Shahzad Ismaily: Filling in the Rest of the Puzzle

I first heard about Shahzad Ismaily when our pal and Tape Op contributor, Eli Crews [ Tape Op #88 ] told me he was moving to New York to help his friend Shahzad open a studio. Soon, I realized we’d worked with some of the same musicians, such as Jolie Holland, Carla Kihlstedt, and Indigo Street. Years later, Portland-based songwriter Laura Veirs booked some time at my studio, Jackpot! Recording, and had Shahzad fly out to co-produce her recent album, Found Light . It was an honor to be invited to drop by, get to hear some of her songs in progress, and to chat with them both. Shahzad owns Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, New York, and has an impeccable history as a session musician (Yoko Ono, Marc Ribot, Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and as a producer (Cass McCombs, Xiu Xiu [ #77 ], Sam Amidon, Jolie Holland). He’s always quite thoughtful, so I knew interviewing him would be something unique.

I thought about doing this interview when you were at Jackpot!, but you were immersed in co-producing and playing on Laura’s record. Sometimes interviews are so reflective it takes away from the project at hand. I didn’t want to chance that!

That’s totally true. Plus, if the day goes well – if a lot of emotional energy has gone into the recording that day – I feel weirdly so wiped out; I generally want to go straight to the Airbnb or hotel and just crash.

You’ve already spent the day making a million little decisions.

It’s true. I’m trying to do my best to be a good dad, and I get little tidbits as I’m coming across information about parenting. I read that kids get equally physically tired if they’ve been running around or if they’ve been working their brain.

We spend a lot of energy keeping these brains working. That’s something we always have to take into account, both in the studio and in creative pursuits. Don’t you think?

Absolutely.

What are your views on being asked to produce an artist?

I’m maybe being unnecessarily dualistic here, but if I imagine two poles of producing, one being the producer that walks in and is able to boss the song and the artist around. I don’t mean that with a negative connotation. Think of any singular effective leader person, like James Brown, Prince, or Laurie Anderson – any of these people who have intense vision. There’s the pull of a producer who walks in and says, “Okay, you came in with this one way, but now we’re going to double the tempo. We’re going to have horns on the B-section. We’re going to make it into this new thing.” That’s magical and remarkable. A visionary who can see the object in a totally new reflected way, and manifest that.

Right.

The other pole is a producer that allows the artist to feel so self-inhabited that exactly what they want to say comes out into the light in the most real, vulnerable, safe, and true way. Then, all of a sudden, a different kind of magic takes place, where the person feels, “I don’t know if I would have said that, had it not felt the way it did in the room today.” That’s the side, so far in my life, that I’ve been able to live in. As an analogy, it’s like when the forest is dark, quiet, and still enough. And then some of the rarest animals come out into the meadow, if only for a little while. That’s what’s exciting. Maybe that comes from being quite ostracized as a kid, knowing how to get the rare, hidden self to come forward.

True. In what ways were you ostracized when young?

In my case, I grew up in 1970’s small-town Pennsylvania. This was well before the internet, where there wasn’t the ability to find a culture of the weird. What we all received was what was on Saturday morning cartoons, evening sitcoms, and Friday night football games. It was very white in the area I was. Unfortunately, between being an immigrant, being Pakistani, and being brown, we have what are given to us as normalized beauty standards. I was well outside of those, in terms of race and culture, but also in terms of the way my body looked, and these kind of unusual deformities. I was on the outside of everything. It was quite grim. But I had the counterbalance of loving parents, so that was lucky.

That’s good. I think a lot of us that end up in music feel like outsiders. Sometimes these environ-ments force us inward and make us creative.

Yeah, I totally agree. It’s also wild what, thus far to me, has seemed to be the open embrace of musicians in the music community. If I walk into a room and pick up an instrument, and I’m elevating the feel of what’s going on, instantly I’ll have a connection with the people around me. What race you are, what you look like, what your background is, is instantly totally subterranean. It makes me think about those photos of jazz groups from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s that are multi-racial, and how powerful those photos are. The level of racial identification when you walked out the door of your house in those eras was so powerful. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but it feels like it disappears when people are playing music together; the groove is moving everybody, and the sound is moving everybody.

I think you’re right. To me that’s one of the beautiful aspects about a recording studio. All that matters is what someone is bringing in, and that it is working. The end result of the recording is the only thing that needs to be judged.

