An Interview With... Carlos Niño

My sonic journey has taken me through many sounds, styles, artists, and scenes. Preparing for this interview was cause to reflect on when I first heard the name Carlos Niño, and I think I can pinpoint it near the beginning of the LA beat era. Since that time his name has floated in and out of my ears depending on how tuned in I was. In more recent times his name has been near the top of my most listened to and cherished artists.

These connections, these diverse and non linear weavings of activity are part of what make Carlos Niño’s music so inspired to my ears. He seems to just get it. He makes uplifting, soulful, joyous, energetic music - even when it’s calm and ethereal.

As I’ve traveled a new path in my life over the last nearly five years, cultivating and developing spiritual and meditative practices to enhance and enlarge my essence, music has been intrinsically connected. As a doorway into the cosmos, a guide towards something greater, a companion through the dark and light moments.

A few years ago when I was discovering International Anthem and this vast modern Jazz world we are blessed to be present with currently, I was thrilled when I saw Carlos’ name pop up in their que of releases. The album was Chicago Waves with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and it is beautiful. Since then he has released multiple projects with the label and continued to collaborate and deliver stellar tunes for our aural pleasure.

As I’ve been getting back in the groove of writing more regularly here and reconnecting with this joy I find in sharing music I hadn’t taken the leap to reach out to anyone for an interview. There was trepidation and fear and doubt. But I’m grateful to say that I sent the email and Carlos responded in kind with a willingness to get on the phone and chat.

He was gracious with his time, excited to discuss many things. It was awesome to hear he is digging the new Armand Hammer album, to listen to stories of his friendships and the creative energies he keeps himself inspired by. It was a beautiful conversation, read the Q & A below and check out the radio show from last week to hear the audio! Many thanks to Carlos for being down to do this and thank you for checking it out.

(Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity)

Where did your journey with spirituality in your life begin?

I feel like there has been an awareness the whole time. I feel like I came in pretty activated and aware, but when it really started to take more form and motion and action and activity and follow through, there are two things that I can point to. One of them is Thich Nhat Hahn. I was really young, maybe like in junior high school reading his books. I got one of his books from an aunt of mine and it was always really meaningful to me, thinking about meditation, walking meditation, about breaths, just about awareness really. Around that same time I was very deeply into Native Tongues, Q-Tip and would hear things that felt like they were related. Also around the same time, I had a cousin who was exposing me to John Coltrane and lots of other music that I would listen to and enjoy in a way but not really understand but listen to because I looked up to him so much that I wanted to be up on it and it was meaningful to me. I think those were really big activations for me. There were a lot of things musically that were guiding me, that I was actively looking to for guidance from. Everything from Public Enemy and KRS-One productions, the Native Tongues was huge. I remember seeing Do The Right Thing in the movie theater when I was, I think I was in like 6th grade, I was pretty young, I was probably like 11. But I was so into music and I was so into movies and had a pretty open, available ability to check things out and I really remember the score. I would later become a huge Bill Lee fan, get to meet Bill Lee and get to hear his Natural Spiritual Orchestra play several times. Obviously a really big Public Enemy fan and Bomb Squad fan, but I feel like in all of that, like in all of those intersections there’s things, if you are caring to feel them and understand them, that are just kind of like buzzing and sparkling of what I’m all about. Not just that but definitely those are very formative things for me.

Is music intrinsically tied in with your spirituality?

I don’t really see them as different. I feel like music is a strange term because what it means or what it’s roots are in this idea of a muse or potentially being inspired I totally feel, but I feel like music itself is a limiting term because a lot of the definitions of music, or of what people think that music is when they are training to be a musician or to write music or to play music is not the whole picture for me. But the spirituality for me is like completely sonic and vibrational. I mean that in a non physical sense and in a physical sense. It’s like metaphysically humming and spinning and buzzing. There’s a feeling, to me, or kind of an awareness of radiance, of frequency, of resonance. These are things to me that I also relate to this term music that isn’t necessarily universally agreed upon or understood, but I see them that way so I see them as completely the same thing. I don’t think spirituality is any one thing. I don’t think that way about music either, but I think of music and spirituality as, for me, very much the same cause I hear music in my thoughts, and I hear music in the forest. Maybe that’s not just music, maybe that’s also the spiritual energy, so to me they are the same thing because at a certain point you stop trying to define them or trying to name them or label them, even though you might want to talk with your friends about it or you might want to be able to articulate your thoughts and feelings about it so that might put you on a quest to try and really figure it out for yourself but for me I would say that they are the same.

