrack,” but that track is all him.

TJG: Is it important to balance these different rhythmic feelings in your music? To have some sort of flexibility with the written material…

KG: Yes. I want everything to be integrated, mostly. The weird or unconventional material is not only that you’re hearing the weird material of the composed parts of the pieces, which would be cool on its own, but also that it’s affecting the improvisation in that you’re going to end up improvising in a different way than if the material were more traditional.

TJG: I last heard your group Find Letter X at SEEDS in February 2020. How has the music for the band evolved since that gig?

KG: There’s more of it. We’re getting better at playing it. 

TJG: One of my favorite moments from that concert at SEEDS was an improvised solo that Kim played before one of your compositions. He played these harmonics up and down the entire bass, until finally setting up an ostinato and drawing the rest of the band in to join him. And later in the piece, you play this sort-of double time gesture, which Kim then mimics across the range of his instrument.

KG: I think you’re talking about a tune I wrote specifically to feature Kim, called “in casks,” which, in case it’s not obvious, [the title] is a ‘sound-a-like’ of his name.

I almost think of that tune like a blues, but with a really weird harmonic take on what it means to go to the IV-chord or the V-chord, since it's not that, but it’s what could be considered substitutions, and then with really weird extensions over it in the upper part that moves against it. Most of the tune is in 4, but there’s a vamp in 9, which is maybe what you’re remembering. In the 4/4 section, there’s always a backbeat on 3. And then during the first two beats, the subdivisions that I’m playing get really specific and change and speed up and slow down. And on [beats] 3 and 4 there’s the very active bit that Kim plays.

TJG: What does Kim bring to the quartet music?

KG: [laughs] I mean, it seems pretty obvious! He’s so singular in his playing and whole approach to the bass, so there’s that—being a really original voice. And also, he’s really the only bass player that could work in this band, as someone who is obsessive about polyrhythms. That’s exactly his shit. I mean, we started just shedding as a trio [with Matt] for fun before I formed this version of this band, and it was just immediately clear that [Kim] is the perfect person for this. If I tried to hire someone who wasn’t obsessed with polyrhythms like Kim, it would be asking so much of them to deal with this music. I mean, no matter how much you pay someone for this kind of music, you’re always asking more of them than… you’re always the one benefitting. Like, no one is benefitting because I hired them; it’s the other way around.

The amount that has to go into this music is kind of insane… just to make it okay, not even to play it really well and to nail everything, [but] just to get through it. It requires way more than I think people realize. And if you don’t pick people that want to play it because they’re enthusiastic about the music and it's exactly their skill set and they’re perfectly suited for it, it just… you can’t do it. Basically, it has to be Kim and Jeremy and Matt, and that’s the only way any of this music works—specifically with those individuals. 

TJG: What should listeners expect to hear at The Jazz Gallery this weekend?

KG: The first set is quartet music for my band Find Letter X, some of which we’ve played before, but I think after the pandemic, we’re feeling extra fresh about it. I know I personally feel more prepared, because I’ve had more time to really work on it in a deeper way. And there’s some new music that we’ve never played before, so also that. And then the second set is the same band playing Snark Horse music, which are one bar compositions, so there’s way more room for the improvising to just go off. And I'm really looking forward to doing that with my band that usually plays music that’s more compositionally involved.

TJG: And one last question, because I just have to ask: what’s your favorite title of a piece that you’ll be playing this weekend?

KG: I like “phoofaux”—that’s one of mine. I don’t remember what it came from, but now every time we order tofu pho for dinner, we’re like, “is that where ‘phoofaux’ came from?” But I don’t remember. It’s one of those things where we say so much stupid shit that we don’t remember the origins of it all.

Drummer Kate Gentile plays The Jazz Gallery on Saturday, February 26, 2022. Ms. Gentile will be joined by Jeremy Viner on reeds, Kim Cass on bass, and Matt Mitchell on piano. The group will play music written for Find Letter X in the first set and Snark Horse in the second. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 P.M. E.S.T. $25 general admission ($!0 for members), $35 reserved table seating ($20 for members) for each set. A livestream is available for $20 ($5 for members). Purchase tickets here.