The harp isn’t commonly associated with jazz, but when John Coltrane began to transform jazz saxophone playing in the late 1950s, it was the harp he had in mind. Practising from a harp method book allowed him to express his complex harmonic ideas in dense, cascading phrases that the critic Ira Gitler memorably described as “sheets of sound.” Through John Coltrane, the harp indirectly but profoundly influenced the sound of modern jazz improvisation.
Fittingly, it was Alice Coltrane, John’s partner in life and music, who popularised the harp as a jazz instrument in the late 1960s, following in the wake of Dorothy Ashby’s intrepid innovations. In the mid-1970s, as her immersion in Hinduism deepened, Alice Coltrane adopted the name “Turiya”, a word of ancient Sanskrit origin denoting the highest and purest state of consciousness. It was in honour of Alice Coltrane that West Australian musicians Michelle Smith (harp), Kate Pass (bass), and Talya Valenti (drums) bestowed the same name on their collaboration.
Turiya’s debut album, Bliss, was released last Friday. It’s a sophisticated blend of jazz harmony and improvisation, hip-hop grooves and breakbeats, and classical and folkloric motifs. Perth MC POW! Negro contributes deft, probing verses to “Solace”, an album highlight composed by drummer Talya Valenti. Ahead of Turiya’s album launch show at The Rechabite in Perth this Thursday, I spoke with Talya about composing for Bliss, collaborating with POW! Negro, and how she went from studying jazz in Perth to performing at Glastonbury.
Tell me about how Turiya came together.
I’d seen videos of Michelle playing at Colab [a long-running, but now sadly lapsed, Perth freestyle rap night with a live band], but every time I went she wasn’t there. During lockdown, I saw her videos on Instagram and messaged “Hey, could we jam?” I think when we first met up there was still social distancing, so we had to play 1.5 metres apart. Eventually, Michelle asked me if I knew Kate, and I said, “Do I know Kate?!”
Kate and I went through uni together, so she’s one of my best friends. It turned out Michelle had been playing with her for about 10 years! So we were like, okay, let’s get Kate to come and jam. It was just free flow improv for quite a few sessions. Then Michelle said, “Oh, I’ve been writing this piece.” And it was “Escalation”. I think that was the first one she brought in, and it was so epic.
So she kept writing and eventually we booked a Perth Fringe Festival show, and that sold out, which was really amazing. We played Michelle’s compositions and filled out our set with some backbeat stuff, like a D’Angelo arrangement. And then we decided to do an album, so Kate and I started bringing in tunes as well.
I first heard you and Kate together on Undeniable with Jessica Carlton and Alana Macpherson. The two of you have a strong dynamic that feels really grounded to me, when Kate locks into an ostinato groove and you bring in your hip-hop and broken beat influences. Does it feel different playing with Kate in Turiya?
That question made me feel really nostalgic; one of my fondest memories of Kate is of her and me hanging out in a practice room at WAAPA [the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts] over 10 years ago, shedding a John Coltrane song called “Equinox”, which has a great bass and drum intro.
I don’t think of playing with Turiya as that different to playing with the quartet. I think both Kate and I just really want to serve the music. That’s how I approach music; whoever I’m playing with, I need to make them sound good, and I need to make the music come across as well as it can. I feel like that’s Kate’s approach too.
And with the ostinato grooves you were talking about, I think that’s one of Kate’s strengths and something I know she likes and uses in her own music. I don’t write much music, but when I have written it, I’ve tried to write to the strengths of the player. So I think in both the songs that I contributed to Bliss, there’s a short, repeating bassline, because Kate’s really great at that, and I think she enjoys it too.
Speaking of ostinatos in Kate’s music, “Labyrinth” on Bliss has one of those grooves that you both play so well, and Kate plays it with such a great sound.
Yeah, I love that bass intro.
You mentioned your two compositions on Bliss. The first one is “Two Years or More”. Is there anything you’d like to share about how you composed that piece and what it means to you?
This is a bit of a recurring theme in the arts at the moment, but that piece came out of the COVID lockdowns. I had been touring a lot and that was shut down, so my whole life changed and it felt like a bit of an identity crisis too. I was trying to get a job – any job – and wasn’t getting anything, and trying to book gigs that got cancelled. Basically, it’s the feeling of that time, that weird feeling. And I was listening to GoGo Penguin, which inspired an arpeggiated approach, just on the harp instead of the piano.
I really like that second section of the piece, where it goes into a swing feel.
