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Feb. 21 – Jon Irabagon's 'Server Farm' confronts A.I. with audacious 10-piece band Out February 21, 2025, Server Farm charts the tension between the human and the virtual with a phenomenal band featuring Mazz Swift, Peter Evans, Miles Okazaki, Wendy Eisenberg, Matt Mitchell, Michael Formanek, Chris Lightcap, Dan Weiss and Levy Lorenzo “As a strikingly original player with an imaginative vision, Irabagon keeps his music refreshingly focused but also bursting with freedom.” – Filipe Freitas, JazzTrail “Irabagon is one of the most exciting talents to enter jazz in the new millennium… No other current saxophonist encompasses his mix of explosive energy, stylistic diversity, lethal chops and radical ideas.” – Thomas Conrad, JazzTimes Labor saving tool or existential threat? That’s the conundrum we seem to be facing from the encroachment of Artificial Intelligence into seemingly every aspect of our daily lives. To explore this potentially dystopian future, Chicago-based saxophonist and composer Jon Irabagon has assembled his largest ensemble to date, a ten-piece band combining some of the most adventurous and innovative musicians on the modern creative music landscape. Out February 21, 2025 via the saxophonist’s Irabbagast Records imprint, Server Farm marks a standout entry in Irabagon’s prolific discography for its conceptual and compositional ambition. The composer set himself a number of challenges in conceiving the project: he incorporated vibraphone and voice into the sonic tapestry and experimented with effects pedals and post-production on his saxophones for the first time. Mimicking an A.I., he analyzed the band members’ work for material for his compositions. Irabagon drew inspiration from Carla Bley’s large ensemble writing, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and John Coltrane’s Ascension, but also wrote very specifically for the stellar band convened for the occasion, a variation on a double quintet. At the core is his regular quartet with pianist and keyboardist Matt Mitchell, electric bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Dan Weiss; they’re joined by violinist and vocalist Mazz Swift, trumpeter Peter Evans, guitarists Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg, acoustic bassist Michael Formanek, and percussionist and electronic musician Levy Lorenzo. “The promise and threat of Artificial Intelligence are just in the air these days, ” Irabagon says. “People are paranoid about what's going to happen, and justifiably so. So I was thinking about that, and at the same time I was writing music for these nine specific musicians that I love and figuring out how to maximalize the way that they naturally play.” With such a daunting prospect ahead of him, Irabagon decided to approach the work by taking on a role parallel to an A.I. He delved deep into the catalogues of his chosen bandmates, all of them venerated bandleaders and composers in their own rights, and mined them for repeated phrases and motifs particular to each musician. He then repurposed these as the basis for his own compositions, tailored for the specific ensemble and designed to provide them as much freedom as possible. “I didn't want to overwrite and stifle the creativity of these artists, ” Irabagon explains. “There's a lot of written material, and some of it is quite challenging, but a lot of it comes from an amalgamation of ideas that they naturally lean towards. Totally by accident, I found that I was turning them into a computer version of themselves, referencing their past material while still staying in the moment and being able to improvise freely.” The title of Server Farm itself references the insidious way that A.I. co-opts the organic in aid of disguising the artificial. The very notion of a “farm” suggests something natural and bucolic, not the reality of a vast warehouse of linked computer servers draining natural resources to fuel the virtual world. A single large data center can swallow up from 1 to 5 million gallons of water per day to cool its overheating machinery, Irabagon points out, a threat to humanity’s survival before even considering the sci-fi notion of computer intelligence eclipsing our own. Irabagon structured Server Farm as a single narrative that progresses from the natural and human to the artificial and hybrid over the course of its five extended tracks. “Colocation” – a term for a “carrier hotel, ” or a data center that rents equipment and bandwidth to retail consumers – opens with the sound of Levy Lorenzo’s kulintang, a traditional set of gongs from the Philippines. It’s an ancient instrument with deep roots in the Filipino heritage shared by Irabagon and Lorenzo. The remainder of the piece was constructed around the eight pitches of Lorenzo’s kulintang. “The album starts out pretty upbeat, with human beings frolicking in the sun, ” Irabagon says. “Then this other thing that we've caused starts to happen.” “Routers” stems from the penchant shared by many of the composers in the ensemble for melodic and harmonic freedom over precise and complex rhythmic forms. The piece begins with the individual musicians weaving together opposing rhythms, with the full melody and harmony gradually emerging over the entirety of the seven-minute track – a notion that harkens back to similar experiments that Irabagon included in his compelling I Don’t Hear Nothin’ But the Blues series. After the initial recording, Irabagon added a tenor solo over the full length of the piece, then ran that solo through effects pedals, chopping it up, flipping and reversing it so that shards and echoes recur throughout. “I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in my basement going crazy throwing all of this together in a big soup, ” he recalls. The 14-minute “Singularities” marks the pivot point in the narrative – specifically Irabagon’s tenor solo at the halfway point, which he says marks the point at which the A.I. begins to take control and human independence is short-circuited. The track begins with a unison line for all ten musicians, an endeavor destined to reveal its flawed humanity. “It’s inherently going to be messy sounding, which is perfect for that moment in the record, ” Irabagon says. The remainder of the album takes a darker turn. Ushered in by Formanek’s droning arco bass, “Graceful Exit” is a lovely ballad undercut by electronic interjections that roil its Ellingtonian elegance with a disorienting air of foreboding. “I wanted there to be beauty even with the sense of impending doom, ” Irabagon says. “Beauty, humor, darkness and insanity are all part of it.” “Spy” ends the album with a full turn into paranoia, with Swift singing the lyrics from a poem penned by Irabagon during his pandemic-era excursions into the wilds of South Dakota. The frantic, uneasy tune echoes the poem’s notion of a bumblebee perceived as a spy drone, the natural outcome of a growing distrust that what we see can be taken at face value. Irabagon’s own recitation of the poem bubbles out of the ether as a disturbing counterpoint to Swift’s vocal. Irabagon hopes to continue the story to chart A.I.’s ongoing development, and to continue facing his own musical challenges – and technological ones, with the thought of incorporating A.I. and multimedia elements into future performances. “Technology and I tend to be at odds with each other, ” Irabagon laughs. “I can't even turn on my phone without something going wrong. So this record was a cathartic experience for me.” Jon Irabagon First-generation Filipino-American Jon Irabagon was the winner of the 2008 Thelonious Monk Saxophone Competition, winner of the Rising Star award in DownBeat Magazine for both alto and tenor saxophones, and the recipient of a Philippine Presidential Award, the highest civilian honor an overseas Filipino can receive. As Nate Chinen wrote in JazzTimes, Irabagon's compositions “are drawn to the play of opposing forces, especially those involving abstraction of form.” Named one of New York City's 25 Jazz Icons by Time Out New York, Irabagon composes for his ensemble Outright!, which received a 5-star review in DownBeat for 2014’s Unhinged, as well as the Jon Irabagon Trio featuring Barry Altschul and Mark Helias and his quartet with Matt Mitchell, Chris Lightcap and Dan Weiss. Irabagon has been an integral part of ensembles such as the Dave Douglas Quintet, the Mary Halvorson Quintet, Septet and Octet, Barry Altschul's 3Dom Factor, Ralph Alessi's This Against That, Mostly Other People do the Killing and Uri Caine's Catbird. Irabagon currently runs his own imprint, Irabbagast Records, to release his own uncategorizable works as well as other cutting-edge, creative artists. Jon Irabagon – Server Farm Irabbagast Records – Irabbagast 029 – Recorded March 12, 2023 Release date February 21, 2025 |
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