Five years ago, Joseph-based pianist Seth Kinzie was awarded a Rotary Peace Fellowship to study peace and social change in Uganda. Since then, Kinzie has created the African Peacemaking Database in Ethiopia and Malawi. He has now released a new album, “Bright Violet,” with the Kinzie Steele Octet and will be performing in Portland at Holocene on Dec. 7. We talk to Kinzie and hear a performance of some of the music inspired by his travels.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We first talked with pianist and composer Seth Kinzie five years ago. Seth lives in the Wallowas in Joseph, but was about to go to Uganda as part of a Rotary Peace Fellowship. The idea was to study peace and social change and to make a peacemaking index. He did that. He also came back with some musical inspiration.
Seth’s band is called Kinzie Steele. It started as a duo, just him and the drummer Andy Steele from Walla Walla, but their duo became a foursome when they added another drummer and an electric guitar. For their new album called “Bright Violet,” they added a string quartet. We met up with the eight-person band recently at the Southeast Portland venue and recording studio, Hallowed Halls. I asked Seth if they could start us off with a song from the new album.
Seth Kinzie: We’re gonna start with a song called “Christine of Congo,” that I wrote for a Congolese refugee I met when I was studying in Uganda, and I was going to meet up with her to give her a recipe for bread. I had to leave my program in Uganda, the peace program out there, before I could meet her and give her this recipe and spend some more time with her. So this is my apology and thank you and ode to her. It’s called “Christine of Congo.”
[“Christine of Congo” plays]
Miller: That is just part of “Christine of Congo,” from the new Kinzie Steele album, “Bright Violet.” Kinzie Steele is Seth Kinzie on piano, Andy Steele on drums, along with Dan Galucki on drums and Ben Walden on electric guitar. For this new album there’s also a string quartet. Today we are hearing Zoe Schlussel on violin, Aidan Wheeler on violin, Timmy Barnett on viola, and Greg Schulberg on cello.
Seth, the last time we talked, this was almost exactly five years ago, just before you were going to be going to Uganda as a Rotary Peace Fellow. I’m guessing a lot of folks did not hear that conversation. Can you just remind us why you went there?
Kinzie: I was fortunate enough to be chosen to study peace building and conflict transformation in Uganda with 15 other fellows for a new program that just opened up at the Rotary Peace Center there. I spent a year in an applied master’s program in Uganda, Somalia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda, just talking to people about peace, learning about peace and conflict dynamics, and eventually started an organization down in Malawi after that work.
Miller: Did you end up getting out of that time which you hoped you would?
Kinzie: One hundred percent. The cool thing about studying peace issues is you have to think about it in your personal life, and it invites more peace in and just think, OK, if I’m studying this important issue, am I really making sure I’m taking the time for myself to get to bring more peace in?
And of course, you are with a lot of amazing people who are dealing with some really intense topics. Most of them were from Africa. I’ve made great friendships, and I learned a lot and I’m really happy to be continuing the work out there.
Miller: How much music could you make or did you listen to while you were there, in Malawi or Uganda or Ethiopia, Somalia?
Kinzie: I listened to a fair amount of music. I also needed to scratch the piano itch in Uganda, and there was a Kampala piano school in the capital, so I taught there while I was taking the program with some great students, and what was really interesting is that they’re really hungry for composition style and technique. Actually, that song I just played, the little riff at the top, that’s these quick 16th notes, was me teaching Jonathan maybe one style of how to write music, and I wouldn’t have come up with that if I wasn’t teaching him.
Miller: Can I hear that riff right now?
Kinzie: Sure.
[Music plays]
Kinzie: One’s going up, one’s going down. So you have these quick notes and then the right hand is kind of echoing those notes or mirroring it or going down and also making a melody.
Miller: And who’s Jonathan?
Kinze: Jonathan is the piano student that I had in Uganda.
Miller: Was that something you knew you were going to be doing while you were there working on peace and building a peace database that we’ll talk about – you knew you’d be teaching piano as well?
Kinzie: No, whenever I travel, I always try and see where the pianos are, so it’s always like an immediate search when I’m in a new place. I thought, ah, there’s pianos here. Unfortunately, at Makerere University in Uganda, the music school was in pretty bad repair. And of course, pianos are a very expensive instrument to maintain, so their pianos weren’t in good shape, but I found this school and immediately went there and asked if I could have some time to play and then if anyone wanted to, I would teach some students.
Miller: How many days can go by without you playing a piano?
Kinzie: More than you think, probably. I’ll go a week without touching a piano, but when I’m at these travels, when I was in other places, it would be sometimes three months, and then you’re really interested in coming back to it.
Miller: Andy, how did you and Seth meet?
Andy Steele: Seth and I met in, probably around 2015, 2016, through a mutual friend, a musician out of Wallowa County named Bart Budwig. He was recording an album around that time called “The Moon and Other Things.” He asked me to play drums on it, so I recorded those tracks as part of a core trio, with Bart on guitar and singing, a bass player, and me, and then he added overdubs of other musicians, one of whom was Seth on piano. So we were actually credited together on an album, before we had ever met in person.
