Jazz musician Artie Roth brings the music to Centennial students as he prepares to release his fourth album
“My brother brought home this album,” Artie Roth says, thinking back to his childhood, “and it’s a famous album in the in the jazz world, called Money Jungle. The recording has what might be familiar names on it. Charles Mingus was the bass player, Max Roach was the drummer and Duke Ellington was the piano player.”
Listening to that album would change the trajectory of Artie’s life, and turn him into the double bass-playing jazz musician of over 20 years he is today. Artie’s put out four albums so far, with his most recent one, Resonants, having just come out May 12. When he’s not playing or recording, he’s passing on his years of practical career experience to Centennial College students in our Music Industry Arts and Performance program. Here’s how he got where he is, and how the students he teaches influence him, too.
Getting into jazz
“My beginnings in music were probably like a lot of us,” Artie says. “I had the perfunctory piano lessons that I did, though I wasn't a very good student. I also played an instrument called the baritone horn in high school. Meanwhile, the bass was something I did extracurricularly. I got into that when I was about 17.”
“I started as an electric bass player,” he continues, “and then I became interested in jazz music. I did my degree at York University; they had a jazz program, and I did my Bachelor in Fine Arts in music there. Following that, I graduated and started a freelance career in jazz music, predominantly playing the double bass.”
“To the untrained ear, what we hear normally in pop music is electric bass, and that boom, boom, boom, good thing you hear in jazz music would be this one,” he says, pointing at his double bass, about the difference between the two instruments.
“I often refer to it as modern improvised music,” he says about the jazz music he plays today, “Because that word jazz, it's a great word. But it means so many things. The thing I love the most about jazz is that the boundaries around the style are very fuzzy. So it's a sponge that absorbs other styles, while influencing other styles of music as well.”
Bringing the industry to the students
“After about 10 years, I started setting up a parallel career for myself teaching,” Artie says. “My first big teaching gig, at York University, began in 2003. And Music Industry Arts and Performance, I started the program in 2016. So now I'm this person that juggles composing, playing gigs, putting out albums and teaching.”
In Music Industry Arts and Performance, students don’t just learn to play music (though that’s a big part of it), the curriculum also includes the business behind the music industry in Canada, and how to be successful in music industry careers through a combination of creative development and industry knowledge. As a teacher in the program, Artie does both solo lessons, and ensemble teaching, where he plays his electric bass with the students, and even when doing that, the students are learning about more than just playing music.
“When you're in a room with five other people, everybody has insecurities, and there are relationship dynamics,” Artie explains about playing in an ensemble. “What you're actually teaching is how to work with other people. The music is the task, but the skill is working with others. You are dealing with the fact that you may be having the best day of your life or the worst day of your life, or somebody else might be, too.”
“Very important things that I feel are being taught: How to conduct a rehearsal, how to not get bogged down, how to organize, how you're going to prepare for next week's rehearsal, the week after that, knowing that you're going to be doing a full performance at the end of the semester that's going to be judged.”
“I think the other thing, as well, is just learning to play styles that you are either unfamiliar with,” he adds, “or you may actually play a style that you don't even like, but you have to put everything into it, and make it convincing. That's a huge thing as a freelance artist.”
One of the things Artie enjoys about teaching is that the learning flows both ways. He’s passing on his experience, and his students are teaching him about modern music.“I really enjoy teaching because I meet a younger generation of players, and they're teaching me,” Artie says. “I'm learning so much about their music, and what it is they came up doing. One of my expressions I like to use is ‘the more music that you love, the more you love music.’ I'm being led into their world, and then, by doing so, I reciprocate back to them by saying, oh, this is the world I come from.”
Modern music production
So, what’s making an album really like these days? Artie knows all about it, since he’s made four of them.“The nuts and bolts of it are that in my case, I write all the music on my albums,” he explains. “Composition is really an involved process that’s very different from playing music.”
“In the wider world is an idea that we just get inspiration from around us, like a unicorn whispering something in our ears,” he says about composing. “But really, it's not quite like that at all. In fact, it's just a measured, hard-working process, and you’re at it every day, trying to create something. There's this old adage about 90% perspiration or perseverance, and 10% whatever the other thing is. With composing, it’s sort of like 95% is garbage, but it's all part of the process.”
“Now, you can do a lot more of it remotely,” he says, about modern album production. “For instance, on my last two albums, my co-producer, Roman Klun, the guy that handles the editing and mastering all those levels of recording, lives in New York. So we bounce tracks back and forth.”
How teaching helped him create
You’d think being a teacher would make composing a new album more challenging, but according to Artie, it’s actually helped him out on a creative level.
“One of my teachers, really great bassist from Toronto by the name of Steve Wallace, had this great line. He said, ‘Teaching is learning from the inside out,’” Artie says. “And I've reflected on that statement a lot. In a certain way, when you try to explain something that you've been doing for 20 or 25 years, it's almost like you're relearning it, and in doing so, you actually deepen your own understanding.”
“The hardest thing when you're on your own trying to create something is that you get in this bubble,” he says. “Teaching is sort of an antidote to that, because you get all these people from all these different areas and backgrounds, generations and cultures, and they just kick you out of your bubble, whether you like it or not. And when that happens, some light shines into your world in a certain way that gets you out of the creative hole you might be in.”
About Resonants
“So, this is my first concept album,” Artie says about his upcoming release. “In other words, I wanted everything on the album to be unified by a certain creative process. The name of the album is Resonants. Have you ever had that experience where there's a sound somewhere in your house, and it makes something else in another room resonate? We were actually recording different objects in the studio resonating with the music that we made. As a composer, what I did later, I harvested all those sounds and created soundscapes and sound sculptures.”
“Really, what I was thinking about, because we were in a sort of pandemic world, is the idea of objects that resonate in a room as an allegory for being on a wavelength or feeling empathically connected to others in a society, that things resonate, you don't know why, but they do,” he adds.
“A lot of jazz albums, the recording and production process is very, for lack of a better word, pure,” he says about the unique way it was created. “The band just plays, and they put microphones in the room. Whereas with this, I wanted to do something with all the technology in the studio, I would work with my co-producer, Roman, and put together those soundscapes. And that's what we call post production, right? I love that, but that's not really a traditional approach to recording a jazz song.”
It’s about all the people
Artie’s students aren’t the only ones who helped him create Resonants. In fact, he stresses that there was a whole team behind him. Being a musician is never a solo game.“You see me, you hear me talking about myself, but I'm really just the sum of hundreds of parts,” Artie says. “Like a robot with a thousand parts, with different people that have contributed to my world. You can't do this as a singularity. It's impossible.”
“I'd like to greatly acknowledge the support of FACTOR, which is the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records,” he continues. “They gave me a grant to help me record this album, and another artistic organization, the Canada Council for the Arts, also gave me a grant to create this album.”
“My jazz band has three amazing musicians,” he says. “Anthony Michelli, who is also a teacher in the MIAP program, he's the drummer on the album. The saxophonist is Mike Filice, and the guitarist is Sam Dickinson. These are amazing musicians who contributed so much of themselves and their time to making the album happen. We've toured, we've played concerts, we've recorded, we've been through a lot together, you know. So I'm the figurehead. And I'm the tip of something, but there's a lot behind me.”
“Last and most importantly, my spouse, Patti, who's been so supportive,” he says. “Imagine being married to a musician! She's been there the whole time.”
Resonants is currently available on Spotify, iTunes and other platforms, with a live performance concert coming in the future. The first two singles, Circle Maker and Sky Blues, are also available to listen to now.