Neil McDonald
Since moving to New York City in 1991, jazz pianist and composer Andy Milne has made a name for himself as a solo artist, collaborator, and bandleader with the five-piece Dapp Theory, with whom he’ll appear at The Jazz Room in Waterloo Saturday night.
Born in Hamilton, Ont. and raised in Bruce County and Toronto, Milne attended York University (where he studied with Oscar Peterson), after which he received a Canada Council grant to study at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He then spent a year in Montreal, working as a sideman for the likes of Ranee Lee and Joe Lovano, before moving to New York.
There, he became a member of the M-BASE collective, with saxophonist Steve Coleman, Cassandra Wilson and Greg Osby, before forming Dapp Theory in 1998. He has also collaborated with Bruce Cockburn, Dianne Reeves, and Avery Brooks, an actor and singer who also played Captain Benjamin Sisko on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” a friendship that led to Milne composing the film score for “The Captains,” William Shatner’s documentary about his fellow overseers of the Starship Enterprise.
Milne’s most recent release with Dapp Theory is their fourth album, 2014’s “Forward In All Directions,” a typically heady brew that blends jazz with spoken word poetry and influences as diverse as Thelonious Monk, Joni Mitchell, KRS-One, and Van Halen.
On the phone from Toronto during a break in his current Canadian tour, Milne said mixing genres like funk and hip-hop with jazz is simply a reflection of the times.
“I think that there’s an awful lot of blending that’s existing in our musical cultures, and our artistic cultures, and our technology cultures, and our everyday cultures these days that we’re more accustomed to it. There’s a lot of hybridizing, so it’s kind of in the air anyway. I think you come into music and you get attracted to different styles and there are things that intrigue you and sometimes it’s a challenge, but you’re searching for a way to satiate your interest in different styles and different traditions,” he said. “And there’s just more and more of it nowadays. I think there’s always been a lot of that in jazz, and I think jazz has been an interesting example over the last hundred years to illustrate that kind of bringing together of styles, but I think nowadays it happens more frequently because there’s more source material available.”
Milne said he has also found inspiration in non-musical sources, such as religion, politics, and art.
“At different times, I’ve been investigating something that conceptually I find compelling or I’m just drawn to it. I think it goes back to perhaps when I was in university, and I was studying music at York University, but I was also very much interested in Zen Buddhism, and I was interested in sociology, and at that time, I was interested and keen on how I could synthesize principles of aesthetics, or just being able to apply a certain thinking to one endeavour and borrowing a pathway. And I started doing that at a fairly young age in my studies without thinking that it was something unusual,” he said.
Milne has recently found inspiration in homeopathy, a subject that will form the core of his next project, a work commissioned by Chamber Music America that will be released this fall. Called “The Seasons of Being,” the album will feature his Dapp Theory bandmates (saxophonist Aaron Kruziki, bassist Chris Tordini, drummer Kenny Grohowski, and spoken-word artist John Moon) and five guest musicians. Milne said investigating homeopathy as a medical option and speaking with practitioners gave him a new avenue to explore with his music.
“It led to a deeper conversation about music and healing, which is not new, but it was new maybe for me and I’m not sure I’ve heard of anybody else going quite in this same direction, but to then look at the way individuals respond to sound, and since my music involves writing and modifying and responding to individual reactions to music, it then became something I wanted to delve into, as to how I could channel a better understanding that I might be able to have of a person, and write for that,” he said.
Milne has collaborated with many artists in his career, but perhaps none more seemingly out of left field than his work scoring William Shatner’s documentary, “The Captains,” a job that came about because of a longstanding musical friendship with another Star Trek captain.
“For many years, I had been performing with the actor Avery Brooks, who’s also a singer and pianist. And when William Shatner was making this documentary that he made that I scored for him — it was called “The Captains” — he was doing interviews with all the actors that succeeded him in captain roles in all the “Star Trek” franchises. And his interview with Avery was very much built around music, it was very improvisational, the two of them sitting at a piano, talking, singing, joking, thinking about similar experiences,” he said. “And so as a result of that exchange and relationship, I guess Shatner had a conversation with Avery about the music, and Avery just said, ‘I’ve got your guy.'”
The collaboration was a success, and Milne has maintained a professional and social relationship with Shatner ever since (and will also be working on the score for an upcoming documentary on the 25th anniversary of “Deep Space Nine”).
“It was sort of a gamble, I think, on his part, but he was going on the strong recommendation of Avery’s, so that’s how we got started,” Milne said.” And then from there, I did six more films for him.”
You can catch a rare local glimpse of Milne and Dapp Theory in action — their current tour includes their first dates in Ontario since 2010 — at The Jazz Room in Waterloo tomorrow night.
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