North Shore News: When you went to Handsworth were you interested in jazz or was it all new to you?

Darcy James Argue: It was fairly new to me. It was a process of discovery. I knew I wanted to play in the jazz band but I didn’t really know anything about it. It felt like the Dark Ages because there was no Internet or anything so it was a very low process of discovery — and meeting people who can point you in the right direction in terms of what records to check out, what players to check out and how to go about learning to deal with the language of jazz which is obviously a rich and complicated subject but it’s also very foreign to someone who’s living in the suburbs of North Vancouver. Trying to process that language happens through recordings and if you’re lucky mediated with a few people who can guide you to the recordings that will help unlock that next step in your development.

The first solo I transcribed was Wynton Kelly’s piano solo off “Freddie Freeloader” from Kind of Blue. Again, he was like a really early hero. I’m thinking back to those early tapes that I had. There was a Clark Terry record called In Orbit with Thelonious Monk playing piano and that was something that was in heavy rotation early on. It was very exciting in a way that was obviously very different from the way Wynton Kelly plays but opened my ears to a more conceptual approach to playing piano.

Certainly Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett later on, once I started picking up their records and trying to transcribe their solos and trying to figure out what was going on in their music, and basically how to imitate them to the best of my ability — which is what you do when you’re young and you’re figuring out how to play.

North Shore News: You were fairly young when you left here would it be fair to say Montreal was the first music scene you were immersed in?

Darcy James Argue: Absolutely. This show that we’re playing in Vancouver on the 26th is going to be my first professional gig in Vancouver ever. When I moved to Montreal and started at McGill as a jazz piano player that was the first time I was of age so I could go see music in clubs and it was the first time that I really had a community of musicians to play regularly with.

There was a circle of players in the high school and there were some talented players but that was a small group and when you get to a music school like McGill that attracts top talent from around the country then it’s a whole different ball game. I remember being just invigorated because people would be playing all the time.

It became more of a social thing and it was the focus of your social life as well as your academic life. In any spare moment getting people together and going into the common rooms and just playing tunes and trying to navigate standards, trying to figure out how to deal with rhythm and how to deal with time and all of those things. All of a sudden music went from something that was pretty solitary in high school practicing by yourself and all of a sudden it became more viable to play with people.

North Shore News: What was the experience like making Infernal Machines?

Darcy James Argue: That was my first album so it was incredibly challenging. I had no idea what I was doing. We went into a New jersey studio for three very long days of recording and I tried to prepare as best I could by talking to other people who had gone through that situation. I knew a little bit what to expect but nothing can fully prepare you for the demands of being in the studio with the 18 players in the band and the engineer staring at you. There’s a lot of blood and guts on the floor, figuratively, but I think that also came through in the recording.

I knew if I was going to document the band in that way (we’d already release a lot of live recordings of the band on Internet for people to download for free) I wanted a different kind of sound. I wanted to document something that wouldn’t be possible in a live situation. There was a lot of planning that went into that sonically — how do we do that, how do we not make it sound like your average big band record? How do we get that kind of detail we are really after in this kind of studio situation?

There was a lot of banging our heads against the wall. How do we get this sound that is in our heads? How do we translate that into the recording? It was a very long and involved process but finally there was this breakthrough where we were able to find just the right balance between all the instruments and all the microphones we had in the room. When we made the music pop everything else was relatively easy once we had that breakthrough — it just took a long time to get to that point.

North Shore News: What are the logistics of travelling with an 18 piece band?

Darcy James Argue: Complicated. Everyone is coming from different place for the beginning of the tour assembling in Vancouver and then going off to different places at the end of it. In addition to the band there’s me so that’s 19 and our sound tech which is 20. We’re also bringing on the road our trumpet soloist Ingrid Jensen who has a two-month old baby girl Corinna who is also going to be joining us on the road. So that’s very exciting. She’s sort of the youngest co-conspirator we’ve ever taken with us. We’re really looking forward to inaugurating her into the jazz life.

North Shore News: The album had a huge response from a wide audience.

Darcy James Argue: You know sometimes jazz can be kind of an insular thing and I think that’s ultimately unhealthy for the art form. I don’t want it to be this music where there’s an immense amount of homework you have to do before you go to a show. My goal as an artist is to reach people. I listen to a lot of different music I listen to contemporary classical music and what’s going on in the indie rock scene and to hip hop and all that stuff permeates my way of thinking about music. I don’t like to draw distinctions or put things in various categories and build creative walls. It’s not the way I listen, it’s not the way I compose. I try to create music that rewards close attentive listening regardless of where people are coming from.