Canadian Originals is a series by Will Chernoff featuring exclusive long-form interviews with Cellar Music artists from Canada. In the first-ever edition of this series, Will talks to composer and pianist Benjamin Sigerson about his album The Forest for the Trees (release date: September 13, 2024). With five keyboard players, a vocalist, and no rhythm section, Ben’s Cellar debut is something else.
Ben, in his early twenties, is a McGill University graduate based in Vancouver.
Will is a bassist best known for his Vancouver jazz website, Rhythm Changes. He spoke to Ben by videocall on August 3, 2024.
WILL CHERNOFF: All right. Thanks for joining me, Ben. How is your day or your last couple of days going?
BENJAMIN SIGERSON: It’s been good. I just got back yesterday from doing a couple gigs with Owen Chow’s [quintet] in Victoria. So it's been busy, but busy is good.
WC: Who's in the band?
BS: It's a bunch of us young guys that went to McGill together. Owen Chow’s the trumpet player, Mateo Jaeckel on trombone, John Mossie on bass, and Kelby MacNayr is playing on drums with us.
WC: Where did you play in Victoria?
BS: We did one gig on Tuesday at the James Bay United Church, so a really nice space, and then we did a Thursday at Hermann's.
WC: John Mossie, I saw his name on the bill for a Frankie's gig with you as well!
BS: Oh yes, that's right, yeah.
WC: Yeah. Interesting connections.
BS: We lived together for a little while, one of my favorite bass players to play with. Nice guy.
WC: You graduated from McGill in 2023, right?
BS: Yes, that's correct.
WC: How do you reflect on that, because that's only about a year or so ago, which for you could feel like an eternity or a very brief time?
BS: [Laughs.] Yeah. it's… I don't know, I guess it's complicated [laughs].
WC: Is there anything you want to share in general about your time going there?
BS: Well, I did my degree in classical composition, so it wasn't in performance or in jazz; which was good in a lot of ways, because composing for classical contemporary stuff is a big part of what I'm doing these days and what I enjoy doing. And it's done a lot for my playing as well. It's a different way of looking at music and so on. The profs that I had – I studied with Brian Cherney and Christine Jensen – were really great. A lot of the playing I did, I had to do under-the-radar, because they didn't want me to get credit for a lot of those courses; or even do a lot of the jazz stuff, so I was doing it under the table. But I did a lot of playing with Kevin Dean, which was invaluable, and Ira Coleman and Min Rager. The people there – Jim Doxas and Adrian Vedady, all the musicians and composers and players in both jazz and classical music – were extraordinarily helpful and generous, so I reflect very warmly on that. Yeah, I'll leave it at that! [Laughs]
WC: The first time I ever heard your playing was on the recording that you did called [Rainy Season, by your ensemble] Plum Rain, which also comes out of your time from McGill, right?
BS: Yes, that's right.
WC: That was with two other musicians, and it was a special kind of project. It was an interesting way for me to get introduced to you. Can you talk about that?
BS: Sure. That was in I guess 2020, in March, just before everything dissolved. It was with myself, Tony Wang on drums, and Honoka Shoji on harp. I think I came up with the idea, but I don't remember why. Maybe it was just that I thought we could do it, and then we thought, “Why not?” It was a free. improvised set, and we were in the studio for exactly as long as the record is. The idea was […] Tony is a jazz drummer, and Honoka is a classical concert harpist – now she's playing with an orchestra in Quebec or something – so between the three of us, we all have very different backgrounds. So to see if we can make some kind of tonal improvised music together: that was the challenge. Then we spun it with having every improvisation based on a poem by an East Asian poet. Some of them were Bashō poems, some of them were Chinese poems that Tony had studied when he was living in China, stuff like that. It was neat. And we've been meaning to do it again, it's just hard to find the three of us in the same town for more than a day [laughs].
WC: I would love to hear it again! Then I noticed that you appeared – and this is relevant to The Forest for the Trees – you appeared on two albums in particular that I'm thinking of from this time period, by your dad Chris Sigerson. Distant Summits, Quiet Path: you contributed compositions to both those albums, and there's moments where – and this relates to your Cellar album for sure – you are both playing keyboards on certain tracks. Can you take me back, as far as you want, and talk about your musical relationship with your dad?
