The small, quietly unassuming town of Monheim lies in a bend in the Rhein river. Set back about fifty metres from the river’s edge sits a similarly unassuming church, the town’s Marienkapelle, which has been quietly offering the local population a place to make a reckoning with more eternal possibilities since the 12th century. Today, the chapel is as busy as it gets, and I find a seat with my fellow congregants just as today’s ‘address’ is about to commence.

The hundred or so of us, patiently seated, face towards the altar, and the centre of the town beyond. Our focus however is Darius Jones, seated, cradling his saxophone, his message no doubt gathering or percolating. Unlike most who address from the front of a church, Jones will take us to a reckoning with the unfamiliar, and unlike us he is facing ultimately up and down river at once. As his performance unfolds and fills the air above and around us, it’s clear he sees a larger landscape.

One of the core participants at Monheim Triennale’s 2024 The Prequel, musician, composer and teacher Darius Jones returns to the 2025 festival, building on the musical explorations and collaborations that wowed audiences at that first appearance.

We catch up later in August and ever the improviser, Jones is mid-house move, about to take up a new assistant professorship at Wesleyan University in Connecticut USA, and answering questions from the sparse living room of a for now unfamiliar home.

Origin stories

Musical origin stories are often full of revealing details, sometimes zigzagging journeys towards goals often unclear to the artist themselves, until the path is revealed. Jones’ memories on this however, are vivid and clear.

Darius Jones: “My, actually my first instrument was the voice. Me and my sister, we sung a ton in church and, you know, so singing was the first thing that I really gravitated to. I sung and I played the saxophone. And, this is gonna sound so weird, but there was a point in school where I had to choose one. And I thought, (and this says so much about my childhood, actually) that if I chose the voice, it would get me in trouble. I don’t know why I thought this, but I did. I remember it vividly. Like, I just like, ‘God, if I sing I’m just going to like try to get girls and all kinds of shit and get in trouble.’ So I thought that playing the saxophone was more noble.

Jones’ uncle played the alto saxophone and as a young man visiting his grandparent’s house, was impressed by how long and often he would practice the instrument. Fascinating sounds would emanate from his room. With his interest clearly piqued, the uncle and grandfather clubbed together to buy the young Darius a saxophone.

Darius Jones: “My uncle played at church, but the music he was really attracted to, which was very popular in the area that I grew up was more like pop or R&B type of saxophone playing. It wasn’t necessarily jazz or avant-garde or any of those things. And there’s that song, ‘Careless Whisper’ by George Michael, and he would play that all the time. I don’t know if it was super popular at the time or what, but he played that song so intensely and that solo specifically – I remember that refrain so well. I also remember hearing a lot of Parliament, Funkadelic, George Clinton, gospel music, some Brecker Brothers, Spiro Gyra, Grover Washington Jr. and David Sanborn. With those I was like ‘wow!’

Did your family support your musical interests?

Darius Jones: “My mom actually was the first person to give me what I would consider a true jazz recording, which was of the Count Basie Orchestra. And she went into this ‘noble’ thing, that she’d bought it because the person on the cover looked like a good person. She didn’t know anything about jazz. And it was just this nice looking black man on the cover and she was like, you know, moustache, nicely trimmed. And I think she thought Count Basie was kind of cute.

And I remember listening to that and loving it, then hearing people like Lester Young and from there I started buying other cassettes and going to the library. And so that was kind of my first forays into jazz as a young person. Now, no one was guiding us, it was more a self discovery type thing.”

One day in junior high school, Jones was coming home from the library with a record by a certain John Coltrane. This LP was to crystallise some emerging issues about the meaning and power of music, its ability to be both sacred or profane, depending on the context and of course, the listener.

Darius Jones: “I put that record on and my sister was like ‘Oh my God, what is this? This is devil music!’ And I was like… I just felt so ashamed. It was funny. So John Coltrane, back then I didn’t listen to him. I gravitated towards more traditional music at that time when I was young, like Branford Marsalis.”

Of course, musical awareness and understanding, that deep listening skill, takes time. And we all know that you have to be ready, primed in a way, before embracing some types of art, some forms of music.

