Take Five With Trombonist-Composer Naomi Moon Siegel

An award-winning trombonist, improviser, composer and educator, Naomi Moon Siegel is committed to creating a positive, transformative music culture beyond conventional genre norms. She has been an innovative performer and recording artist since graduating from Oberlin Conservatory in 2006. Siegel kicked off her professional career on the West Coast in Oakland, California, and came of age as a composer and bandleader in Seattle's thriving improv scene. Siegel is a staunch advocate for intersectional gender justice in jazz and music settings, leading workshops to build awareness and work towards positive systemic shifts in our music culture. Her third album Shatter The Glass Sanctuary (Slow & Steady Records, 2024) is a collection of adventurous original works that chronicles her adjustment to small-town living in Missoula, Montana, after residing for many years in Seattle, Washington. The music follows her inward journey of emotional highs and lows, propelled ever forward by a stellar sextet of acclaimed Seattle musicians. She is currently touring the new album throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Instruments:

Trombone is my primary instrument. I also play the piano and ukulele mostly for compositional purposes.

Teachers and/or influences?

Gladys Knight was a big, early influence on me. My Dad had a VHS tape of an HBO special she did in the '80s with Patti Labelle and Dionne Warwick called Sisters In The Name of Love. All of her performances on that tape blew me away, but especially her version of "I Will Survive." I was so struck by the way she expressed and felt every single word and sentiment she sang. I love the timbre of her voice, which feels somewhat akin to the trombone. Having seen her perform live a couple of times, I also greatly appreciate how genuinely generous she is as a performer, expressing her gratitude to be there and making eye contact with as many folks in the audience as possible.

I like to shout out Don Drummond, the trombonist from the original Skatalites. His solos really taught me about telling a story, stringing the listener along, and letting an improvisation unfurl slowly, deliberately, motivically, and melodically.

I'd like to express my gratitude to Wendell Logan who taught his students about the history of Black American Music in so many of its different forms, giving us a deeper context for this music we call jazz.

Wayne Horvitz's way of building community across generations and genres is an inspiration. I am also influenced by his compositional voice in terms of exploring harmony more from a timbral perspective rather than a functional perspective.

I knew I wanted to be a musician when...

I was always drawn to music and started playing piano at a young age. It felt like magic to me as a young kid and playing music provided a sanctuary in my house with three brothers, a place where I could explore emotions I didn't know how to speak about.

In 6th grade, I was in my elementary school's jazz band—it was the first year the school had a jazz band and we were pumped. A lot of folks from that band are still working in music today. I remember playing "Louie, Louie" for an all school assembly and it felt like the audience just went wild for the music, screaming and cheering. It was an amazing feeling to be part of this larger, grooving ensemble while also getting to express my individual voice through improvisation and share it all with our larger community. Ever since then, I have wanted to keep playing music.

That being said, I'm not sure I knew I wanted to be a ,em>musician. I didn't really have a sense of what it could look like to be a musician. My family wasn't really friends with any professional musicians. And the way it was often presented to me, growing up in music education, was that you would just know, like it was a divine calling. I didn't feel that. I didn't feel like there was some divine intervention telling me that I should play music, I just knew I wanted to keep playing. There was such little representation of non-cis men playing, teaching, and composing, I struggled to feel like I belonged in this music or like my voice mattered and was worthy in this music. Finally, in my early twenties, I had a mentor, the great saxophonist Kristen Strom, who helped me learn how to build an authentic life as a musician, incorporating those elements that I first fell in love with in 6th grade.

Your sound and approach to music.

Music is about building relationships. There is a relationship to build with yourself and the time you spend on your craft alone. And there is a relationship to build with your collaborators so that you can foster an environment of trust and risk-taking. So often in our culture, we focus so much on the product, that we forget the importance of the creative process.

In terms of playing music, I feel that sound and tone quality are imperative. As a trombonist, I spend a lot of time cultivating the sound that I want on my instrument. Having a sound is essential to conveying a sense of rhythm. Groove and rhythm are absolutely paramount, even when playing free or music without a steady pulse, there is a cadence, a feel. From there comes melody and lyricism, which I see as crucial parts to telling a story. I am also very interested in timbres and textures in my approach to music.

As a composer, the approach I most often take is to do my best to open myself up like a channel to see what musical ideas come through. I notate those ideas as much as I can in the given moment and then come back to them later to arrange them for an ensemble.

Your teaching approach

I do my best to take on a holistic approach to teaching students. Playing the trombone, or really anything, is such a physical experience. I try to instill a sense of mindfulness with my students as they investigate and deepen their connection to breath. I spend a lot of time on cultivating tone quality and air support. I see fundamentals as essential to building a foundation upon which to play anything. I use improvisation and the actual experience of playing music with others as much as possible in my private lessons. At the same time, I aim to get to know my students' personal interests and connections to music so that I can build off of that and help them develop their own relationship to music.

When teaching ensembles and group classes, I aim to cultivate a sense of trust and belonging. I really emphasize listening as a crucial component to playing. Being in an ensemble, being in a community is all about listening to other people. We can learn so much from listening. I will often use Pauline Oliveros' Sonic Meditations or other similar activities to practice listening together, which I see as strengthening our ability to play music together. It is important to me to give context for the music we play and give proper recognition to the African-American roots of this music. It is also important to me that we are conscious of what story we are telling as performers, always paying attention to feature composers of various demographics, for example.

