“As a strikingly original player with an imaginative vision, Irabagon keeps his music refreshingly focused but also bursting with freedom.” – Filipe Freitas, JazzTrail
“Irabagon is one of the most exciting talents to enter jazz in the new millennium… No other current saxophonist encompasses his mix of explosive energy, stylistic diversity, lethal chops and radical ideas.” – Thomas Conrad, JazzTimes
“Visceral clamour meets groove…. Server Farm moves nimbly between extremes of structure and texture. The beauty lies where the layers intersect.” – James Hale, DownBeat
“The promise and threat of Artificial Intelligence are just in the air these days,” Irabagon says. “People are paranoid about what’s going to happen, and justifiably so. So I was thinking about that, and at the same time I was writing music for these nine specific musicians that I love and figuring out how to maximalize the way that they naturally play.”
With such a daunting prospect ahead of him, Irabagon decided to approach the work by taking on a role parallel to an A.I. He delved deep into the catalogues of his chosen bandmates, all of them venerated bandleaders and composers in their own rights, and mined them for repeated phrases and motifs particular to each musician. He then repurposed these as the basis for his own compositions, tailored for the specific ensemble and designed to provide them as much freedom as possible.
“I didn’t want to overwrite and stifle the creativity of these artists,” Irabagon explains. “There’s a lot of written material, and some of it is quite challenging, but a lot of it comes from an amalgamation of ideas that they naturally lean towards. Totally by accident, I found that I was turning them into a computer version of themselves, referencing their past material while still staying in the moment and being able to improvise freely.”
The title of Server Farm itself references the insidious way that A.I. co-opts the organic in aid of disguising the artificial. The very notion of a “farm” suggests something natural and bucolic, not the reality of a vast warehouse of linked computer servers draining natural resources to fuel the virtual world. A single large data center can swallow up from 1 to 5 million gallons of water per day to cool its overheating machinery, Irabagon points out, a threat to humanity’s survival before even considering the sci-fi notion of computer intelligence eclipsing our own.
Irabagon structured Server Farm as a single narrative that progresses from the natural and human to the artificial and hybrid over the course of its five extended tracks. “Colocation” – a term for a “carrier hotel,” or a data center that rents equipment and bandwidth to retail consumers – opens with the sound of Levy Lorenzo’s kulintang, a traditional set of gongs from the Philippines. It’s an ancient instrument with deep roots in the Filipino heritage shared by Irabagon and Lorenzo. The remainder of the piece was constructed around the eight pitches of Lorenzo’s kulintang. “The album starts out pretty upbeat, with human beings frolicking in the sun,” Irabagon says. “Then this other thing that we’ve caused starts to happen.”
“Routers” stems from the penchant shared by many of the composers in the ensemble for melodic and harmonic freedom over precise and complex rhythmic forms. The piece begins with the individual musicians weaving together opposing rhythms, with the full melody and harmony gradually emerging over the entirety of the seven-minute track – a notion that harkens back to similar experiments that Irabagon included in his compelling I Don’t Hear Nothin’ But the Blues series. After the initial recording, Irabagon added a tenor solo over the full length of the piece, then ran that solo through effects pedals, chopping it up, flipping and reversing it so that shards and echoes recur throughout. “I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in my basement going crazy throwing all of this together in a big soup,” he recalls.
The 14-minute “Singularities” marks the pivot point in the narrative – specifically Irabagon’s tenor solo at the halfway point, which he says marks the point at which the A.I. begins to take control and human independence is short-circuited. The track begins with a unison line for all ten musicians, an endeavor destined to reveal its flawed humanity. “It’s inherently going to be messy sounding, which is perfect for that moment in the record,” Irabagon says.
The remainder of the album takes a darker turn. Ushered in by Formanek’s droning arco bass, “Graceful Exit” is a lovely ballad undercut by electronic interjections that roil its Ellingtonian elegance with a disorienting air of foreboding. “I wanted there to be beauty even with the sense of impending doom,” Irabagon says. “Beauty, humor, darkness and insanity are all part of it.”
“Spy” ends the album with a full turn into paranoia, with Swift singing the lyrics from a poem penned by Irabagon during his pandemic-era excursions into the wilds of South Dakota. The frantic, uneasy tune echoes the poem’s notion of a bumblebee perceived as a spy drone, the natural outcome of a growing distrust that what we see can be taken at face value. Irabagon’s own recitation of the poem bubbles out of the ether as a disturbing counterpoint to Swift’s vocal.
Irabagon hopes to continue the story to chart A.I.’s ongoing development, and to continue facing his own musical challenges – and technological ones, with the thought of incorporating A.I. and multimedia elements into future performances. “Technology and I tend to be at odds with each other,” Irabagon laughs. “I can’t even turn on my phone without something going wrong. So this record was a cathartic experience for me.”
