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Goldberg.
When renowned jazz and klezmer musician and composer Ben Goldberg was considering the right place to do his next recording — of a quintet made up of some of his favorite musicians — “it didn’t take a lot of thought,” he said.
On Friday, the Bay Area-based Goldberg will be bringing guitarist Mary Halvorson, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, bassist Michael Formanek, and saxophonist Ellery Eskelin to Firehouse 12 on Crown Street. They’ll perform at 8:30 in Firehouse 12’s recording studio and concert space. On Saturday the quintet will play at Firehouse 12, but this time behind closed doors, taking advantage of the place as a recording and production studio.
Goldberg’s stint at Firehouse 12 this weekend is emblematic of the way the studio and recording space has made itself a place in the national network for jazz and experimental music, and made itself a part of that community of musicians, since it opened in 2007.
Goldberg came to prominence in the 1990s with New Klezmer Trio, which melded jazz and klezmer together in new ways. It was instrumental in the wave of experiments with klezmer that followed. Over 30 albums and countless gigs later, Goldberg has played with everyone from Bill Frisell to John Zorn to Nels Cline, and formed several groups of his own. One of those is the Out Louds, a trio with Halvorson and Fujiwara that released its first record in 2016.
The Out Louds form the “core of this quintet” that Golderg is bringing to Firehouse 12, Goldberg said. Meanwhile, however, Halvorson and Fujiwara were in another trio with Formanek called Thumbscrew. And Goldberg had admired Eskelin’s playing from afar. “The way I first encountered Ellery,” Goldberg, was on a recording. “I heard one note out of the tenor saxophone and thought, ‘I need to get to know this person, I need to have this person in my life.’”
Goldberg’s idea was to have all the above musicians join forces. Goldberg would “write some new music for that configuration.” The group tried out the material at the Zorn-run music club The Stone in New York City. It went well.
“Let’s take it another step,” Goldberg thought. So he contacted Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12 and scheduled Friday’s show, and Saturday’s recording date.
On paper, this arrangement might look like a complicated negotiation of a few different professional music projects. But on a personal level, it’s much simpler. “It’s just me and my friends — people that I love playing with,” Goldberg said.
“When you’re writing music, or envisioning a band, what kind of sound you want to achieve, you really do think about people rather than instruments. People have a sound. Everybody has a sound.” he added.“There’s not another person on the planet that sounds like Mary on the guitar.”
In writing for specific people, Goldberg said, he feels he’s tapping into a jazz tradition that “goes way back. If you think about the Duke Ellington orchestra, Count Basie” — they didn’t write music for a hypothetical ensemble. They wrote for their ensembles, for their players, and they wrote music that played to their strengths. The musicians in those bands were “people that you can recognize in an instant,” Goldberg said. “You can really get to know people through their sound.”
So why come to New Haven to record? Goldberg was familiar with Firehouse 12, having played there and recorded two albums there already. “There’s something unique to me about the practice of having a concert in a recording studio, and setting up mics. Everybody always plays better in front of an audience,” he said.
This makes the audience an integral part of the process. “I’ve always found the audience to be very receptive and appreciative, and serious in a good way” at Firehouse 12, Goldberg said. “They know what they’re doing. They know why they’re there.”
“Plus, there’s that feeling that someone is on your side — it’s part of the community, part of the work that we do as musicians,” Goldberg added. Sometimes “you look at the audience and think, ‘are they going to be okay with what we’re about to do?’ But Firehouse 12 is a place where you feel like, ‘these people can take anything we can throw at them.’ Whatever artistic latitude you need to claim, there’s not going to be a problem.”
Goldberg also chose to land at Firehouse 12 for its attention to detail, of a kind usually reserved for much larger venues, in his experience. “For the size of the venue that it is, I can’t think of another place that takes care of business on such a high level as Firehouse 12,” he said. “To me the only comparison is to small places that we play in Europe that have state funding.”
“There’s an atmosphere of mutual respect — respect paid to the musicians, and respect paid to the audience. And then you have a great bar,” he added with a laugh. “What could be better than that?”
The Ben Goldberg Quintet plays at Firehouse 12, 45 Crown St., on June 8, at 8:30 p.m. Click here for tickets and more information. Firehouse 12 finishes up its spring concert series with the Samuel Blaser Trio on June 15.
