Pianist and songwriter Robin Holcomb and cellist Peggy Lee have been making music together for nearly two decades, their partnership deepening through performances at venues from Vancouver's PuSH Festival to Seattle's The Royal Room. Their relationship began with occasional collaborations, including Lee's participation in Talking Pictures' 2009 recording featuring Holcomb's compositions. These early encounters have grown into a conversation between two artists with differing but complementary sensibilities. Their long-awaited Reno, released on Songlines Records, followed the duo's patient steps to recording their album debut.
Holcomb brings to the partnership a compositional voice that has been called "staggeringly beautiful" by the New York Times, shaped through her unique path from sharecropping tobacco in North Carolina as a young woman to the downtown New York improvisation scene of the 1980s. Her harmonic language draws from American folk traditions while remaining thoroughly contemporary. This distinctive combination has earned commissions from the Philadelphia Orchestra and produced critically acclaimed recordings on Nonesuch Records. Lee, a Vancouver-based cellist and composer, contributes what one critic describes as "melodic offerings never fully revealed as if they're cloaked in shadows, yet they always find the most direct path to the listener's heart." Through her work with ensembles like Film in Music and collaborations ranging from Dave Douglas to the late Ron Miles, she has demonstrated an accomplished versatility between composition and improvisation.
Reno unveils sixteen tracks that span Holcomb's songwriting across four decades, from her earliest composition "Larks, They Crazy" to selections from song cycles including The Utopia Project and We Are All Failing Them. The album was recorded over two days in a Seattle home studio, producer Wayne Horvitz noting the "living room feel" that permeates both the sound and the performances. Holcomb's piano charts are the structural starting point, but Lee's cello parts often appear intuitively from the compositions, creating what Holcomb describes as music that moves fluidly between vocal and instrumental spaces. The music successfully brings together the vibes of contemporary classical focus, avant-jazz freedom, and American folk meditation.
For the Spotlight On podcast, host Lawrence Peryer spoke with Robin Holcomb and Peggy Lee in person at Seattle's Royal Room. The talented and cordial pair discuss their collaborative process, the role of gender in experimental music, and how their different musical backgrounds create space for what Holcomb calls "empathy, intuition, and shared interest in a wide variety of music."
You can listen to the whole conversation in the Spotlight On player below. The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
Lawrence Peryer: I want to ask, just by way of getting started, how did you two first cross paths? Were you aware of each other professionally?
Robin Holcomb: I don't remember the year.
Peggy Lee: I'm not good with the years either, but I do remember you walking into Veda Hille's house. We were doing a project on Nick Drake at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.
Robin: I think I knew of you, or I knew that there were a number of fabulous improvising musicians in Vancouver when we lived here. Peggy was in a band called Talking Pictures. They've done concerts with my husband, Wayne Horvitz, and his music, as well as my own, and everybody in the band wrote. That's how it started for me. We've known each other for a fairly long time.
Lawrence: How do you bridge your different musical perspectives? And what's unique and informs your other work when you go your separate ways?
Robin: Well, for me, it's all music. It's not one thing or another. When I'm writing, it's whatever seems appropriate to the music in the moment. Usually, when I work with Peggy, we always start with my piano chart, and then she figures out a part from that. Sometimes I write a line for her, but often she invents one based on the piano part and extrapolates on that. I look for that in all the bands I play in. I don't always get that quality of empathy, intuition, and shared interest in a wide variety of music.
I think Peggy is unique in that she's an amazing improviser, and also, she's great at working with songwriters. She's really good at supporting a song. It just makes it sound a lot bigger, and you don't need other instruments particularly. It sounds very full what she comes up with. Those two skills don't always come together, so that's really great for me.
Peggy: Thank you, Robin!
Robin: Okay, now let's see what you can do. (laughter)
Peggy: Robin's music is so unique—music and words—and I've just found a place that I feel comfortable using sort of my whole vocabulary, whether it's really active stuff or very simple, pure sounds. It just feeds all the things that I love to do.
Lawrence: How do you engage with the lyrics? Is that part of your interpretation?
Peggy: Not literally. It's almost like when I work with dancers. I'm peripherally aware and try to engage, but not exactly.
Lawrence: On the topic of lyrics, when you first started writing, Robin, were you thinking of poetry ultimately as song? Did you self-identify as a poet and transition to music?
Robin: They were kind of going on at the same time. I guess you could say I self-identified as a poet very briefly when I was living in Santa Cruz, California. There was a wonderful poetry scene there. I was on the fringe of that. I was already playing and writing music, but I hadn't put words and music together. In fact, I was very frustrated trying to do that because songs make up a lot of what I listen to.