BS: I guess it starts from birth [laughs]. Both my parents are musicians, my dad obviously a jazz pianist and my mom also a jazz singer and music teacher. My musical relationship with my dad also extended to my grandfather, who was a good musician, a piano player and a singer. He would sub for my dad on the odd thing, too. I sort of had no choice in terms of being a musician. With my dad, it was records we would listen to. My grandpa would burn these CDs for me with Blossom Dearie or Nat King Cole, a lot of Nat King Cole. We would always listen to that. When I was around five, my mom got me started on classical music; but I did that for a few years, then I kind of fell off because I was like, “I'm not sure what I'm doing.” Then my dad, when I was around grade six, showed me how to play “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” and then taught me how to read changes. I understood the logic of the changes, and we had all these fake books laying around, so then I just started doing that. From then on, that was just all I was doing. We didn't really sit down and have too many lessons per se. We didn't have a weekly or even a monthly thing. I would be playing, and then if I was doing something wrong, he'd come down and fix it. Or more than that, we would just end up playing together: even when I was really small, he’d play bassline and chords, and I would play whatever I wanted over a blues. That's how I really started playing. Most of it is just playing together, at least being in the room or hearing him practicing downstairs or anything like that. We're still doing it now. Now I'm trying to pick up the bass, so we're playing the odd thing together where I’m playing bass and he's playing piano. We're still trying to keep it up [laughs].
WC: I know, actually, that you've taken some lessons on the bass!
BS: Yeah, when I was in Montreal, I was actually doing a lot of playing as a bassist in my fourth year. In my third year, my roommate was John Mossie, the bass player. I love his playing, and we were playing a lot together. When I was a kid – really small, I was three or so – I remember distinctly feeling, “I want to be a bass player.” Like, this is really what I want to do is be a bassist.
WC: Oh!
So I’d play with the guitars and pretend like it was a bass or something like that. In third year of university, when we had just got back from covid, I was like, “You know what, why don't I just do it?” I practiced for a while. I did two or three gigs on the bass. Over the summer, I forgot about it. And then I came back and was playing a little bit of bass. I got asked to play in a couple combos, and I was doing this one with Kevin Dean, and so I was playing the bass for a handful of things. There was a while [where] I was doing a lot more work as a bass player that I was as a piano player [laughs]. There's a couple lessons: [with] Darren Radtke, with Ira Coleman with Adrian Vedady. I had a good smattering of advice.
WC: Great names, great advice for sure. So the years for you at McGill: you would have shown up there in the fall of 2019. Is that right?
BS: That's right. Yes.
WC: So yeah, when you say “third year, getting out of covid” that's when a lot of things started to open and reopen: 2022. Yeah, that makes sense.
BS: Yeah, fall of ‘21 going into ‘22.
WC: So in 2022, you also put out Dogs of Orion, which I also discovered. It's not Plum Rain, but that's another project that's with your McGill people that was made during your McGill time.
BS: Yes. That one, again, I don't remember why. I think I was in a mindset where I was like, “I have to do a record every year,” or or I felt like I didn’t have enough to do somehow. A great thing about McGill is their recording program and being able to work with the sound recording students to get some projects done. I thought while I'm there that it'd be great to do some stuff. It was me, Honoka again on the harp, and Raphael Agustin on bass, who's a Vancouver-based guy now. Again, it was this smattering of people from different genres, and I wasn't particularly thinking of it as a jazz record or a classical record. At least in my intention, there was a certain vibe or mood or colour about it [...] whether it was jazz, there's a Scarlatti sonata, there's also the old tune “Whispering” – Owen Chow plays on that, actually – and Caity Gyorgy sings a couple tunes with us. It's not that it has to be jazz or classical or free or whatever you want to call it. It's not a fusion either. It's just all music that exists in the same space, in my mind anyways, so I thought it would be an interesting thing to try and live in that gray zone of kinds of music. And there's neat instrumentation, we were in the concert hall for it and that [was] great for the piano in the harp, and Caity Gyorgy sounds great on it. As always, I don't love some of the lyrics I wrote for her, but [laughs] she sounds great!
