Stephen Menold dropped out of Camosun’s Jazz Studies program in April 2013 with just one credit standing between him and a diploma, but he felt the pull of a city—Montreal—with a stronger arts culture than Victoria’s, and he just couldn’t resist any longer.
“I just had to expand my universe,” says Menold. “My idea was actually just to get out and explore and find my own way, and I felt like if I didn’t leave then, I wouldn’t; I had to just jump and go for it.”
Menold has since harnessed the sights and sounds of that city’s culture, as well as heavy influences from the music of Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk, into a career in jazz. Menold says he has always been attracted more to the emotional side of music than to its intellectual side.
“I find a huge, glaring problem with modern jazz today is that with colleges and universities taking it as an art form, they deconstruct it to the point of taking the emotion out of it,” he says. “Just looking at the notes and looking at the mathematics, I find a lot of modern players… I’m not trying to throw shade or start any battles, but it seems like there’s a much larger push for being compositionally creative.”
Menold says another problem is that many people are looking outside themselves for material.
“If you don’t look inwards first you’re not going to have anything to say,” he says.
As an example of looking to the external the way some musicians do, Menold jokes about writing a tune about a black hole in outer space.
“Is your life not interesting enough? I guess what I’m trying to say is I write from more of a personal experience,” he says. “Say something interesting about you. I don’t want to learn about the cosmos, I want to see what makes you tick, what makes the artist think and feel. That’s more of a universal experience—the human emotion… Putting your own thoughts into the emotion as opposed to just abstract thought makes more of a global feeling, and, I think, that’s what makes jazz accessible.”
Stephen Menold Quartet
8 pm Saturday, June 16
$15, Hermann’s Jazz Club
hermannsjazz.com