Riley Mulherkar: The Value of Slow Work

News, From the Magazine, Riley Mulherkar

By Alexa Peters I May. 29, 2024

“If I just sit down and try to play a song all by myself, just tapping my foot, that’s going to be the best thing, because that’s the most honest and most true thing,” says Mulherkar in discussing his debut solo album.
(Photo: Zenith Richards)

The first time trumpeter/composer Riley Mulherkar met his longtime mentor Wynton Marsalis, he was in the third grade. It was after a Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra show in Seattle, Mulherkar’s hometown. Mulherkar still remembers what Marsalis told him backstage when he mentioned he was learning trumpet.

“He told me to practice slow. And he repeated that about five times,” said Mulherkar.

Ironically, and due in part to following such advice, Mulherkar’s jazz career started young and moved fast. After attending and playing in the jazz band at Seattle’s Garfield High School, the alma mater of Quincy Jones and home to a renowned high school jazz program, Mulherkar’s playing caught national attention, and he moved to New York to attend Juilliard. Upon graduation, he’d already co-founded the innovative brass quartet The Westerlies, which has gone on to record nine studio albums.

But, with Riley, his debut solo record, Mulherkar submerged himself in the wisdom of working slowly. Mulherkar spent five patient years making the debut with his producers, Son Lux’s Rafiq Bhatia and jazz pianist and composer Chris Pattishall. The result is a thrilling self-portrait, featuring originals and re-envisioned classics that map to friends, heroes and mentors, like Marsalis, that have shaped Mulherkar’s career.

Riley features jazzier originals like “Hopscotch,” which Mulherkar wrote while at Juilliard but hadn’t found a home for until now, and ambient interludes, like the pensive “Looking Out,” that help the record breathe. But it also features transformed versions of jazz classics, including a haunting treatment of Jelly Roll Morton’s 1906 tune “King Porter Stomp,” famously performed by Mulherkar’s hero Joe “King” Oliver, and an airy rendition of “Here Comes De Honey Man,” from Miles Davis’ Porgy And Bess, Mulherkar’s all-time favorite record. And, with the help of long-time friends and producers Pattishall and Bhatia, every track is a window into Mulherkar’s emotional connection to the art form.

“One of the mantras that we had from the beginning was to create a record that sounded the way that jazz makes me feel,” said Mulherkar. “So, we wanted to try to incorporate whatever techniques we could ... so that we could give the listener the feeling that I get when I listen to this music that I love so much, and how it hits me. That brought us into this whole space of exploring all the sonic possibilities in the studio, and creating arrangements that were based on studio techniques just as much as they were based on performance techniques.”

After years of contemplating this first statement, Mulherkar began to sketch Riley in 2018, while participating in the weeklong SPACE on Ryder Farm residency. Immersed in the rural quiet, Mulherkar wrote the record’s first track, “Chicken Coop Blues,” in an actual chicken coop. While there, he also wrote “Ride Or Die,” a groovy tune with a cascading melody and striking climax, originally named “Ryder Farm.” By spring 2019, he’d looped in Pattishall and Bhatia, and all three began to conceptualize the album.

When the pandemic hit, Mulherkar continued to chip away at the project, communicating drum samples and sounds he liked to Bhatia and Pattishall over voice texts and Zoom. In 2021, Mulherkar was awarded the Bryan Gallace Fellowship, another initiative from Ryder Farm designed to support musicians across genres, which he put toward his budget for Riley. That same year, he brought in bassist Russell Hall and drummer Kyle Poole to join Pattishall on piano and fill out the band.

The bulk of Riley was recorded in 2022, with Bhatia and Pattishall using software and hardware synths, samplers, drum machines and the band’s live performances in the studio to sculpt the sonic layers they ultimately interworked through multitracking and overdubbing.

“I would play something, and then Chris and Rafiq would send it back to me in my headphones, and I could try to play along to what I just played, and see what variation there is, and see how those things relate to each other, and see how they feel layered on each other,” said Mulherkar. “It was about them pushing me to try things in my performance, because they had ideas about how they could manipulate or how they could weave things together.”

Likewise, Pattishall, who was in Abu Dhabi performing, told DownBeat in an email that EQ and compression were used on Riley, but not to target the “natural” sound most jazz records aim to get. Instead, they used those effects to boost high frequencies or emphasize Riley’s breath, aiming to “hyper-realize” the performances and intimacy, and sprinkle in some “ASMR-inspired ear candy.”

The result strikes an elusive balance between honest and larger-than-life, traditional and contemporary. Riley clearly lives within the jazz aesthetic, but there’s a fierce originality stemming from the use of production and performance techniques that are somewhat unorthodox to jazz.

“One guiding light for us was Sam Amidon and his music,” said Mulherkar. “He’s got a way of taking an old folk song and creating arrangements and breeding recordings that may not be acoustic at all … but the ultimate effect is one that feels maybe even more acoustic or real or in the soil of the ground than if he were to play and sing into a mic.”

This collaborative process proved fruitful, but long. Still, the pace imbued Riley with patience, vulnerability and honesty. It also affirmed for Mulherkar the value of “slow work.”

“When you’re learning the music, you have questions of identity and tradition and influence, and they’re all going on hyper-speed all the time,” said Mulherkar. “And this record, I think slowed me down and forced me to trust that, whether it’s ‘King’ Oliver, whether it’s Ron Miles, whether it’s Wynton, that stuff is in me. That’s my lineage, and so if I just sit down and try to play a song all by myself, just tapping my foot, that’s going to be the best thing, because that’s the most honest and most true thing.” DB