Hollin Jones
Andy Milne Talks about Jazz and Film Scoring
Andy Milne is a two-time Juno Award-winning pianist and composer whose more than 30-year career to date has seen him collaborate with filmmakers, authors, visual artists, and musicians in multiple genres. A mainstay of the New York jazz scene and full-time professor, he is a former student of Oscar Peterson and has released 12 recordings with his longstanding quintet Dapp Theory, his trio Unison and others. We caught up with him to find out about his early embrace of music software, his journey in recording and mixing and about composing film scores for William Shatner.
Hi Andy! Early in your career you were a student of Oscar Peterson, a music legend and widely considered to be one of the best jazz piano players the world has ever known. How did you come to be a student of his?
At the time I was going to university he was affiliated with York University in Toronto, and that was my primary reason for wanting to go there. In a way he’s the reason why I play — I was growing up as a young black kid in Canada, and here was this towering figure in music — it’s kind of hard to miss his presence. It wasn’t like we did weekly piano lessons, he was more my ensemble coach. But I got to appreciate his artistry and his personality and compassion as a human. And I think that was really instructive for me in terms of how I was relating to other musicians and how I was learning to push myself. I’ve never felt like I’m somebody that sounds like him or has wanted to emulate him — there are probably other pianists that are a bigger influence on my style. But he has a huge influence on me without me necessarily sounding at all like him.
You’re from Canada originally, how did you end up in New York?
When I finished school I went and studied at the jazz program at the Banff Centre, which is in Canada. It’s actually a program that Oscar started back in the ’60s. And when I graduated from university, saxophonist Steve Coleman was the artistic director of the program at the time. He really took a liking to me and saw how I was kind of just diving into his music and so he encouraged me to move to New York, which I had never even thought about doing at the time. I moved to Montreal first and then I moved to New York a year after that, basically realizing this was the sort of push that I had to make to be around really strong creative players.
You’ve always been a piano player, but at what point did studio technology come into your life?
You’re implying electronic technology because of course the piano sitting behind me is technology. But yes, electronic technology was coming into my professional life just at a point when it was becoming pretty common that the average musician would be curious about a personal computer or have it within their grasp to own one. But my first personal computer was an Atari, I started with Master Tracks Pro and then I quickly got Cubase. For me at the time it was a compositional sketch pad, not a full production tool like it is now.
Do you engineer your recordings yourself?
It’s gone through various phases. For most of my Dapp Theory recordings, from 1999, Sean Rickman, who eventually became the drummer in the band, was doing a lot of the production but we were mixing tracks together, so I was learning from him. And partly it was just economics, we didn’t have the money to go to a full-fledged studio and rent it out for two or three days and make a record. So, it was a few years later before I was able to cobble together the funds and I could go to be in a full studio environment.
In fact, I’m basically still studying right now, taking lessons with a great mixing engineer in LA who mixes my records — studying with Rich Breen to just kind of refine my mixing chops — it’s a dynamic conversation. The same thing happens when I have my piano tech here. He comes over and we voice my piano, and he’s here for six hours because he knows I can hear the difference. So, it’s all been a gradual and continuing process, is the short answer.
You’ve recently got a Steinberg AXR4 interface — how are you finding it?
It’s great. There’s something I just discovered about it a couple of days ago, realizing the integration that’s baked into Cubase between the hardware and the software. I needed to upgrade my setup significantly because I was just coming into some work where I needed to take things to another place sonically. I started acquiring some other microphones and the interface was also a big part of that. So, as a Cubase user it fits in nicely.
“I switched over [to Dorico] maybe three years ago now. I was a Sibelius user for a long time and that first year as I switched over was a challenge to overcome the initial learning curve. And now I use it all the time.”
You use Dorico as well?
I do. I switched over maybe three years ago now. I was a Sibelius user for a long time and that first year as I switched over was a challenge to overcome the initial learning curve. And now I use it all the time. What’s amazing is Steinberg is so committed to it and it’s developing so rapidly. You know, like it being the fifth version already.
