Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Trust, Timing
Cochran finds moment is perfect for music
Amos Cochran didn’t set out to record his new album “Niente” just now. In fact, last year he was awarded the Artists 360 grant to facilitate recording a different album. But when the stars aligned with new artistic collaborations, timing and the atmosphere of Fort Smith’s SOL Studio, it just felt like the right time to bring forth the new music.
“I had been told for about the last year — both of us have been told for about the last year — ‘You guys have got to meet, you’ve got to hang out. You guys are really on the same page about a lot of stuff,’” Cochran remembers of studio owner and founder Grant Thomas.
When the two finally did connect, Cochran recalls offering to record a song the studio could then use in its portfolio to demonstrate its diverse capabilities beyond more “typical” music — like rock, bluegrass, blues — as they also have “this weird, strange electronic/classical thing you’ve also done.”
“And he said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great. But what if we recorded a bunch of stuff?’”
So the pair started meeting once a week to record bits here and there — getting to know each other, and Cochran getting to know the studio. Fast forward, and around the time Cochran discovered his friend and collaborator, violinist Miranda Baker Burns, would soon be moving away, he saw the serendipity of having established a working relationship with a great local studio, having some experimental new material to record and wanting to send off his friend with one last project together.
“She comes from a very classical Suzuki-trained background. And I come from a background of ‘let’s get together in the garage and jam until we like the song,’ which are two very different worlds that I’ve had to learn how to traverse,” Cochran shares.
Cochran recounts the moment Burns changed the way he thinks about music: a little over a year ago, the two were preparing for a Trillium Salon concert together. Cochran played one of his earliest piano pieces for her — a tune he’s been tweaking on and off for some eight years — and Burns proposed he write a part in for her. When they played the new piece together, he recalls, it was an experience he’d never had with another musician.
“It was the first time I feel like I have ever really written something down and added it to something of mine and it was like, ‘Wow, she can play exactly what I am hearing in my head.’ I’ve heard it on my computer and synthesizers and stuff that sound awful compared to [her], and then she played it and I was just floored.”
The new album, “Niente,” means “from silence” and is a representation of a technique Cochran often uses in his arranging where an instrument — particularly strings — swells from nothing into the sonic dreamscape of his composition. The album, he shares, is a documentation, of sorts, of the way he, Burns, and fellow collaborator and cellist
Christian Serrano-Torres are recording music together in this season of their work.
“Honestly, still to this day, I feel like I’ve snuck in the back door and I shouldn’t be doing” this type of music, Cochran admits. “Because I grew up playing bass on Dickson Street in jam bands, so what the hell am I doing behind the piano conducting string players? But with Miranda, that moment we had where she played that tune for the first time, she interpreted and played what I wrote in such a way that I all of a sudden went, ‘Wow, I can actually do this.’
“That kind of moment is very influential on somebody who writes things. She really allowed me to trust what I’m doing. I didn’t even realize I didn’t trust myself, but when I heard it, I was like, ‘Holy s***, I do trust myself.’”