“Liner Notes” is a Sounds Visual Media spinoff series where musicians, composers, DJs, beatmakers, and collectors dig into their crates to share favorite records. In this installment, saxophonist/composer Dennis Mitcheltree talks about his upcoming album Seeing Red, where he partnered with his long-standing quartet to channel intense sociopolitical emotions into a rich, empathetic sonic spectrum designed to transcend anger–and reflect the interconnectedness of the universe. He also shares some of his favorite records by John Coltrane, Jan Garabek, Sonny Rollins, and Joe Lovano.

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I’m Dennis Mitcheltree, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to talk about my latest release, Seeing Red, which comes out October 2nd on the Denger Music label. Thank you so much, Justin, for having me on. I really appreciate being able to talk about music in general.

The new album is a quartet recording featuring myself on saxophones, Johannes Wallmann on piano, Jesse Crawford on bass, and Bill McClellan on drums. All the tracks are original compositions. We’re a group that has been together for nearly 30 years, and I feel incredibly lucky to continuously make music with these wonderful musicians and benefit from their dedication to our shared musical vision. I can’t think of anything cooler than that.

The album title, Seeing Red, is essentially a commentary on how split and angry our society is right now. The music itself is presented as an antidote to that situation.

If you’re planning to get Seeing Red, please purchase it on Bandcamp at dennismitcheltree.bandcamp.com. With the current state of music streaming compensation, streaming services just don’t cut it, but Bandcamp does. Please support us there.

Track Spotlight: “Lapis Lazuli”

This song weaves a mix of 3/4 and 4/4 time throughout the form over a conventional yet unconventional harmonic foundation. Lapis lazuli is a metamorphic stone of a deep, deep blue that symbolizes wisdom, truth, and self-awareness. The composition itself is unusual because it shifts through different key centers in very short order. Honestly, it’s one of those tunes that sounds great, but when you start improvising over it, you realize just how difficult it can be. Through repeated playing with these musicians, we really managed to bring it together. It’s my favorite cut on the album.

Track Spotlight: “Brooklyn”

“Brooklyn” isn’t new; I wrote it about 30 years ago based on a situation I experienced while living in Brooklyn involving someone named Brooklyn. It was a unique situation that I don’t want to get too deep into, but it was one of the most heart-wrenching moments of my life. This particular composition just sprang into my head as the event was happening. Honestly, that doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s usually right on. This piece is very evocative of what I was going through at the time.

Track Spotlight: “Undocumented Language”

As I see it, music is a language—one that can’t be documented the way a spoken language like English or French can. Especially in jazz, where you’re improvising, it’s something that only happens in the moment. This recording is a snapshot of one of those moments. Every time we play it, it becomes something new, which is what I truly love about this music.

To touch on our history as musicians: we all met and started playing together in New York back in the ’90s and did several tours together. Again, I feel so fortunate to play with people who are such exceptional musicians and individuals as Johannes, Jesse, and Bill. We’re planning upcoming tours in New York and the Bay Area around the time this album drops on October 2nd.

Sounds Visual: If you were pulling a few records from your crate that really defined your path as a listener, which ones would you put on?

Dennis Mitcheltree: My favorite part of an interview like this is discussing the albums that influenced me. I’d like to start with the music that first got me into jazz.

I’ve always loved music of any kind. I remember being about five years old at a parade, watching the marching band come down the street, and not just hearing, but feeling that bass drum pounding right in the middle of my body. It was exciting, a little scary, and very cool. It really started me on this whole appreciation for “vibration,” which I’m deeply into now.

The sound of an instrument is the foundational element of what we do. There’s rhythm, harmony, and melody, but the basic sound we make is where everything originates. Duke Ellington famously said, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Well, I guess I could say: It shouldn’t be around if it ain’t got that sound. That feeling of sound resonating through my entire body was where my love for music started.

Growing up in Wisconsin, I didn’t come from a jazz family, so I didn’t get into jazz right away. But when I was around 13 or 14, I heard John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1965). At that age, I was looking for something meaningful in my life—something with real values that I could devote myself to. Hearing Coltrane play on that record made me realize the profound value of what he was putting out into the world, and it made me want to do the same in my own way–though obviously, I’m not John Coltrane.

