Andy Beta in conversation with Steve Tibbetts

When you think Midwest guitar hero who recorded prolifically for the ECM label starting in the 1970s and is seen as a guitar god in the world of jazz, you may be thinking of Missourian Pat Metheny. In the “great man” realm of listening, he tends to eclipse his labelmate, Steve Tibbetts.

In a manner, Minnesotan Steve Tibbetts has traveled a similar path, though one slightly further from the spotlight, even further off the beaten path, opting for globetrotting detours than stadium world tours. You can get a glimpse of Tibbetts’ many travels just by looking at his many impeccable ECM album covers: Northern Song, Safe Journey, Exploded View. And plenty more can be seen on his own website.

I first encountered Tibbetts’ singular sound world courtesy of 1989’s Big Map Idea, and in the accompanying interview by Michael Engelbrecht he refers to the everyday experience that in sound there are “possibilities of boredom and of entertainment, there are possibilities of sound actually tapping into your memory and uncovering something with potential, with energy in it.” Tibbetts might deflect on the “guitar hero” tag, as he’s always been in service to that sound, not in drawing attention to his fretwork. Rather than large canvases with attention-grabbing splashes of color, Tibbetts is more like quilt-making, where as a listener you must zoom in to reveal the craftsmanship of the stitch work.

There’s a subtlety and nuance to all of Tibbetts’ work that I find hard to pin down or name. And over the past few years, he’s moving at his leisure: in the 21st century, he’s released albums in 6-8 year spans. Even after dozens of listens to his latest, 2025’s Close, it felt like spilled mercury. The more I tried to grab a hold, the more it moved through my grasp. It feels like it will continue to yield new aspects of his sound over the next few years until the next glimpse of his sound comes into earshot.

We chatted in December of 2025 via Zoom. Upon the video starting in his Minneapolis studio, I was treated to a brief one-minute solo from the man.

You mailed me your new ECM CD and in the note, you noticed that my address in New York City was up near West End Ave. and mentioned that your grandfather was a pastor at Riverside Church.

He was, yeah. My parents lived on West End Avenue. My parents grew up in Chicago. They both had fathers who were preachers. Douglas Horton, my mother’s father, who was a great ecumenical United Church of Christ minister, moved to New York, got the flat at 271 West End and wrote a letter to my grandfather, my father’s father, saying there was a position open at Riverside Church. My parents ended up living in adjoining flats. My father met my mother when he was eight. My father went off to war in Alaska and the Philippines during World War II. When he came back he slept on a cot in my paternal grandfather’s office for a while and then proposed to my mother. And that was it.

You come from a family of pastors then?

Two uncles, two grandfathers. My father decided he’d seen enough in World War II to disabuse himself of the notion of an all-seeing, compassionate deity.

Yeah, I think that would do it. Did you ever get to see your grandfather sermonize?

No, but I’ve listened to his stentorian tones online, in the Riverside Church archives. He had a big voice. My father had a sociology degree from Harvard. He used to say to me that the baseline for his life post-World War II was that nothing could have possibly been worse than combat, therefore everything was okay. Still, he wanted to do something to continue the fight against fascism. Would we call him Antifa these days? Yes, we would.

With his degree in sociology he began to work as a union organizer for the AFL and with what was left over of the IWW, the International Workers of the World. He always considered himself an IWW man. But they were starting to get a little scrutinized in those days.

That was, what, the McCarthy era?

It was a little before that. But my father…I still have his little red book of Joe Hill songs. It’s sized to fit in a pocket, it’s red, and it has a picture on the cover of a factory worker with huge biceps waving a wrench aloft. Great songs. It’s fantastic stuff. Look for the Little Red Book, Joe Hill songbook. It’s a dime, or it cost a dime in those days. They would sell them on the streets.

I’m only familiar with the Little Red Book.

That one is really boring. I had that one, too. Every college student has owned one along with a poster of the CCP liberating Taiwan on their wall without knowing what that was really about. CCP soldiers riding in a boat holding the red book up as they cross the strait of Taiwan.

Did your father’s outlook kind of filter down to you?

I don’t think it did. He was reluctant to talk about the war, except among his peers. He was really troubled by war memories as he grew older. He lived to be 101. I felt like he wanted to talk, but he just wouldn’t. At one point I went over to the Veterans Center in Madison and asked them, “Do you want to talk to a Greatest Generation guy?” There were two men and a woman in the office, nobody else there. They said, “Yeah, we would love to.” They all stood up. I asked, “How many of you have seen combat?” The woman said, “We have all seen combat.” I said, “My father might like to talk to you.” They said, “We would love to talk to him, but he has to call us. We can’t just go over, or call him.” They couldn’t make a cold call. 