That’s an interesting point. I never thought about that. If you think about a workplace, and how built into a workplace are a possible set of assumptions of what the person entering in the door is supposed to bring, then the recording studio is one of the most open-ended versions of that. You can walk in, be almost anyone and do almost anything. If it flows with the sound of what we’re needing, all of a sudden, you’re completely welcome in that space.

Absolutely.

Versus a job where it’s more the identity of the human coming in and how they function.

Sometimes it’s a surprise. We’ll bring someone in to do one thing and they end up doing another. I’ve seen sessions where tensions were high, creativity was low. Then one person walks in and all of a sudden everything opens up.

It’s so magic that it’s a “vibe.” That adorable hippie term is so meaningful in the studio. The tone of what the room feels like, and therefore what takes place. These days, it feels like we’re leaning towards “sessions should feel cozy and happy.” Yet I read these stories of [Fleetwood Mac’s] Rumours being made in the ‘70s, and those people were so pissed at each other! There was real tension and real ill will in the air, and they still came away with a masterpiece. But it feels like, right now, people are trying to make it as nice as possible in the studio. I wonder about that sometimes. I definitely see Marc Ribot [guitar] artistically come to life when he’s pissed at someone, or he feels that there’s someone to pull down in a space. It’s interesting what brings out different personalities.

What was your backstory? Growing up, did you start studying music when you were young?

I was a little kid, like 2 to 4 years old. Somewhere around that age an intense fire was lit to be a musician and deal with sound. Where did it come from? My parents didn’t play. Much later in life, I was contemplating that question, and my partner got me to visit a seer in Iceland who speaks to the dead. That woman’s thought was my brother, who was born when I was around two years old and only lived to be around one week old, was a musician. “When he passed, his spirit went right into you.”

Wow!

That’s the answer that I’m sitting with at the moment. So, I had no road in front of me. I was in elementary school, and I asked to be in the marching band. I started on the bass drum. I had an elementary school drum teacher who said, “Tap your left foot to all the quarter notes for every rhythm you’re reading.” That was magical, because he was saying to internalize a sense of a pulse and do everything against it, but to also feel all that in your body. Kiss was a band I was listening heavily to as a middle-schooler. That foray they did into making a movie [ Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park ] where they’re in an amusement theme park and people are facing them? I have a deep memory of watching it as a kid.

Same here!

When I was 15, I’d collected a bunch of cassette tapes, mostly of pop music that’s on the radio, like The Human League and Madonna. The band that I was in took the bus from Pennsylvania to New Orleans [Louisiana] to play. In the process, I lost all my cassette tapes. I went to a record store and said, “Where should I start?” They got me a Dave Brubeck record and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue . By that random turn of events, jazz entered the picture. Then, around 16, I found music that had a deep thread of melancholy, because that resonated with how my life felt. That was Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and U2’s Joshua Tree . Years later, I can put on anything from Joshua Tree , feel the 16-year-old who doesn’t know how to play music, but then also simultaneously feel current Shahzad appreciating the amazing textures of the Brian Eno [ Tape Op #85 ] and Daniel Lanois [ #37 , #127 ] choices on that record.

How did your musicianship improve?

I was totally self-taught for a long time. I was trying to learn how to play, up in my attic with a drum set, trying to learn drum parts from Joshua Tree . One thing that’s very surprising is, when I was 15, in English class they asked us to make up an essay and submit it to the local Danville, Pennsylvania, newspaper. I wrote an essay about having a recording studio. It’s a little something like this: “You’re at the bottom of the stairs. You walk slowly up the stairs, and you feel like you’re entering a cozy space, like a tent or the warmth of your own bed. You open the door, and it’s your workspace as a musician.” I was describing a recording studio. I wrote that when I was 15, and then I eventually made a studio when I was 44.

That’s amazing! Did you study jazz somewhere after high school?

There was moment I tried to. I was 18 at a music school in New York. They had a summer program. Somehow, I’d convinced my parents let me be in New York for a month or two and do this. I was in this little classroom, and this totally disheveled teacher comes stumbling in, hungover, in a football jersey with dark sunglasses, and then he asks everybody, “Okay, if you’ve got a five horn horn section, how are you going to voice the top tenor?” Everybody’s hand shoots up and they say, “E-flat down to D-flat.” I looked around and felt like I was in an alien landscape, because I had none of this information. I thought, “Oh, my god, I don’t belong here.” I walked out of the class, and I left four days later.

Wow. What path did you pursue then?