WC: [Laughs.] Yeah. Neat instrumentation: as you say, this is a big thing for you, because The Forest for the Trees has some of the neatest instrumentation I've seen in a long time. I'm curious how you got there. How did you decide to make an album with four other keyboard players, and a vocalist, and have that be the instrumentation for this record?
BS: Like you're saying before, it started with Distant Summits, my dad's record. That was 2018 or 2019. I played on two tracks; they were both tunes I wrote. It was “The Softest of Eyes” and “Moonlight Memories”. I co-wrote that with Lucas Dubovik, who's a tenor player who lives in Montreal [WC: and raised here in BC!]. Yeah, it was me, my dad, and Chris Gestrin [all on keyboards together], and somehow it just all seemed to work totally fine. It never felt like there were anyone stepping on anyone's toes or anything that I was like[…] when I was 18, doing that, “Yeah, that's a Juno in the bag, that's just such a sick idea.” [Laughs] [...] In my fourth year in fall [of] ‘22, I thought I would try a chance at writing a grant for the Canada Council. My guess is that the Canada Council likes a really good bit, so here's a great bit for you! So not only is it that I thought it would be possible, but it was something I really wanted to do. To have Sharon on the record, and Tilden on the record too, along with my dad and Chris Gestrin was really great. I knew for sure I wanted to have those musicians. Especially Sharon, who was my only piano teacher before university or outside of my parents. Sharon was the only jazz piano teacher I had. I took a couple lessons from her over a few years and of course absolutely love her playing. It was just one of those things where, as the piano player, all I do is listen to other piano players or admire other piano players, and it seems like some cosmic injustice that you would never work with them. So outside of switching sides to go try and be a bass player [laughs] I could do this project […] And of course, Steve Maddock is just so good! What more can you say about it! [laughs] When I write tunes, I enjoy writing lyrics […] I write tunes in the style of the Great American Songbook or attempting to sound like some kind of standard. When I'm doing that, when I learn tunes, I think of the lyrics all the time. I'm subscribed to the school of, “If you don't know the lyrics, you don't know the tune” [...] I thought, the tune’s not done until I write the lyrics, so I needed a singer.
WC: Yeah, there's a lot of foreshadowing of the project as well on the Christmas project Snowdust, because there you have you and your dad, you have your compositions, you have Steve Maddock. When this project arrived as an upcoming thing for you, even though it had this ‘wow’ bit like you say, it made perfect sense to me, because I had seen the previous year you collaborate on that Christmas album, and It had a continuity with that, I felt.
BS: Yeah, that's funny, because we actually did the Forest for the Trees recording first.
WC: What?!
BS: Yeah, we did the recording about a year ago now, and it's just taken a while to get it on its feet.
WC: Wow!
BS: But yes, we did that, and then we thought, “Well, let's just get Steve again and do it again.” [Laughs.]
WC: But it makes so much sense in the reverse. That's so funny.
BS: Yeah!
WC: Yeah, so you recorded it with Chris Gestrin really directing and engineering the project that way, right? Because he did all the post-production, and he engineered it with all the piano players. And, as you say in the liner notes, the dozens and dozens of keyboards that he has laying around [...] What was recording like?
BS: It was great. When you have so many pros in the room that just know how to get it done, it's just so easy. The only one that had any kind of hard time was me [laughs]. Chris is such a great guy to have in the studio. We did it at his place. I've recorded there a couple times with my dad, and I house-sit for Chris on occasion, so then I spend time in the studio just noodling around by myself down there. So it’s already a pretty comfortable situation. Of course, all these musicians I know really well and trust a lot. It was actually a lot easier than recording sessions I've done at McGill or whatever, where I don't know what I'm doing, no one else knows what they're doing, the sound guy doesn't know what they're doing. We knew it was going to work, we weren't sure how it was going to work. We did a rehearsal just before, in my basement. We ran the heads and tails of things and thought, “Yeah, that should be okay” […] So, how was it? Easy, good, fun. Chris is great.
WC: Can you talk compositionally, and expand on what you already say in the liner notes of the album, about the suite that comprises the first four tracks and how you position in the concept of the album? That seems like one of the big parts of the composer's statement of the project for you.
