Larry Goldings on Rhombus

American organist and composer Larry Goldings has spent more than three decades redefining the possibilities of the organ trio. Renowned for his versatility and effortless musicality, Goldings has built an extraordinary career spanning jazz, film scores, and collaborations with artists ranging from James Taylor and John Scofield to John Mayer. Yet at the heart of his work remains the enduring trio with guitarist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart – a group whose remarkable chemistry has evolved over thirty-five years into one of the most highly celebrated ensembles in modern jazz.

Their latest album, Rhombus, finds the trio balancing fresh compositions with inspired interpretations of music by Keith Jarrett, Abdullah Ibrahim and others, capturing the trust and conversational interplay that have long defined their sound. It was a pleasure to speak with Larry about the creative freedom that comes from decades of collaboration, the art of keeping familiar material feeling fresh, and why, even after all these years together, surprise remains at the heart of the group's improvisations...

Let’s start by talking about your ensemble members, Peter Bernstein and Bill Stewart. I gather that you've been playing together for 35 years – is it possible to still feel surprised when playing together?

For sure. I'm often surprised by both of them. They're two of the most creative people I know, and I think, like me, they thrive in spontaneous situations. We all like to be surprised in order to get the thrill out of improvising that one can get. 

There are many times on a gig where I’ll be surprised or challenged by what they do, even when we're playing things we’ve done before. I mean, we actually have a very large repertoire, and so part of what we do to freshen up and invite surprise is try to really dig deep into it so we don't get tired of playing certain tunes.

Having said that, there are tunes that we play all the time, and the challenge is to try to keep being fresh. But those guys are two of my favourite musicians - partly because they're 'in the moment' as players, and that's a great place to be.

Does knowing them so well allow you to take more risks when you're playing, especially live? 

Yes. Trust is one of the biggest things that one can hope to have in a musical relationship, and it's the trust that really gives you that confidence to take chances. You know that someone's going to be there to support you and your ideas.

Can you tell me about the title choice?

I wish I could tell you that there was some deep reason. We were looking at the tunes that we decided on for the album, and reflected on which one was a better album title. ‘Rhombus’ was the weirder one, and the one that we know probably hasn't been used. It was one of the originals – I wish I could say there was some profound message behind it, but it just felt right.

Why did you choose to build Rhombus around compositions by other great jazz writers rather than mostly original material?

It's rarely a plan in terms of what the repertoire will end up being used – at least the way we put our records together. In this case we were on the road, so we had all the time in the world to try stuff on the tour, which made it really easy once we got to the end in New York to do the record. 

It was pretty easy by that point to figure out what we wanted to do, because we'd been discussing it on tour. In this particular case, we'd been playing one new tune by me and one new one by Peter. Those were obvious choices, so we thought, ‘Why don't we just record those?’

Other than that, we were trying out the Keith Jarrett tune, ‘Everything That Lives Laments’, and the Abdullah Ibrahim tune, ‘Mama’. For years I've been trying to find a way to bring an Abdullah Ibrahim tune to the organ trio, and I don't think there's one that's ever recorded a Keith Jarrett tune either, so that's a fun kind of challenge.

When it came time for the record, we just reflected on the tunes we’ve been playing for years, and what we’d been playing recently that we haven't recorded yet. We asked a lot of questions – whether they should be originals, or arrangements of standards; what tunes did we have, and did we have a record's worth of material? Will it all work together?

Our repertoire is eclectic, but it's not so eclectic that it can't all work on one record. If somebody said, ‘Make a record right now,’ it'd be easy because we could either come up with standards that we all know and record those, or between the three of us we all have tunes that none of us have recorded, or have recorded in other situations and want to revisit. We can re-record them and get a completely different version, so there's never a lack of material. But it was interesting when it started to unfold that we'd have this Keith Jarrett tune, which is kind of a different vibe for us. Then it was just a matter of sequencing it to make it work as a record.