I went to college. I was initially studying political science, international relations, and a little bit of pre-med. But I was very quietly signing up for a music theory class, or a music ensemble class. As soon as I did that, I got voraciously excited about it. I would buy books about theory. I bought a small-scale electric bass. Then I moved to [Phoenix] Arizona, ostensibly to start a little pop-rock band with friends from college. What was lucky is I went to Stinkweeds Records, and I also found this place, Modified Arts, that was suggesting we should just improvise and see what sounds we’d make. I found the experimental improvising music scene, and I found weird records at this record store that were saying, “Music can be anything.” That was a big starting point for me. Later, when I moved to New York, I found people that were a good connection for me to play with. They weren’t purely about shredding, reading [music] really well, or working on a Broadway score. They were more about, “What are you feeling right now , and what sounds can we make that relate to that?” Connect with the other person and move the whole thing upwards. As I started doing that more and more, while simultaneously learning theory, to a basic degree, I could also bring it into the songwriter world playing with that enthusiasm and spontaneity. Now, there were at least two worlds that I could functionally exist in, whether it was on bass, drums, or guitar.

Do you think it was having to find your own path, and becoming more of a listener and participant than a studier?

Definitely. I got lucky, looking back on it. I’ve had friends who have gone through a real serious schooling path, and what hits them at some point is, “How do I develop my own voice?” I was finding music entirely on my own.

I asked Kendra Lynn, Jackpot!’s manager who engineered your sessions here, for some questions about you, and she said you had studied music in many different countries. Where have you been?

When I was in college, I had a close friend who decided to get a PhD in Balinese music, and he found himself going to Bali. One year he said, “You should come down there with me!” All of a sudden, I was in Bali going to these small villages. It was really following different friends who were on their way somewhere, and I would tag along. Similarly, I went to Morocco. I was moved by the sound of the Gnawa music and the gimbri. We imagine when you stay with one thing, then you understand that thing. But what if by touching many horizontal aspects, you begin to understand its nature also? How does rhythm work in the context of Moroccan Gnawa music, and then try to understand rhythm in the context of a Balinese gamelan, you might start to understand rhythm well, just as you would if you had stayed with one thing for a long time.

What led to recording studios for you?

It started with playing a concert, and a musician in the audience came up to me later and said, “How did you get that sound on the bass? I’m working on a record next week. Could you come in and build a bit of that flavor into what I’ve been working on?” We’d go in the studio and dive into it further with the engineer in the control room. Badawi [Raz Mesinai] and I were talking at the time about dub music, and the slow, watery feel of certain tracks. He said, “I’m making another record. Come over to my studio.” I brought my bass in, and he started up some drums that he had. I’m trying to think about a line and playing, and then he stops and says, “Okay, I’ve got what I need.” I’m sitting there, and I watch him zoom in on a creaking sound that’s in between two notes. It’s the non-music, or the dark space. He taught me that sometimes we’re looking in the wrong place. We’re looking at the notes or the line, when actually the music is over here, in the pure sound design of something that might have happened with a musician and what they were playing.

An instant master class.

Totally.

<div class="captxt" style="background-color: #fff !important; color: #000 !important; text-align: center !important;"><em class="fa fa-camera"></em> Jonathan Forsythe / German Festival</div>

I assume you started playing on more sessions and working in studios with different people. What were some of the earlier experiences with that?

I was playing a live show and Sean Lennon was in the audience. He came up and said, “Man, I enjoy your playing. I’m going to get my mom [Yoko Ono] to make another Plastic Ono Band record [ Between My Head and the Sky ], and I’d like you to be on it.” That was maybe 2007. I was so excited. It was him, his mom Yoko Ono, Yuka Honda, this Japanese band Cornelius [ Tape Op #69 ], and me in Sear Sound [ #41 ]. They booked it for a week. Sean specifically said, “Look, sometimes my mom gets really excited in the middle of the night. Whoever can potentially sleep in the studio the whole night, it would be great, because she’s going to roam in at 3 a.m. and want to do stuff.” I got a little spot for myself on the couch and stayed there the whole week. Sure enough, this one song, “Waiting for the D Train,” was her walking in in the morning, waking up whoever could be woken up, and then we were all improvising. The song just happened.

That’s pretty special.

