PRESTON FRAZIER: My first exposure to your music was the album Catharsis.
JUAN DHAS: Yes, my second album, Catharsis, came out in 2018. I moved to Dubai for about a year in 2019 and returned to Colombia again in October 2020 – and I’ve just been here for the time being.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Let’s start with your current album, Aether, and how it came about.
JUAN DHAS: Aether was fascinating, but it took a long time. The record was a concept that has been around for a while. A year after I released Catharsis, I started writing for the album. I had maybe about seven songs written in 2019 that I initially thought I was going to record with the trio from that album, Kike Harker on upright bass and Roman Berrocal on drums. Life took me to Dubai, and initially, I was going to record with Anthony Muthurajah (co-producer of Catharsis) and another friend of ours, Elie Afif. Anthony ended up recording on the final album. When I got to Dubai, I worked with the incredible bassist Daniele Camarda, who played with Lionel Loueke and a bunch of those kind of kind of cats. Patrick Graney ended up also performing on Aether. We started rehearsing for the album, doing pre-production, and conceptualizing our direction – then the pandemic hit.

I was trapped in Dubai for a good seven months. When I returned to Colombia and was a little more settled, I started thinking about it again. I released a few singles on Bandcamp.com around 2021: “Nomad,” “For a Chapter Closed and Another Begun,” “Heartbeat,” and “Traced in the Sand.” That whole year, from ’21 to 2022, was spent exploring the composition and experimenting with different colors. The sound had become crystallized. Bassist Petros Klampanis connected me to Quique Ramirez, who played drums on the album. I figured, OK, it might be nice to do a drum and percussion split, so I had Quique record from Spain, Patrick record from Ohio, and Anthony move from Dubai to New York. We got Santiago Bosch on synth and piano for two tracks. I wanted to shift away from the piano and explore different textures on keyboards. Santiago was a classmate of mine at Berkeley. For the song “Unsung Hymn,” we got drummer Antonio Fusco, a friend of a friend. So it’s a genuinely international record.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Embracing Clarity is the first album you recorded in the United States. Catharsis was recorded in Bogota. The recording of Aether was done all over the world. Did the musicians send you their parts?
JUAN DHAS: Yes. I did a video on my YouTube channel covering the whole process. If I flew to the U.S., the budget was just astronomical because you’re taking into account flights, lodging, food, transport, all the costs that come with making an album and then video, of course. So I figured, if everyone’s got a home recording set up that sounds good, you can get a very reliable sound, and people have their methods of filming themselves too. Maybe we can get this done more economically and try to see if we can do this at an extreme level. So it doesn’t feel like a multi-track recording, which I think many people are in the jazz world.

PRESTON FRAZIER: It doesn’t sound like you were thousands of miles apart.
JUAN DHAS: Mission accomplished. When we were recording, there were overdubs here and there just for textual reasons. Some of my heroes, the Pat Metheny Group and the Yellowjackets, experimented with overdubbing. The goal was to make it feel like we were all in the room. I spent some time tweaking the mockups to track the solos beforehand when I sent them to people. I would also improvise a solo in one take, keeping everything as simple as possible and with minimal editing. I would play the melodies so that other guys would feel like they are playing with somebody as opposed to a generic backing track. The guide tracks usually start with a percussion track. I’d add bass and some MIDI bass as guidance to provide low-end reference information.

I would do the string arrangement if there were a choir arrangement because I used some choir samples. I would layer in my guitar for the melodies, the solos, and the comping, and I would also layer in my voice and do a very rough mix because I’m great at mixing. I’d do something so that it’s comfortable to play to, and then I would remove the necessary tracks for each musician and send them out to them, and we’d always start with percussion or drums. Once I had one of the layers, I would remove the MIDI data. If there’s percussion or drums, I don’t need MIDI percussion anymore. So, I would remove that, then send it to Santiago for his part or Anthony for his part, and then I would track it at the end, exclusively relying on what people had sent me.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Was co-producer Anthony Muthurajah involved in the beginning of the project?
JUAN DHAS: Anthony and I are close friends. One thing he did on the album Catharsis was that Anthony played drums and bass on those demo tracks. The recorded musicians used some of Anthony’s ideas in their parts or approaches to the music. Anthony and I have collaborated for a very long time. He was much more involved on this record, giving feedback, suggesting ideas, and recommending players. Anthony played piano on one tune as well, on “Communion.” He also said, “I think your voice would be a perfect addition. I think you should layer in your voice singing.” That’s how I started bringing that sound to my music.

PRESTON FRAZIER: I don’t recall any previous albums that you contributed with the vocals.
JUAN DHAS: No, it wasn’t a conceptual thing back then. However, my first introduction to music was singing. Although I never had formal singing or vocal lessons training, it was just something I’d always done. The voice has this extra texture. It is quite human, so it’s nice to explore that and connect a little better through the music.

