Ever since vocalists, multi-instrumentalists and composers Dina Maccabee and Jesse Olsen Bay got together in 2004 to become Ramon & Jessica, the lovely toned pair have moved cagily around the sonic chessboard. Starting with the chiming harmonic folk of their eponymous debut and its subtly complex 2006 follow-up (Handyman’s Honeymoon), Ramon & Jessica leapt to something more opulent and orchestrated in 2012 (Fly South) before winding up at an opposite pole with a series of bracing, intricate, exploratory a cappella duets, including their ballet score work with San Francisco choreographer Amy Seiwert.
“Challenging conventional forms, structures and aesthetics … using lyrics and music to honestly and critically address our own experiences and observations,” Ramon & Jessica, according to the legend of their personal website, “strive to elicit enjoyment, reflection and surprise.” That ideology reminds one of lyricist, storyteller, improvising vocal avatar and all-around jazzbo Jon Hendricks. Which brings us to Ramon & Jessica’s new album, Roses are Blue.
Based on Getrude Stein’s 1939 children’s book The World Is Round, and touching on that author’s haughty way with word repetition and pulsating free rhythm, Ramon & Jessica — with additional voices such as scat singer Lorin Benedict and bass choir vocalist Tony Domenick — have created a new-school a cappella masterpiece, a chirpily idiosyncratic, modern-yet-ancient avant-garde take on the witty vocal jazz of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, a sound that takes the chess pieces of group singing off the board and throws them into the air (whether Ramon & Jessica know it or not).
“I’ve noticed myself saying to a few people, ‘This album may be very “not for everyone” … but if it’s for you, it’s very for you,’ notes Maccabee of the uniquely stylized Roses are Blue.
With Dina in Berlin and Jesse bouncing along the East Coast, we still managed to catch up and discuss group singing, Gertrude Stein, jazz and more.
Beyond me thinking that Roses are Blue is a modern twist on what Lambert, Hendricks & Ross wrought, what role does jazz play a role in what the two of you do from the start into the present?
Dina Maccabee: That is very interesting to hear, because other than Lorin Benedict’s contribution, I don’t primarily think of Ramon & Jessica or Roses Are Blue as jazz. But our roots as collaborators go back to high school where jazz vocabularies were definitely ingrained. If I’m not wrong, we both did Jazz Choir, Jazz Band and also Stanford Jazz Camp. We even danced to jazz together in modern dance class. And we both went on to study improvisation and jazz vocabularies more formally during college.
During the early days of the duo, I was still dwelling in a pretty jazz-oriented corner of the Bay Area music scene, which you can see reflected on some of the guests on our albums such as Dave Mihaly and Daniel Fabricant. At the same time, I would say I never felt fully comfortable saying “I am a jazz musician.” I really love the things I love … yet I can remember feeling impostor syndrome when I played with amazing jazz musicians in the Bay Area. I remember the late, beloved Bay Area jazz master Rob Reich once asked me if I “liked music that swings.” I do … but it also doesn’t usually feel like my own native language.
Jesse Olsen Bay: While the music we make has never been “jazz” stylistically, with a few exceptions I think that what we create is very much in the spirit of jazz in that we pull from a variety of genres, both popular and “high art” styles. There’s a kind of irreverence in our music, a willingness to beg, borrow and steal from anything that appeals to us.
Your Lambert, Hendricks & Ross comment makes a lot of sense in this context — we’re always blurring the lines between pop and art music. Also, our music tends to incorporate composed material and improvisation. I should also mention that some of my most influential mentors have been jazz musicians — drummer Milford Graves, saxophonist Charles Gayle and others — so a jazz perspective is always a deep part of my creative process.
What is your feeling towards other vocal groups or pairings, of all stripes?
DM: I’m mesmerized by groups that sing in tight harmony, like barbershop, Balkan styles, early music. I was obsessed with The Tallis Scholars as a kid, and when they came to Berlin to perform the entire cycle of Josquin Masses, I went to the whole series.
I’m very drawn to vocal duos like the Meredith Monk piece “Facing North.” I more recently discovered the Japanese group Marewrew, which performs traditional Ainu vocal music. I also join shape-note singings sometimes in Berlin and am currently writing other improvisational music for unaccompanied vocal ensemble, so I basically can’t get enough of it.
JOB: Same as Dina — I love listening to vocal music. For this project we drew on a variety of vocal traditions and styles, sometimes intentionally and sometimes intuitively. When the ensemble gathered to record, we spent a lot of time watching YouTube clips of vocal groups from around the world, which provided inspiration. Tony Domenick showed us a clip of an all-male Corsican a cappella group that absolutely blew me away.
In the early days of Ramon & Jessica, I think we were intentionally riffing on the “boy-girl folk duo” genre, acknowledging that we fit into that framework while pushing the edges of it, even poking fun at it a bit. Even our name, Ramon & Jessica, is a play on this: It could be the name of a “typical” boy-girl duo, but obviously those aren’t our real names and the genders are switched: Dina is Ramon, Jesse is Jessica.
There also happens to be a sharp folk edge to what you two do, but “folk” in the fashion of, say, The Roches, that unsettling, settled sound.
DM: Any comparison to the Roches is a huge compliment to me, in terms of musicianship and craft, and also making the balance of virtuosity, humor and earnestness made to look easy. I’ve spent a lot of “personal practice time” with folk styles, so that is bound to seep in. I went to fiddle camp for a while. If I get stuck while songwriting, I ask “what would Leonard Cohen do” or “what would Elliott Smith do.”
