Vol. 2, No. 4
AN INTERVIEW WITH
SARAH CLAUSEN
Vol. 2, No. 4
JL
So how did you come to being a musician? And particularly speaking, how did you come to wanting to make weird music?
SC
I went through many weird phases, like first really wanting to sing as a toddler and a younger child. And then when I was like a teen pre-teen, being so into the sounds of metal and emo music and some shitty punk rap.
JL
That's such a common way in, honestly. I can relate. (laughs)
SC
And then I was really interested in learning the guitar and I taught myself how to play. I’ve been saxophone since like fifth grade for middle school band and stuff. I was always terrified of taking a solo until I got to high school when my band director kind of made me take a solo. And then I wanted a solo all the time. (laughs) I was like: “oh this is really cool. I can do whatever I want.” I very quickly wanted to do weird stuff in my solos—so much so that my band director would get mad at me. (laughs)
JL
Hell yeah. (laughs)
SC
Once I started getting really interested in the saxophone—which was really not until high school—I started listening to a lot of Ornette Coleman and I started listening to a lot of Johnny Hodges and was so interested in both of them and the dichotomy between them—and the similarities between them too, coming from two totally different musical backgrounds. So that's definitely where it started moving in the weird direction, during high school. And then in college I was in a very traditional jazz separated program.
JL
Right. At Northern?
SC
At Northern Illinois University. I obviously really liked weird music going into that program but I feel like I got even more into weird music there in spite of all of the more conservative, white men in the program. I really hated it, honestly. That's just how I am for some reason. Inherent contrarian saxophone player. (laughs)
And that's also when I started to get into classical music. I was a big Bartok nerd. I was a classic college Bartok nerd.
JL
That's cool.
SC
I was always trying to tell the other saxophone players, like “here's Albert Ayler, here's Eric Dolphy, here's all the weirdos.” And they'd always just kind of get mad and spew at me all of their reasons why that wasn’t “real jazz.”
There was like a whole cult of people at Northern who were like Wayne Shorter isn't good. (laughs)
JL
Oh what? (laughs)
SC
Like Wayne Shorter can't play the saxophone. (laughs)
JL
Are you fucking kidding me? He’s one of the most “can play the saxophone” people in the 20th century. (laughs)
SC
The reason behind that was always to them like, "Oh, well we have never heard him play bebop before."
JL
Which is such a stupid line in the sand to draw in general.
SC
It is. But even so I was like: “Well, you think you haven't heard Wayne play bebop but the problem is that you haven't looked hard enough.”
JL
Further back in the catalogue.
SC
Yeah. I remember telling my saxophone teacher Geof Bradfield, about all the people in his studio who were talking shit about Wayne Shorter and Geof devoted a whole master class to showing them all these tapes of Wayne Shorter playing bebop and just shredding.
JL
See, this is what college should be for—it's to try and get weird, false assumptions, and bullshit out of your system, you know? Then you can be aware about the things you make statements about and get serious about your music.
SC
Totally. And then I think freshman year I found out about Pi Recordings and started digging through that whole catalogue. Listening to Steve Lehman a bunch. But through them, I got really, really, really into Matt Mitchell's music—and then I started to really get interested in composing. I really didn't start composing music until like late junior year in college, but it was really important for me.
JL
Right.
SC
Yeah, and basically, that's how I got into weird music.
JL
Sweet, so Rage Against the Machine and…
SC
…and Bartok, and Charlie Parker, and Albert Ayler. (laughs)
When I was in college, I worked at Chipotle like 35 hours a week and mostly did back-of-house work: chopping onions and doing dishes and stuff. But the cool thing about being in back-of-house is you get to play your own music during your shift. So I would just like blast Spiritual Unity, like all day long.
(both laugh)
SC
It’s a great way to cope with a bad situation, honestly. (laughs) I would also play recordings of all the Bach organ works back there.
JL
Do you have any particular recordings you like? Or like a particular work that stands out. I only, of course, ask cause I'm interested in this 'cause of the organ shit.
SC
I'll go to my Bach playlist and find it quick…
JL
I, for the record, also attest to playing Bach organ recordings really loud as a means of escaping the world being extremely effective.
SC
Can definitely agree to that. This is the one:
JL
Oh yeah, the Karl Richter one. That’s one of my favorites too. On that recording, he played everything with no rubato or tempo flexibility whatsoever. Everything in the score was interpreted very literally, which is actually not really historically correct at all. But he also was known for having some of the most intense, dogmatic articulation. Like you can just hear every goddamn note so clearly. It's right on the edge of almost sounding like a robot was playing. But he picks the right tempo, he picks the right registration, and like is just technically a fucking genius. So for me, it works. It’s like the most “metal” Bach organ recording out there.