BS: Yeah. The first four tunes are the Wildfire Season Suite, I called it. I started writing it I guess two years ago when there [were] those Hope wildfires. The feeling continues to grow, and I don't mean to be cynical about it at all. But it's sort of a funny thing when these fires, it's just become a normal thing where we have a wildfire season. And at the time when I wrote it, I thought, “Maybe I'm being a little melodramatic with it.” But not at all, actually, it turns out. With these things that are so clear and present and yet not much seems to change, the only change that does happen is changing to acceptance. Or it seems to be, anyways. I heard on the CBC the other day that they're scientists are discussing about changing what a ‘freak weather incident’ is, because there's just so many now that they're saying that's just normal, I guess. Something about that doesn't exactly sit right with me. Compositionally, I originally wanted it to just be for four keyboards. The tracks two, three, and four are just me, my dad, Chris Gestrin, and Sharon. But I thought, in the continuity of the album, it would be good to have everyone off the top and sort of set the tone album-wise and thematically as well.
The lyrics, basically that's the idea of the thing […] I've done some hiking trips out in the Rockies, near Banff and Jasper which has now been burnt too. Even at that time, I was thinking, “Wow, this is really not great.”
And “Bleeding Ice” is about this Glacier somewhere near Banff – the main one – and how it's just been receding like nobody's business.
“Million-Acre Matchbox” is the same thing looking at all these dead trees from the pine beetle epidemics, and you know, that's just kindling waiting to be lit.
“Rocky Mountain Black Lung” is, now the kindling is lit, and so the black lung disease and smoke in the fire. Anyway, so it's not cheery or anything like that [laughs]. It's a complicated thing, and I don't necessarily have any solutions for it either, but I guess it's a way to present a complicated and emotionally-charged topic [...] It's just a way to bring it up, and it's important that the conversation exists.
WC: Yeah, and it is remarkable just within the last week or so how immediately relevant that subject has become on the way to your album release, as you already mentioned. It's sad, and it's quite something. It speaks to what you were talking about feeling two years ago for sure.
BS: Yeah, totally.
WC: One of the most interesting moments in the flow of the album for me is “Sunsetters”, kind of a bossa-like composition, because that ends up being the only other instrumental track – other than those subsequent three tracks in the suite after the title track opens the album. All the rest of the songs that you wrote are vocal performances with lyrics, with Steve Maddock, except for “Sunsetters”.
Is there anything there that you want to talk about with its position within the album or how the rest of the back half of the album flows in general?
BS: I really like records are where one of the tracks seems to be very different all of a sudden than the rest of them. [On] Dogs of Orion, Honoka does a Scarlatti sonata, which is the longest track and is remarkably different than everything else. Or piano trio records where it’s a solo piano tune all of a sudden the middle of the record. Ellis Marsalis does a lot of stuff like that. Or there's the Ross Taggart album, too, where every other tune – instead of doing it with the band – he does duo with Linton Garner.
WC: Right!
BS: So it's this mood change, this colour change, that I think is quite pleasant. I didn't even do it as extreme as I wanted to in the back of my mind. I was thinking, maybe I should just get everyone to do one solo tune. I think that'd be cool. Or everyone do the same tune in four different ways or five different ways, but that’s a different grant to write [laughs].
WC: Does it matter to you that something like that happens in the middle [of an album], as opposed to right at the end, for maximum effect?
BS: Yeah, it's like when you watch a Shakespeare play and at the start of the third act there's the two bumbling fools that come out, and there's nothing to do with the plot: it was kind of a break from it. So let's call it a Shakespearean tactic [that] I'm employing for us.
WC: That's awesome. You know what, though? I think you do have a surprise at the end, and it delighted me. It was the blaring synth sound by Tilden on the last track.
BS: Yeah. Well, I thought that was just awesome. He was goofing around and then doing whatever. I went, “Aw, you have to do that. That's fantastic.” That just sounds like a Mario Kart intro or something, that's hilarious. And it's only funny because he just plays so well and it's such a great solo. Yeah, just a fun little thing. It sounds good!
WC: Yeah, there are a bunch of fun little things about the way he appears across the album, like the string pads, right? In terms of what you can do with orchestration of the five keyboards, that's an interesting thing that shows up when he plays string pads.
BS: Yeah, yeah. He can fit anywhere and do pretty much anything. So I have someone like Tilden on the synth, where it's just filling in all these orchestration bits or colour bits, where I wouldn't even guess to do it. See, he’s the total right guy for it. It's really great.