JOB: We both grew up steeped in folk music. I grew up in a folk-singing hippie family. Folk instrumentation, chord progressions, melodies and harmonies were the backbone of our early work together and continue to be foundational.
Is there a division of labor as to who does what within Ramon & Jessica – lyrics, melodies – always separate, always together or is that fluid?
JOB: We both do a bit of everything. The process often goes like this: One of us brings in a sketch of a song, perhaps a single verse or chorus, or maybe something a little more developed. Then we’ll work together to flesh it out. This usually involves taking a simple idea and making it more sophisticated, layered and complex, adding new sections, changing the melody, adding harmonies. Some of my favorite moments in life are getting voicemails from Dina with an idea for a song. Usually she’s driving. She’ll sing a short snippet of something, lyrics and melody, a perfect little pop hook.
My parents were pretty hip, so I remember The World Is Round vividly. And of course, her poetry certainly has a bop jazz vibe to it. Who is the Gertrude Stein fan between you?
DM: If I’m honest, I had never heard of it. And I thought Gertrude Stein was clever, but I didn’t feel I had access to it or a strong personal resonance until we really started digging into this text. Then the weight of it, the revolutionary impact, started to seep in. When we found the book it was more of a curiosity, which we also related to. “Is this text somehow weird in the same way we are?”
JOB: Neither of us were Stein fans before this project. Of course we’d heard of her, and I’d read a bit of her work here and there, but had never really taken the time to immerse myself in it. I’d certainly never heard of her books for children.
How and why exactly did Stein’s iconic prose style — repetitive, stream-of-consciousness execution, oddly rhythmic — feel right for an a cappella song cycle for six voices and a narrator?
DM: The structure and format of the piece came about as a response to working the text, more than vice versa. We started out with duos, as I recall, then became very curious what we might be able to do with additional voices. We both use looping so that was an option, but adding singers seemed like more fun. I think the ensemble is able to capture the feeling of accretion that the text can have, adding layers upon layers of small simple words to create a kind of “waterfall” of sounds and images. You don’t always know where you are, but if you stop worrying about that you can enjoy the ebb and flow of it.
JOB: I have a slightly different memory of this project’s inception. We had been working on duet a cappella music for a while, exploring the range of possibilities in the simplicity of two voices working together in harmony, hocket, canon, etc. We had developed some unique and exciting techniques and wanted to experiment with them in a larger vocal ensemble.
But in order to work with vocalists of a high enough skill level, we needed to find funding to pay people. We decided to write grants, which would require a clear concept. We started brainstorming possibilities for texts to work with. We’ve always blurred the lines between children’s music, adult pop and experimental music, so we were drawn to researching experimental children’s books. Lo and behold, Gertrude Stein wrote some.
We wrote up a proposal, and received initial funding from San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music’s Musical Grant Program to begin composing and rehearsing.
At first, I found the text very challenging to work with. There’s something mundane and commonplace about Stein’s word choices and how she puts them together, almost anti-poetic. My instinct in setting text is to find “the hook,” the catchy phrase, the clear image, but Stein seems to avoid these kinds of things. Often, we ended up working more texturally, embracing the stream-of-consciousness style, which ultimately worked quite well with six interwoven voices.
DM: I think there is something elemental and unadorned about the Stein text. It’s stripped down to a pretty narrow set of words that repeat and recombine to create new meanings. For me that has some kind of synesthetic connection to layered voices, without instruments.
Why welcome other voices than your own? Was it a shared sense of whimsy and experimentation?
DM: As much as we may aim for simplicity and directness — I don’t think we ever aim at complexity for its own sake — this music ended up demanding a pretty rare set of overlapping skills. The ensemble needed to be able either to read or memorize an hour of often through-composed material, with some idiosyncratic harmonic and rhythmic moves that basically fall flat unless they’re executed well in tune and in time.
Our aesthetic is definitely “natural” singing, but at the same time everyone needs to be comfortable with some challenging and not necessarily intuitive parts. So we made a list of people we could imagine enjoying that kind of challenge and went from there.
In Tony’s case, we met him through the grapevine, which was incredibly lucky. We’ve also had two other super-talented members, Michael Mellender and Ben Zucker, who also were formative in the evolution of Roses.
JOB: We were looking for singers who could bring their own personality and character to the music, as opposed to just trained singers who could sing the music “correctly.” Everyone in the ensemble comes from a unique musical background, and you really hear that on the album. There are moments that really sound like a “cast of characters,” with individual voices standing out in contrast to each other. [As a result], the moments where the ensemble blends seamlessly become even more powerful and lovely.
So, I know that we’re not sure if it is a jazz album. But is Roses are Blue a kids’ album?
JOB: I don’t think of this as a kids’ album. It does play with the tropes of “kids’ album,” But I actually think it might scare kids! There are some pretty disturbing and strange moments on it. That being said, in my 15 years of parenting I’ve learned to never underestimate what kids are capable of understanding and absorbing.
DM: I think I hoped to create something that defies that question in the same way a “children’s book by Gertrude Stein” potentially strikes one as an oxymoron. The main character is a kid. And the situations are kid situations like going to school, adventuring in the woods. It has playful musical imagery that I hope kids can get, like hooting owls and falling waterfalls.
But obviously “kids’ music” is a fluid idea that can be pedagogical or twee. As a kid I had musical obsessions, like The Music Man and A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. I still think those are great. I also listened obsessively to other things that I would now rate as awful. I wouldn’t say I understand what kids like or “should” listen to. But I do think it’s possible for many ages and generations of listeners to find something in Roses to latch on to. JT