SC
I know, that's why I think I was drawn to that recording. Also just because all of my teachers were like, “the Deutsche Gramophone recordings are always the best recordings.”
JL
Yeah, I have that same LP at home. Such a classic.
Okay, so you go to college, which was instrumental in developing this kind of earlier part of your identity as a musician. And then you move here to Chicago pretty much immediately after, right?
SC
Immediately afterwards.
JL
And that was what year?
SC
2018.
JL
Right, right. So what was that move like for you?
SC
I think the period before 2020 when I first moved was really important for me in realizing exactly what I can be as a musician. It was very revealing on what possibilities were there for me and what possibilities were not there for me, socioeconomically speaking. (laughs)
JL
I can relate, yeah. (laughs)
SC
And then, you know, having a lot of time off from music during 2020 and 2021 was enlightening as well.
I mean, when I first moved here, I was really in the grind culture. I was totally consumed by the grind.
JL
Yeah, I get that.
SC
I thought it was so awesome. I started working at Starbucks right when I got here—I went and interviewed at the Starbucks store, like before I even moved to the city. I was like, “okay great, I have a job in Chicago now.” And I remember honestly being so excited about working at Starbucks because I had just been working at Chipotle for like three years in my life back in DeKalb. Like I was basically doing the same thing, but since it was in Chicago it felt completely different.
So my life then was like: I moved here, I was working a 4:30am to 11am shift at Starbucks, five days a week. Going to the Hungry Brain, the Whistler jam sessions, and staying up until 1 am—basically getting two and a half hours of sleep every night.
JL
That’s the definition of the improvised music grind culture routine for sure.
SC
And then, you know, I was trying to get gigs in between all of that. I had a band called Space Eater right when I first moved here. We played for a little bit and had a few shows, and then we didn’t play.
Then after that, I started playing with a trio called Glass Hand.
JL
I think that was probably the first group I heard you in.
SC
Right—that one was with Emerson Hunton and Jacob Heinemann.
JL
Exactly—I remember hearing that record when it came out on Scripts Records.
SC
That’s the one.
Through those years, I was just kind of like going and going and never stopping—as grind culture encourages. I was working, and then I was rehearsing, and then I was going to do the classic Northwest side Monday evening rounds: I would go to Myopic Books, then I would go see whatever was at Elastic on the Anagram Series, and then I would go to the Whistler jam right after that. In the moment it wasn't miserable even though it took a lot of energy to do. Because I think we—especially as like working class artists—we tend to think of things like: “well, what I had to deal with before was worse and now I'm in the city doing this and this is better than that.”
JL
Yeah, that's totally fucking true.
SC
Like you're doing all this other shit that's objectively exhausting, but then you go to your day job at Starbucks and it's like: “Okay, well, the suffering is for something.”
JL
Totally, and in reality it is all a kind of suffering and exhaustion. But there's an imagined version of grind culture that's like: “this suffering is going to take me somewhere and I will have less suffering in the future because I'll be doing more music work and I’ll be getting gigs and meeting new people.” The grind culture thing in general is so motivated by that kind of belief.
SC
Right, that’s exactly it. On top of all of that, there's such a huge difference in how expensive it is to live here compared to when I first moved here in 2018. Like things have gotten so much worse.
JL
Yes, it's insane.
SC
But, you know, I was doing all that stuff and I was not struggling yet financially, really. I had the job and I would get paid like 20 bucks to play a gig, and at that point, I was like, “whatever—this works for me.” I was still kind of in the mindset of like, “one day, I won't have to have this job and I'll just be making money from music.” But then the pandemic hit and I was unemployed for like two months, which was really unsettling.
JL
Right, right.
SC
And then I soon went back to work. And that period was when I started to get into more political writings and specifically studying Marxism. And through that I started realizing how I never really want to have to grind in the way I used to ever again.
JL
Absolutely.
SC
I feel like that was such an important realization for a lot of musicians during the pandemic, to some degree. At least even if that realization only lasted for like the duration of the pandemic, I feel like that was like one of the most important things to come out of it for a lot of people.
JL
I totally agree—it was really important for me personally as well.
SC
And then coupled with reading a lot of Marxist literature, I started to realize that it doesn't matter how much I grind because a person like me will grind their whole life and then we'll just do that and it won’t get us anything.
JL
Yeah, exactly. It's like a black hole.
