SoulCuts Interview: Jesse Fischer Breaks Down Soul Cycle’s Homebrew

Jesse: I think you’ve hit the nail on the end. I was going for something accessible, but with depth, so that as you listen to it more, you get more out of it. There are also a few levels to the reasons behind why we called it Homebrew. At the most literal level, it’s because we brewed it up ourselves, all in-house, from the production to the engineering, tracking, mixing and mastering. And, when I was making the album, I was remembering that time before I became a professional musician, growing up, when we were just playing for the love of it. I hope it’s captured that.

SoulCuts: It’s an earthy album, but that’s not to say it’s without polish. You can definitely feel the roots, but it’s immediately listenable. How do you go about creating something that hits instantly with people but retains that replay value?

Jesse: For me, anytime I have an idea, I play it over and over in my head for days, or it could even be weeks, and then I might try to record it in a number of different ways, mixing up the ideas. I’m such a critical listener, especially with my own music, so if it stays in my head and keeps coming back without forcing, or trying to work on it, then I know that there’s something there. I don’t really write music down on paper anymore. If I think of an idea and it’s still there a few days later, then there must be something there, and that’s the basic process. I then take it to the band. We’re fortunate to have a lot of different collaborators on this album and it was fun to try ideas out and see what would work with all the different personalities.

SoulCuts: How does it work with the band from a writing and arranging perspective. Do you all come together to provide the material?

Jesse: Well, this record was actually all me, apart from the two covers. Everyone in the band writes, everyone is an artist in their own right and has contributed things in the past. However, for this record I wanted to do something very personal and intimate and I was at a place where I really wanted to focus on that. Everyone was very sensitive to that and brought out the best of themselves to support the music that I had written.

SoulCuts: Does this approach explain the name change from Soul Cycle to Jesse Fischer and Soul Cycle?

Jesse: Ah, you caught that! A little bit, I suppose, but it was somewhat just practical too. People sometimes don’t realise that I’m part of Soul Cycle. The name change reflects that the album is a personal document, much more so than the previous records that we put out. Some know me as a jazz pianist, while others know me as a side-person in the R&B world. A lot of people haven’t heard of Soul Cycle, even if they know me. They might know me as a producer and engineer, but don’t know that I play. With this album, I hope to connect everything and let people know that this is the full package.

SoulCuts: In this day and age, it’s not uncommon for artists to wear a variety of hats (particularly given budgetary constraints), but this is sometimes at the detriment of at least one of the elements, giving rise to substandard products. It must be hard to maintain that consistency across such a wide range of disciplines.

Jesse: It’s interesting and definitely a challenge. But, I’m very well suited to it, even if it wasn’t a question of money. I have so many interests. I get joy out of engineering. I just love it doing it, even aside from my own work. I never thought I would be a musician. I always thought that I would work on the technical side, or just behind the scenes. But I’ve come from a place where I’ve studied all these different disciplines, not just for my music, but for their own sake. It’s definitely a challenge and it’s hard to find time to sleep (laughs).

SoulCuts: There surely must be an area in which you’re less comfortable, at least one part of the puzzle that presents a much greater challenge?

Jesse: Of all the things I do, it’s probably the performing. I think that’s the hardest. I’ve just spent the past two months being a publicist for myself and I enjoy that, I’m really getting into that, but when I’m up on stage, showing people who I am such an intimate way, that’s the hardest thing, but it’s what I love to do the most.

SoulCuts: Is it challenging because it’s the most important aspect of being an artist?

Jesse: I don’t know. I think it’s perhaps because it doesn’t fit my personality, which is much more suited to being behind the scenes. But I’ve learned later in life that I love performing. It’s just that it’s difficult. I need to get used to it. I’ve been performing since I was a kid, but it’s a much bigger responsibility now. You know people have come to see me, and I’m going to affect their whole mood, their experience. It’s an interesting challenge.

SoulCuts: I’ve unfortunately not had the pleasure of witnessing the Soul Cycle live experience, can you break it down for us?

Jesse: Yeah, we’ve still not played in the UK. Hopefully I’ll be over this year, at least to do some promotion. But the live experience, it’s very dynamic, much more like this record than Flipped.

SoulCuts: Flipped was very well received.

Jesse: Yeah, Flipped got a good buzz, and part of that was thanks to me getting better at publicity. But the record connected with folks in a contemporary, electronic way. Flipped was recorded in the contemporary studio way. Yet, when we’re live, it’s exciting. There’s a lot of open-ended things going on and a lot of room for improvisation. I’ve been playing with the guys in band together for about five years, so sometimes exciting things happen. There’s a lot of trust between us and we’re all willing to go somewhere where we didn’t intend, or expect, to be. It’s a jazz band, of course, but I also take a lot inspiration from my work playing with R&B, pop and hip-hop groups because in that environment there’s a lot of energy on stage. But everything we do retains that jazzy edge.

SoulCuts: How often do you and the band perform together?

Jesse: This year, we took a break, but prior to that, we’d play New York a few times a year, DC and Atlanta, where we’ve got a decent fanbase. I want to take this record further, definitely want to go back to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and we’ve got some fans down in Jackson, Mississippi, all the way down to Miami, so we want to perform far and wide.

SoulCuts: And of course, London…

Jesse: (Laughs) It’s all a question of budgets. I do love being an indie artist, I’m in control of all elements and can see what I’m spending on, but the downside is that we’re without a six figure budget for marketing and tour support, so we have to do things when we can.

