How important is it to you to develop a center of jazz artists that reflect our regional aesthetic? Most of the artists on Shifting Paradigm are from the Midwest. I think it’s clear that the music industry has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, and Congress needs to revise the laws that govern the industry in the digital age. However, if a song gets on a playlist with a big audience, it can generate a huge amount of revenue.
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It takes roughly 2000 song streams to equal the revenue from one album download on Bandcamp. Is there any hope that streaming services will pay more in the future? Shifting Paradigm is an artist-friendly label, where artists get at least 75 percent of the sales revenue.
I think that fans were just really great about supporting artists last year as live performances were shut down. We didn’t do a whole lot except work together as artists to help push each other’s music. Yeah, it’s interesting that despite the label only putting out a few releases in 2020, it was one of our best years. What adjustments did you make to keep Shifting Paradigm afloat? You run Shifting Paradigm Records and have said that during the pandemic some of your sales went up as people consumed music while at home. But I’ve really become less into the idea of favorite players and prefer listening to as many great players as I can because they all have different voices on the instrument, different feels, different ideas, and for me, not listening to any one player too much has helped me to sound more like myself as a guitarist. I got into Kurt Rosenwinkel, Adam Rogers, Ben Monder, and then players like Lage Lund, Mike Moreno, Gilad Hekselman and more recently Mary Halvorson.
It was Pete, who was listening outside, and he said something like, “Sounds great … which one of you sounds like Pat Martino?” That was a great compliment but also made me realize that I needed to expand my listening. The story of how I met my bandmate in Atlantis Quartet, drummer Pete Hennig, is that I was playing with a trio in a practice space here in the Twin Cities not long after moving here and we got done with a tune and heard a knock on the door. From there, I became obsessed with Pat Martino for several years. Any guitarist could spend a lifetime digging into those two. I also got very into Grant Green at that time on the recommendation of one of my professor’s. I never returned it! That record cost me over $100.
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I remember checking out Wes Montgomery’s Full House record from the college library when I was 19 and listening to it a repeat. Time will tell, but right now my primary focus is on the Zacc Harris Group record this Fall. I certainly have a good batch of tunes from that which I have considered doing with an acoustic guitar trio perhaps. In the end, I got very into home recording and ended up launching a Patreon site to put out these home recordings, many of which were acoustic guitar driven. So from March 2020 through the summer, I was playing a lot of acoustic guitar, including rekindling my love of bluegrass, which I played a lot in my 20s touring with a “jamgrass” band. When everything first shut down and all of my gigs got cancelled, I just didn’t have the motivation to practice the music that I’d been playing so much for the past 15 years…modern jazz and standards. Might you play in some new groups as a result?
You’ve said that during the pandemic you played in new styles of music to keep yourself stimulated. But on the positive side, I have a record coming out this September, with a release show at the Dakota on September 19, and I am lining up tour dates around the Midwest this fall in support of that, so that will be something to look forward to. My weekly Sunday gig since 2007 at the Riverview Wine Bar looks to be gone now as they have closed their doors. I’d say that I’m up to eight to 12 gigs a month, which is certainly less than I was doing pre-pandemic, but a good sign of progress in the live music world. Are you getting back out there now with live gigs?
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