I can’t remember exactly how that came together. I think I just wrote a chord progression and was like, “Michelle can you do some cool gliss-y things on the harp?” [laughs] And she made it fit within the progression. After we recorded it, I remember thinking, “That’s a weird song. I’m not happy with it.” Maybe because it switches between a few different feels. But after some space, it’s grown on me.
I like that the swing section only happens once.
I think it’s the only time you hear swing on the entire album too!
The other piece you contributed to Bliss is “Solace”. I’m really interested to hear about how that piece came together and the process of collaborating with POW! Negro.
That one came together much more recently. I picked up the guitar sometime last year. I don’t know how to play the guitar, so I was just making up chords. I came up with this progression that was flowing in some odd time signatures. Luckily, my partner is a really great guitarist, so he could help me work out the chords I was playing!
I put the chords into Musescore and sent it to Michelle. Then she came over and we revoiced it all for the harp. Michelle was cycling through different voicings, different ways of playing each chord, until I was like “Yeah! That one!” We got it to sound as similar as possible to the original guitar part. Michelle also came up with an instrumental hook later on.
As I worked on the song more, I started thinking it would be great for spoken word. I was influenced by hearing Aja Monet’s “give my regards to Brooklyn” on RTRFM [Perth’s biggest community radio station] a year earlier. I remember Rhian Todhunter played it. I’m also really into a drummer called Kassa Overall. He’s a jazz drummer who’s into hip-hop, and he’s also a rapper and a producer. He totally has his own thing.
And, you know, I love all that stuff, but I’m not a rapper, so I started thinking about asking Nelson [POW! Negro] because he’s so great. I’d worked with him before with Special Feelings [a contemporary jazz collective now based in Melbourne], but I was still a little bit nervous to ask him. Then he came to a Turiya show, so I finally asked him and he said yes. I was so excited.
We recorded a demo in a rehearsal and sent it to Nelson. I knew I wanted the piece to be about solace, so I gave him that word and an idea of what I wanted the song to encapsulate. We didn’t hear anything from him in terms of demos, and then when we went into the studio, he came in after work one day and just nailed it in one take. I was crying because the lyrics were so incredible, and his performance… It just couldn't have been better.
His writing is exceptional. You can hear him spinning that concept of solace around, examining it from different angles. And there’s all this water-related imagery that unifies his verses.
The imagery has a really strong sense of place to me. At one point he says, “The port lights glitter/And I find no solace under the bridge.” It really transported me back to a time where I remember sitting under that big bridge in Fremantle, with Nelson and some other friends, just hanging out.
Was “Solace” influenced by your experience of performing with Aja Monet at the Fremantle Biennale in November last year?
Like I said, it was definitely influenced by her track “give my regards to Brooklyn”. But the interesting – the serendipitous – timing of it all was: we finished the album in the first week of July last year, and then the next week I was really lucky to be involved in a WOMPP [Women of Music Production Perth] workshop. At the end of one of those workshop days, I was already feeling emotional, I think because I felt so grateful, and then I got an email from [Perth composer/arranger/artistic director] Mace Francis saying, “Hey, just wondering would you be keen or available to do this gig for a poet/activist who’s coming over. Her name’s Aja Monet.”
And I was like, what? I started crying just reading the email, because I had been hearing her album, when the poems do what they do, on RTRFM and loved it so much. Then I found out Michelle was on the gig as well and she hadn’t realised the connection. I was like, “Remember that ‘give my regards to Brooklyn’ track I sent you? That’s Aja Monet!”
I was at that gig, which was wonderful, and I noticed at certain points she would turn to you and gesture for more, for something to punctuate her phrases. She did the same thing to Nate Smith during her Tiny Desk performance. I was wondering what that felt like for you.
One of my favourite tracks on when the poems do what they do is “black joy”, which is all about black culture and life in America. And I’m white; I don’t have those experiences, good or bad. So going into that performance, I felt like, if I was going to be taking up space, I wanted to pay as much respect as I could, and try to give Aja a sense of that respect. I really wanted to support her.
I didn’t have a memory of those moments you’re talking about until I saw a video of the gig recently. I was trying to go in and out of time, like playing out of time over the band to follow her and then going back in. I don't know if I achieved the effect that she wanted, but I hope so. I’m so grateful that she come out here to Perth, on the west coast only, and that the Biennale made that happen. We’re so lucky that we got to see her.
Since you finished your jazz degree at WAAPA in 2012 you’ve had so many different musical experiences inside and outside of jazz. You’ve toured with Stella Donnelly, played at Glastonbury and Splendour in the Grass, worked with Methyl Ethel… I was wondering if there’s something about being a musician that you’ve learnt from experience rather than study that you’re willing to share.