It wasn't until after I moved to New York in the late seventies that I tried to put the two together, and I was just miserable at the first few attempts. Just awful. Then I got a job in Santa Cruz. I came back from New York and wrote music for a production of The Tempest. I used some Gamelan instruments—that's what I did in college, which was play Degung, which is West Javanese Gamelan music.
The singers had a real hard time with the melodies that I created, but I could sing them with ease, which I thought was odd but also really interesting. Then I thought, "Well, maybe I can sing it and play at the same time." I went back to old poems and set those to music. So it was first Shakespeare, then the old poems, and then on to writing lyrics, which was another step that was difficult to navigate. In poetry, I prefer to write very sparsely, using few words to evoke rather than tell, and I’ve brought that approach to lyric writing, which I think has served me well. The weird rhythms that can happen in poetry also worked well in songwriting for me.
Lawrence: Were you a minimalist by nature, or was that something that you became from being in New York and around that scene?
Robin: I wouldn't say I was that influenced by minimalist composers. I would say that, in terms of writing, I was influenced by Asian poets of various sorts, or maybe I just didn't have the patience to read wordy poems. I somehow figured out a way to put music that didn't come from changes to words. The harmonic progressions kind of emerged from that.
Lawrence: So more of an aesthetic influence?
Robin: I guess, maybe.
Lawrence: I think about the downtown scene in New York. It’s very easy for me to idealize everything that sprang from that, but it's also true that so much came from that scene. Do either of you recognize or see lineage there?
Peggy: I wasn't aware, but when I moved to Vancouver, the musicians I started to play with were fully aware of that world. So I was sort of influenced secondhand. The Jazz Festival at the time also brought over a lot of European improvisers, especially from the Dutch scene, which was a big influence.
Lawrence: What was it about the Dutch scene? What was your connection there?
Peggy: Well, the music—the first group that blew my socks off was Clusone Trio with Han Bennink, Ernst Reijseger, and Michael Moore. I'd never heard a cello played like that. And also just how much fun they were having. (laughter)
Lawrence: We forget about that part sometimes. It's like challenging and intense music, and I love it when I see the people on the bandstand smiling and laughing, like, "I can't believe you pulled that off."
Peggy: Yeah. And then there was the ICP Orchestra that would come over, and that was also a revelation.
Robin Holcomb on piano (Photo by Peter Gannushkin) and Peggy Lee on cello (Photo by Victoria Johnson)
Lawrence: I don't know even the right way to ask the question, but how do you perceive gender, and have you had to note it throughout your career? Do you feel a sense of encouragement or optimism about the female presence in the creative music world?
Robin: I used to always say I haven't found that being a woman has made a difference one way or another in music—in the work I get, in the music I play, and the opportunities I have. Then I started to think about it not all that long ago, and it came down to, "Well, there are a few jerks in all the genders," and I still couldn't say men have the advantage, although in many ways they do. I just found my way around that, I think.
But I have been the beneficiary of some very conscious addressing of gender inequality recently. The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned me to write for them because they decided to make a big gesture and commission six women at the same time, as they hadn't been presenting music by women. I was one of those. I came up through a program that the American Composers Orchestra sponsored, so that's how they found out about me. That was lucky. I think I'd always wanted to write orchestra music, but it wouldn't have happened as easily if it weren't for that program and that moment in time.
Peggy: I guess I would also say that I haven't felt in any way left out or cut out over the years, but I do notice—for a few years, I helped this great drummer, Jerry Granelli, out in Nova Scotia at a creative music workshop, and I felt that women were definitely underrepresented in that. So, it made me aware that improvised and creative music still has a way to go, just by showing young women that this is something open to them.
Lawrence: This is something that actually Wayne has gotten me to think about a lot over the last several months, which is improvisation as composition. It's always interesting when a musician talks about the self-image of an improviser as opposed to a composer.
Peggy: I do compose for groups—mostly my own groups—and I call that composition, but I also say it incorporates improvisers, myself included. I don't really play contemporary solo repertoire at all. I always feel like the time I would spend learning that, and then the opportunities to perform it, I'd rather just work on my own vocabulary as an improviser.
Robin: I think when one works without any structure, predetermined or prompt or anything, sometimes something happens within the composition that becomes the focus of the composition, like commenting on it or changing it. That's one way structure develops. I think that's really exciting to be on stage and have no idea what's going to happen—there aren't any wrong notes and you make it all music.
Lawrence: It's so exciting when it locks in. And you have to be so present because it's so fleeting. I'm curious, are you still able to surprise each other when you're playing? Do you look up from your instrument and say, "Wow, that's"—you know, a twenty-some-odd-year musical relationship, and I'm hearing something exciting and new?
