I hear the same level of swing in music by “serious” composers that I hear in jazz. There are passages in the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 that just plain swing. Stravinsky’s music always swings.. The second movement of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses is an unbelievably swinging piece with heavy trombones and tympani. You find it in all sorts of places, and it makes you want to move, no matter what “kind” of music it is.

I grew up on rock ‘n’ roll, and my first playing experiences were in that music - I was an electric guitar player, and I still love the sound of crunch guitar and synth grooves and massive gated backbeat snare drums.

But I don’t hear electronic music in the same way that I used to. I think we’ve gone too far; I’ve been to concerts in the past few years by jazz musicians whom I really admire, and been assaulted by the amplified sound of the bands. These are concert halls famous for their acoustics, which classical trios fill with sound, without a single microphone. But jazz groups load the stage with mikes, amps, monitors, and banks of speakers, and turn responsibility for their sound over to an engineer sitting behind the mixing board in the last row of the hall. It doesn’t make sense.

We’ve gotten away from the organic sound of the instruments themselves. I think in these times, we would do well to re-learn how to hear the natural acoustics of wood and brass and metal. There’s a whole generation of young people who’ve never heard an acoustic band at all. Even fewer have heard an oboe or a bassoon, a French horn or a cello. I’m very excited to have connected with players like those on my CD October – classically-trained improvisers. We’ll be working to find opportunities to have this band bring that sound to audiences.

Some musicians say that in today’s loud, fast world, you have to be loud, too, to “cut through” the clutter of our environment. They feel that a contemporary sound is one that reflects the pace and urgency of the world we live in – the sounds of the city, computer-generated sounds. I’m less interested in a “modern” sound than I am in an a timeless, organic sound: wood, reeds, brass, metal, strings, wind, bows, fingers.