I feel like I’ve learned to just be true to what I want to do and enjoy it.
Before I went to WAAPA, I listened to mostly rock and probably liked a couple of pop and R&B things. I started listening to hip-hop a bit later, when I was about 19. I think my main reason for studying jazz was to get better at the drums. When I did the jazz course, I never felt like I was good enough at jazz because I didn’t come into it until later, and a lot of people who go into the jazz course have already been playing jazz in high school. But I enjoyed the music, and I tried my best.
After graduating, I realised that hardly anyone would be able to make a career based entirely on jazz, in Australia at least. The only person I knew who was doing that was Tal Cohen, and he went to the United States to do it. And I thought that if I wanted to tour, I would need to leave Australia. Then I moved to Tasmania for a couple of years.
Wow.
Yeah, which is kind of the opposite of moving to somewhere like NYC, which is probably an idea a lot of jazz students think they should pursue. So I was in Tasmania, and at first nothing much was happening for me there. But eventually I met some great people on the northwest coast to play with. Then I met this awesome woman called Sheyana Wijesingha. She got me some gigs, and I used to have to drive like an hour or two to the gigs because they were in a different town.
I started playing rock again. And I was like, shit, now that I've done this whole jazz degree and learned how to play like a jazz drummer, I don't sound like a rock drummer anymore. No one said that; I just noticed it. So I had to re-learn how to play rock. Then, when I came back to Perth, I saw my friend [singer-songwriter] Tanaya Harper playing solo, and I was like “I can hear what the drums should be doing, can we jam?” So we started Bells Rapids, which Stella Donnelly joined. Then Stella’s solo career took off, and she asked me to join her band and tour with her.
And I was like, this is amazing! I get to play with my friends and I get to go on tour. I’d always wanted to tour, it was my dream. And I didn’t have to go to America to do it. The drum parts were quite simple, but they served the music. The lyrics were an important part of many of those songs, and the arrangements were really great. And when COVID shut down touring, I realised that playing those simple beats for two years had really impacted my time in a good way.
Then after the lockdowns ended, Jake Webb asked me to play for Methyl Ethel. He’s a really great drummer. He can play everything, and record and mix it. He does it all, and he’s very meticulous. He wrote all the drum parts and sent me demos of them. It was really awesome to see how he worked.
All of that experience really informed me, because that kind of indie rock or experimental pop music is highly arranged, and sound and post-production are really important, whereas traditionally in jazz the focus is on improvisation and a live sound. Although Bliss still sounds pretty acoustic, I was asking our engineer, Kieran Kenderessy, “Hey, on this bit can you put a little reverb or delay on the harp” or on the vocal. Which I know is really simple, but it has a subtle impact.
And I don’t know what Michelle and Kate think, but in the future I’d like to go down the road of exploring sound more, and maybe even use some pedals on the harp. Because jazz doesn’t always experiment with all the possibilities we have now. Like in the 1950s, obviously you wouldn’t be setting up an amplifier with pedals. But maybe, if Charlie Parker was around now… [laughs] I shouldn’t say that. But, like, would he be using pedals? It’s interesting to think about.
Turiya are launching Bliss at The Rechabite on Thursday 4 July. Kate has been studying in New York this year, but she’s back in town for the launch. How does it feel to be rehearsing the music together again; do any of the songs feel different to when you recorded them?
Well, we hadn’t played “Solace” in full since we recorded it, because it was so fresh. But the rest of the album has felt really easy to play. It was actually a relief to play the music again, because there's so much stuff you need to do for an album release; there's a lot of admin involved. So it was really nice to just play together, and because we’ve heard the album so many times now it felt easy.
But we’re also trying not to get too locked in to exactly how the album sounds; there’s always space for improvisation. We’ve got one or two more rehearsals booked, just for playing’s sake and to get it tight. But we’re ready. We’re only going to rehearse with Nelson at soundcheck, to save that experience for the live performance.
What’s next for Turiya after the album launch?
When I got into contact with a jazz festival on the east coast a couple of years ago, the first thing they asked was, “Do you have an album out?” So I’m hoping that the album will lead to more opportunities to perform at jazz festivals. We’d love to play at the Perth Jazz Festival. And if we got the opportunity and the funding to take the band overseas, that would be really great. We will probably be pretty quiet for a little while after the album launch, and then we’ll see what happens.
Tickets to Turiya’s album launch at The Rechabite on Thursday 4 July 2024 are available here.