My father struggled a great deal, not just with PTSD, it was something he called it “AOE.” He said, “In those days we didn’t call it PTSD, we called it ‘accumulation of everything.’” AOE. His goal was to come out of the war and create a good worker’s state and work with unions as they existed at the time. Over the years he became slightly embittered with the AFL merging with the CIO, and with the Democrats changing into what he called the “red wine and runny cheese party.”

He lost a strike in Danville Virginia with the Dan River Textile mill a few years after the war, and got an offer to teach labor law in Madison. We moved there. At that time there were no Democrats in Wisconsin. It was all Progressives. Bob LaFollete and others laid the ground for the Progressives. My dad and the guy who ran the Madison fire department created the Democratic Party of Wisconsin at our kitchen table and went from there. He traveled all over Wisconsin as part of the University of Wisconsin Extension Division, teaching labor law. But he never lost his annoyance, his sarcasm over what the Democrats had become and how workers were having such a hard time in Wisconsin.

Knowing this religious lineage, how would you kind of describe your faith?

Oh I don’t, I…I’m not even an atheist, you might put it that way. I think being an atheist means you don’t believe in something. I wouldn’t even go that far. I don’t think we can really know much of anything, actually. I believe in science. When my wife and kids and I travelled to the UK we went into Westminster Chapel, the big church in London. Many great luminaries are buried there, in the church itself. Poet’s corner. I knelt on Charles Darwin’s grave and felt tears come to my eyes. This is a guy that turned the world upside down through reason and science. I trust that. That’s my faith, even though, yes, I’m a meditator, a Buddhist, I’ve done a lot of Tibetan Buddhist practice, have done lots of solitary retreat. The unwillingness to totally sign on to anything organized is probably the legacy of my father.

So I guess you do carry that forward for him.

I guess so. At the end of his life I think he became sort of an accomplished meditator in his own way. He sat most of the day in a chair, a lounge chair. He was completely lucid. He had all his marbles. He watched the birds on a bird feeder my sister had suction-cupped to the window by his chair. He watched the birds and the sky.

It seems that people –especially guitarists– are anxious to adopt a line of spirituality without thinking it through. It’s always the guitarists.

It always struck me how all the guys in the 1970s had their gurus and whatnot. For a while I really chalked up Alice Coltrane’s thing kind of along those same lines, you know, she’s got Swami Satchidananda. That’s her guru or whatever. But she definitely went much further, I think, than anyone else.

As I said to you, I think she walked the walk. She started an ashram. She did an enormous amount of retreat and meditation and bhakti yoga. I don’t know how she was received by Hindus or if she ever went to India.

Many many times.

I believe it was her husband who was asked “How would you like to be remembered?” And he said, “As a saint.”

That is correct.

John Coltrane walked the walk, too. These days I work part-time as a licensed practical nurse and when we’re writing our notes in the evening we like to listen to A Love Supreme. That’s pretty close to scripture; it bears repeated listenings. The group…it’s not just Coltrane. It’s Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. Together they made their little ashram at Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey. Can you imagine having been in the control room when they finished “Acknowledgement” and saying, “Pretty good take!” over the studio talkback mic? Or maybe, “I think we’ll keep that one.”

It’s funny because, Impulse they put it out within like a month. Like, whatever Bob Thiele heard, he knew this was…a “hit.”

You think he did? Or he knew he had a hit? I don’t know what he thought, but do you think he knew the profundity of it? It’s hard to say.

I have my own working theory of, if Alice is a God-realized being and this is the record made within you know within a year of John meeting her, isn’t it ultimately made for her?

A little Love Supreme conspiracy theory, I guess.

Can you talk a little bit about your work as a LPN?

Sometimes when I’m walking into the LTCU I’ve asked myself, “How did this happen?” I have no idea, really, but there were some indications I might do the work. In ‘85 I was teaching at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. I was on the faculty with Robben Ford, Art Lande, and Paul McCandless. I had just received a grant to go to Tibet to circumambulate Mount Kailash, go to Lake Manasarovar. That trip fell through, but somebody at the Naropa Institute told me, “You know, the school is starting a study abroad program.” So I cashed in as many of the little good-will chips I’d built up from teaching that summer and signed on as sort of bogus faculty. I said, “I will be happy to work for the program for nothing, and then maybe you can hire me.” The woman in charge of it, Frances Harwood, was unsure how to pull this first program off. I helped her as much as I could in Kathmandu.