We've been doing this a long time, and these days unfortunately, the way people listen to music is so different. Regardless, I still think of a record as a statement, so it's important to try to put it together in a way that works for someone listening all the way through. This is actually a pretty short record, because we’re putting it out on vinyl which can only hold about 43 or 44 minutes. We were actually thinking about doing a record of all Wayne Shorter tunes, which would've been more of a concept record, but that has its challenges too. As we were thinking about all the Wayne tunes we liked, they were all the same tempo, or they were ballads, or short forms. In that respect, we thought maybe it wasn't going to be as diverse a sound, even though it was all the same composer. So we opted to be a little bit more diverse. That's essentially how we put this record together.

Listening habits today are vastly different, especially with streaming singular tracks instead of a whole album etc. Would you say that listeners will get the most out of this album by listening to it in its entirety?

I think one should, in general. Pop records are different, but I'm definitely old enough to think about artistic jazz records as statements. If you really like an artist, I think that's how you get the fuller glimpse of what they're thinking about.

Did anything evolve in a way that you didn't expect when you came to record the album? 

Well, actually, in the case of the Keith Jarrett tune and the Abdullah tune, we just happened upon them very late in the tour and hadn't really been playing them. So those two were definitely the freshest takes. In fact, one of them was the first take, and I might have used the second take of ‘Mama.’ It's really different if you've played them at a rehearsal, as opposed to playing them in front of people at a show. You really learn a lot from the reactions of people. But those came together so well in the studio – they were very spontaneous, because we hadn't overplayed them.

In the case of some of the standards like ‘In Walked Bud’, you automatically want to try to very consciously just do something different with it. The studio session was almost like the next gig on the tour, and that was a good headspace to be in. There are always other elements that will inspire some kind of spontaneity as an organ player too. I play piano as well, and the same goes for that – we don't get to travel with our own instruments so we're always playing some rented gear, which in itself can often be an unknown. You think, ‘What don't I know about this instrument yet that's going to surprise me during a gig?’ or ‘What facets of the instrument do I not like, and therefore I have to avoid using, which forces me to then do something that I might not naturally do?’. Those kinds of challenges can, if you accept them as positive challenges, make you play something interesting and lead to surprising results. 

I used to work with a great guitar player named Jim Hall, and if the acoustics were really boomy in a venue, he would very much think about the repertoire and say, ‘I don't think we should do this song because it's going to be too loud in this room.’ So reacting to your environment, and making decisions based on what might sound better are things to think about too.

Is there anything that you're keen for listeners to experience when they listen to the album?

I think one of the things about this band is the interplay between the three of us, and the conversation that we have.  Especially in the context, if you look at your typical sort of old-school organ trio. Anybody who's familiar with our band knows this already, but the organ trios that I grew up listening to, it's typical that the organ is the centre and playing all the melodies. The guitar player often takes a back seat in the classic organ trios. This has never been the case for us – it's been the opposite in a way. 

One of the reasons I love playing with Peter is that I just love him as a melody player, and I love to be an accompanist for him. So a lot of the melodies are Peter out front, and me and Bill as the accompanists. If people are newcomers to our band, or with an expectation because they know that the band has an organ in it, I would just say to remove any preconceptions. We’re just trying to play good music that contains a lot of improvisation, and not like organ jazz in the traditional sense - like Jimmy Smith playing a blues and the band supporting him. We’re very much about interplay and about people's strong musical personalities, which we all have.

I think a great musician tries to transcend their instrument, and just think about music, rather than the role of a specific instrument. There's no answer for that, it really comes down to your own creativity. For me, it's more about orchestration and colours and textures, and I just happen to be on an organ. It's an instrument that has a lot of those possibilities. 

Any final thoughts? 

I think I just want to say that it feels amazing to all three of us that we've been playing together this long. I think it's certainly the longest-running organ/guitar/drums trio maybe in the history of jazz. I just consider those guys phenomenal. I'm so lucky to play with them, and everybody should check out their own work in other situations too, because we all adapt to different contexts. If you hear Peter somewhere else, you get a kind of slightly different version of him. The same goes for me and Bill. We come to a very special, specific place with this trio, but we all play outside of the group too.

Rhombus is available on Smoke Sessions from Friday 7th August.