Miller: So your music met before the two of you met as human beings?
Steele: Exactly. It was shortly after then, we knew of each other, just being in the same scene in Northeastern Oregon. Then he had been in a band, and the drummer had moved away to go to school, and I’d been in a band and the guitarist and primary songwriter had moved away, so we were both sort of floating and looking for a new opportunity. It just started by getting together at his house in Joseph or my house in La Grande and just spending weekends together improvising and making things up on the fly and then slowly crafting songs out of that.
Miller: How did you know that the musical partnership was going to work?
Steele: I feel like it was really evident immediately. I remember the first afternoon that we were just sitting there playing together and there was just a chemistry there. Seth would be doing things and I’d be like, I wonder if he’s about to hit on this thing, and I would hit there and he would be in the same place. There were just these things that started to sync up, and I think our approach to music is we’re coming from very different places in terms of our backgrounds and our training, but –
Miller: Am I right that you’re more into jam bands, funk, as opposed to more jazz, or am I wrong?
Steele: I would definitely throw the jazz in there with the jam bands and the funk and stuff like that. I grew up in a musical household. My mom was a classical flutist, and my dad is still a jazz saxophonist, but he taught professionally. That was the environment that I grew up in and it’s what I enjoy playing. I didn’t have the classical pedigree that Seth had growing up on the piano, but there are a ton of shared musical interests that we have, and I think that the different dynamic of our backgrounds shows through on how we play together.
Miller: Can we hear another song?
Kinzie: Sure, this one’s called, “Anahareo,” and it’s just gonna be Andy and I.
Miller: Is there any story behind this? Any bread recipe?
Kinzie: This is a little ode to a Mohawk woman named Anahareo, who is a great Canadian adventuress, and was one of the first female gold miners in Canada, and she helped save the beaver. The beaver was completely going extinct and being over trapped, and she and her partner made an awareness campaign on it, and now the beaver’s doing good. So I wrote her a song.
[“Anahareo” plays]
Miller: That is “Anahareo” by Kinzie Steele. It’s from their debut album, “When I Was a Tree.” Their new album is called “Bright Violet.” So you started as a duo, that’s embedded in the name of the group, but you’ve kept adding instruments. Another drummer, electric guitar, and then, for this new album, as I mentioned earlier, a string quartet. How do you think about the growth, the evolution of the band?
Kinzie: I think of it in a similar way to how we improvise, where songs can always continue to unfold into something deeper and more. There’s always melodies hidden within it that you can choose to not put in if you want to keep the space really open, or some songs really want to be developed and have this vast space.
Miller: Do you know that when you’re working on a melody, or does it come later?
Kinzie: No, it comes later. This took many years of putting this all together. So after a couple of years of playing a song, I’ll think, oh, OK, maybe I don’t have to play all this on piano, I can unload the burden to other instruments. Or, I’ll be listening to myself play, I’ve recorded it and I’ll play over the top like, oh no, there’s these new melodies that want to come out. And I think the same happens with percussion too, which is why we added Dan on drums.
Miller: Andy, what does it feel like to have another drummer with a whole other drum kit playing alongside you?
Steele: It’s totally a dream come true of mine. Dan was the first drummer that I ever saw when I moved to Oregon in 2013. I saw an old band of his when they came through La Grande two months after I moved there, I was like, I love this guy’s playing, he is so cool. I want to be his friend.
Miller: And what was it that you heard in his playing that so grabbed you?
Steele: It’s like, expressive and flowy and there’s like a stream of consciousness to the playing that I can relate to, in terms of how I also like to play. There’s always like a line through it, but he plays with the beat and with the groove and adding flourishes, and that was just something that I always really enjoyed and respected about Dan’s playing.
When we were having conversations about adding other instrumentation, I don’t think I would’ve wanted to just call up a drummer and say, hey, we need an auxiliary percussionist to round out the sound. Dan was a friend and someone who I respected as a musician and felt like he would be the right person to really be a collaborator because it’s easy to step on each other’s toes when there are two drummers. So knowing that it was someone – and we had played together and jammed together in the past – but knowing that it was someone who we knew how to gel with each other sonically, was super important.
Miller: Can we hear another song with the whole band?
Kinzie: Let’s do it. This is called, “Morning Hymn.”
Miller: And this is from the new album?
Kinzie: That’s right, yeah. On the album you’ll notice there’s vocalists. We don’t have a vocalist here today, but we’re going to put some of those on strings, which is not on the album. So this is a special performance.
Miller: This is Seth Kinzie on piano, Andy Steele and Dan Galucki on drums, Ben Walden on electric guitar, and then the string quartet is Zoe Schlussel and Aidan Wheeler on violin, Timmy Barnett on viola and Greg Schulberg on cello.
[“Morning Hymn” plays]
Miller: That’s “Morning Hymn” from the new Kinzie Steele album, “Bright Violet.” Is that a religious song for you?
