Digital Interviews: How did being the son of music teachers contribute to your desire to play music?

Paul McCandless: Well, it contributed just about everything. I come from a musical family. My father’s father was an oboist, played baritone horn and also fiddle. My mother’s family -- the grandmother played, and all her sisters and brothers played. In my family, my mom and dad were my high school music teachers, and junior high. My mother taught me in grade school and kindergarten, so I just was inundated with music. They always said they never pushed me to be a musician, but they never showed me anything else. [laughs] From the beginning, I started to play the clarinet. I started when I was nine. I was a typical kid -- I’d much rather play baseball than practice my clarinet. But I really caught fire, at a certain point, when I was 13. I had a really amazing experience. I was playing some Bach suites, which were originally for violin. They’re complete onto themselves. I had a version of them for clarinet. So, I was just sitting in this beautiful echo-y room, playing these Bach suites, and I kind of had this strange experience that I wasn’t really playing. It just was going, and I was more or less a participant. I was not just sitting there moving my fingers up and down -- something sort of came through me, in a way, and I found myself losing self-consciousness and kind of moving into another zone.

DI: You had conquered a certain level?

PM: Yeah, exactly. I got past the mechanics of making music, and I started to really just participate in the musical part of it. It was a magical experience that I looked forward to repeating when I could. At that point, I really knew I wanted to be a musician.

DI: You also played with the Pittsburgh Symphony?

PM: I was a student. There was not a regular fourth chair in the orchestra on the oboe section. When they did some big pieces -- which they were doing a lot of, because Mahler was very popular at that time -- and some large treatments of other famous works, they hired one of the better students from the Pittsburgh area. I was a student at Duquesne University at the time, so I played with the Pittsburgh Symphony whenever they needed a fourth oboe or a second English horn. I also played saxophone on a recording of Porgy and Bess with the orchestra. That was a great start. It was so thrilling to sit in the middle of a beautiful symphony orchestra with a really world-class conductor. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

DI: How did you hook up with Paul Winter?

PM: I went to New York and studied at a conservatory called Manhattan School of Music with Robert Bloom, who was a great oboist. He was my main classical teacher. At that point, I started traveling with Paul Winter. He invited me to come on the road my fourth year. I told him I had to finish school before I went on the road with him. Then, I went on the road and just worked with him for three or four years, and then met the Oregon guys in his group. We’re celebrating our 30th anniversary as a quartet.

DI: Oregon has a vast recorded output. You guys seem to enjoy the studio.

PM: We have a very long life. We average less than one record a year, but sometimes almost one record a year. We’ve been 30 years, and we just finished our 24th album. Our newest record is actually with the Tchaikovsky Orchestra of Moscow. It’s a double-CD on the Intuition label. It’s a record of a lifetime for us. It’s some of our older pieces, and some brand new works, all for orchestra and our quartet -- Ralph Towner on guitar, me on oboe and English horn, Glenn Moore’s our bassist, and Mark Walker plays percussion. We all went over to Moscow and made this record with the Tchaikovsky Orchestra.

DI: How important is improvisation in Oregon’s playing?

PM: Improvisation is always key to whatever the Oregon band does. It’s one of the things that makes me interested in music -- the element of surprise, being able to develop musical ideas spontaneously. The orchestra -- their parts are composed, but we largely have improvised parts, or sections of it are improvised. We take solos. We have one piece called “Free-form Piece for Orchestra and Improvisors.” The orchestra has an elaborate set of written music that they play on cue from the conductor. A lot of it overlaps, and can be cued in in any order, but the four of us don’t have one thing written on the page. We just go, you know, or don’t go, as the case may be.

DI: The younger jam-band stars of today really dig playing with you. What’s it like for you?

PM: It’s really fun, because the approach is very different than the way our group, our aesthetic was formed. We tried to take in a lot of influences that we heard, but we would never want them to show. We’d try to, in a sense, integrate those and synthesize all those influences and come out with something that didn’t sound like anything exactly. Some of the younger bands are having a lot of fun just “butting” one style right up against the other, and stopping on a dime, going from some kind of a fusion thing to salsa and then into an Irish jig, and you can hear the influence very clearly. The audience is having a lot of fun with it. They like the surprise of it. It’s really different from the way we approached putting our music together. I’ve been playing with Comotion, and also sitting in on a few gigs with String Cheese [Incident] and playing with Tony Furtado. It’s a different style. It’s yet another way to improvise that isn’t strictly jazz. It’s another language, and it’s very compatible with my own style, which is not completely from the jazz tradition either. Oregon was always sort of an alternative kind of music that was an extension of jazz, but not really playing in the tradition of jazz. It was really non-traditional music.

DI: How did you go about pulling out those different influences, and fashioning a mix?

