Libby Ando: Please introduce yourself however you feel most comfortable. 

I'm Sebastian Rios. Hello everybody. I'm a jazz musician, a bass player and yeah, just trying to figure it out, like everyone else. Thank you so much again.

L: We're so excited for you to join us! Tell us about your experience performing at High Line Nine. 

I used to live very close to there—it’s such a nice area. I think bringing the visual art and the music together just creates a special atmosphere for people. The music itself was different because it's not our usual band. I'm a co-leader of the New Jazz Underground, which is a trio, with Abdias Armenteros, TJ Reddick and myself. This band (at HL9) was with Zoe Obadia and Kayvon Gordon who are incredible musicians, but I never really got the chance to play with them together, just us three. Yeah, we got to play some of my original music and it was just really fun to see how they played and interpreted differently than the usual band. It’s just fun in that way. It was just such a great vibe there—it's awesome. 

L: How do you think music performance interacts with our world? Like in general, you briefly spoke about music happening around there. 

Well, it's ubiquitous in our daily lives, even if it's not a live musical performance, we're always dealing with it. You step into a CVS or something and you're hearing some music, or you go onto the subway platform and you hear some random band playing or something, like a violin player. That's awesome. I think it's just who we are. As long as we could make a sound, we’re expressing ourselves. It’s everywhere you look, traditions, weddings or bar mitzvahs, Christmas or Hanukkah or, whatever celebration or whatever turn in life that you have: it's accompanied by music. Breakups, full of music. You know, it's just who we are. We’ve got eating, sleeping, drinking, music. It's like fifth or sixth on that list of essentials for us to just be human. It's like telling stories. It's what we do. 

L: As well as being in the trio New Jazz Underground, you also created a monthly concert series, new jazz underground, with the photographer, Peter Lueders. Can you tell us more about this project? 

Yeah. Well, Peter, he's a fantastic artist himself, and he runs a studio down in Wall Street. My friend, Julian Lee knew him before I did. Julian's a great saxophone player and a jazz musician and I guess they met somewhere and he started going to Peter’s studio for this thing called Bohemian Sunday. He invited me one day and he's like, oh, bring your bass, we'll play. And I walk in. It's like nude models posing. Like a group of like 20 or 30 people like drawing and Julian, like playing, just playing over there. So, we would play and she would do this every month. I slowly got to know Peter through that and just found out about, he was really interested in putting on shows and just doing something different and unique. We put on a show in July of 2019. It's just such a different vibe from a normal jazz show. Doing that, he had such a wonderful community that was so willing to participate. A lot of the people that were there had never even been to a jazz concert. They were still such a great audience. And, I think it made them kind of look differently about the music. 

Much of the perception around the music is really like the marketing of it. It's not really the music itself. We put on those shows and it's just such a wonderful opportunity to present our own music to an audience that is enthusiastic, but not the typical normal audience. It just brings a different energy out. And, he's just friends with so many wonderful artists also. Dancers, photographers, filmmakers, screenwriters: he just has so many wonderful, amazing friends that it's expansive energy. In the future, I really want to do more things like that, where we can just bring people into the music that wouldn't necessarily be a part of it. Just because you do it in a certain way. You just got to be creative about how to present things, and people will always enjoy it. 

L: When you perform at a jazz show and there's an audience waiting to hear jazz, that's a very different audience than one who's going to a hybrid show and has fresh ears being newly exposed to the genre. Sometimes artists say: oh, I wish I could listen to this again or read this again… to go back and hear it for the first time. You're really getting true first impressions when you have an audience like this. 

Yeah. It’s so interesting when it's like first impressions of the music that you've been playing. As I’ve been getting older, I see a lot of people my age, like it just gets kind of beat out of them sometimes. Like, there'll be this fantastic young, great musician, and then something will just come along to kind of kill their spirits. But, when you're just that young kid, like, 13, 14, just figuring out the music, you have this kind of exuberance about it. And, just seeing that again, it reinforces that feeling like it still motivates you, but your awareness of it deteriorates. 

L: So far, collaborating with other artists from other disciplines has been a staple of your career. At Juilliard, you collaborated with the dance department, which I'm sure was very rewarding. Could you elaborate on your thoughts about just the importance of these interdisciplinary collaborations? 

Well, it goes back to the last thing where it just inspires you. It gives you a different perspective on things. When visuals and music are married, the effects of both of them together create something that's greater than the sum of the two things. It’s so interesting to hear perspectives from, say, a filmmaker, somebody like Quentin Tarantino, who will pace his scenes and how he cuts them to music that he already knows, music that he had been listening to for a long time. I know he has a huge record collection. When he starts thinking about a movie, he'll go through the record collection and listen to different things, and it will inspire him and give him ideas. It's interesting that  people who write film scores, they get the pictures and all that, like later, and then they create the music to the visuals, I dunno. I guess, like in movies, you feel the most effect,  music can really... When it comes to romance, having a very sweet intimate moment or a horror movie where you feel very on edge, and a jump scare comes at the perfect time. It's all married, the music and the visual. 

I think it just creates a different perception for us. Like even when I think about classic jazz albums, like kind of blue, for example, like when I was like a teenager, like I bought a CD and like 2011 or whatever, and I would stare like, I would put it in a car. I would run the car,  in the garage, and stare at the album cover. When I would close my eyes and listen to the album, it would be like the album cover art, like, but not the art, but like the blues and the blacks and the gradients, like, it'll be like the kind of color of the album. I remember In Rainbows by Radiohead. The visual of the album cover, even though it's not like a visual representation of every moment, like a changing movie, it just changes how I see the music, if that makes sense. 

L: As a composer and performer, what inspires you the most, or what is one place you gather inspiration? 

It's not everything, but it can be anything. I was going through TikTok and there's this meme: “Oh no, our table, it's broken.” The musicality of that: it's so rhythmic, and that's what makes it funny. 

It literally can come from anywhere, a lot of times it's about transmutation. If you're disciplined about things, like there's a Duke Ellington quote where he says, “Why get mad when I could just write a great song? Like why get in a fight when I could write a great song?” It's a transmutation of energy, it comes from everywhere. When I see Ron Carter playing or something like that, it just takes me. It's like, wow, this is wow. This is what it's about. Anything: anger, inspiration, sadness, if you transmute it, it’ll come through.