I read somewhere that you don’t view yourself or your music as healing but you recognize that people may take it that way.

Well people sometimes talk to me about it in that way too. When I was describing what the new album title means I decided to give an example of that. I can’t decide for anyone how they are going to feel about anything, but I can create and offer what I’m feeling and share it and release it. I think the thing for me about the terminology of spirituality or things related to ceremony or shaman energy is just how framed it is by a lot of people in religion or religious practices. Things that have to do with rules and guidelines that I just don’t have, that I don’t think about and that I have really no interest in. There’s really this sense of like the aliveness of the music, how it’s not oriented in any particular form and in that sense it can kind of go anywhere and it can be anything and it can be contributed to and with by anyone. Somebody doesn’t need to know how to play anything in particular to be able to meet me somewhere. If they are themselves and they are open, and they might be a shaman themself, very specifically, or they might be from a particular tradition of music or a particular tradition of life but the meeting with me is gonna be how really yourself are you? How real are you, and in that, then we can create anything. I kind of feel like I’m aware that I'm making intense energetic music. Whether it’s more calm and quiet or whether it’s more rhythmic and maybe just more powerful in various ways and those things can be both, what I just said can be interchangeable, can be very powerful and also very calm. I think this terminology of I’m just chillin, on fire - it’s appropriate, it doesn’t have to be defined, it’s going.

I equate it to fire is just a lot of energy and you can be chilling but also be full of energy.

Yeah. Fire is of, and in, and serves and also leads all the other elements. So if we are talking about an elemental concept, to me, water has a lot of fire in it and fire has a lot of water in it and fire couldn't really function the way we know it to function without the earth and without the air, so it would need a platform, not always, but largely as a base. The air and the fire are completely dancing together and the air and the water are totally related and the earth and the air are related and that is a really magical, spiritual dance. I think that they do go together. Fire can also be incredibly calming. As much as it is potentially destructive to humans or to various environments it also brings magical new life. Without fire there are a lot of things that wouldn’t get ignited to even grow.

Do you view all the and friend records as their own separate entities or are they all just you?

They are just happening. I like them, I make them with the intention of having more music that I would actually want to listen to, that I would want to share. I like to get really excited about the music so that I feel like it’s worth sharing. I feel very driven to do it. It’s highly collaborative and a lot of the people that are involved don’t necessarily know exactly what it’s going to be or what it’s for, they just sort of trust me and trust themselves and that is something that I have earned over a long time of working with people. I feel great about it. I think some of the pieces maybe are their own pieces but I’m really oriented to making albums and the albums kind of speak, they start saying like ‘oh, oh I want this’ or ‘I want to feel this’ or ‘I want to be kind of like highlighted by that.’ I’m just creating all the time so anything could potentially be in the queue for an album sequence and that album sequence when I feel like it’s really what it is and what it wants to be then I turn it in and say let's put this one out. I'm kind of constantly doing that.

My impression, from an outsider looking in, is that you have all these different pieces of audio, whether it’s from live performances or things worked on in the studio by yourself or with friends and you add people to them, you ask people to join on them and they become a compilation and you compile - you have some amount of songs that you feel is finished and you compile them into this album. Is that wrong? Are you creating songs specifically for a specific project?

