What will the listener hear this time out from Loren Stillman? “I feel that this album is a lot mellower than some other ones that I have done in the past. It seems a little more laid back, free flowing and easy. It is more approachable from the standpoint of improvisation, but also within the compositions, it gravitates more towards a classical composition. There is more happening in terms of time signatures changing, and there is not an identifiable one in the music,” he says. 

Continuing with his discussion of time signatures, Stillman notes, “There is a lot of music that is composed with odd time signatures from the onset, and the idea is to compose within this grid of time. You decide (in advance) what you’re working with or what your template is. That’s something that I don’t like to do, I just like to let it go. I would say that the commonality in this record is just that. You can’t identify where it is in the music, but you feel a pulse, and not necessarily, that it is in ¾ or 4/4. What I am really trying to build for is to write with a pulse.”

Stillman’s penchant for innovation and submitting to his creative instincts, surfaces again with the song “Shape Shifter.”  “It is pretty well a waltz that stays in ¾ all of the time, except for the very last bar of the song, which creates a hiccup in the piece. You have been hearing this whole form in ¾ and then there is this one bar that throws a wrench in the gears. I was just trying to write a melody, and then later tried to find an introduction that worked.”

About “Shape Shifter,” Stillman comments, “There were these big chords, and these big open sections that were played on the piano. I had Drew solo over the piano voicing. The melody reminded me of someone shape shifting, and conforming their personality to accommodate a situation, to be adaptable or a social chameleon. I don’t know why that came to mind, but it did. That was really the premise of that song.” 

Stillman responds to the suggestion that he is more of an innovator than a follower, by laughing, “That is really a big compliment. I don’t really know how to respond to that. I am just doing what I know how to do. I don’t know any other way to go about it, than to write the music that I hear, and to play it the way that I play. I really don’t know how to do anything else.  I never thought about it in any other terms.”

The Brooklyn, New York based Stillman is signed to the German music label Pirouet Records, and he speaks enthusiastically about the management’s support for and promotion of his music. “They give each project that comes out their full attention,” he says.

It is unlikely that Loren Stillman will ever lose his passion for wanting to continually document his music and his life through his music, but he says, “I think what I have discovered with Pirouet, is I would rather make fewer records, and make more of an artistic statement.”

May 2008

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