The Muse

Mike Herriott is a Canadian classical and jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist from St. John’s, Newfoundland, whose expansive career led him to perform in many places across the world and collaborate with other notable musicians, from Maynard Ferguson to Michael Bublé and more.

Last month, Herriott released his first solo album since 2016, titled Tales of Tricksters and Vagabonds. In the meantime, Herriott worked on several projects with his wife, Ofra Harnoy, including Back to Bach in 2019 and On the Rock, a Newfoundland-inspired album, in 2020.

Herriott and Harnoy share quite the romantic story, first meeting in 1982 and rekindling their relationship after 35 years of separation. I have had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Herriott to discuss the new album, his creation processes, and the experiences that shaped him. 

The creation process

Herriott prefers to dispel overly romanticized visions of work as a composer. “[I won’t be] sitting in my nightgown, smoking a pipe and drinking a martini, writing furiously on a piece of paper,” he explained humorously.

He emphasized the importance of academia in his creation process, as Isn’t Life Grand and Tales of Tricksters and Vagabonds were both born while he was working on his Master’s degree in composition at York University. All of the tracks featured on Isn’t Life Grand are the various assignments Herriott worked on over the course of his degree.

Before there was Tales…, there was Herriott’s thesis proposal.

A narrative perspective

His focus was on changing direction as a composer. His previous compositions were predominantly impressionistic, drawing on his interactions with his environment and his experiences, so, for Tales…, he challenged himself to approach composing from a narrative perspective, each piece telling the story of one character – the first two compositions, which he presented as his thesis, were Sir Jack and Rodion’s Republic, focusing on Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, and Rodion Raskolnikov from Fyodor Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment.

Then, one day, as he and his wife were out on a walk, he mentioned his idea to expand this concept into a six-part suite, and so the album came to be.

Literary influences

To Herriott, Tales of Tricksters and Vagabonds is his way of reckoning with the unpleasant or unsavoury characters we may come across in our daily lives.

“Every character in this suite, they’re based on real people; they’re based on some experience that the author had that they had to get out of their system,” he explains.

The characters we read about may remind us of someone we know in real life, but on paper, they have no power or influence over us. For this reason, Herriott found himself fascinated by the more “off-kilter, to a certain degree antagonistic” iconic characters from folklore and literature.

Having already written about Falstaff and Raskolnikov, Herriott took to brainstorming together with Harnoy, to create a lineup of such characters that covers the whole spectrum between light-hearted mischief and genuine cruelty. Those other characters became Rumpelstiltskin, Puss in Boots, Romeo and Juliet’s Mercutio, and Uriah Heep from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

Putting himself in the position of a narrator, Herriott drew both on the texts that the characters originated from, as well as on his own experiences, further illustrating the interconnectedness of reality and fiction.

“I see each character as a caricature of people I’ve known in my life, some personally, some that I’ve interacted with in other ways,” he expressed. Particularly, with Raskolnikov, he found himself inspired by the character’s false sense of self-righteousness that drew him to murder, which he compared to the personality of former U.S. president Donald Trump. 

As previously mentioned, Tales… is also a project focused on changing one’s perspectives as an artist. Herriott detailed the ways in which he had to learn to think differently while composing. For one, the notion of conveying narratives in music, without the use of words, was initially quite a challenge.

“I felt like I had my professors standing over me, going, ‘Well, what’s that, then? How are you telling that part of the story?’ And I really had to shut that out,” he explains. Trusting the process was crucial to the album’s creation. “I had to get rid of the audience around me, I couldn’t progress with that in mind.”

Experiencing self-doubt

All artists, regardless of their level of experience, can struggle with feeling confident in their own work, especially when they’re trying to change their perspectives. What’s important is not to lose confidence and let yourself be discouraged by the inevitable setbacks during the creation process. Herriott admits that, currently, his favourite movement of the suite to listen to, Mercutio, was the one he had the most doubts about in the writing stage; it was only late in the recording process that he began to feel truly satisfied with it. 

Herriott acknowledges the influence that his peers have had on him during the creation of the album. “In working with them, [I] spent a lot of time kind of getting inside their head. I’m always curious to figure out how somebody comes up with something that sounds so great, so I dig in to figure out all the elements,” he said.

Artistic influences

Among others, he listed Maria Schneider, Kenny Wheeler and Hugh Fraser as fellow musicians whose influences he can recognize in his own compositions.

However, Herriott is open to inspiration from a wide variety of sources. He mentioned drawing from Russian composers of the early 20th century, namely Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, as well as the band Steely Dan while composing Rodion’s Republic.

Herriott noted that in composition, similarities to other artists can often be inevitable, which can be a minor source of anxiety; to illustrate that, he recalled an anecdote wherein Kenny Wheeler was asked about how he felt when he would finish writing a piece of music. Wheeler responded that if he liked the composition, he would hope that no one else had written it yet. 

Current and future projects

Right now, Herriott is working on promoting Tales of Tricksters and Vagabonds, as well as working on commissions. He takes delight in waiting for the right moment to take up another project.

“It could be next week; it could be three years from now,” he notes, adding that as a composer, you often have to “dig into [yourself]” to find the impetus for creation and that when life presents you with a reason to introspect and find inspiration within yourself, it makes the creation process more special. This philosophy seems to fall in line with Herriott’s subjective and impressionistic style.

Tales of Tricksters and Vagabonds is a light-hearted, whimsical album, a celebration of storytelling and a fundamentally interdisciplinary work of art. It’s also quite accessible; jazz can often be a challenging genre to casual listeners, but this album, just like the characters it represents, is classic and timeless.

The album was released just over a month ago, on October 27th, and is currently available on streaming platforms. Enthusiasts of physical media can also purchase the CD through Mike Herriott’s website.