SC
Yeah, it is a black hole. And then I started thinking more critically about the circumstances of other musicians who just grind for a little while and then everything cool happens to them.
JL
Right.
SC
And then I started to get mad.
JL
Yeah. (both laughing)
That is a very common and honestly normal response to the current circumstances. There is something about reflecting on the differences between the pre- and post-pandemic periods in Chicago that made some of these things that make—honestly, so many people—really angry or sad pretty apparent. I haven’t brought this up in any of the interviews here before, but when I was living here between 2017 and 2019 I was mostly working as a composer and was only witnessing how things happened in the improvised music scene from a distance. I spent time at Slate Arts in Humboldt Park, went to the obvious spots like the Hungry Brain, Constellation, the Whistler, Cafe Mustache, and I was always really struck by how—especially with the younger folks at the time—the community was so cooperative and welcoming. Like even as basically a stranger, I played a nice session at Orotund Music off of Armitage and was just struck by how supportive everybody was and how people were there to share ideas and have fun.
SC
Yeah that’s totally how it was.
JL
Then I came back in 2022 once the pandemic restrictions were lifted and I really noticed how different things felt. Some people reoriented their lives to have more space and not be a part of the grind culture so much. But there were also people who kind of doubled down on the grind culture in a really unhealthy way as well. There seemed to be an anxiety where everything was getting more competitive and also more expensive. And that all really affected the feeling of some of the spaces where we could meet up and do this kind of music.
SC
And a lot of those spaces are gone now.
JL
No kidding. I mean, Slate is gone, Orotund…
SC
Orotund is gone, yeah. I even think of the places that still exist that used to have jam sessions regularly, like the Whistler jam every week.
JL
Yep, exactly.
SC
There used to be a Monday night series at Elastic and it's no longer there. And on top of that, just to afford to keep living here, everybody is also working a ton more.
JL
Yeah, yeah, right. Basically, there's the people that have enough money where they don't have to work ever—or at least very little—and that's its own thing. But for the grind culture that used to—for better or for worse—keep the community active, people have more economic pressure now. That time spent going to shows might be too much for people after working a day job that requires more hours worked just to pay rent. Like, “back in the day” five years ago or so, I would regularly stay up until two in the morning on Friday going to shows then would wake up the next day and teach piano at 9am and not think twice about it and it just kinda worked.
Now, I think the people who cannot afford to live without having a day job are forced to consider how their professional life as a musician affects their day job—which limits what we can do as musicians. But we are doing the same kinds of music work as many people in the scene who never once have to think about how they’re going to make rent or how they’ll pay for expensive professional opportunities.
SC
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It was during the pandemic where I started to notice the people who were just completely unaffected by it—where nothing that happened was really that bad for them. They could—in some form—just kind of continue doing what they do.
Now in my own life—especially in the last two years—I have had to be very cognizant of when I might have to say no to a gig because of job security, essentially.
JL
Yeah, right. Absolutely.
SC
Like, I work at a coffee shop and I have to be at work at 5:45 in the morning. I’m not 22 years old anymore and I cannot survive on two hours of sleep like I used to. So, if somebody offers me a gig and it pays like 50 bucks, I’m either going to have to do a bunch of shuffling around my schedule to try and move my work shift so that I can get enough sleep to play late, or I’m just going to say no. I’m not going to call off work to play a gig that’s going to pay me 50 bucks, when I would make more at my day job. Like I need those wages to survive.
JL
Totally. There’s a real consequence to taking a gig instead of being able to work. Of course it would be so different if these gigs were better paid, or even if rent were cheaper, but they’re not. If we had more flexibility on when improvised music shows were booked, then maybe more options would be out there, but there isn’t really.
This is one of the tough things about improvised music, experimental music, any of the non-commercial music out there: we have to figure out how to find the energy and time to do the labor required to perform the music essentially from the free time we have in a day because, for the majority of artists, this music does not pay anything back at all. And for those of us who have day jobs to pay the bills, we don’t have a lot of energy left and we don’t have a lot of free time to make music during. Our reserves of energy are not infinite.
But this is just one of the many inequalities that exist in improvised music: there are the people who have the free time and energy to continue participating in the grind culture that is tacitly expected of everybody and then there are those who have very little time and energy to offer for the same work. The people who have the time and energy very often have family wealth and financial privilege and the people who don’t have that always have to do a cost-benefit analysis of how much energy there is left to do music from. It is terrible and alienating.
SC
Yeah, yeah. There was a time in my life where—and I’m not encouraging that people should do this, regardless—but there used to be a time where it was easy for me to say yes to everything I wanted to as a musician.