What was beautiful about that was a feeling of some gentle bridge to the ‘60s or ‘70s, imagining what was it like when people made records then. Particularly because it was happening at Sear Sound, with that specific history. Throughout all the times I was in the studio, I was watching. “What’s the engineer doing? What does that piece of gear do? How are they setting it? How is it making the drums or bass sound?” When a take was done, I was always excited to go into the control room and hang there for the rest of the time. I wanted to try to figure out what was happening around me. That was a nice beginning of a bridge towards engineering and being on the other side of it.

Did the session work lead to you studying engineering?

It led to production. It also led me to getting gear. There was a solid ten-year block where I was in a studio or playing a show every single day of the entire year, for ten years. Someone would say, “Come record on Friday,” or, “Play this show on Saturday.” It was always rolling. I barely had any expenses. No kid, no partner, no apartment. Little overhead. I would have a little chunk of money in a week. If I found someone was selling an old microphone for half price, I’d buy it and put it in storage. I accumulated all this gear. I was slowly plugging it in and learning how to use it. Being on the player side of studios was starting to give me some knowledge of engineering.

What year did you start Figure 8 Recording?

The studio started functioning in late 2014 and early 2015. What led to it was I was in a relationship that started in 2007, and about three or four years in, this person is saying, “You’re never here.” I thought, “Okay, what if I made a studio in New York. Could I work more and not travel quite as much?” I started looking for a place to buy and build a recording studio. I was thinking a little place. Then, all of a sudden, it ballooned out so fast.

You have to be careful!

The studio got larger, and it got much more expensive to build. My relationship also ended partway through starting to do the construction. There was a moment halfway through the building part of it where I thought, “This was the worst decision I’d ever made in my life.” I went from having no overhead to suddenly having loans, mortgages, and constant super insane bills to pay every month to some contractor or acoustician. What was so weird was that the first day the studio was done, and people came in and recorded, it’s been extreme happiness from there forward. I had no idea this thing would take place where community would develop, and people would become creatively alive. Bands would become interconnected. It has been amazing. It’s a totally unexpected outcome; I’m so grateful, and it has been so nourishing.

It provides something for the community. It’s hard to explain what it is like to own and run a studio. With having the space, how has that changed your life as a musician?

For the first several years, particularly before my daughter was born, I was so happy that the studio was accidentally set up the way that it was, with a manager and engineers who circulated around it. It meant that I could walk out of the door, go on tour for a month, not even think about the studio, but know it was doing great. At the beginning, it didn’t affect me too much, except that there was more joy in my life in general. My life had an additional layer of purpose and meaning, because I’d created something that was benefiting a lot of people. Then there started to be more times where I became a more studio-bound working musician, and that was wonderful. I feel like I have romantic stories in my head of the session musicians at Motown, or the session musicians in ‘50s L.A. What a beautiful life that must have been. I was having breakfast with Jim White this morning, the drummer from the Dirty Three.

Yeah, a great drummer.

We were talking about how COVID has been double dark for musicians, because our social life has also disappeared with our work life when we don’t play shows and don’t tour. We’re so lucky that working is also hanging out and socializing. It’s not like we go to work and then on Friday have to go to the bar with friends to get the social thing in. They’re simultaneous, and it’s so beautiful in that way.

Oh, absolutely.

I started to play and record a bit more in the studio since making it. I also have really enjoyed that the studio houses my collection of instruments. When I get asked to overdub on someone’s record, I can walk right down the stairs and play hand drum, marimba, Oberheim Two-Voice, and go through all kinds of instruments. Before, when I went to the studio, I would fill my car with as much as I could.

I remember talking to Eli Crews when he was moving out from Oakland. I know he was going to be working out of your studio a bunch back then.

Yeah, he definitely did.

How did that come around?

I was at his studio in Oakland, [California], New, Improved Recording. I recorded with Fred Frith there with violinist Carla Kihlstedt, and also worked with guitarist Indigo Street. On one of those sessions, I said, “Listen Eli, you could totally say no, but I’m going to build a studio in New York. Would you want to be a part of it? There’s an apartment above the studio in the building. Do you want to move in there to make it easy to move to New York?” What was lucky is that his wife, Beth, was just thinking about being closer to her brother, and having the kids and families closer to each other. They came over, Eli looked at the apartment on the third floor, and was like, “Yeah, we could make this work.” Eli very kindly designed the patchbays, wired all the wiring in the walls, and he worked there as a head engineer for a bunch of years until he bought his place [Spillway Sound] upstate. I’m very lucky that groups of people have coalesced around this. I often give studio tours to a prospective person, and they’re like, “Wow this place is so organized!” It really has to do with the people who have been around making it. If I made this place alone, it would be a pile of gear in the center of the floor, one quarter of which is working. [ laughter ] That’s the level of design knowledge I would have.