PM: Some of it had to do with the instrumentation. Our first group -- I played the oboe, my strongest instrument, and English horn. Ralph Towner played classical guitar, although he played jazz piano, but it initially didn’t fit within the group. As he explored different ways of playing the piano, and different styles of music, it began to fit more and more, integrating some folk-like elements and Keith Jarrett and Elton John and some of the composers of the day -- finding different ways to use the piano other than in a swinging kind of feel.

DI: Maybe more as a rhythm instrument?

PM: Rhythm, and more “even” eighth notes. So, the instruments marked our group very distinctly. Our percussionist played tabla very well. This was one of his main instruments. Our bassist was using the bow and he put on an unusual tuning to give the bass a very different sound. So, for starters, our group, even if we were playing traditional jazz, would have still sounded very different, because the instrumentation was so unusual. It also gave the listener a lot of information about exoticism. The oboe always sounds Middle Eastern to people, and we had a sitar and a tabla, which gave an Indian flavor; and the classical guitar, which some people associate with Spanish music or South America, in addition to the classical tradition. We had a lot of references just in the instrumentation. Then, some of the music we were drawing on was coming from music we were hearing at that time, and integrating it. Joni Mitchell was a very big influence on Ralph Towner’s composition. She’d had a very instinctive way of composing, and Ralph is a mixture of instinct and incredible erudition. He’s a complete artist, especially in the composition area. We had a lot of these things. They weren’t really generating the pieces we were playing, but there was something inspiring in the various music we were hearing, that caused us to write. Not necessarily write in the style that we were hearing, but to find a new style. At that point, there was an opposition between originality and uniqueness and stuff that’s traditional. In that contrast period, we were definitely looking for something that we hadn’t heard before. Now, I think that those things have changed. The values have changed a little bit. Now there’s not such a value on originality; it has more to do with modularity, where you’re combining different sets of variables, like in the various jam bands. There’s a bluegrass feel, there’s a rock influence, there’s Grateful Dead, and then there’s all this world music, and African drumming and stuff that all gets included in the “one from column A, one from column B” way of approaching things.

DI: You’re playing with Darol Anger and Mike Marshall. What’s it like playing within their dynamic?

PM: Well, these guys are like me. They come from some traditional music, but they have a tremendous range. They’re both, on their instruments, terrific virtuosos, and also very experienced musicians who have their own stamp that they put on the music. They have very well developed personalities -- very much Darol Anger, very much Mike Marshall. They bring a maturity to the proceedings that’s really unifying, because they draw on a lot of the influence that some of the younger musicians are playing around with, but they’ve been doing it a lot longer and they have their own personalities very well formed.

DI: What projects can we look forward to?

PM: Well, I have to plug the Oregon record. That’s a new way to go with the group, to pursue our classical, our symphonic performances. This double-album took a lot of work. It’s a tremendous triumph, and in real adversity. It’s not easy to go to Moscow and put together a first-class recording, to organize all that. It’s getting really great reviews. We’re looking to do more performances in an orchestral setting. We have an offer from Ravinia in Chicago to do something next summer, and we’re pursuing that. I feel very at home in that, maybe because of my instruments and the classical reference that they have. It feels good. I know how to do that world of music and integrate the improvisational side. I want to press on with these new relationships, and just see where it all takes us. I think that we probably have even more music that we’re going to want to do in the future, that will be even another step beyond what we did on the Comotion record. I’ve admired Darol and Mike, and have been on a label with them before, but we really didn’t play much together, because they have their own gigs and tours, and I was in other bands, or with Oregon, or doing my solo stuff. It’s really very gratifying to play with them, and also with Jeff Sipe and Tye North, who I’d known for years, Sipe from the Aquarium Rescue Unit, a great band that used to be from Atlanta, with Colonel Bruce Hampton. So, it’s bringing together a lot of people that I’ve wanted to play with, and have never really had a chance. Mike Kang had the idea to put all these people together. And I, for my own self, have some hopes of writing another album. I haven’t put one of my own albums out for about eight years. That’s a real important side of my personality, to me -- how I write music. It takes a real commitment on my part, because I travel so much, that I really don’t get around to writing much music. I’m usually playing other people’s music.

DI: You’ve been involved in the music industry for a while now, and there are people out there just starting out. What would you tell them?

PM: I think it’s really good to find a combination of people and ideas that you feel good with, and that you can really learn from. I think one of the huge plusses in my career was that I was connected to Ralph Towner, who’s a brilliant composer. You don’t get too many of those. I think it’s really important to seek out someone who has a real gift for writing music. Short of that, then a combination of players that have a real chemistry, that allow you to grow and become a better musician. I still think people should try to be unique, and I haven’t given up on the notion of people really finding a singular, unique voice, or a group that has a very singular sound -- that you can hear one bar and you know who it is. I think people need to find situations where it’s open-ended in terms of growth, where you don’t cop a style and that’s it, but where there’s an open-ended situation.