Matt Lavelle - In Swing We Trust (2022) Hi Res

Swing has always been at the heart of jazz and free jazz as I have learned it and played it. My first mentor Hildred Humphries was a saxophonist from the Swing era, and played with Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Roy Eldridge The very first solo I ever took was on C Jam Blues with my High school big band led by legendary educator Bert Hughes in Nyack, Ny in 1987. I knew 1 blues scale and had just spent the summer getting my chops back after I had only been doing art since I first started learning the trumpet in middle school. What came out of me was a blues swing riff right in time, I still remember it. While I knew about 2% about music, the swing aspect of my musical personality was already in me. Bert played Joe Williams singing Work Song live with the Basie orchestra, and I felt something deep inside. My friend and trombone player Foster Bass said “man, you should have seen your face when Bert played that track.” I ventured to Sam Goody and said something like “What’s the greatest jazz you have?” I left with 2 cassettes: Louis Armstrong’s greatest hits, and Miles Davis greatest hits. I fell so hard and deep for music that I have made it my life’s core direction since then. From Louis what I felt the most was the blues. From Miles, the way he painted on My Funny Valentine remains to this day, a level of expression that I have been striving to reach, a type of creative mountaintop. Swing, was always at the heart of it.

When Tom Cabrera mentioned recording an album recently I immediately heard the word swing in my head. As Tom said, swing is what we DO. The thing is that I have spent the last 22 years also playing free. All the way back in the beginning, Hildred saw this in me and encouraged it. But as the late great Reverend Nat Dixon said when we were talking about Ornette, nobody ever said that Ornette didn’t swing! Playing free but still swinging is just what my natural self is, and always has been. Free melody too. I’m obsessed with taking apart tunes written by Duke, OC, and myself and using the melodic DNA for improvisation. I feel that when you play free your natural self comes out, and I just can’t be any other way. That’s what connected me with Bern Nix, Francois Grillot, and Giuseppi Logan who had his own type of swing. I feel that a person’s swing is just as unique as they are, and there are thousands of different ways to do it, and thousands of different levels. We end up gravitating towards those with similar swing vibes, and Tom and I have been swinging since we met in the early 90’s. This was the first time I played with bassist Phil Sirois, and he is right at the heart of this swinging free session that was totally spontaneous with no prior discussion, structure, or any other plan other than to do what we do.
It’s also very interesting that all 3 of us playing on this album are painters.
A few notes about the music.

On Giuseppi’s horn I’m playing his actual horn, an E-flat piccolo clarinet. The first time I met this horn was when he brought it to Sam Ash where I worked and we got him a mouthpiece for it. After G left Earth I became a caretaker of all his horns. I had always wanted to try a piccolo clarinet and play notes up in the sky, as for years I have been playing notes under water and more deep down in the Earth Frank Lowe Says Goodbye is based on a very moving phrase I heard him play shortly before his own transcendence.