Alex Massa
Water Music
2020 | Jazz
— Mari Copeny, a.k.a. “Little Miss Flint”
Alex Massa: I was born in Sturgis, grew up in Rapid City though. My grandfather was a doctor up in Sturgis and he was actually the one who delivered me. So I grew up here, and started on the drums in 5th grade, percussion. Did that for two and half years, and then in the middle of my 7th grade year our teacher out here, Stan Hanson, he looked at the band and he goes, “Hey, we have like thirteen drummers and three trumpet players. Who wants to switch?” And no one raised their hand, so I did. I go, “I’ll play trumpet.” There were some guys in the trumpet section who I thought were really cool, and I was like, “I could be cool if I hang out with them.” They were, like, always dressed in black, in Metallica and Pantera shirts, and I was wearing khakis and button-downs with gelled hair. I also started playing the piano at seven. Quit piano lessons after middle school because high school was coming and I started doing marching band. Hated marching band. I actually got out of doing it my freshman year of high school because I just hated it so much, then I experienced a shunning from the trumpets in band because everyone was so mad that I wasn’t doing marching band. The last three years I did marching band and hated just about every minute of that. I had a good trumpet teacher in high school. I think the best thing he taught me was sight-reading. But, you know, I was never in all state band, all state jazz, all state orchestra. I could never get in to any of those, which I think is crazy because anybody that did ended up quitting their fucking instruments and I’m the only one that’s still playing.
So senior year starts and I’m looking at schools. Grant Manhart [trumpet professor at Northern State University in Aberdeen, SD] had come out and asked me what I wanted to do. First I said, “I want to be in music education,” because that’s what everyone was telling me to go into. Then he looks at me and he goes, “But what do you really want to do?” [laughs] And so I go, “I want to play trumpet, man.” And he said, “Alright come to Northern, I’ll teach you how to play trumpet.” And then, you know, college, all five and a half years of my undergraduate, did that, and that was great. That dynamic between myself and that trumpet professor was a great experience, but it was also a thing. It was difficult, it was challenging, I learned what I needed to learn, and when I left I really left.
After that, I graduated in December 2011. Then 2012, February, I got a call, it was a recruiter for one of the cruise ships. So I did an audition, and it all went really fast, because I got that call on February 2nd or 4th, and by the 20th I was on the ship. I was in cold-ass South Dakota in February then all the sudden I was in Aruba and Antigua and all that. So I did that for four months. That was a trip. That was a crazy, crazy experience. I went from having one mentor [at Northern] that was really intense and an asshole, to having a music director on the cruise ship who was an asshole. I was just like, “Oh, so this is just the rest of life. I’m just going to playing under assholes.” It was really difficult. One day [the music director] got in my face because I was sitting in with the rock band on the ship. He comes up like, “I didn’t give you permission to do this.” And I was like, “Why do I need your permission?” He pulled me offstage, and I just took him out to the side of the deck, like, outside so that people couldn’t hear us, and I grabbed him and I threw him over the side of the ship.
I’m just kidding. No, but, he got in my face and I was like, “Hey man, you’re going to stop this shit right now. And if you want me to leave, that’s fine, but you’re going to be the one to go and tell the cruise director why I’m leaving tomorrow morning at the next port. We’re going to go wake him up.” It was, like, midnight. I just got in his face and was like, “This is never going to happen again. If you have some constructive criticism, give it to me, but you’re not allowed to yell at me in front of customers.” After that it was all good. And that was kind of a big moment in my career because I really demanded, for the first time, what I was going to be worth, in terms of genuine respect. It’s like, “You don’t have to look at me like I’m Clifford Brown or Roy Hargrove, but you can’t look at me and talk to me like I’m a piece of shit on the sidewalk.” The rest of the cruise went really smoothly. He was a great music director, he was just a bungholio. We got the chance to play a lot of straight ahead modern stuff, and we played a lot of traditional New Orleans stuff, we played big band sets, and we played a lot of classical music, so that was a great experience getting to use all of the skill sets that I learned at Northern.
