The Durham-based percussionist, composer, and improviser Joe Westerlund is a sonic explorer. On each of his solo outings he uses drums and other percussive instruments to create textures that descriptively range from meditative to cinematic, and on his latest outing "Curiosities From The Shift," he's tapping into dance music in a way that he hasn't before.
The record started taking shape during the COVID lockdown, and came together after Westerlund spent years studying the clave, the rhythmic pattern often associated with Brazilian and Cuban music.
"I was writing a lot of this music while I started this process of peeling back layers of the types of rhythms and percussion I was interested in," Westerlund said. "Clave was always something that came up when I was getting my education in jazz."
In the early 2000's Westerlund studied with the iconic percussionist Milford Graves at Bennington College in Vermont. Graves grew up in Cuban neighborhoods so the clave was always central to what he taught his students. More recently, Westerlund has studied with Brevan Hampden, the Artist in Residence and Jazz Combo Clinician at the University of North Carolina's Jazz Studies program.
"He's very well versed in Salsa and Latin jazz, so he taught me more about the origins and history of clave," Westerlund said. "It's something that has been in the African diaspora for centuries. It showed up a lot during the Rhumba boom in the 1930s and 1940s, and in a lot of New Orleans music, and music from the Caribbean neighborhoods in New York. Artists like Eddie Palmieri and Mongo Santamaria."
On "Curiosities" Westerlund has taken what he learned and made something uniquely his own. It's something with a bit more of a groove than his previous solo outings. He laughs when he describes the record as "dance music," but the rhythms on the record are what tie it all together.
"I had this hard drive full of stuff, and I thought I'd start pulling out the more "danceable" music from that. I started off with just beats and thought I'd make a beat tape or collage, but I kept finding melodies and structures for a lot of these pieces," he said. "Early on it felt like I just had all this junk lying around, but then eventually it turned into something very concise and complete."
Some of the rhythms that Westerlund refers to were originally sent to Tim Rutili of the experimental rock band Califone. Rutili and Westerlund have worked together in the past, and during lockdown Rutili asked Westerlund to send him some beats as inspiration.
While Rutili didn't end up using any of them, they ended up forming the foundation for "Curiosities From The Shift." Westerlund refers to the trio of songs "Tem," "Fone," and "Can Tangle" as "the Califone tries."
"Curiosities" was recorded at Betty's, the Chapel Hill studio owned by Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, over a 10-day stretch. It's a place where Westerlund has spent a lot of time creatively, collaborating with friends and working on his own music in the past.
"They have a lot of natural light from big windows, and it's all one room. The control room is not separate from the live room. So it creates this really nice feedback loop between everybody," he said. "I really love that they intentionally set it up that way. It's a clubhouse."
Though Westerlund has spent his fair share of time at Betty's, this was the first time he was there working alone, an experience he says was a little spooky. "It's out in the woods, and I hadn't been that alone in a while," he said. "So I was like, Okay, this feels like the beginning of 'The Shining,' when he's still having fun.”
"Curiosities From The Shift" is out now on Psychic Hotline.
