When it comes to exploring an instrument’s full potential, few have more credentials to their name than Peter Evans. Imagine grappling with a 2000+ year old instrument and approaching it with so much curiosity and humility, that it sends you on a never-ending quest to refine and reevaluate its possibilities. In the process, Evans has crossed boundaries and built new bridges between genres, musical eras, the avant-garde and the worldwide underground.

At the time of this conversation, Evans had just returned from playing a gig in Brussels with a quartet plus a full orchestra. Given his special place in between the worlds of jazz, classical and various subcultural strains, Evans bounces around Europe regularly. Cologne, one of the two major cities right next to Monheim, has a special place in his heart. He’s been visiting the city frequently, giving master classes at the Hochschule für Musik. Back in 2001, when WDR Symphony were looking for someone to perform a virtually unplayable trumpet concerto by composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, they knew who to call. Which is all you need to know about Evans’ technical prowess and reputation.

Prompted by a comparison of Brussels and Cologne, where old-timey houses, bare concrete and post-WWII buildings make for a bizarrely jumbled puzzle, Evans grants a glimpse into his aesthetic headspace: “In Cologne, you have stuff from the ancient Romans lying around. Big rocks in the middle of the road of this brutalist Post-World-War-Two architecture, which I love. I’ll stand there and look at a parking lot for half an hour. I just get a kick out of it.”

It’s this sense of genuine wonder that Evans’s performances with bands like Being & Becoming, his quartets, quintets and trios, his sideman gigs and solo sets instil in the audience. Every note is piercing with technical accuracy, but essentially, Evans offers a guided meditation on the power of sound itself, laying bare the core of what constitutes music, as Albert Ayler put it, as the “healing force of the universe.”

Peter, I saw you perform in Monheim at The Prequel last year. Maybe you can help me recall the things you did there?

I played on the ship, the main venue, with Heiner Goebbels. And I played solo in the church. I knew Heiner a little bit from before. He wouldn’t have remembered me, but I met him at a big opera production that I was a part of in New York about 10 years ago, for a Louis Andriessen piece called “De Materie”. Heiner was the stage director.

He has a reputation for being meticulous.

But he’s always been pretty out there, too. In college I found this ECM record called “Der Mann im Fahrstuhl.”George Lewis is on it, and some other cool improvisers. Heiner Goebbels is constantly moving between different areas. I was really happy when I saw that he was on the list of people for the Monheim Prequel.

For your solo gig at Monheim, the church was packed. I remember wondering how long it would take me mentally to zoom in. Then the switch flicked immediately. The whole audience was so attentive. How long does it take yourself to get into that state? Is there any latency between saying hello and really getting into the zone?

Ideally no. Having done this for a long time now, I figured out that it is more important than anything to commit to what you’re doing. To earn the trust of the audience that it’s worth listening to. If you can see that the performer is focused and what’s coming out of them has intentionality and energy, then hopefully that would be enough.

Where did that process start for you?

I started playing solo when I was in the Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio. I was checking out the New Music side of things. And then I found out about the history of the AACM and the European improvisers, all those people who had been playing solo. People like Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, John Butcher. Back then these people were just names to me, disembodied sounds on CDs. By the time I moved to New York, I was 21 and I didn’t know anybody, but I did have that ball rolling already. If I met somebody doing a weird gig somewhere, I always had something to say.

Being part of a niche practice is a great way to see weird parts of the city.

Yeah, you’re not going to do those gigs in a jazz club. Especially if nobody knows you. So I was playing what we call DIY gigs. One of them was at a juice bar in SOHO. We’d have shows there after it closed. Ladies walking around in high heels in front of the glass windows, looking through like in a zoo… Then we played at places like Death By Audio, which was a great DIY space that closed. Or the Zebulon, which was a bit jazzier and bigger. There was a space called the Cake Shop, too, which is more of a rock and roll place in the basement.

Those places are where you learn how to wrangle a crowd. People are drinking and there’s talking and other bands that are loud. Gigs like that give you a thicker skin, and an ability to reach out to the audience in different ways. I think comedians talk about this too. We’re all playing by the rules of whatever this weird game is.

The fact that most of these places where Evans has earned his chops are now defunct shows how much of “this weird game” is about creating chances for yourself. Those stand-up comedians Evans mentions can for sure attest to this special kind of grind, and the near unlearnable sensibility to feel out each audience. Evans speaks of “a sixth sense for tuning into the frequency of the room. A non-verbal way of communicating, some pheromonal shit.” He cites the late comedy great Patrice O’Neal as a master of this aspect of the trade. More than anything, solo instrumentalists and stand-up comics need a huge amount of courage as both art forms can only reliably be practiced and developed in front of a live audience. But whereas comedians have the physical payoff of laughter, the cues for a successful musical performance can be dead silent. “If you’re scanning for auditory signals, it’s hard because if they’re super silent, that could also mean they’re just tuned out. On the other hand, I did a solo gig in China for 500, 600 people that were all 20-years-olds and younger. The crazier and weirder the music was, the more they loved it,” Evans says.