So that ended, and I moved up [to Winnipeg, Manitoba] August 20th, 2012 and started my degree, Master’s in Jazz Studies. I had a good year up there, had a lot of fun. And then did the summer up there, joined a New-Orleans-style brass band. That was helping me pay to live in Canada because I couldn’t technically work there. So everyone was just paying me cash and I was like, “Sweet.” I started the next year, and in early October I went down to Aberdeen for a show. Then I came back up, and it turned out I had forgotten to renew my visa. And so long story short they said, “You can’t come back in. This is a felony. If you don’t leave now we’re going to put you in jail for six months.” And I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll leave.” And that was the end of Canada for me. So I turned around, and I went and spent a night in Grand Forks going like, “What the fuck am I going to do?” Because all I had brought was my flugelhorn, two trumpets, and a backpack that had an extra pair of pants and an extra shirt. That’s all I had in my car. So I called one of my best friends, he dropped everything he was doing, and we travelled around the western United Stated for the next four weeks. Then I went back up to Aberdeen for my brother’s graduation, then we road tripped, and the last stop was New Orleans. We brought our horns out, we took a bunch of mushrooms, and walked around the city for the whole night and sat in with all these different bands. I told some people, “I want to move to New Orleans,” and they said, “Well, then come to New Orleans.” So we woke up the next morning, quietly drove to Corpus Christi where my folks were living and then a month later I was driving to New Orleans with everything that I own, which was three trumpets and a backpack with a couple clothes. That was the start of a whole different cycle of life for me. I was in New Orleans for five years. And then after five years, this woman that I was dating, she said she was going to move back to Chicago, so I followed her up and we have been chilling ever since. New Orleans and Chicago are so much story. Five years in New Orleans, did a lot of cool shit, two years in Chicago, and now as of today we’ve been in Rapid City, South Dakota for a year.
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Chicago’s the birthplace of American improvised avant-garde. When I was getting ready to move to Chicago from New Orleans, I had been playing avant-garde, free-improvised music in New Orleans, and some of the cats down there, they’re like, “Hey, I love Chicago. Get in touch with this guy, get in touch with these guys,” and one of them was Anton Hatwich, the bassist. I cold-called him up. So [he] and I started to develop a pretty deep musical relationship. The first gig we had was super dope. Everything felt natural, it didn’t feel like playing with new cats that I had never met. In September of 2018, I went down to the Trumpet Summit, which sounds like what it is: a bunch of trumpet players, jam session. The drummer there was Isaiah Spencer and I was just like, “Wow, that dude is fucking slamming.” So I eventually sat it in and they didn’t hate it. And the rest of that fall was just me continuing to run into Anton, and seeing Isaiah, playing a couple of random gigs here and there. Then then in February [2019] I had a tour set up and I had to find guys. So I called Anton and he’s like, “Yeah man.” And I go, “I don’t know who to get for drums.” And he says, “Call Isaiah.” But Isaiah and I had never worked together. So I just called him up and he said yes. We had one rehearsal before we left, I brought all this music, we played through it, and it was dope. So we went and got in a van together, played seven or eight hits in ten days.
In that set was a song called “Black Snake” which I had written a couple years back while in Iceland watching [on TV] the water protectors from Standing Rock up in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The Dakota Access [Pipeline] protests. That song that we played as a trio, along with the story, got the most crowd engagement, and reaction, and response than anything else that we played for the entire tour, every single night. So after that tour I got back and I was like, “People really responded to me and my work that I consider to be musical activism, to whatever degree you can call that. This is what I want to do. Why not take this concept and make it into something?” So I wrote a couple other songs and I got a double trio together: two drummers, two bassists, and two horns. The saxophonist I had was Mai Sugimoto who’s a staple on the Chicago improvising scene, just a brilliant, brilliant artist. I brought this music in, we didn't even have a rehearsal for this show, literally finished it before going out the door. That’s my M.O., is to not have shit done until I’m leaving for the gig. We got there and went over sixty minutes worth of music in three minutes before we hit the gig. And it was great success. It was a small crowd, but everyone really dug it. The band really loved it. So I kept writing and editing. I cut out the extra drummer and bassist and I put in another saxophonist, and that was the missing link for what I was hearing at the moment for Water Music. Artie [Black], he and I had hooked up at a couple jam sessions, and he’s really one of my favorite saxophonists. We went and played a couple shows including one that was called “Water Music on the Beach” that was up by [Lake Michigan] on the north side of Chicago. It’s a big avant-garde festival of sound and sight. We played this set of music, kind of a very loose interpretation of it, on the beach in front of the water.
