David Jamison Designs ‘Late Bloomer’ To Deliver a Cozy Live Show Experience (INTERVIEW)

Philadelphia-based artist David Jamison recently released his sophomore LP, Late Bloomer, building on his Heat Check EP released in 2020 and 2021’s Enjoy the Journey LP. The bassist, composer, and Producer also has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering and has a long history of playing drums and percussion in various groups including the Johns Hopkins Jazz Band, Johns Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, and currently the Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra. A few years ago, he also took up bass playing and started composing his own music. 

On the new album, Jamison is joined by members of The Smooth Show, including saxophonist Stephen Mitnaul, keyboardist David Criswell, and drummer Clayton Carothers. Other performers include guitarist Nick DiGiacomo (The Moon Jocks), vocalist Elle Gyandoh, MCs RC and Asha-Lé Davis, and Dain Saint. Like many of the live shows that Jamison loves the most, this album combines genre influences, ranging from Jazz, to Blues, to Funk, Rap, and more. Creating this album stemmed from a particular concept that Jamison followed with a passion, recording it as live as possible, and directing sound as carefully as possible, to recreate a private live show feel. I spoke with Jamison about setting this plan in motion and carrying it out so beautifully on Late Bloomer

HMS: You seem like a very busy man, from playing live shows, to creating and releasing this new LP, and your wider work life. I heard that you played for Juneteenth, too.

David Jamison: I did, yes. There’s an African American Alliance in Cheltenham who put on programming throughout the year, and we just moved to the township last summer. This was their first annual Juneteenth Festival and it was pretty awesome to be part of it. 

There were other groups of performers there, including a local drum troop from the local middle school. There was an African drumming troupe that performed. I was honored because we had the longest timeslot. 

HMS: I’ve seen that you play from your past repertoire and also a wide range of music when you play out. 

DJ: It tends to depend on who the audience will be. For the Juneteenth Festival, we had people of all ages, so for that one, most of the songs I picked were Jazz tunes, in part because it’s easy listening and people were walking around outside, unlike a music venue where you’re the only source of entertainment. I was also playing with a keyboardist that I’d never played with before, so having Jazz standards makes that a little easier.

I did one of my own originals at that performance, but at the album release in May, that one was dominated by original tunes. I try to be adaptable and feel out what the audience is looking for, what kind of venue it is, and if there is a specific event related to it. For this one, it being Juneteenth, I wanted to focus on Black Jazz composers, which made sense for that type of event. 

HMS: You have a varied musical background, originally doing drums and percussion with a number of bands. How did you branch out from there to composing and playing bass?

DJ: I started out playing in a school concert band in percussion, learning all the different pieces in the section. I kept doing that, but I also expanded into more Jazz band set up with full drum kit and Latin percussion, basically, including bongos and congos. I stayed with those two things in different capacities. In college, I played in a Jazz band, but I also played drums for a student musical theater group, and played percussion for the symphony orchestra there. I always kept those different avenues open, on the Jazz side and the orchestra side. It was only a few years ago that I decided to pick up bass and expand my horizons further. 

HMS: Just from my outside observation, it seems like you are someone who doesn’t put yourself in a particular box, and now all of these different areas of knowledge are really useful to you right now, creating your own records.

DJ: That may be true. I got into running in my late 20s and from there started doing sprint triathlons. I felt like, “Let’s try something new and see how it goes.” It didn’t stick with it! [Laughs] I enjoyed it while I did it, and at least I tried it. I do like to keep my horizons open.

HMS: I am generally impressed when artists have taken on a longform project like an EP or LP, and had the tenacity to see it through and bring it to the world. With you, I know that you have a doctorate degree, so I know that you are no stranger to longform projects and what it takes to complete them. But I’m sure this album was still challenging because it’s a huge amount of work. 

DJ: [Laughs] It was definitely a challenge for sure. But since you bring up the Ph.D., I do think that experience had some takeaways that I could apply here. For instance, you’re trying to put together a story. You have these pieces that you’re trying to bring together to make it work. With a Ph.D., you’re doing research for multiple years, you’re trying to answer certain questions, and you’re trying to tell this final story in the end. 

It’s a lot time and effort trying to bring those details together, and that’s how putting together an album is. You have these concepts that you want to explore, and you ask, “How can I do that? What kinds of tunes do I want to put together? What kinds of instrumentation would help me tell that story best? What people do I want playing those instruments? What studio would be best?” 

I had several conversations with Nick DiGiacomo, the guitar player, who I had collaborated with before, and I wanted him to help me Produce this album. By that time, I had several songs written, and I kind of knew what I wanted to say, but the question was, “How do I make this a realization?” Even though I’d put out one LP and one EP prior, those were recorded at home, and I knew that I wanted this one recorded in a studio with more of a live feel, using real instruments rather than virtual instruments. He got me thinking about different song inspirations for sound and also about what kind of studio would work best for live sound.

HMS: I knew this LP was recorded around a live sound, but it didn’t occur to me that would be a point in making a decision on studios. That makes perfect sense. 