I think it’s both of what you just said. I think what you said is totally correct except that I’m also creating them for a specific project. I might record every concert that I play in a period and something from one of those concerts might just jump right out at me and be like ‘Yo, I need to be on this album!’ The last piece that’s on the new album was recorded at the album release concert for my last International Anthem album Extra Presence. We did this concert, it was a really unique group, Kamasi came and played with us and it was beautiful and this piece just, as it was happening I knew I was going to revisit it. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be for. I don’t feel like they are compilations but they are compiled. But they are more like, they are kind of like ecosystems, little universes, they are speaking up about how they want to be connected to something else. I think a compilation can do that, but a compilation can also do something else which is like be more academic, like these are all songs by a particular artist and they are compiled together, it could be like a best of, you could have a best of that is one of the best albums ever made because someone just happens to sequence the songs so well that you are just like ‘wow, I want to listen to this over and over and over again.’ That is the best kind of compilation, something where it’s not just so much about the concept but it’s about the complimentary energy and sounds of the pieces and I think that is an artform. This isn’t so unlike that but it is more also. Like if the title comes to me and I'm really tuning into what speaks that title? There is a process but it is very intuitive and in some ways a very fast process, it’s not like a process that I would say is complicated for me.

Did you and Ben LaMar Gay know each other before you got connected with International Anthem?

No. We met through the guy who owns and runs International Anthem, Scottie McNiece. He has two amazing partners who are also co-owners/founders with him. One is David Allen who masters all of my International Anthem albums and another guy who is called Dave [ed: Vettraino] who is based in Chicago who runs a lot of the operation from Chicago. I met Ben through working with Scottie and Makaya McCraven. I had met Ben maybe one other time and was already aware of him and a fan of his but we played together maybe three or four times, because I was on Makaya’s album Universal Beings and there were a couple of concerts that were organized by International Anthem of everyone that played on those records. So everyone from London, New York, Chicago and LA all together at the same time which was really interesting. And there were another couple times I think we played together. I’ve definitely been a fan of Ben and really stoked to know him through this relationship with International Anthem.

A lot of what International Anthem is doing, what Shabaka Hutchings is doing along with the rest of the London Jazz scene and then there is Kamasi in LA, there are a lot of different things happening with “jazz” music currently. To me it feels like it’s gone full circle to where there are these cats playing instruments but inspired by hiphop, beats, does that resonate with you?

Well it fully resonates with me because it’s true, and it fully resonates with me because I’ve lived that also. I don’t know how far back you have gone with my music but I’ve had a lot of experience with hiphop and I don’t know, just a lot of different music. I think what’s happened is that there is just like a broadness, an openness where these forms, even if they are mastered by people, like Kamasi or Shabaka, they are not holding themselves to the forms, they are not making albums that have any form, they are not saying ‘I need to make an album that sounds like this’ for any reason. They are going to make an album that sounds like whatever it sounds like for the reason that they feel like making it. To me that is a very liberating reality. When you asked me about my spiritual path and I mentioned Q-Tip, I think Q-Tip is one of the people who ushered this in in our age. I think he is a very vital and important, prophetic person in music and in the world. I think, everything is everything and everyone is influencing everyone and they should. This idea that anything should be beholden to a specific genre or form or tradition is just not accurate. I respect peoples traditions and I respect people's forms and I respect people doing whatever they want to do but I’m gonna do my version of it and someone else that you might like is going to do their version of it and of course they are going to be influenced and influencing others and that is kind of the point of it. I also think back in the day, that was the case too. It is just part of a continuum. Whether you can hear it in their sound or not, but I think you can. I just feel like it’s a circulation. It’s a rotation. To me it’s really like anything goes. I think the most innovative artists in every genre are always showing us that.

What are you working on now?