“Water Thief” is an improvised track for the most part. It’s really rooted in the sliminess and the slinkiness of Nestlé who is in charge of so much water. They no longer have their license as of last year or something, but ever since the ‘30s they’ve been taking water from the San Bernardino watershed for something ridiculous like a thousand dollars a year. And in Michigan they take from the groundwater and Lake Michigan, and they pay $250,000 per year, and then they turn around and they sell it back to these Michiganers like in the city of Flint, who are still without clean water. They take it and they give it to these places like they’re the saviors, when in reality they’re just forty miles down the road and for some weird reason they have access to a clean well — one of the world’s richest companies, how do they have access to a clean well? So that was kind of a de-tribute to Nestlé, but I didn’t want to put Nestlé anywhere on the record.
And the “Suite for Flint” was about the Flint water crisis, and how things started out very softly, but were quickly coming out of control and becoming tangled by the powers who were supposed to be protecting us. The second movement, which is “Thanks a lot, Obama,” details the trip that Obama took there in 2015 or 16. During his speech to the people he basically said, “I probably ate paint chips as a child and I turned out fine, so you have nothing to worry about.” And then he pretended to drink the water. So the residents got really discouraged very quickly because they finally had a representative in the White House that appeared to look like them, and he basically made a mockery of their situation. And [the last movement] “Little Miss Flint” is a musical interpretation of a young woman who rose up front this situation to become an activist for the city and a water protector for her city. Her name is Mari Copeny. She’s now in high school and still raising money for books and backpacks and things for kids in the city. She’s doing a lot of great work.
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So December 10th of 2019 we recorded all this in Chicago at Shirk Studios. I checked out the recordings two days after everything was done and I hated all of it. I hated every single second of it. I was so mad. So I let it sleep. And then right after the first of the year I finally listened to everything again and I was like, “Oh. This is pretty dope.” So I went to my engineer and I said, “Hey, let’s get this stuff done.” Mind you, this is end of January 2020. Nobody knows what’s about to happen. We’re hearing stuff through the grapevine, but we’re all fucking just licking dirty telephone poles and stuff, like nothing’s going to happen to us. Just breathing into stranger’s mouths. Over three mixing sessions we got a ton of music mixed down: We got Water Music mixed, I got a Strange Winds record mixed, and I got the first Alex Massa Plays Well With Others record mixed. So I was getting ready to release all this stuff, and I had booked a release party for Water Music, and I was starting to book a tour, and I was calling vinyl people, and I was about to throw a ton of money into promotion, and before I gave the green light on everything March 14th happened and everything closed down. Like everyone, it was obviously a shock, but it also felt like — You know, after a couple weeks it began to dawn on us that everything we were doing was totally screwed. Yeah, I got super down. I still released the first Alex Massa Plays Well With Others, and Water Music just went to the wayside. I was just like, “Well if I can’t do it the way that I want to do it, just throw it out, not even have a release date, just put it online. Fuck it.” So I was talking to my label, ears&eyes Records, and I was like, “You know what? I do need to do this.” Just putting your music on [eyes&ears Records] — being in the experimental, avant-garde, modern classical, modern jazz vibe — it gets it seen by a lot more people without doing a lot. So I gave them the bread they needed for promotion and I started writing everything up. We set a release date for November 1st, I wanted it to be released while Donald Trump was president. I thought it was important, because it was made during a horrible presidency. I had 250 vinyl records and sold a lot of them. I didn’t put as much into promotion as I could have, or maybe should have, but I still received a lot of really great comments and criticism about the record that I’ve taken with me. I'm just thrilled that I was able to make it happen. With water rights becoming more and more of an issue, I think that it’s a very important project. Just helping people be a little more aware with water: where it comes from, how it gets to you, the systems that are in place about who gets water and who gets the clean water.
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In regards to what’s next, I’m doing a lot of writing for film and TV. When I was in New Orleans I helped score a film, and also when I was in Chicago I helped score a film by a Sioux Falls born-and-raised cat named John Hansen, and it was a short that Anton [Hatwich] and I did together, just bass and trumpet. That was a lot of fun. I really love doing that. I really love putting my own spin on it.
ALEX MASSA’S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Jami Lynn — Fall Is a Good Time to Die (2015)
Sequoia Crosswhite — Grandma’s Boy (2019)
Brian Hanegan — Constellation (2021)
Humbletown — The Path I Chose to Walk (2021)
SOURCES
Massa, Alex. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 13 Oct. 2021.
Meredith, Karenna. “Little Miss Flint Wants to Run for President in 2044, and She Hopes America Evolves by Then.” POPSUGAR News, 12 Aug. 2020, https://www.popsugar.com/news/mari-copeny-gap-be-the-future-campaign-interview-47686191.