Kinzie: Kind of, yeah, it’s the play on words. I used to call it “mourning” with a “u,” sad hymn, and some people said it made them feel soothed and happy and there’s sort of a healing quality, so I made it more open ended. But it’s actually based off of some Icelandic folk music that’s essentially funeral music. It brings up some sad moments, but I think, really, it’s a beautiful piece and I’m so happy to have the strings playing on it.
Miller: My understanding is that you’ve had a Buddhist meditation practice for basically your entire adult life. Is there a connection for you between music and meditation?
Kinzie: Yeah. I’m becoming a better musician too and playing with Andy, you learn to keep the space open. I probably used to play too many notes, and maybe that came from playing just by myself with a drummer, so you think you need to fill the space. In meditation, ultimately the great teacher is just being silent and seeing what arises and how there’s some clarity and maybe some focus and maybe some healthy space that comes out when you’re just quiet with yourself.
Trying to have moments in the music when you don’t need to fill it, and you can let it be open and free and seeing where that leads myself as a composer, where it leads me and where it maybe strikes a chord with the audience too, there’s probably a connection there.
Miller: It’s a paradox, right? Because what you’re talking about, I suppose, is silence, the power of silence, even as a musician. Were you afraid of it before, as a musician?
Kinzie: I don’t know if I was ever afraid of it, but I wasn’t aware how to tap into it, probably. So spending more time going on retreats and meditating with other people and just having to practice by myself just to sit each day, you realize, oh, there’s a healthy space here. I think that just spending more time doing less musically and maybe in life is a healthy way to go. That’s also why I left Portland and moved to Joseph, this small town of a thousand, 12 years ago, and I’m happy I did.
Miller: Do you think it changed your music?
Kinzie: One hundred percent. Actually, one reason why I left is because I was not happy with my songs. I didn’t have enough space to play the music. I had to be like, OK, I’m really busy, 5-7 on Wednesday, you can write some music, which for me doesn’t work at all. Now I have more free time, it’s pretty cold, you don’t go outside too much out there. There’s not a whole lot to do sometimes, so there’s plenty of time to write music.
Miller: What about the land itself? Do you think that has changed the way you think about or make music?
Kinzie: You’re in a pretty stark and beautiful setting. You have these beautiful, nearly 10,000-foot mountains right outside my door. You have the second deepest lake in Oregon a 10-minute walk away. You have the beautiful Zumwalt Prairie. You have Hells Canyon also, which is one of the deepest canyons in North America. You’re constantly surrounded by lots of inspiration and it’s so open. It’s an open area, east of the Cascades out there, it’s pineland, it’s not so thick with forest and trees like we have in the west. That openness has probably inspired me in some form.
Miller: Andy, you, too, are on the eastern side of the Cascades. Do you feel like it has affected you as a musician?
Steele: I think so, and I think that the musical growth that I’ve personally experienced since moving to that region, it is certainly influenced by the musicians that I have met since I’ve been there, people like Seth and sort of developing our own musical language together. But, like Seth, I spend a lot of time outdoors and I love nature, and it’s a fun part of being in Joseph and doing songwriting there. We can hang out and jam for a morning and then go for a walk to Wallowa Lake, and have that be part of the process. I’m sure that it has influenced us in ways that we don’t entirely recognize, but it certainly feels like a very peaceful setting to quiet your mind, as he was saying, and I think that’s reflected in the music that we come up with there.
Miller: Seth, we started by talking about your work doing peacemaking, peace building, working on the muscles of making peace more possible. When we spoke in late 2020, that was just a couple weeks before January 6, 2021, and it seems inescapable that the reality or possibility of political violence in this country has only gotten worse since then. I’m just curious how you think about peacemaking in the context of our own country?
Kinzie: It’s a tough question and I get it occasionally, but, thinking about it on the global scale or the political scale of what’s going on in the United States or any specific country is a tough way to go about it, because you can be really defenseless and not have any control over that reality. But if you think of it on your own daily habits, your own community level, hope does come out, because you can think about maybe how you can practice peace with your family, or maybe you can bring some artistic energy or creativity into it. So I acknowledge the darkness that is going on in the world right now, but I think that my approach to responding to that is just to stay and like, OK, what can I do with my small community? How can we work on keeping the light active together? And music is a great way to do that.
Miller: Can we hear one more song?
Kinzie: Sure.
Miller: What are we gonna hear?
Kinzie: We’re gonna hear “Pleiades.” This is our ode to the Seven Sisters in the sky, and again, this is a little bit of a debut because we’ll have some strings added to this piece too.
Miller: And this is from your first album?
Kinzie: That’s right, it’s the last track. It’s a 20-minute piece, seven movements, seven songs, and we’re just gonna do the last two movements for it.
[“Pleiades” plays]
Miller: Kinzie Steele is Seth Kinzie on piano, Andy Steele and Dan Galucki on drums, and Ben Walden on electric guitar. We heard them in performance with Zoe Schlussel and Aidan Wheeler on violin, Timmy Barnett on viola and Greg Schulberg on cello. Kinzie Steele’s new album is called “Bright Violet.”
Huge thanks to the great folks at Hallowed Halls who helped us out with this session, Deanna and Justin Phelps, Jordan Porto and Jessie Broderick.
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