When people think of jazz fusion, they might think back to a sound of the 1970s groups experimenting with electrified instruments and outside influences in jazz. Almost 60 years later, bands are still experimenting with this. You're listening to Off the Record with Stephen Philip Harvey, where we sit down and talk to a variety of musicians on today's music scene.
Today we're sitting down with Noah Pierre. He's a guitarist, composer, and band leader located in the DMV. When we chatted, we sat down to talk about the different influences on his new album, inwards by the Noah Pierre Band.
Yes, yes. Thanks for having me, man. Yes. So the new record is called Inwards. It's the second full length album that I recorded with my band, Noah Pierre Band.
It came out on the sixth, so just a little bit ago. It's been really nice to have these songs out into the world finally. You know, we've been playing them in shows for like the past year or so, so it's nice to have like the full length record recording and stuff because I mean, when we do gigs, like we go all kinds of places with the music as well.
So with these songs, as well as like how the record is kind of how it paces. Like I was trying to figure out a way to like, touch on the things that we do as a band and like make it into one kind of statement, you know? It was a nice challenge, you know, it was a lot of fun.
He has been based in the DMV since starting his career, attending Towson University and working as a professional musician since.
I've been in the DMV since I was like 14. Um, I was, I was a kid obviously, so my parents moved out here for work. Since then I've just been kind of going around doing different gigs and trying to play with a lot of different kinds of people.
It's like a really nice music scene in the DMV and especially… There's a lot of like really killing and really different players here, you know, so it's super inspiring musically. Like, I'm a guitar player mostly, but I also kind of see myself as like a, like a, like a composer and like a producer and like, I'm lucky to be in a band with like four other guys that actually also think the same way.
So we're all improvisers, but then we're all also producers and writers, and we're all into like a lot of different kinds of musics.
The band fuses everything possible in their music, from eclectic musical backgrounds to their shared childhood experiences, resulting in a truly unique sound.
Well that “Dr. Kelp” is actually a Ricky's tune. So Ricky Jefferson, my keyboard player, wrote that one. I mean we're all like big fans of SpongeBob.
That was something that we kind of, we realized about ourselves like super early on. So I think he wrote that as sort of like a little funny, you know, homage to that. But in regards to my other tunes, I don't know, it kind of just depends, like with the instrumental songs like. I try to kind of go, usually I'm drawing for like, from like either an emotion or like, like a scene, um, or like an event that kind of happens.
So the, the title will be like, um, you know, reflective of that. And then the vocal tunes. Um, it's the same kind of thing. Like I name them just based on what they're about. Lyrically, you know…
This was Off the Record, hosted by me, Stephen Philip Harvey, a Delmarva Public Media production. Thanks for listening to our interview with Noah Pierre. To hear more Off the Record interviews or to listen to other original segments like this, visit delmarvapublicmedia.org.