WC: Chris Gestrin is the bass player, really!
BS: Right. Yeah.
WC: On pretty much every tune: I appreciated that a lot, the way he sits in the centre of the mix and is the bass player for everyone for the whole project.
BS: Yeah.
WC: Do you have to think about playing, when you solo on the album, just with your right hand and not playing so much in the left, because you have three people or more comping around you?
BS: Yeah, definitely it was on my mind. It's been on my mind generally speaking. But yes, definitely leave a lot more space, even in the comping. We're all listening to the three other compers. But it's cool. You're thinking about almost replacing the drums where sometimes, when the drummer is switching to ride or hat or things like that, it's a colour change. So when we switch who's comping or who's leading the comping, it's a colour change. Who needs the drums if you have four keyboards that can fool around?
WC: I love that you brought that up, because that's exactly where I was hoping to go with that! I was just talking about how Chris was the bass player, and I was like, “Who's the drummer?” And then I thought, there's three or four people comping, and that's the drum kit of your ensemble.
BS: Yeah, exactly.
WC: Did you think about that in advance, or is that something you only realized when you listen back to the mixed tracks?
BS: No, it was something that I was thinking about. I had spent a while listening to the CODE Quartet from Montreal: that's Jim Doxas, Adrian Vedady, Christine Jensen, and Lex French. I had written this paper in my fourth year about Jim Doxas playing in that group, and I was surprised, because usually I don't really love chordless groups. But I really like that chordless group, and I thought the reason was because of Jim. The way he was playing filled the space in a way [such] that a chord player wouldn't even be appropriate in that group, because of the way he was playing. I thought if it can go that way, then it can go the other way. In my lessons with Christine Jensen, she would always talk to me about being rhythmic and ‘being the drummer’. We did play a lot of duo together. Usually our lessons [would] just be an hour of duo playing. I was starting to think like a drummer, thinking, “Where did those left hand shots come in?” I spent a lot of time listening to drummers [...] Jeff Hamilton, especially with Monty Alexander, and things like that. It was definitely on my mind. I don't think I wrote it in my grant saying that this is how I'm going to replace the drums, but I knew it would work that way. Then when we went to hear the mix, even some of the percussive elements of the organ. that sounds fantastic. There you go. It doesn't need anything more.
WC: Love it.
BS: But it's also fun to put on your headphones and play drums along with it sometimes. There’s that too.
WC: I was going to say, if you needed extra bits of content or new promotional things, or to do fun things to extend the album, you could make alternate mixes and get Jim Doxas to play drums to different tracks. You could mute Chris's bass then bring in a bass player or something. There's all kinds of weird stuff fun stuff you could do, in theory.
BS: Yeah, totally.
WC: I'm cognizant of your time. Is there anything else about this project? You're playing it at Frankie's on September 13th, so this is going to appear on stage. I'm fascinated to hear how that is. But even beyond that too, is they're just anything else on your mind that you would like to share about this project, or anything else you'd like to bring up or shout out that we haven't talked about yet?
BS: I guess not […] This album really is, for me, more than anything it's about the other piano players and having them all at the same time. That's really special for me, that I was in a position that I could organize this project and have people that I want to play on it, and that I have a lifetime connection of looking up to these musicians. Then of course having it on Cellar under Cory Weeds, which was another sort of unreachable dream-come-true for me. I remember when I was in grade six [...] it was the last year the Cellar was open. I went to go see [the Vancouver group] We Three Queens around Christmas at the old Cellar. I wrote about that experience in my grade-six descriptive paragraphs for the rest of the year. There was always, in my reality, a mythology around the Cellar and around the [Cellar Music label], so to do a record with the piano players that I have all the CDs of in my shelf, that I have in the car, and that I've studied with and that I've house-sitted for – on the Cellar label, which is all in so many ways seemed mythically unattainable – is a really special thing for me to be able to be a part of the community. More than anything, I'm very grateful to the musicians on the record, and to Cory and Cellar for making this ultimate Vancouver piano-player’s project.
WC: It's a very special one. Thank you, Ben, for talking about it with me.
BS: Thank you so much. I'm glad to talk about it. Thank you.