PRESTON FRAZIER: In terms of your guitar style and sound, how has it changed since Catharsis?
JUAN DHAS: Immensely. My sound had already changed by the time I got to Dubai. Just being exposed to Daniele Camarda and the advice and guidance he provided was the catalyst for a bunch of changes that have happened since, and it was almost like a change was happening every month. It just kept changing. One example is how I raised the action on the guitar. I kept increasing it more and more just for its resonance properties and because it influenced my playing. I started doing away with pedals, which were very important during Catharsis and other singles. You can, in a way, track the evolution through the singles’ release. I’ve stopped using pedals.

PRESTON FRAZIER: You’ve started playing slide guitar, too.
JUAN DHAS: Yes, I started experimenting. The sound is still evolving. I’ve also been using an acoustic microphone on my carbon guitar. That’s blending a direct signal from the amp, pushing my amp more, controlling everything from the volume knob, and brightening my sound a little bit so I can hear more detail in the guitar sound. I don’t play with the pick anymore; I play with my fingers. So it’s constantly evolving. I’m grateful for what Catharsis was. It’s just like an excellent little snapshot in time, yeah.

PRESTON FRAZIER: There is a slide solo on “Jade,” which is just fantastic. But your tone is impressive. I thought I saw that you had gone from a six-string to a seven-string guitar.
JUAN DHAS: Yes, that was recent. Thank you to Kiesel Guitars for sending me the instrument! Kiesel is out in California. Every time I pick up the guitar, I’m grateful to be playing it. However, the Kiesel 7-string arrived after the recording process. I’m sure we’ll see some more recordings with it soon because it’s kind of my main thing right now. Having that seven-string is kind of another development in that it’s a sound I’ve been hearing in my head for the past four years: I want that extra range or that extra low end just because my playing has taken a more rhythmic and percussive direction. It’s nice to have that low-end when you’re playing in that style, especially if you’re playing duets with people or in trio settings and you need more depth, musically speaking.

PRESTON FRAZIER: We’ll begin at the beginning of Aether and discuss the song “Socotra.”
JUAN DHAS: “Socotra” really wasn’t a conscious exploration. I just started playing and thought, “Oh, there’s a story in here.” It came out of the Yemeni groove, which is a part of Yemeni music. A friend of mine sent me a recording. There was a particularly weird Yemeni groove in 11 that I was enamored by, so I started messing around with it a little. It also ties into a photo of an island there; it’s just otherworldly. You see some of the flora and fauna from there, and it’s just like, wow, this looks like an alien planet almost. I used this groove, which has this poly meter feel. 

PRESTON FRAZIER: Santiago Bosch did a piano solo. Also, there is some synth work, which is pretty impressive.
JUAN DHAS: That tune was exclusively synth work. So he did a comp take with a synth and a synth solo using a breath controller. So that’s what gives it that very breath-like sound because he’s quite literally controlling it with his breath. It’s a little nod to Allan Holdsworth. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to escape his influence.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Can you talk about your vocal approach on this one?
JUAN DHAS: The vocal approach is very similar across all the tunes. The beauty of the songs, in a way, or the beauty of the vocal approach, is that they are tied to the quality of the melodies in a communal way. It’s just about singing the melody. I’ve always really cherished and admired certain singers when they can just sing a melody in place. For me, it’s just an extra texture in there, and it adds this nice warmth to the ensemble sound.

PRESTON FRAZIER: How about “Scarlet Thread,” with a beautiful bass solo and significant synthesizer and percussion parts?
JUAN DHAS: Anthony did an excellent bass solo on that, and Patrick Duke Graney just dialed in with all his percussion takes across the tunes. I just love the sounds of playing with a drummer and a percussionist. There’s more room for the guitar. It just creates this beautiful ensemble sound, and yeah, I did some string arrangements there for that tune, as well. The song refers back to the East Asia myth around the idea of a soulmate but that each soulmate is connected through an invisible red thread.

PRESTON FRAZIER: How about the song “Air & Water”?
JUAN DHAS: I remember sending this to a student once, and he said, “Man, I almost hear a bird flying over a coastline.” Well, there’s a title! It was just an enjoyable tune to put together. Anthony did a phenomenal take on that tune. I can’t remember if it was a fretted bass. There were some tunes where we’d like to have the fretless color. “Scarlet Thread” definitely was a fretless tune. “Air & Water” was another tune for which I felt percussion was a great fit. It also pays a little nod to my admiration for Brazilian music.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Let’s go to “Unsung Hymn.”
JUAN DHAS: When I wrote the tune, the melody almost sounded like a hymn. The song reflects on something lost to time, like a forgotten hymn. The song also pays homage to the jazz tradition of swing, especially to that late John Coltrane sound from A Love Supreme. That kind of music which gave birth to the musicians that came after as well like Kenny Garrett, but paying respect to like Elvin [Jones] and McCoy [Tyner] and that kind of sound. I think it was cool to have Santiago do a synth solo. Santiago just absolutely ripping solo. I will say swing is so much easier to do live in the room in in a studio but hey it can be done it just takes a while and we had Antonio Fusco come in and play drums on that and he did a wonderful job.