Darius Jones: “There was this one guy, Jimmy, that did kind of sabotage the whole thing because he was a great guitar player, he played a lot of blues. He was a great dude and he would make me cassettes, he’d be like, ‘oh, check this out!’ And those cassettes featured artists like Albert Ayler or Eric Dolphy just the most super ‘out there’ stuff, a lot of really edgy music. And honestly, back then I remember listening to that stuff and being like ‘huh?’ Like, as if I didn’t have an opinion about it. Was it good? I would put it on, I would let it play… but I wasn’t necessarily attracted to it.”

As an artist still in the embryonic phase of his career, he was still soaking up influences, good and bad, enduring and passing. But even back then, it was clear to him that the appetite to become a better player thrives on exposure to a range of inspirations.

Darius Jones: “Yes - I think that is kind of why I’m the way I am –because there was no one kind of guiding me. But then we musicians grow, and our tastes change as we experience life.”

The philosophical, spiritual mission

In the past, Jones has described music making and composition as a kind of spiritual and philosophical practice. Like many artists, he has wrestled with music and the creative process as a means of emergence and personal illumination. 

Darius Jones: “I think from the very jump, I thought that I was doing something that was more godly – that music wasn’t just purely entertainment and I think that mentality has kind of stayed with me. At times I became confused as I was developing a position where I couldn’t even grasp the idea of making instrumental music from an entertainment perspective. 

I would see local entertainers, and I didn’t really like it. I thought it was very corny even a little sad at times. I remember this one guy who was super popular, during my first or second semester at college. And everyone’s like, ‘this cat is the guy!’ And I remember listening to him and he was just like on performing on his knees and everything he was doing made me think, ‘Oh my God, like, no one is going to like me – if this is what people want, it’s not what I want to be able to give them.” 

For Jones the saxophone couldn’t have been more disconnected from the many hackneyed motifs and images the instrument has come to be associated with in twentieth century pop culture.  

Darius Jones: “I think for me, everything was about the spiritual, like trying to reach for God or another plane of existence. You know, for me, music was very much something that saved my life. It helped me in enormously hard times and a very, very, troubled childhood. So, I think I’ve held on to that mentality throughout my career.”

Collaboration and the Fluxus movement

Darius Jones has written about and clearly been deeply inspired by the Fluxus movement in his compositions and approach to music. I asked him if he’d found their emphasis on process and form helpful as a composer or creator. 

Darius Jones: “Yes, Fluxus is a great example of my non-entertainment thing. In some ways, it’s like they were making commentary about the system of art. Subverting the perception of these things. This idea about kind of coaching art making from a lived perspective. So for me, where I create my art, I live. Where I present my art, I live, you know. And I find that fascinating. I find it beautiful. So yes there are the capitalistic schemes that we all kind of fall into, which are unfortunately necessary for the majority of us to survive. But as an art movement Fluxus was just a ragtag bunch of people. If you look at the first performances that took place in Germany, there was an Asian dude, there was a Black guy, there was a woman, there was a white guy, Europeans and Americans, just like this cabal of people and the only agenda was mayhem. Or the idea of process, like ‘what are we gonna do?’ And then the outcome is part of the experience, part of the surprise or the more improvisational components of it.” 

As Jones read and researched more deeply into the history and practice of the Fluxus movement, he identified something quite profound in its ethos and the way that art movement has affected the world. He also sees analogies to the impact of the co-operative movement and its self-organising alternative to faceless capitalism. 

Darius Jones: “I look at that idea that a group of people could just go and buy a building and they, mostly artists, could pool their funds and they work on this building and they make it into their own in the place where they create art and do all these things. And it’s fascinating, because the more you look, there are so many examples of that everywhere. It’s kind of crazy, it’s like like they just figured it out. And I love that about it.” 

At The Prequel in 2024 Jones also got to interact and perform with local students and a choir from around Monheim.  

Darius Jones: “I was fascinated by being in an environment that is unfamiliar. So seeing, you know, little German children kind of getting up for a performance, that’s not something that I see every day, and getting to experience their different characteristics and temperament. The interaction with people was interesting, but ultimately I’m just a musician,  just a horn player in that situation. So it’s just like, I’m just kind of like making sure that I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, to the best of my ability with what is being presented to me. I’m also kind of being of service to the situation.” 