I always tell my staff here that I don’t want Jackpot! to look like some guy in his 50s has a place he can come dabble with music. It has to be a clean, organized, professional place. Somewhere that people can make their own.

I appreciate that. I don’t know why I have the same allergy to this “cottage industry hobby clubhouse life” that sometimes music can become. I don’t ever want that. I want it to be, “This is where artists work, and this is a space for making art.” You’re right: That does have to do with organization. “Is it working? Is it clean? What does it smell like? How does it feel?” I love the idea that whoever walks in the door today doesn’t have to feel what happened yesterday, or what will happen tomorrow. They can totally inhabit the place as they like. We’ve all been around engineers that, for some reason, kill the music. A pet peeve of mine is when engineers get hyper-specific about getting the mic in the right place, and they’re not noticing that the musician has stopped feeling like playing the song at all.

You’ve worked with Kendra Lynn here. You saw how she works. She is listening to what the conversation is that she’s not involved in so she can be ready.

I love those kind of engineers. They’ve overheard that we were talking about maybe doing a bass take, and they’ve already set a DI up. It’s the best. I felt that way with Kendra. It was so nice to talk to her on Skype ahead of the session, talking with me and Laura about what we might like to do and how it might work.

What do you have going on for the future right now?

On Arooj Aftab’s previous record [ Vulture Prince ], I appeared with some overdubbing, and we got to know each other better. Now, as she’s working on her next record, she’s reaching out ahead of time and saying, “I’d like to work on some tracks with you. Let’s check in on this poet who was an 18th century courtesan. He was a poet that was part of the nobility but also a part of the brothel scene that wrote all these amazing poems in Pakistan.” That thread is there. There’s a fellow doing a podcast about Tibetan scholars, and I’m going to do the scoring for that podcast with Devendra Banhart. Another fellow wants to collaboratively write a record based on the [Buddhist] Heart Sutra, so I’m reading it, thinking about it, and improvising on it. I obviously recently co-produced Laura Veirs’ record, and also Cass McCombs’ record [ Heartmind ]. It looks like I’ll be working on a record with Feist at some point this year.

How do those jobs usually come about?

It’s so accidental. Laura had a clear path about how she was going to make a record. She cold called me. What was interesting is we had toured almost 18 years before that. We had good conversations on the phone, and then it rolled into doing it. With Cass McCombs, I had co-produced a record [ The Living and the Dead ] for Jolie Holland many years ago. Andy Kaulkin, who runs Anti- Records, was a solid supporter of Jolie’s and would come out to her shows. He saw me play drums with her. We hung out for a while and had some real nice conversations. There he was, as an active label head, talking to Cass on the phone. He’s saying, “I want to make a more spiritual record.” Andy’s like, “Call Shahzad.” It’s very circuitous, and very much seeing what comes to me.

Right. You and I both worked with Jolie Holland.

Totally. I might have played on one and helped co-produce the second one. She’s an incredible musician, as you know. She is a no artifice person, always. Everything we were doing was based on how it was feeling. It was so soft and effervescent. Trying to tune into each other, and tune into what was happening in the room.

It was so fun to work with her several times, as nothing is about being technical. It’s all about evoking emotional responses.

Absolutely. For some reason, all of us, myself included, walk in the door thinking, “This song is meant to do this.” It’s really fun to flip all that upside down whenever we can. I’m fond of reminding myself that all of these forms are so recently invented. I almost feel like aggressively saying that they’re false, like, “The piano is a false invention.” The idea that we’re going to imbue it with incredible respect and history was made out of thin air. Verse/chorus is completely irrelevant. Then I can pull that attitude into the studio. I can tell the musician, “Listen, whatever you’re obsessing over, and what you feel like meticulously “can only be this way,” in another context it would be totally irrelevant. Let’s try it a new way.”

Absolutely. There was an openness to the tracks of Laura’s that I heard. It’s letting the listener in.

I do feel that’s the magic ticket, letting air into the sound. Somehow not narrating to the listener what’s taking place, so that there’s just enough of the listener having to be present themselves. Like leaving a puzzle half-finished. When the listener walks up to it, their own mind and their own heart is filling in the rest of the puzzle.

www.figure8recording.com