Gravitating towards the “crazier and weirder” side of music – which in Evans’ case covers every end of the spectrum, from the ethereal to the overpowering – seems something that he can appreciate, too. One might assume that his birthplace of Chicago might have something to do with it. After all, it’s the cradle of Creative Jazz and the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), where visionaries like the Art Ensemble of Chicago have turned improvised music upside down and inside out for decades. “We left Chicago when I was three. But my parents were jazz fans. That’s kind of what got my beak wet,” he explains. “In the 70s and 80s, my parents saw Dexter Gordon and Earl Hines. Wynton Marsalis was a big deal. Miles was coming out of his retirement, so they saw him a couple times. My dad got a CD player pretty early on in the 80s. I loved it.”

How long did it take until you landed on your main instruments? Besides the trumpet you also play piano a bit, right?

I play a little piano, I used to be better. But I liked playing trumpet right away. I started playing when I was seven. At eight or nine, I was having a frustrating time with it, like: “I quit. I don’t want to do this anymore.” My mom just started laughing. “You’re not gonna quit. Stop it.” I wasn’t a prodigy, but I definitely had a knack for it.

As an educator, how do you go about working with these types of raw talent?

The last teaching thing I did at Oberlin, I noticed that the kids were really fixated on this idea of forging your own identity, constructing your voice. I wish I had told them to focus on being just good musicians and not good jazz musicians. I’m not just talking about the craft of it, the technical part, but also just awareness. Learning about different kinds of music. Being a professional dilettante. That would be a great use of the time in music school.

No matter where I go, everything’s segmented into different departments: jazz, classical, electronic music, experimental improv… There’s no natural interaction. If you study jazz trumpet, you don’t interact with people that might be playing a Stravinsky octet. I was always naturally curious about different styles, and I was trying to meet those players. I never felt like I belonged in anything anyway.

Was this dabbling in so many different genres ever actively discouraged?

Yeah, certain people were discouraging about that. I was always around older musicians and teachers that insisted on a level of high standards. Especially in the classical scene, they don’t get it. I had teachers that told me I was wasting my time, and I was going to work at a gas station. That’s how people used to threaten you back then, “you’re gonna have a normal job.” {laughs}. When I got that reaction from teachers, I was like: “I’m trying to do impossible stuff on the instrument. Can you please just back off and let me do it?” As a career path, the classical route didn’t seem like a sure thing either. So it was impossible to go in that direction, when I’m already getting my mind blown by Milford Graves records …

It feels like you’ve created a situation for yourself, from which you can go into any kind of direction. There’s a group of people who will follow you on these different ventures, which I guess circles back to our initial discussion about establishing trust.

Thanks. It’s funny that you see it like that, because in the last year, I’ve hit a time where it was not easy to create. It was especially painful. And I had a breakthrough recently thinking about this. Sometimes, if you get into a rhythm, a consistency, you’re taking it for granted. Certain things start to seem like a well-oiled machine, right? “Why isn’t this working?” You get mad about it. But that is the whole point of it: accepting that things are not going smoothly, that you’re in a different stage of your development. The times where interesting shit happened were often not the easiest times.

Speaking of finding new methods: one distinctive thing you do, especially in your solo work, is using audible breathing and the sounds that are not necessarily just trumpet playing, as rhythmic or stylistic elements.

I’ve always enjoyed that. I go out of my way to find recordings of examples of this. There’s this guy, Paolo Pandolfo, who’s a [viola da] gamba player and early music specialist, and his recordings of solo gamba are extremely closely mic’d. You can hear all the fretwork and the strings and the creaking wood. It feels like you’re hearing the inside of a ship.

I love hearing the mechanism of the flute. I love hearing the actual keys and all that, in addition to the tones, almost as a counterpoint. I listen to tons of early music, vocal music and and it’s a really psychedelic feeling when you start to separate the consonants, the phonemes from the elongated vowels, when you start to hear “S”’s and “T”’s and “F”’s, coming out of this stereophonic space.

I just like sound. When I started to realise that I couldn’t hide these sounds coming out, I doubled down. I might put a mic right next to my head. Sometimes, I’ve even gone further with it and put it through the subwoofer. It just adds another layer.