SoulCuts: You’ve always done covers in the past, but this time around the choices (Imagine featuring Rogiers and the first single, You’ve Got A Friend with Gretchen Parleto) differ in that they’re pop/rock classics. Is this an attempt to gain some traction, or radio play, choosing very familiar tracks to help push the music over?

Jesse: (Laughs) To show you how naive I am, until you just mentioned that, I hadn’t thought that at all. Homebrew is really a very personal document. Growing up, my parents, especially my mom, played a lot of Beatles, John Lennon non stop and Joni Mitchell. That music is so ingrained in my early memories. I got into soul and Stax and Motown a little later. That music my parents played is very meaningful to me. I wanted something with meaning in both the lyrics and music for this album, and I think that’s what led me to those particular songs.

SoulCuts: They are songs we all know. People will immediately feel at home, although the arrangements are different. How much work did you put into the covers to put the Soul Cycle stamp on them, or did it just grow organically?

Jesse: One reason that I like to pick songs that everybody knows is because there’s a challenge in trying to flip them and do something different. The process is all very subconscious. Leading up to the session, I’ll play the songs over and over in my head and at some point it just comes together. With Gretchen’s track, I’ve been a fan of her work for years (even before I knew her), her music, voice, her arrangements and how she works with her band. I think that I wanted to capture what she does, what we do and mix it with the actual song. With that particular song, I just sat at the piano and played for fifteen minutes, after a couple of weeks of carrying it with me, and it just popped out! The one with Rogiers (Imagine), I had an idea of what I wanted to do but it wasn’t until I got together with my bass and drum players, Jerome Jennings and Josh David (the three of us have played in numerous groups over the years) that I found a groove that worked. But then when you get together with the singer, it’s a whole other thing. They want to figure out how to phrase the melody and there’s some give and take. We also recorded it live, meaning that we were really able to vibe off each other. In fact, nearly the whole record was recorded that way.

SoulCuts: Media and radio will often focus on the vocal tracks on an album as they’re an easier sell to the public, in general. However, for me, the instrumental cuts really hit home. 95 South, in particular manages to meld jazz, soul and funk into a pretty addictive cut. How do you go about putting together the non-vocal cuts?

Jesse: The process is strange. The songs come together in pieces. For 95 South, I was driving on Interstate 95 and we were at the rest stop, doing a gig where I was using Soul Cycle as the backing group for an artist, and I was thinking of a costume change piece, or a little interlude for the singer we were working with and it just came to me. We then didn’t end up working with the singer and I developed the song, adding that other section with the weird bridge, the suspense building section and made the arrangement a little more spiffy with the breaks in the middle. I wanted something to showcase Brian because he has a great sound on alto. I also wanted to make a track like those on that first Kool and the Gang album, just a cool vibe, something to put on at a barbecue and just relax, cool music to have on in the background.

SoulCuts: As we’ve discussed you’re incredibly busy outside of Soul Cycle. Would you sometimes just like to focus wholly on your own band?

Jesse: It’s a question that I ask myself everyday. I love composing. I love writing and would definitely need an outlet for my writing, whatever I do. I write in a number of styles and want to explore those other sides. I want to do a piano trio record, something more acoustic. I would also like to do an electronic record but it’s a question of time and money. But I also really love producing singers. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a couple of singers this year with projects that I really believe in. I hope to do a lot more production.

SoulCuts: So, who are these artists that we need to check out?

Jesse: Andre Henry, he’s my dude. Working with him was just great (SoulCuts has reviewed Insomnia right here!). His new record is going to be really different. We’ve already started working on it. It’s very exciting. He’ll write two or three songs a day. He’s just like that, always writing catchy songs with a message and melody. He’s an all-round great musician and it’s a pleasure to work with him. I also have a record coming up with Myoshi Marilla who hasn’t put out a record in four or five years, but she’s a great writer and a great voice.

SoulCuts: Who are your biggest influences?

Jesse: The easy answer is Herbie Hancock. I love his playing, his touch, everything from his early stuff and what he did in the eighties. I love what’s he done and what he’s still doing to this day. He’s been a huge influence on me. On this record I was really trying to get my orchestrations and arrangements together. I listened to a lot of Gil Evans orchestrations with Miles, Oliver Nelson’s orchestrations, a lot of those late 50s/60s type arrangements, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Ahmad Jamal, as a pianist, and also classical music, which I listened to a lot when I was a kid, composers like Bach, Ravel, Chopin. I got a lot of ideas about melody and counterpoint from Bach. I also got a lot of ideas about textures and some of the harmonies from French composers like Debussy. And then there are billions of contemporary artists that I’ve been listening to a lot.

SoulCuts: That sounds like such a vast spectrum of influences. How are you able to coalesce these and come up with something coherent?

Jesse: I’m a little worried that the album may not be all that coherent. It’s perhaps a little too all over the place, but then again, this is the kind of album that I love. I make the type of music that I’d like to listen to and I love to hear things that are a little all over the place and diverse. I’d like to think that it does hang together. The process is like creating a collage, you put a bunch of stuff together and see how it fits, see if it works and you cut and paste. The stuff that just doesn’t work, you throw away. For this album, some of the ideas are from five or six years ago, and they seemed to work. I think my brain is always doing the subconscious thing mixing bass lines and stuff together. I was born in 1980, but in the last twenty years it seems that there has been a lot of this aesthetic of mixing and matching, including people who are not musicians, but just those who listen to music, creating their own playlists and mixes. I think the world is ready for a little mix and match!

SoulCuts: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?