JL
Totally.
SC
And now just as a matter of making my financial survival work, I have to be so selective about what I can and can't do. Again, like saying yes is not just a choice—there are conditions that allow you to or don't allow you to say yes to a gig. And that's like, in my view, not just an individual problem but a political and economic problem. You know?
JL
It definitely is.
SC
Related to that, one thing that I remember happening a lot when I first moved here—it still happens to me now—was something that I used to have a lot of shame about, which was mentioning that I had a day job to other people in the scene.
JL
Right, right.
SC
So many times I would be in a conversation with another musician—like a musician who came from wealth or like a venue owner, press person, label runners, and people like that—and I would just ask people what their jobs were. It was kind of sadly naive. I just made the assumption that, since I knew how much money I was making from the normal gigs you can get in Chicago, that there was absolutely no way that anyone else was making that much more money.
JL
Totally.
SC
I would just ask as if it were the most normal question what someone else’s day job was. And they would answer “I don’t have one. Do you have one?” and I would answer “yeah, of course.” And in their response they would kind of snub me about it and I would get this feeling that they looked down on me because I wasn’t like “taking my work seriously enough” since I had a day job or something like that.
JL
I’ve experienced that myself too and it is so frustrating. It is such a bizarre, just totally irrational thing to snub someone over. You and I come from a class background where like, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have the money to pay for housing and food and then you become homeless or you starve. You know, like you have to have a job or you die: pick one. Asking people what their day job is isn’t like a crazy question, especially when we’re in a scene that basically has no money to support the people who make it.
Whenever I’ve experienced this, it has always given me this kind of disturbing, stark realization of how even playing weird music—free jazz, improvised music, experimental music—we hear about the kind of DIY ethos behind it and that we’re not doing this for the money, but then when you look at the financial conditions that are needed to support this kind of music or for people to have “careers” based on it, you realize that this music is actually very much about money in a deeply repressed and unspoken way. And I think you can really see that in our peers who come from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds, who might have families where the parents were lawyers or doctors or businesspeople. I think there is a way where they see the choice to play noncommercial, weird music as a kind of noble vow of not making money—that they’re choosing to not do what their parents did and that they deserve some kind of moral reward as a result. They’re forgoing maintaining their class background so that they can create art that serves the good of society or something like that. This is of course a completely foolish, delusional way of thinking about being an artist since the wealth of their parents doesn’t just disappear because you choose to play free jazz—it is still there to pay rent or pay tuition to fancy schools or summer festivals and the like. For working class musicians like us, we have to work day jobs just to be able to live in the cities where there is a scene for the kind of music to begin with. But our wealthier peers probably just think that they’re giving up being a doctor on the North Shore who makes 250k a year like their parents do.
SC
Right. They think they're sacrificing something that their class background entitles them to.
JL
And they think they’re sacrificing something for the benefit of society because they’re not making money on their art and thus that makes it a noble, moral sacrifice. A part of that I can empathize with to a degree, but it is just a really antisocial, aristocratic, and extremely class-blind idea of what an artist is.
SC
See, I don't empathize with that at all. (laughs)
JL
I mean, on an emotional level, I definitely agree with you there. (laughs)
SC
Because I think that if you already have this amount of money…
JL
Yeah, go there!
SC
…you're doing something that I think we all have to admit is in your self-interest and isn’t necessarily benefiting anyone generally. Even though some people may think that their music is beneficial to people, it's only beneficial to specific people.
JL
Absolutely.
SC
If you have all the time in the world to send a thousand emails, to spend money on PR, to make music all day, why don't you, like you said, like why don't you become a labor lawyer? Why don't you take some of your money and go to school and get a degree in something that might actually benefit a large amount of people.
JL
Exactly.
SC
But that's like part of the myth.
JL
It is part of the myth of our generation for sure. I always like to go back to our heroes and elder figures—you brought up many great ones in the beginning of this conversation—and look at how their work was able to improve the lives of the society they were working in and the people who came generations later. It is important to really understand the kinds of real sacrifice that went into a lot of improvised music before it entered into the academy, especially. And that all can be really inspiring for us in the present.
SC
Totally
JL
That being said, we’re not living in the same world as Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler were living in. We can’t just look at what they did and—without understanding the economic and political context they were working in—and think that basically copying their paths as musicians will yield the same kind of social good in our day and age. I think there’s a way in which people think that doing improvised music or free jazz is inherently good and moral in of itself, when there’s always been a community ethic behind it which helped it survive back when it didn’t have the support and renown that it has today. There are so many narcissistic ways in which people just want to reenact the lives of their heroes and they forget that there are pragmatic, communal things that our forebears did to make sure that free jazz and improvised music flourished. There were responsibilities that people in those scenes had to each other back in the 60’s and 70’s that are so easily forgotten nowadays.