DJ: Live can take many different forms, too, but if you’re talking about a band with the kind of style that we play in, with a very lively drum feel, there are some studios that work better. We recorded at MNYK Studios and they already had a great drum kit there. That’s attractive! You always want to make sure that the room is tall enough and long enough that when you set up those room mics to capture the drums, it has a bigger feel. Some studios are smaller and you’ll get a different profile of sound. Rittenhouse Soundworks is another we looked at, and we used their engineer for the Mastering. It was cool to still be able to work with those guys.

HMS: I think I know what you mean, because sometimes we talk about a sense of space or air and with some more modern approaches to recording, mixing, and mastering, that can be removed. The space is more typical of a live or even analog tradition.

DJ: That’s true. A lot of the things we thought about in post-production was, “What’s the spacing of the instruments going to be?” I actually mixed the album myself, with Nick’s help, since I had mixed most of the tracks on the previous LP. But it was about trying to give the sound of a live experience, like you’re really there in the room. I was purposeful in panning the instruments. 

I actually thought about what happens when I go to places like TIME in Center City, how are they spaced out? Usually, your drums and bass are fairly centered, but I wanted my keys to be more central, my sax on the left, and my guitars over on the right. If you listen to the songs, that orientation is the same in every song. The guitar is always panned slightly right, the sax is always panned slightly left. The keys are in stereo. Bass and drums are down the middle. In the audience, the hi-hat is slightly to the right and that detail is there, too. Obviously, some bands move a lot around the stage, but players tend to be set up in one spot. 

HMS: I love this concept. You’re explaining to me why I felt certain ways about the album while listening to it. I really felt that this was one show I was listening to and that has been created through your consistency. But it also has an extra emotional connection in some ways, because it doesn’t have the extra background noise that you might have in a venue. It’s a bit more mellow and direct for that reason.

DJ: You want the listener to feel almost like it’s a private show for them, and that’s something that I love about some of the older Jazz albums that I listened to a lot when thinking about the concept for this album and composing the music. You put one of those records on, and you feel like you’ve walked into a small venue, and they are on stage, and you’re the only one there. You’re transported to that space. 

HMS: I think everyone should have some experience of that. It’s getting rarer.

DJ: The creation of music is a little different now. I’m not actually old, but I feel old saying that. [Laughs]

HMS: Did you really have this whole concept for the album laid out in your mind before making it? I notice there are certain eras of music and different genres accented more in certain songs. Were you trying to cover a lot of territory?

DJ: I did. Sometimes there’s a certain idea for an album, for instance a concept like love or forgiveness. In this instance, the concept wasn’t so much about a tangible thing, it was more about the experience of listening to the music. That became the concept. I wanted the concept to be about us in the studio creating the album in real-time and you feeling that when you listened to it. That’s what I mean here when I talk about a “concept”, not the traditional idea of the concept album. 

But in terms of genres, it’s honestly just what came to me. They are the songs that I was feeling in that moment, and I feel like they worked best with the kind of instrumentation I wanted. That’s how the different genres came about. Some albums focus only on one genre, and I might explore that more in future. But for this one, it felt right to play around with all of those, because I thought about the local bands that I like listening to live, and you can’t necessarily call them a Jazz band, or a Blues band, or a Funk band, because they will cover all of those things. 

They may start with a Miles Davis song and somehow transition into Parliament-Funkadelic. It’s seamless. For me, having different genres actually made a lot of sense. It’s harder to make sense on paper, but musically it makes a lot of sense. Also, with the other players, I don’t want to be too prescriptive. I want to let the guys do their thing.

HMS: Because you recorded all this in a fairly short space of time, all of the players must be incredibly awesome. 

DJ: That was one of several reasons that I chose these guys. They don’t do this for a living, but they act professionally. The hardest part of working with them was finding times we could get together, but everything else was super simple. We had demos, rehearsals where I talked about the album and sound, and then we ran through things. A week later we recorded everything. They came in ready and that’s the only reason we were able to do it this way. We got nine tracks worth of music in ten hours of recording. There’s even stuff that didn’t make the album. With the “Intro” and “Interlude”, those are one minute or minute and a half-long snippets of ten minute recordings. 

HMS: Now I want to hear the rest of it! That reminds me to mention how structured the album is. It’s got an “Intro Jam”, it’s got jams in the middle, it’s got an “Interlude”, and you can see the architecture which fits with a live show structure.

DJ: Exactly, it all comes together and fits that common theme. This isn’t true of every live show, but it’s true of a lot of live shows that I go to, that the band will start up with a jam. They will warm up and make sure everybody’s tuned, and that’s what I was thinking with the “Intro Jam”. It was the initial warm-up jam that we did on the day of recording. That was our sound check. 

The bassline was from a song on my first EP, also called “Flaws and All”, so we started with that. That recording itself was probably twelve minutes long to get into the right headspace. Live shows often have a little interlude, so that’s what the “Bodyroll [Interlude Jam]” is. The “Uncle Nearest [Rhythm Section Jam]” was completely unplanned. We were recording “Rap Snacks” and we hit that final note, and the drummer, Clayton Carothers just kept playing. He didn’t want to stop, so we just made some stuff up. That’s one live take of us making stuff up for six minutes. Then I thought we better wrap it up and get onto the next song in the session. 

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