Oh man, this year alone, after the album that we are talking about, I have a full length album by an amazing pianist, composer, singer and band leader from South Africa named Thandi Ntuli entitled Rainbow Revisited. There is an album that will probably only really be available in Europe by Carlos Nino, Idris Ackamoor and Nate Mercereau. The vinyl and cassette will primarily be available through the label and distributor Rush Hour. I don’t expect it to be in too many shops in the US but it will be in Europe and Japan a lot. I released an anthology of a band I had back in the day, the band was called Build An Ark - if you haven’t heard of that group I highly recommend the anthology they released, I think they did an excellent job and it’s something that I produced, it came out in April on Record Store Day. And then a couple of projects that I don’t talk about, can’t really talk about because they have more specific campaigns that are coming. But there are already like eight or nine other records that are either finished or being finished that will come out in the next half a year, maybe between now and mid 2024. It’s just nonstop. I would say that the dump lords like Mach-Hommy, Tha God Fahim and people like my homie Knxwledge and various other artists who are just down to release music all the time, that’s an ethos I have had and grown up with. I’ve had a long term friendship and close camaraderie with Madlib and he is another person that kind of set off this whole idea in modern times of I’m gonna make music and release it. I had mentioned to you that at my album release concert a contemporary and dear brother of mine, Sam Gendel, was playing and Sam releases multiple full length albums every year. I’m just in that zone, I just make a lot of music and I put it out and I have great partnerships with labels that are interested in working with me which I feel very honored by. But even if you look at a label like ECM, which is a kind of universally beloved label, and you look at how many albums in a particular year Keith Jarrett might have released or Pat Methany might have released or some combination of Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland and Paul Motian, I don’t know, like so many other artists, they are just constantly releasing albums. Gunter Hampel, who is the father of the singer Cavana Lee who is on a lot of my new album, and Gunter had his own label and released constantly. Sun Ra Arkestra, I mean Sun Ra himself, he oversaw the release of like, several hundred albums in his time and had many many labels around the world releasing albums and some of them were all in like clusters. I’m just more like that. I’m just like if people don’t get it it’s cool, I don’t do it just to do it, I do it because it’s naturally, truly who I am and how I feel and like I said I have these outlets which I feel very blessed by but I feel like I would just do it myself if no one else wanted to do it and I would do it in any format that was the most meaningful and accessible. I don’t just press vinyl to have vinyl because vinyl is horrible for the environment, I mean streaming is horrible for the environment too, so, there are a lot of issues in and around how the music is distributed but I try to make everything as meaningful as possible so that it is worthy of those resources.

Hearing that you have something going on with Idris Ackamoor is very exciting, that’s pretty awesome.

Yeah it’s a full length album that will be out in December. I have the test pressings, I don’t know when they are going to announce it. Idris, Nate and I have played I think 5 concerts together at this point and we just have a thing. I’ve known him for a while, also since like 2016 or so and we just get along great, we’ve been playing concerts together and recording them and we made this record and it’s really good. It’s called Free, Dancing....

I know you are a record collector but I’ve heard you mention specifically that you collect digitally too. What does that look like for you?

If you look at my account on Bandcamp I think I have like 32, 35 hundred purchases. I’m constantly collecting music. It’s just kind of a vibe. I’m not a hoarder at all. I have a very respectable, concise, LP collection and I have a very, very small 45 collection. If you saw my record collection you’d be like ‘oh he is one of those guys,’ it's kind of meticulous, it’s like exact. I don’t mess around at all. I don’t mess around with bum corners, I don’t mess around, like my stuff is cared for deeply. It’s funny because sometimes people will be like ‘well, I only spin vinyl’ and I’m like ‘oh yeah, that’s cool, that’s good.’ I wouldn’t bring my vinyl to a place that was too wet, too moist, too hot, too dusty, too whatever. Like for me, I care about the LPs. I think a lot of them, especially the very collectible ones, are like artifacts. I know a lot of elders and a lot of the people whose music that I love and collect are people that I’ve met and known. Everyone from Alice Coltrane to Pharoah Sanders to a lot of the hiphop artists we are talking about, Gil Scott-Heron comes to mind, I worked with him for a long time. I have a small collection compared to some of my friends who have a lot of records and I care for my records probably as good as any of them whether they have a big or small collection, whether they are like a master turntablist like J. Rocc or Cut Chemist who I’m close with, both of those guys, those guys have a lot more records than me and I also have like a very, I don’t know, I love my collection, it’s awesome.

Do you have thoughts on how huge vinyl has become and the state of that market these days?