I’m going to go on a bit of a rant, but I think if we can accept that this music is pretty much not commercially viable except for the smallest minority of musicians, we have to confront and deal with the wealth inequality in the improvised music scene. Let’s even just look at a scene that was really foundational in the development of free jazz and improvised music—the New York loft jazz scene in the late 60’s and 70’s. Obviously, we all know that many of the musicians that were in that scene were relatively poor. What we might not think about often enough is that there were also several very wealthy people in that scene—who, for example, came from families that had founded major American companies. And, just like today, there were many people who came from educated, middle-class families as well. We forget that the wealthy people in that scene were oftentimes both artists themselves, but in a very important way, they were also patrons, funders, and impresarios on top of that. Their wealth wasn’t something that they completely hoarded for themselves—that wealth was what helped legendary musicians that we adore today afford the production costs for their albums and the price to travel and share their work. There was a kind of optimism about the music that inspired people who had the means to invest in their less wealthy peers, because the collective project of the music itself was more important than the “career” of any given individual.
SC
Exactly, exactly!
JL
And this ethic is seemingly completely lost in our field now—especially in younger, middle class and wealthy artists. In my experience, it is mostly working class people who are the most supportive and willing to unconditionally help others, while the middle and upper class people just bank everything and ignore that money even exists in our world. To even have a frank and honest conversation about money is triggering to our wealthy peers. They assume we’re all equal when we’re very literally not, so conversations around how the proceeds of a gig are split, who pays the room fees for booking certain gigs, who helps people get in touch with press, who hypes each others’ work—like these all become really class-blind things.
I think middle and upper class people just feel individually entitled to their career because they conflate their career with something essential and personal to their being. So when that is threatened by people having frank conversations about wealth—in my experience, my wealthy peers do not have the emotional maturity to deal with it. This kind of music in particular is so inspired by our peers and by the community we belong to. But there’s just been decades and decades of entrepreneurial individualism and kinds of like “small-business owner” vibes that have eroded all of the communal cooperation that made previous generations of improvised music so great.
SC
I fucking hate it. (laughs)
JL
I hate it too. (laughs) Anyway, off my soapbox on that issue...
Okay let’s talk about the album itself since so much of the narrative and affect grew out of some of the experiences you’ve shared so far. Can you kind of walk us through your concept for the album?
SC
Totally. Each song on this record was written as a brief expression from a specific time. They were written or improvised right after a moment of either a really traumatic experience or a moment of total personal reckoning.
JL
Right—that’s pretty palpably felt.
SC
Most of the time these came out of experiences I had working various wage jobs during my life. Some of them were reckoning with what it means to grow up working class and all the family dynamics that come out of that.
This was a big reason why I wanted to put it out on Empty Stage because this music is really sending a specific message that is trying to liberate the working class musician and lovers of music who are out there—telling them that “you’re not the one that is failing—the system that we’re forced to participate in is failing you and that none of this was meant to work for you.”
JL
Right, right.
SC
And then from that place of knowing, I hope it will help people acknowledge the truth of the situation, convene, and start to figure things out—figure out what we’re gonna do about it all.
JL
I mean, that was definitely—when I first listened to it—what struck me about the project as being really special. Like there’s a lot of overtly angry music that expresses some of these sentiments, but I think your album really expressed the kinds of individual, lonely frustrations that come with being a working class artist. And the creative diversity of styles and types of production in the album helped bring that all out too. I’m generally pretty underwhelmed by various kinds of fusion genres within improvised music, but you really pull it off where the kinds of expressive, really emotional sides to this album were always augmented by things that were slightly off-kilter and weird—which just felt like the perfect kind of sound to express the concept of the work itself.
Giving space to some of these feelings was very cathartic for me as a listener too—to hear the frustration but also the working-through of a kind of consciousness as well. I am just very happy to have this project a part of the label. I hope that people out there can really relate to the story and the emotions in the recording because the place that this album is coming from is really fucking needed right now.
SC
Thanks. I agree. (laughing)
JL
Any other things you want to say? Any parting words of peace or frustration?
SC
No, I think I kind of said it all for now!
JL
Ok nice! Cheers to “With Many Hands,” Sarah!
SC
Cheers!
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Empty Stage Journal & Records
Empty Stage Journal & Records
Chicago, Illinois