At the end of the program she said “You’re hired, you got it.” So on and off for the next 12 years, I worked on the ground in either Kathmandu or Ubud. Kathmandu was the autumn program, Ubud was the spring program. I set up visas, did the books, arranged ground transportation, made black market connections for changing money and even created what we called “go kits.” In early 1991 I was met by the US consular agent at the airport. Andy Toth. He said, “Just so you’re aware, the US started a war in Kuwait.” He suggested the directors and I put together a rough evacuation plan and assemble a crude go-kit. This wasn’t exactly in my job description, but that’s just what we had to do. 

My actual job, my business card said “Director of Health and Well-being.” Besides all the other stuff I had to do it meant I was the guide for whoever got amoebic dysentery, bacterial dysentery or giardia. So I did have some experience with health care, keeping people sane under stress, doing what I could, and then understanding what was beyond my capabilities.

Then, when my mother died in Madison, I found myself interested in all these people coming and going. My sister would say, “The CNA will leave in an hour, and then the LPN will be here, and then the RN will come. They’ll dispense medications and then the BSN will stop in to see how things are going.” What? Who are these people? What do these acronyms stand for? So I talked to them and it seemed like something I could do. I’d already done it, sort of, in Asia. A lot of musicians need to have a side gig. Same with writers. I thought, “Maybe this would work.”

Right.

I asked the CNA how he liked the job and he said, “It’s okay. The best thing about it is I can work whenever I want. I can quit anytime, and I can go back home to West Africa, to Ghana, to Accra, and see my family.” I thought, “This sounds right up my alley.” So I became a CNA, Certified Nursing Assistant, and when that course was ending one of the faculty pulled me aside and said, “Since you have a degree, a BFA, a year in school will you get an LPN license. Same deal, you’ll be able to work as much as you want, wherever you want but you’ll make twice as much. That sounded pretty good. These days I’m just working four to eight evening PM shifts a month.

What was your question? How has it influenced me? It has, in a practical sense. How to work. I’ve seen how hard my co-workers work. How they came from Mombassa, from Kenya, from Accra, from the Congo. They came over here, they learned a language. They went to school. They passed the courses, they got a diploma in being a nurse or assistant, and then they got a license. And now they’re dealing with people who are very sick. Think about that, think about somebody asking you to go to Kenya and learn Swahili and then work in a hospital. It’d be a pretty heavy lift. These people work full-time. They work so hard. After my first couple shifts at this long-term care facility I was on the couch for a day. It was taxing emotionally and physically. I’ve seen how these people work, and I suppose this is probably how most of humanity works their jobs.

I’m here at this studio. If I feel a little blurry, just slightly tired, wisps of fatigue drifting past, I can go to the corner and take a nap. I can’t do that at my nursing job. A shift is a shift, right? A shift is a shift. I thought, “If I could work as hard as they do on music, I’d get a lot more done.” It could be that the naps and the open space I make is necessary for the creative process, but I think I give into it a little too much. Maybe that happens to you as a writer. As in, “Today I don’t feel like writing. I’m going to go get a coffee or something. Take a nap.”

Ha! I wrote the book in seven months and I kind of couldn’t believe it because I distracted myself as much as humanly possible. Taking naps, all that kind of good stuff. I feel you’re in the zone now of…like a seven-year cycle with releasing records and I was trying to think if it’s more like a periodic cicada cycle or if it’s more like a you know like a comet cycle.

(Laughs) I think it’s just a cycle. I was putting out more in the 90s, going straight from Big Map Idea to The Fall of Us All, and then suddenly having the opportunity to work with Joe Boyd and Hannibal Records in making the record with Chöying Drolma.

For this one, yeah, the seven-year cycle seems to have wormed its way into the narrative. There are just not too many seven-year cycles left for me. But I do have a couple of things on the way, a live-concert and didn’t-fit-anywhere-else compilation that people my age often put out. They look back through their files and think “Well, either I relegate this to the dustbin of time or I try to wedge it together like fitting two jigsaw puzzles from different boxes together and see if someone will put it out.” It’s really a mess.

Do you do much live playing anymore? I don’t remember there ever being a live album.

