No Frontiers

He might be coming to Australia at the invitation of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, but that word “jazz” barely scratches the surface of the musical oeuvre of self-confessed music nerd, American wunderkind Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Multi-instrumentalist, arranger, composer, music director, producer, DJ and educator, Atwood-Ferguson has contributed to more than 300 albums by artists as diverse as jazz guys Wayne Shorter and Quincy Jones, soul and pop men Ray Charles and Henry Mancini, and R&B/hip hop people like Erykah Badu, Common and Guru – he's even composed and conducted Suite For Ma Dukes, a tribute to the late hip hop producer J Dilla, a work from which he will be drawing much of the repertoire he'll performing here with a local seven-piece ensemble. Somewhere in all this activity, he's also finally recorded his debut album.

“That's running a little bit behind,” Atwood-Ferguson admits on line from his home in Los Angeles during preparations for a concert in Atlanta with a 60-piece orchestra. “First, my string quartet Quartetto Fantastico will be able to release our album, a collection of beautiful cinematic improvisations that's gonna be a double album – and it's probably gonna be early next year now, just because it takes so much time and so much money to do my solo album the way I want to do it. That'll be a double album too, some tracks with a couple of people, others with a sixty-piece orchestra.”

He'll be playing a track from that forthcoming album, Doom Raider, during his Australian visit, “a pretty fun, dark rockin' song and kinda reminds me of a Tony Williams' Lifetime meets Mahavishnu Orchestra vibe.” There'll be plenty of improvising during the set, but as mentioned earlier, there'll be quite a few pieces from his Suite For Ma Duke, something dear to his heart though on paper his passion for the work of hip hop artist J Dilla might seem unlikely.

“To me,” Atwood-Ferguson explains, “we're just human beings before we put, like, labels on things. Music I think comes from a very soulful place, on everyone's account – it's just passion, and it just so happens that our particular passion has led us here. Music is music so, yeah, I studied classical music but good music that people spend time trying to make with discipline, constantly trying to learn to emote with great skills, in any genre, there's a certain depth that people reach just becomes so influential. So we can call it classical music, we can call it whatever, but if it's done really well, it's gonna be moving, so I grew up, yes, with classical music, but I also grew up with Motown music and with Jimi Hendrix, and so I think hip hop is a very natural extension of soul music and Jimi Hendrix and jazz – I think it's all related.

“Dilla is, I think, a perfect example of what I'm talking about, of a passionate artisan. I think his passion was so sincere, and he was so obsessed in a positive way with music and an understanding in the music that it became transcendent – it became bigger than hip hop, it became bigger than him, it became bigger than the artists he was producing for – and I think that's what we're attracted to, attracted to something that makes us forget the petty things in life and get in touch with the big, deep river of love in life.” Atwood-Ferguson concludes.