Your dream band

My dream band is a band that has full funding and administrative support to rehearse, record and perform on a regular basis. Ideally, this would be a collaborative band that really gels interpersonally, with each member having a similar amount of investment in the project and bringing compositional and improvisational ideas. We would mutually push each other's growth individually and collectively, developing a deep sense of trust and experimentation.

Favorite venue

Moon-Randolph Homestead in the north hills of Missoula very rarely has live music, but there is a sweet time right around the summer solstice when they bring up a flatbed truck to serve as a bandstand and feature music in a beautiful, sloped pasture that serves as a natural amphitheater with gorgeous acoustics. The caretakers of this homestead are so kind and supportive, and the community loves a good reason to hike up (or drive) to these beautiful hills and bask in the long daylight. This is one of my all time favorite places to play music, especially when Richard Macintosh is doing sound.

Your all-time favorite albums and why?

This is an impossible question to answer but I'll share a few albums that have stuck out for me at one time or another. I'm often drawn to albums that use timbres in interesting ways.

M. Ward -End of Amnesia
Gillian Welch -Revelator
Tune Yards -Bird Brains
Bill Frisell Quartet
Joanna Newsom -Milk Eyed Mender
Aretha Franklin -Amazing Grace
Thelonious Monk -Criss-Cross
Duke Ellington -The Queen's Suite
Roswell Rudd/Toumani Diabaté -Malicool
Ahmad Jamal—At The Pershing -But Not For Me
Joni Mitchell -Blue (and so many more albums)
Shona Mbira Music
Mos Def and Talib Kweli -Reflection Eternal

What do you think is the most important thing you are contributing musically?

My voice, my story.

Did you know...

I love to compose next to moving water.

The first jazz album I bought was:

It was an Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers album featuring Wynton Marsalis that I found in the used CD section at a record store near my house. That thing swings hard!

Music you are listening to now:

Red Baraat Sound the People. My child is obsessed with this album. I love it too.

I'm also loving listening to Amber Mark Three Dimensions Deep. It's my hype album right now. The grooves are so good. It helps pump me up when I'm going out into the world to do something publicly.

How would you describe the state of jazz today?

There are so many great musicians out there, but I feel especially inspired by the folks who are using jazz in tandem with social justice or in a way that uses the music to move toward creating the culture and the world they want to see. Caroline Davis is somebody who comes to mind in this realm. There is so much inertia in jazz towards featuring very similar aesthetics. Sometimes these aesthetics can feel less about expression and more about showcasing. I'm interested in the expressive possibilities of this music.

What are some of the essential requirements to keep jazz alive and growing?

One thought I have is that we should not keep jazz in a silo. We need to build networks and audiences across communities, have concerts that feature artists from across genres. I also think more multimedia collaborations would be helpful, like bringing back the relationship this music always had to dance and movement.

I think we need to be conscious that every single performance we give and every album we put out into the world tells a story. The story that has been perpetuated and emphasized over and over again in jazz is that cis men are the instrumentalists and composers of this music. That story is not true, and it's also detrimental to the growth of this music. We need to vary the stories that we put out into the world, so that this music can be inclusive and transformed by folks across gender, race, ability, and age. If you are a band director, one very easy way to do this, for example, is to always program concerts to include women composers and composers of different races.

Connecting the music more to the state of the world that we are in would also help keep jazz alive and relevant to younger folks—like using the music for activism and protest and expression.

What is in the near future?

My new album Shatter The Glass Sanctuary comes out on November 8 on Slow & Steady Records. I am very proud of this album and excited to share it with the world. It features a stellar sextet of Seattle musicians and we had the pleasure of working with Allison Miller as our producer. We play all of my original compositions that investigate themes such as holding grief and paradox in our hyper-productive culture. I'll be touring around the Pacific Northwest this fall in support of the album, and I'm working to make my way to other parts of the county in 2025.

This January I have a residency lined up at VCCA during which I'll be working on compositions for my next project, which explores my experience being a parent and how it relates to my identity as a musician.

I am also very excited to be reuniting with my longtime collaborator Kate Olson to play in the Earshot Jazz Festival this fall. Our band Syrinx Effect is an electroacoustic improvisation-based ensemble that always pushes my boundaries to grow as a musician. It's been really fun to dive back into using guitar pedals and explore new sounds as a soloist and for this duo project.

What song would you like played at your funeral?

Mostly, I would say that I'd like for folks to hear the ambient, natural sounds around them. But perhaps for the more celebratory part of the funeral, it would be great to have a more dance oriented retrospective of some of the music that I enjoyed throughout my life, like Jackson 5, Gladys Knight, early Skatalites and roots reggae, Fela Kuti, Amber Mark...

If I could have dinner with anyone from history, who would it be and why?

Alice Coltrane comes to mind first. I'm fascinated by not just her music, but the way she interwove community, parenthood and spirituality with her life as a musician. But there are so many folks I'd love to spend time with from history. It'd be amazing to have an epic hang with Geri Allen, Mary Lou Williams, and Melba Liston.

Comments