I started out on the oboe before picking up the saxophone, eventually settling on the tenor sax. Again, the sheer spirituality of A Love Supreme blew me away and cemented my desire to commit myself to this path.

Once I dedicated myself to it, I realized I had a lot to learn about how to craft this music, so I started digging into earlier recordings from the ’30s and ’40s. When I heard Charlie “Bird” Parker on the Savoy Sessions (Recorded 1947-48, released 1978) double album back around 1982, I realized you could combine high art with straight-ahead swing and create incredibly beautiful melodies. That really drove me to study harmonic concepts, building melodic solos over those structures, and discovering the freedom within a jazz standard context. The Savoy Sessions completely killed me.

Because the spiritual quality of the music was what initially drew me in, I kept searching for more of that feeling. I came across a duo album by Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach called Forgotten Fantasies (Horizon, 1976) at a record store—the kind of shop I really wish we had more of these days. The more I listened, the more I was blown away not only by their musicianship, but by the deep level of spirituality they achieved with just two people filling up all that sound. It brought back that same feeling I had when I recorded my own duo album with Johannes Wallmann; making music as a duo is a truly special thing that requires a real mutual affinity, understanding, and shared desire to collaborate. Forgotten Fantasies was just great.

I was also branching out into the ECM label’s releases around that time and picked up Jan Garbarek‘s album Paths, Prints (ECM, 1982). The “wash of sound” on that record really spoke to me. It was jazz in a way I hadn’t heard before—the rhythmic aspect was very European and ECM-esque, but the overall feel was wonderful.

Continuing that exploration of sound beyond a straight-ahead jazz context, I began playing along with recordings from other genres—not to match their style, but to explore how I could interact with them. I put on the album Faith by The Cure (Fiction, 1981) , and its darkness blew me away. I just started blowing over it, and that turned out to be a seminal moment for me.

Eventually, I attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston to learn how the music was structured on a technical level. That brought me back full circle to straight-ahead jazz. The next album I transcribed from top to bottom was Sonny Stitt, Bud Powell, J.J. Johnson (Prestige, 1956). What initially caught my eye was the album cover, which featured these angry-looking birds—one of the most bizarre covers ever. But inside, the music consisted almost entirely of jazz standards, blues, and rhythm changes. The way Sonny Stitt navigated those chord changes made it a blueprint for fitting melody over harmony, and transcribing it taught me a lot.

Similarly, I revisited Sonny Rollins, who remains a favorite of mine. I’ve listened to a lot of Sonny, but my favorite for pure swing was Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957). It was also my first exposure to a tenor player performing without a piano in a bass-and-drums trio format—a setup I use a lot these days. The swing and sheer inventiveness he brought to that record blew me away, and I transcribed that entire album as well.

Toward the end of my time at Berklee in the late ’80s, I went out to see live music constantly. I used to frequent the 1369 Club in Boston, which was a fantastic place to hear music. Joe Lovano played there with Kenny Werner, Dennis Irwin, and Mel Lewis in the middle of a tour where they were recording Joe Lovano‘s album Tones, Shapes & Colors (Soul Note, 1985). They played many of those same tunes, and I remember it being one of the most incredible concepts I’d ever seen live. It brought everything to a whole new level for me. I eventually got the album and still listen to it today; the compositions are great, and it served as a blueprint for how I wanted to present my own group.

As I got deeper into composition, I listened extensively to Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Later on, I had the incredible fortune of arranging small-group (six-piece) music by Mingus, Ellington, Monk, Joe Henderson, and Woody Shaw for a series called Influences. The project presented concerts of my arrangements at Carnegie Hall featuring brilliant musicians like Gary Bartz, Ingrid Jensen, Kenny Werner, and Uri Caine. It was a dream come true. Delving so deeply into those iconic composers deeply influenced my understanding of what jazz is capable of; they became a part of me.