Jones is currently teaching in the USA at Wesleyan University. Universities of course have become quite a volatile place, a locus of cultural conflict sometimes, where expectations, values and aspirations all come into play. I wondered how his students’ responses to his teaching has shaped his own thinking and practice.  

Darius Jones: “I love my students – they make me think a whole myriad of things. One I kind of think about a lot, is the act of being in love with a thing that you’ve not quite mastered yet. There’s something so beautiful about the struggle. Sometimes they’re just devastated that they didn’t play as well or something and they’re questioning everything. I love when they practice hard and realise like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so physical. I’m in pain!’ That’s important because all of this is a part of the thing that you’re trying to pursue! And beyond, there’s the ultimate devastation of the thought, ‘will anyone like this?’ No. There’s a chance that even if you work really hard, you may not become famous. I tell them, being a musician is not being an artist. These are two very different things. If you want to be a musician, I always tell them, go to Lincoln Center, maybe go see a ballet, look down and instead of looking at the dancers, look down at the orchestra pit at the musicians, you’ll see them pulling out a book and reading it while they’re resting, or eating a sandwich as they walk away. So often I say ‘you want to be a musician, but the reality is you’re actually trying to be an artist.’ And that’s a very different and a much harder thing to be.”

An afternoon by the river

Let us return to that chapel for a moment. It’s July 4th 2024. Breaking the rapt silence, Jones commences, unfurling a plaintive melody, drawing on the sax’s celebrated ability to channel human trains of thought, sometimes soaring, sometimes questioning, always flowing. As he plays a conversation between two musical figures emerges, low and brooding, then shrill and responsive, two characters who have begun circling each other in the centre of the chapel. Meditative and soaring by turns, but then aren’t chapels a place for sins and their repentance? 

Finally, the notes soften until it’s only the rhythm of the player’s breath that’s discernible. The two characters, continuing their exchange, have perhaps disappeared up (or down) river… It’s a quintessential Monheim moment and a painterly touch by Jones, effortlessly focusing our attention on the connection between the ephemeral, the eternal and the powerfully expressive. The memory of this wonderful performance  leads to me to wonder how he plans to follow that prequel.

Meditations from and for a better world

I catch up with Darius again in the grey gloom of January 2025, our conversation initially tempered by the reappearance of the orange fascist wannabe. We briefly entertain the progressive possibilities if Canada were to reverse annex the USA before returning to the more elevated promise of Jones’ planned shows at the Triennale’s 2025 edition. The mood lifts, as a result. 

Darius Jones: “I’ll be presenting a composed work, called ‘Samesoul Maker’ – a piece for four voices, bells and prepared vibraphone. It’s been performed twice before in New York, but this is the first time I’ve performed a composition of mine in Europe, which is something I’m really excited about. It’s a long form piece and one that utilises my own invented language system for the vocalised text. I have an obsession with ritual, base things and what they mean to a society. The whole point of the piece is that it’s a ritual, essentially a meditation that should take place every day.” 

The piece is a companion to Jones’ 2023 work ‘The Oversoul Manual’ and set in the same ‘Mannish Boy universe’ – a kind of alien spiritual realm, with its own community practices and language. If ‘Oversoul Manual’ characterised the creation of new life, produced when voices and spirits harmonise, ‘Samesoul Maker’ is a meditation for those left behind, waiting to see who is born and what their nature might be, good or bad. 

Darius Jones: I don’t want to give away too much at this point,” laughs Jones. “but as a composer I try to think about the different ways of meditating, what it is as a process, how ideas move and get channeled. The music has a primal quality as a result, but I’m masking the way things transition in the writing. I will say that everything in this piece is written – no improvisation, it’s all scored.” 

„Samesoul Maker“ will be performed twice at Monheim Triennale – as Jones puts it, the plurality providing an opportunity for the performers and audiences alike to find new things in the act of creating and appreciating it. And as all attendees of the Triennale understand, when offered the chance to meditate in a different and better musical universe, you should always take it.