PRESTON FRAZIER: It’s a wonderful song, it’s probably my favorite song of the album. How about to “The Secrets Elpis Never Told”?
JUAN DHAS: That was one of the tunes that went back to the pandemic. So all of the ones you’d mentioned right now probably are written around 2022, 2021, some of them. This goes back to 2020 and it was kind of the time we were kind of first locked down and no one knew what was going to happen. Some people were despondent. I wrote this tune and I decided to focus on something along the lines of hope. I always give, like, a working title to my songs before I come up with the final title. I was sitting there thinking to myself, “How many people have a song called ‘Hope’ or something to do with hope?” So I did some reading, and I’m a sucker for mythology and just stories in general. So I found a story about hope: The ancient Greek translation for hope is Elpis which was originally one of the many things featured in or held in Pandora’s box.

Supposedly there’s a debate, I don’t know how contested that is in today’s world, but when Pandora opened the box and all the horrors of the box were unleashed into the world everything that was contained. Hope stayed in the box. And some people argue that Elpis stayed in the box because Elpis felt humanity didn’t deserve hope for releasing all the horrors of the box into the world.
Some people say some people postulate that hope stayed in the box to give humanity hope in the light of everything being released, so but nobody knows. So hence, “The Secret Elpis Never Told” is why it is supposed to stay in the box. We don’t know. I hope it’s the latter. I read the story and thought, “Oh wow, that I think we kind of need that right now like at this time.” I was literally trapped in a country I couldn’t leave, Colombia closed borders. Flights were just filling up. Some of my friends abroad were trapped too.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Let’s discuss the song “Jade.”
JUAN DHAS: “Jade” was written for somebody who’s no longer in my life but gave me this piece of jade I wear around my neck. It was a fun little nod to them, and I think the song and the title just matched in such a way where I’m like, I can’t really change that, it just works, it is what it is. I was trying to find a spot on the album where I could play slide and where it felt apt. It’s something I’ve been exploring for about two years, but at the time I’d probably been playing about a year so I was also trying to be very specific. That’s one thing to think about where I think maybe jazz musicians could consider taking, or consider incorporating more production elements, or thinking like a producer. Just because a song has room for something doesn’t mean that we have to do it on every song. One of these elements I wanted to incorporate was the slide as it has such a particular color that if you used it on every tune or on many tunes, you could potentially burn out sound in a way the vocals with the same thing. That’s why there are some non vocal tunes as well to kind of balance out that color musically speaking. I wanted to find a really special place to play that sound and that was kind of the most fitting sound or the most fitting song for that sound.

PRESTON FRAZIER: Patrick Duke Graney adds a special flavor to “Jade” on percussion. There’s a bass solo as well.
JUAN DHAS: It’s personally a heavy song – not heavy in terms of heavy like riffing, it’s a heavy emotional song. But I think we can stand to put ourselves in the music a little more.
I think it’s something that when done yields very powerful results and if we think about it, that’s what all of our heroes did.

PRESTON FRAZIER: The final song on the album is “Memoria.”
JUAN DHAS: Yes, that’s actually the first song that kicked off the whole odyssey over writing this album. Or was it? When it came time to recording the album, had to sift through maybe about 30 songs that I’d had compiled over the years and figure out, what are the best, what’s the best collection? “Memoria” was written in 2019, and I was originally going to record it along with a small collection of other tunes that I’d written. At the time I thought, “Let’s explore something different. Let’s explore percussion.” I remember telling Patrick, “I really want a very big percussion sound. Don’t be afraid to layer.” We were trying to figure out a guest spot. At one point, we were going to call a friend of ours who’s a clarinet player, to play the melody. We were also thinking of adding my voice in the melody, but then we actually settled on Anthony overdubbing a bass track. He’s playing fretted bass for his accompanying part. And interestingly, his solo and the melody are all fretless bass.

Aether was an opportunity to explore a texture for each song and each song kind of was it’s even though there might be connecting themes or connecting ideas as far as arrangements or just like conceptual sound that permeates the whole record. I really wanted each song to kind of feel like it’s own universe, for lack of a better term – like its own little world. That’s something I’m I guess I’ve subconsciously always tried to do with my music.