Robin: When we do songs, I tend to play them pretty much the same way. Not exactly, but they have relaxed in some ways, or the rhythms have changed a little bit sometimes. Peggy has some parts that have become somewhat set, but they aren't always. And then when there's improvising—that's a whole different story.
Peggy: But I think even within the set stuff, just being present makes it different every time. That's exciting.
Robin: I didn't start singing in public till long after I started writing songs. I don't improvise as a vocalist. I mean, I can make my voice do all sorts of things. I just never do.
Peggy: Has anybody asked you to?
Robin: Every once in a while. I usually weasel out of it. (laughter)
I often say that my voice has changed over the years, and I describe it as I sound more like an old goat the older I get—just the quality of my voice. Peggy has always brought this incredibly wide timbral palette to the music, where it can be really screechy and scratchy, and there are all kinds of really nice blends that happen when it's not all pure notes, clear pitches. I think it's great, but it's not intentional—it just is the music.
Lawrence: At the outset of a new project, what kind of preparatory discussions do you have? Do you set an intention?
Robin: Well, can I talk about this album? Peggy and I have been playing together for a long, long time, and you would think we’d have made a record by now, but we haven't. We recorded the music and then decided not to put it out because there was a lot of pedal noise from my piano. Some of that same music is on this record, Reno, so it wasn't a new project by any means. We've performed together, and this repertoire keeps developing. We add a new tune or we drop one or whatever. So it's kind of an old project that was never documented. It just kind of evolved.
We did a concert at Big Ears Festival this year, and the record is very similar to what we played there, which was a combination of songs and instrumental pieces with lots of improvising. It took me a while to be able to do both of those things in the same performance, particularly bringing songs to improvised music concerts. It didn't feel unnatural to me, but people around me didn't think it made that much sense. In general, people seem to want it to be one thing or the other thing. I didn't agree, but now things have loosened up quite a bit. However, I still don't hear that many people doing what we do.
Peggy: I'm quite happy that we didn't release the previous stuff we recorded because I feel like it's all evolved a lot, and I feel more comfortable in this situation.
Lawrence: Did Wayne Horvitz, as the producer, also have conversations with you about what the record would be?
Robin: He was definitely enthusiastic about us doing it, and he envisioned that a blend of all the different kinds of music we play would make a good record. He thought it was something he would like to hear and that other people would like to hear. We collaborated on the mixing and deciding what tunes to use and the order of things to sequence.
Lawrence: My understanding is that most of the recording took place over a short period of time?
Robin: Two days at a friend's house here in Seattle. He has the same piano as is here at the Royal Room, and as Wayne has at home. They're all built the same year, but my friend has maintained his phenomenally, so it really sounds wonderful. He has a room in his house that just sounds good, and he has a bunch of recording gear one floor below, so we don't even have to see Wayne or him.
Peggy: It’s a very nice feeling to play in someone's home as opposed to a studio. We had really good snacks and a kitchen. (laughter)
Robin: Really good coffee.
Lawrence: When you've participated with different bands, such as with Film in Music, would you say that there was a concept first?
Peggy: Film in Music came to me because the Jazz Society presented a series up in Vancouver called Time Flies. Ten musicians would play over maybe three or four nights in various combinations—trios, duos, solos—just mixing it up every night and all improvised.
But I had this feeling—say there's a trio on stage, there were seven people backstage drinking and eating and chatting, and then the next thing that would come up would have no relationship to what had just happened. So I thought of a piece that would have everybody together and some composed parts, but also really good stretches of just purely improvised trios or duos or solos, making it like they're all characters in some production, so that everything was related over the course of the set.
For some reason, I based it on the HBO series Deadwood. So all the titles and all the music were informed by that series and its darkness. It was a really fun project to do. I’d just think about the musicians as characters and then compose group pieces for them. Remember in the series, some guy like Al Swearengen would get up and just give a soliloquy on his balcony? That's what I felt like the improvisation should be like—"This is what I'm saying right now about this situation."
Lawrence: I'm curious, are there things that you've taken from each other as either players or composers that you’ve integrated and can point to as touchstones in your own development?
Peggy: The goal is to have your own sound—recognizable sound—and Robin has her own sound.
Robin: So does Peggy.
Peggy: I just feel like all the subtleties and every little detail—and it's not detail like exacting this or that. It's more just like breathing, and I feel like that's the goal, and I feel like that's what it's all about.
Robin: This is an odd way to answer the question, but sometimes I'll be playing with someone, not Peggy, and I'll really miss Peggy, and I'll try to put into words what she does and ask, "Can you just, instead of going this direction, can you consider this direction?" It's hard, though, and the results are never the same, but they're different in a good way. It's always a little bit different when we play together, which I guess keeps it fresh, but I just don't particularly like that word.
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