If the gig is right, if there’s more than one gig and we can go out, we’ll do it. We got a call four years ago for a gig at a beautiful concert hall in Singapore called the Espalande. Look it up. We couldn’t say no. The Punkt Festival in southern Norway, Christianland got in touch. Erik Honoré and Jan Bang. They said, “We want to have you and Marc come over and play for about an hour, while we sample you. And then we’ll improvise with the samples to conclude the evening.” That sounded pretty good. Too good a gig to turn down. New York is a hard gig to turn down. We just need a couple of warm-ups on the way there. If Joe’s Pub calls, well, what a great room.

You always strike me as a world traveler. Would that be true? Even as a musician, it seems like from your ECM album covers and the like that you want to go and check out these places.

I haven’t been to Africa. I haven’t been to Australia. I haven’t been to South America. That’s a lot of landmass I haven’t seen. That’s a lot of places I haven’t been to. When I was working for the study-abroad program I could get myself to South Asia, to Indonesia early, travel from Bangkok south along the Malay Peninsula across Java, and then finally arrive in Denpasar. I’d head upcountry to Ubud, and do my job setting up the program. Then, if I could, I’d stay after the end of the program and do something like travel along the chain of islands to the east, Nusa Tenggara. It’s incredible. Volcanoes. The same thing with Kathmandu. If you’re there long enough and you get to know people, they trust you. If you mention that you’re interested in visiting a closed area of Tibet that the Chinese Communist Party do not want Westerners in, you might find a way there. It’s happened.

What was the first place that you went to and really got in deep?

Norway. I’d never been out of the country until I was 27.

So what year would that have been?

1981.

So for your first ECM recording, Northern Song.

Yes, flying to Norway from Minnesota was like traveling for nine hours and arriving nowhere, arriving back where you started. Minnesota is Norway. But everything had changed just a little bit stepping through the black mirror. We felt right at home. The sonic lilt in the language is pretty much the same there. With Marc being Danish, we settled in quite well.

Did you get to see the Northern Lights that far north?

No, but we saw them two weeks ago here in St. Paul. I bet you had them in New York, too. There was a huge solar prominence. My son studies heliophysics, or whatever you call it. Solar activity. He told us there was a big one coming. But this was in the papers, too. We didn’t see the Northern Lights in 1981, recording Northern Song. We were mostly keeping our eyes to the ground and trying to do a good job with this record company, this producer, and this engineer. We were scared. I guess it kind of set the table for everything else. Much to my surprise.

So kind of walk me through what’s the gestation period for Close. I mean, I find it’s almost a continuum of the last couple records. But I keep thinking of river rocks, of how time tends to keep smoothing down the edges, making it more slippery.

Art is weird and life is long, something like that. (long pause) My daily life as a musician is really terrifyingly mundane and boring. I get here to this studio at 1pm, work til 7 or 8, go to the Y, go home, drink a beer, talk to my wife, go to bed. Some days are utter nonsense. Nothing happens: naps, playing guitar, soldering cables. A lost day. Nothing. 

But then I get in the car, take a left out of the driveway, and suddenly think “I know what I’m going to do tomorrow.” This is common among people who live alone in their so-called artistic minds. You still have to go to the place where you make your art. You have to show up and hope for the best. If you want to get hit by the train, you gotta play on the tracks. So that’s what I do.

It also helps to get out of Dodge. Get out of town. I hope to go to Southeast Asia soon. I’d like to see what Cambodia is like. It’s good to leave. It’s good to go somewhere weird, strange, somewhere that turns your head upside down, turns your mind inside out. The work here is mundane, tedious. I’ve seen this again and again: suddenly it starts to come together, and it’s quite exciting when it does. When themes start to emerge and cohere and it seems like there’s a way forward. But sometimes the way to make it all come together is to leave it all behind.

I also have to rely on Marc, too. You might be lacking clarity in how your musical DNA is interacting with itself. Marc knows my mind, my foibles, my strengths and weaknesses. In the case of this last album he was very good at saying, “This is worth pursuing. You’re doing the right thing. You’re on the right track.” Then he’s out the door and gone for two months until I’m ready for him to come back and play.

And you and Marc go back to college days?