What level of technique needs to be achieved before you can develop your own artistic expression in these creative ways?

So, there’s technique. That’s the ability to operate your instrument. But there’s also musicianship, which I would look at as a form of technique. Musicianship is having good ears, having a good sense of the music. Not just good intonation, but actually being able to hear fluctuations in intonation, having a good sense of rhythm. Very general things, of course.

Broadening my sense of musicianship, that’s the frontier. Right now, I’m practicing from this book from the 1500s. It’s an Italian book about ornamentation for recorder players. The author gives you every single way to go from a single note. It would be a whole step, or a third, or a fourth, and then a systematised way to fill it in with ornaments. Some of them are with sevens and fives and elevens. I didn’t know they were doing stuff like that back then in the 1500s!

I still practice and you’re never really done with that. But I’m not sitting around trying to develop more and more wildly virtuosic technique. Now that I have a pretty good command over the instrument, I’m trying to tighten it up in other ways.

A lot of people have attached spiritual and ritualistic traditions to your music. Are those influences you deliberately seek out?

Honestly, I always thought that there was an aspect of that to music per se. A friend of mine’s husband is an experimental nuclear physicist, and he was saying, “the thing about music is that it has a very low barrier of entry into a really deep thing.” Whereas with experimental physics, you can’t even talk about it unless you have a certain level of understanding.

Music is a friendly and low-barrier entry into a very vague religious type of space or spiritual practice. But I’ve never been religious, despite being raised Catholic. I felt like their music sucked and I just hated the whole thing. I never liked it. Although I thought it was kind of spooky, the incense and stuff. Cool acoustics in the church, too. But once I started to really understand what was going on, I wasn’t into it at all.

What is your relationship to the canon and the idea of canonisation? Yesterday I was listening to “Standards”. Is it still challenging for you to try to make something exciting out of music that is ingrained into everyone’s brain?

That record was one of those things that just came easy. We went to the studio during COVID. I just met Sam, this great piano player from the Cologne area. He was a student in Lisbon. For me, the whole reason for doing it was “Embraceable You”. Maybe in the Monheim performance we will do something kind of like that.

But as for canonisation: jazz listeners and jazz musicians are nerdy about details. But also classical people or pop fans, they know who played the second guitar for Ozzy Osbourne… People know that stuff. For jazz, it’s very common to be talking about the nitty gritty. And when you dig a little deeper into any part of music history, the more you see how complex and interwoven everything is.

I am slightly allergic to the idea of identifying scenes and communities. Last week we were talking about this very issue. Minimalism, for instance: There were a lot of other interesting composers. It wasn’t just Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Those guys were proactive and organised in forming their own bands and documenting it. There’s a reason people know them. But there were other people like John Gibson, the woodwind player, and even La Monte Young, who had a much different type of career.

I treat the canon more like a case by case thing: if there’s an area of music that I don’t know anything about, then I’ll probably go right for whatever the main things are. But in, unfortunately, the schools have squeezed the canon onto a pretty small amount of artists. Many people just aren’t exposed to a what’s really been out there.

High time for new sounds then. Especially after visiting The Prequel, a lot of people are keen to see what you will bring to Monheim Triennale this year. Can you already spill the beans on what is planned?

I was told to think big. So I did. I wanted to get the best of both worlds, bringing a band that really knows each other, and then also adding something to it. It ended up being my dream team group. The core is Being & Becoming, for which we’re bringing in Tyshawn Sorey on drums. The premiere of that version of the band will be at Monheim. We’re also adding three singers. Sofia Jernberg, a vocalist from Sweden. We did a duo tour a couple years ago. She brought me to Monheim in 2022 to arrange the Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn pieces for her and the string orchestra.

She introduced me to Monheim. Then we’ll have Alice Tessier, who is a flutist and classical singer. I know Alice from the New Music side of things, but I’ve brought her into my little orbit the last couple years. And then, of course, there’s Mazz Swift from Queens, New York. An incredible violinist and vocalist. This is a really unique trio of singers, who also are multi-instrumentalists.

As for what I’m writing: I keep coming back to the structure of a Bach Cantata. The way he organised them in terms of the instrumental groups. Reiner Michalke’s idea was to break it up into two sections. We’re going to rehearse for a couple days, and then we’re going to do two parts. Two nights at SoJus 7. It will be exciting. I never really had to deal with text in this way. The structure and the meaning will reveal itself as I’m writing. But I can picture it, I can hear it already. It’s going to be two, probably 35 minutes-performances that feature all the artists in the group in different ways. I guess that’s what it comes down to in terms of my process: I have a kind of macro picture, and then whittle it down to the details.