Well I think a lot of it is just a fad, you know, people want to have something, I don't know how much they are actually listening to those records and or utilizing them. I am very much about, I did a radio show for twenty years. I like to support my friends who make music, I like to support elders and the various people who I don’t know around the world who are making music. I think people buying records is rad because it keeps the record stores going and keeps a whole energy going but I don’t know if we need millions of copies of any new contemporary records by any mega pop stars. I don’t know if the boom is more of a trend in something decorative or if it’s actually something they are listening too. I still think the majority of people who buy vinyl are not listening to their music primarily on vinyl. But yeah I think it’s cool. I wish everyone well in their journey. I have a friend, he listens to music on a Hi-Fi System that is so tricked out and expensive and will only listen to it that way and I have friends who have busted ass records who are incredible DJs and they do amazing wonderful things with records that other friends of mine wouldn’t even touch. I think it’s just really about a person's personal connection to it and how they want to use it but I am into using it. I was talking about how snobby I am in a way about condition but I still play em.

I heard you and J. Rocc talking about doing a Sun Ra comp, is that something that you think y’all might still do one day?

No I don’t think so but you know he made his Sun Ra album.

With Hit + Run?

Yeah. I’ll send you a photo, he wrote this beautiful dedication on the test press that he gave to me when I went to his show a few years later and he wrote something on there like ‘to my mentor in all of this Sun Ra stuff.’ Now listen, J Rocc is a GOAT of DJing, he is one of the greatest of all time, he is also a little bit older than me, he is someone I grew up looking up to. He is somebody who was on the radio for years an hour or two after my show was done. I used to think to myself ‘hey, I got nothing on this dudes mixing so my radio show better be really good because if he is listening I want him to be like yo that show was dope, now I’m gonna go do what I do.’ I consider him like a real DJ artist whereas I’m a selector. Very different. We’ve always gotten along really well. I have the most love for him. But I think he kinda did his thing with that Sun Ra mix and there are just so many compilations out there. I think the things we would have released have probably all been released since then and so there isn’t really a need for another comp. I think J Rocc’s mix kinda just did it and I know that was partially in tribute to Ras G as well. I was definitely involved in that quartet of Madlib, J Rocc, Ras G in regard to being a very dedicated, avid Sun Ra fan and collector. My radio show for 20 years was called Spaceways Radio.

Did you meet Ras at Aaron’s or somewhere else out on the scene?

We met on the bus. We used to see each other on the bus a lot, the La Brea bus and I think he might have been coming to places like Aaron’s but I met him in the earlier era of Aaron’s, not the era of Aaron’s that is known in the beat era. This is more like the mid 90s. He was a little bit younger than me, I’d say I probably met him around 97-98-99, I had already had a radio show that he was listening to. He was just really cool. I didn’t really know much about what he was doing but he was someone I would see at a record store or on the bus or at an event. I used to put on major concerts in LA in the 90s with luminaries that I was playing on the radio like Gary Bartz NTU Troop, Eugene McDaniels, Gil Scott-Heron, Brian Jackson, Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, etc, etc. Ras definitely knew about all of that and he was DJing from time to time or maybe regularly at a certain point at Project Blowed, so I would say we became friends later, like past 99, when Dublab really started taking off. But I knew him for a few years before that.

I heard a quote from you, you were equating the world and living life as if dropping into a wave and in there you said “Part of doing it is also not doing it.” That just really resonated with me, do you remember saying that, do you have any more elaboration to that idea?

Yeah, what that relates to is that if you are alive and you are living and you are in it, then that is part of you having this most ultimate experience of whatever it might be that you are envisioning like catching the wave of your life or catching sets of waves that are the waves of your life or catching eternally the vibration of how it feels to be that stoked. So sometimes people are feeling really disconnected and dysregulated and disjointed and fractured and my main thing is stay in the water, stay in whatever that is for you, whatever the metaphor of it is. You can get out and be on the beach in this metaphor as well but don’t not be oriented towards that life, that living, the living. If you are alive, be alive. The concept behind that is just sort of the down time is part of the up time, they are not separate. Like I would never go to the ocean and be bummed, like ‘man it’s too stormy, it’s too choppy, it’s too cold, it’s too hot.’ I’d just be like ‘dude I’m at the ocean!’ Whatever it is, whatever the experience is, it's part of this maybe bigger desire to connect with it in the most magical way. I don’t see it as like I didn’t get to do the thing that I most wanted to do, I just see it all as one.