No, we met in 1979. I graduated from Macalester in ‘76. A friend of mine said, “You have to come see this conga player play.” We went to see his band, and it was incredible. It’s not just his playing. You have to know you are able to get along with people. Do I really want to get in a van with this guy? It was Marc’s 70th birthday two days ago. I visited him at his new warehouse space. He is a certified Soto Zen priest with actual papers. Certified in the Soto archives in Kyoto. He’s trying to work with people in a way that he can do some good. I’m not exactly sure what his program is, but he and his wife are proceeding with some sort of offering to bring a cohort of practitioners or students into play. You’d have to look him up, urbanmonk.com, and see what he’s doing. He’s in St. Paul, still playing. He’s the first call in St. Paul for percussion. He has his pick of gigs.

Is your interest in Tibetan Buddhism and his in Zen on parallel tracks? Like, did you guys get into this at the same time?

No, I started becoming interested in it by reading Alexandra David-Neel in high school. There weren’t too many books out then that we could look to. William James was one. I was focused on psychedelics, LSD, mescaline, whatever that would come around Madison in those days. Reading about something that seemed similar but involved meditation was intriguing. Alexandra David-Neel writes about monks flying. “Well, sign me up!”

I just came across this interesting storyabout this mushroom in China. It doesn’t have psilocybin but there’s something in it and basically like when you eat it and you cook it or whatever and I think they call it a Lilliputian mushroom because you see little people everywhere.

I was in Mexico a couple of years at a program with Dzongszar Khyentse Rinpoche traveling with an old friend of mine, Ginger. On the taxi ride back to the hotel I mentioned Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind to Ginger and his last chapter about smoking the toad, the secretions from a certain toad from the Sonoran desert. This kid in the front seat says, “You want to do that? You can do it right now. We have a 30 minute ride and you’ll be down by the time you get back to the hotel.” He had a little vape pen with ‘essence of toad’ in it. As I understand it, this particular trip is a complete deconstruction of reality. It isn’t even M.C. Escher’s world. It’s more like falling into a Jackson Pollock painting or something. Falling into a Rothko.

So did you smoke the toad then?

No. No way. I declined. Not in Mexico, man.

As far as Marc’s way forward I believe he met Katagiri Roshi in Minneapolis and thought, “this looks like a pretty clean lineage,” and went from there. But he was reluctant. I’m speaking out of turn here. I believe he was put off, as many of us are, by the institutional fabric that always arises around any religion or so-called spirituality. The organization around spiritual groups can be off-putting, to say the least.

A few years ago, I was in India and realized “oh Amma’s compound is nearby, I’m gonna go check it out.” She seemed okay. But, like, just kind of everything and everyone around her was…

Well, I have to hand it to people, teachers like Mingyur Rinpoche, who is not…he’s an acquaintance of mine, I’ve studied with him, and he is able to sit with the institutional structure and work skillfully with it. Other young, incarnate lamas I’ve known in Asia have said, “Forget it, I’m out of here.” They would leave Sikkim, leave Rumtek Monastery where they were being trained. 

A friend of mine hitchhiked from Gangtok to Hetadu in Nepal and then up to Kathmandu to get out of the box he was going to be assigned to. “I am not going to live my life as a reincarnated Tulku, because I know where they will put me. They’ll stick me in far western Nepal, in a little town called Marpha where my predecessor died. They want me there to do ceremonies for birth, death, marriage, blessings for businesses, forget it.”

As some eagle-eyed readers may have noted, the conversation took place last December. Come January, things got rather warzone-esque in Tibbetts’ hometown of Minneapolis. My intention to ask follow-ups took a backseat to the chaos unfurling on the ground as an occupying force attempted to take over the city. I wanted to ask him more about what it was like during those fraught months, but held off. Since Tibbetts works as an LPN, the execution of another nurse in the community was intense, to say the least.

So you’re kind of studying this thing. And then, did your practice sort of deepened as you were traveling through like, you know, Southeast Asia?

No, no, my practice, I wish I could say it deepened at all. You know, I have no problem with music, I have a lot of confidence in the music I do. I seem to have been born with some sort of natural talent. It’s always been there. Meditation, I’m not that good at. Nonetheless, the best place for really taking a crack at meditation is in solitary retreat. For that, it deepens, after a fashion, in southern Colorado at a retreat facility called Dorje Khyung Dzong. Some of the practices I’ve taken on require solitary retreat, practices where you don’t see anybody for weeks at a time. Do I like it? I’m not crazy about it. But the alternative is worse.

What would you say is your morning meditation? How long are you sitting for?

An hour and a half. It’s still mostly distraction, as I’m sure you know.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a nine-year-old. So it’s like, I’m lucky if I get 20 minutes…

Hey, man, that is your meditation. You know? That comes first. I had triplets. I didn’t even want kids, but somebody said, “You don’t want kids? I think it’s the secret to life.” And it was! It was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I want to understand my role in whatever the branch of this tree is or whatever…You should have more.