Back in 2008 you had a piano duo called Crystal Magnets and you were working with surround sound, which at that point wasn’t quite as easy to do as it is now. Is surround something you’re still interested in or still working with?
Oh, I totally love surround. I’d made an SACD solo piano recording that was in surround, but I basically did the surround mix after doing the stereo mix. It was cool but I didn’t even have a system at home that I could listen to the recording back — now I do have two 5.0 systems. From that experience I started having conversations with engineers and I thought, what would it be like if we could actually compose the music for the medium? And so that sort of sparked this idea for creating this project where we would compose the music and think about the surround medium. The physical space we’d record in and the actual recording medium, both from the point of view of how you record the pianos but also how we’d compose the music for that type of mix.
Returning to the subject of film, it was around 2011 that you got into film scoring. And more recently you have become a grantee of the Reel Change program which is partly sponsored by Steinberg.
Yes, that was started by Chris Beck to bring more voices into film composing. The film I’m working on later this summer got some funding from Reel Change to support the score. But going back to 2011, I had always been interested in scoring for films. And then that opportunity presented itself because I had been working with Avery Brooks for a number of years, and he called me up one day and said “Mr. Milne, would you like to score a film?” And I said, sure. He didn’t really say much about it after that and then then nine months later he called, and it turned out it’s a film directed by William Shatner. Two days after that, Shatner and I are having a conference call talking about the film, and three weeks after that I was in LA playing to the picture. I jumped right in, but it was very intimidating because Shatner thought he wanted an improvised score. The picture wasn’t locked yet, so essentially I’m playing live to this over-two-hour documentary, with temp music in one ear and I have no idea if they love it or hate it. That was a really wild introduction. I got the gig and ended up both composing and improvising parts of the score.
Are your scores piano driven or are they more orchestral? How do they tend to work?
Those first ones were very piano driven, and I would say that even my orchestral writing can still be piano driven because I can think of the piano orchestrally, it’s a very accessible language for me. So, it depends on either what the budget is or what the filmmaker wants. The last score I did, they weren’t interested in an orchestral score, they wanted a late ’60s jazz revolutionary kind of energy.
Years ago, before I moved out to Michigan, I was living in New York and teaching a class where I had my students learn how to improvise scores. I would take these scenes from a bunch of different movies and I would manage to kind strip the score out and keep the dialog and the Foley and then I would get them to improvise scores, but not just to a silent picture.
We’re talking about a sort of live experience, projecting a film and composing over it. The piano is such a versatile instrument for that, it’s one of the most versatile instruments that you could pair with images, I think the guitar is another one. But the saxophone, the trumpet, the bass, the drums, they don’t lend themselves so easily to being sonically balanced with dialog in a live setting. With a piano you can evoke so many emotions with a single note depending on how you play it. I definitely dig that aspect of scoring because it’s so powerful, because you can have a pipe organ or a theater organ where there’s all these different timbres, you can change one little element of something and completely change the mood. Synthesizers are great that way, too. So, having all those things at your disposal is definitely pretty powerful.
Is there anything else coming up for you in the rest of this year that you’d like to tell us about, any releases or films or albums performances?
I just recently came out with a new record with my trio called Time Will Tell. I have a chamber music piece that’s premiering at the end of the summer — myself, a piano quintet and a really fabulous string quartet called the Isidore String Quartet that I had the pleasure of being commissioned to write this piece for. It’s a long 22-minute piece commissioned by the Banff International String Quartet Competition, so I’ve got to focus on that. I just recently finished premiering some orchestral arrangements that were part of a celebration of John Coltrane’s music with an orchestra — the premiere was in Toronto last month with the Toronto Symphony. And then this next film score I guess I’m going to get started on. At the same, time I’m always exploring performance opportunities, and different things in other areas, too.