Was the Chöying Drolma record a commercial success?

It was like catching lightning in a bottle, yeah. So naturally we tried to do it again, always a mistake. We were very lucky the first time.

How did you come to collaborate with Chöying?

I was working in Kathmandu in the south part of the valley in a village called Pharping, a very special spot. I would spend the early part of the evening on the roof of the monastery in Parpang with two translators, Andreas Kretschmar and Eric Schmidt. We’d drink a beer, a big one, a Bintang. One night Andreas said: “Are you ready for a little concert? Let’s go record this nun. Let’s go listen to her sing.” We walked down and there was Chöying Drolma in a shrine room singing. I brought the recording back to Minnesota and added some instruments, just for fun. I was mostly trying to get a software program going, Mark of the Unicorn’s Digital Performer, to see if I could sync up tape and samples. I sent the finished tape to John Diliberto, a writer somewhere in Philadelphia, and Rob Simonds at Rykodisc. Rob called back.

Rykodisc was doing very well then. They had just won a Grammy with David Bowie’s Sound and Vision. Rykodisc was the first company to start bringing out compact discs in the U.S. Other record companies thought, “What is this CD thing? This is a fad.” But then, like ECM, companies realized they’d be able to sell their entire catalog a second time. Rykodisc wanted to do the project with Choying. I called up ECM. I sent it to them and said, “Do you want to do this?” They said, “We’ll get back to you.” A few calls like that. What we call “the long no.” 

As a musician you have to deal skillfully with subtle forms of humiliation. It’s just the pavement we’re walking on, right? Then, Rykodisc’s Joe Boyd got in touch and said, “We’ll offer whatever you want for this record within reason: control over the cover, marketing input, a reasonable advance, and we’ll get you out on the road. We’re prepared to offer you the highest possible royalty we can.”

I was always struck by the presentation of Chö. It’s not really like a Nonesuch Explorer record that tells you everything. There’s no presentation, not like translations of what she’s singing, or how the collaboration came together.

I love the Nonesuch Explorer series. I listened to every single release. Made tapes, mixtapes of the releases. I didn’t want to do that sort of presentation with Chö. It’s been done. I guess it keeps it from being this documentarian sort of field recording. But I had to proceed with caution. I went to the abbot of the monastery, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, who I’ve known since 1985, and I said, “Is this okay? Do you know what we’re doing? We’re going to make a record. We’re going to put this out in the market. Is that okay?”

He was totally on board. The blowback came from Western acolytes: “How dare you?” That sort of thing. Not surprising. People who have converted to a religion or political party tend to be a little more strident in their approval or disapproval. Nonetheless, we made our own converts on the road. The concerts were very good, good enough so that sometimes I’d have to turn away onstage when I felt like I might cry. I thought that if people saw a tear coming down my cheek, they’d think I manufactured it.

So you feel the second record doesn’t quite capture what you captured the first one?

No. You get lightning in a bottle, you get lucky. You think, “Let’s do it again.”

But you guys were kind of together in the same place making it?

For Selwa, Chöying was onboard a little bit more, talking about what she’d like to hear under her singing. She understood the process more, not surprising since she is about the smartest person I’ve ever met. We would talk about the Tibetan, and how to translate it. We would talk about the order that compositions should appear in. You don’t put a Mahakala liturgy, a protector deity, at the front of the album. That would be like eating your dessert first at a Michelin star restaurant. It would be untoward.

So we began to sequence the music in a way that made more sense. Don’t put the Book of Revelations right after Genesis. It’s not so much that Selwa didn’t work, it’s just that the first one was truly magical. For all of us. Lightning in a bottle. For Marc, Chöying, and me, it was a once in a lifetime thing. Musicians come together as they always do and suddenly realize they’re in the midst of something quite special and greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a cliché, but it does happen. When it does, you have to stand back and respect it. 

But trying to make it happen, you know, good luck with that. Or like The Köln Concert, which ECM is flogging right now in its 50th year. You know the story behind that. Look this up on the BBC. It’s called For One Night Only. It’s a great rundown of how it all went down with the promoter, Freda, who booked the concert, and others who were involved. How Jarrett rejected the piano and stalked off the stage. They found another one, they tuned it as best they could. He sits down, starts playing and as she said, “We knew right then that this was something very special.”