Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

On fatherhood, moving upstate, making music in a room with friends, waiting for the song to talk back, being a Zen Priest.

Photo by Brandon Schulman

I have a nice albeit brief memory of meeting up with Jefre-Cantu Ledesma when our kids were not quite 3, a dad date with two odd, enthusiastic, perhaps still kinda drooly lurching dervishes of energy in joyous play at a playground in Harlem. It feels like a decade has past, but it was one of those little hangs from before Covid happened that now feel like some lost jewel of the past. When we reconnected on the phone recently, we realized it was just five years. Which is long in child years (and pandemic years), but it also speaks to the illusion of time, the vast chasms that actually signify the past.

Time seems to be a subject in Cantu-Ledesma’s music. Which is to say, I cue up “The Milky Sea,” the epic composition that comprises the whole of Side A on his most recent album, Gift Songs, and then it seems to immediately be over. But somehow, 20 minutes has passed. As P so eloquently described the piece, it’s ambient, but with “[an] abiding sense of mystery.”

I can’t help but think of Cantu-Ledesma’s move upstate in closer proximity to the Hudson River and the landscape around that body of water, the awe-inducing expanse of it, the minutiae of sounds and sunlight that play across its surface. It feels like I put a bare foot in its waters, take a step, and then emerge on a distant shore an indeterminable amount of time later. That’s music at its most therapeutic.

Writing about his last album on Mexican Summer, Tracing Back the Radiance (hey, also from six years back!), I said:

Not much happens, but not much needs to; its serene sound world is established from the hushed opening moments and you want nothing more than to reside within it…less Mark Rothko more like Agnes Martin, a nearly empty space suffused with gentle light. Simply put, it’s ineffable, seemingly capable of lowering your heart rate and instilling calmness with every listen.

But Cantu-Ledesma’s music – by turns experimental, noisy, patient, challenging, calming, beautiful– can also be about the simple joy of making a song, which Gift Songs also leans into. Whether it’s complex and painstakingly mixed and arranged, the result of arduous file-sharing back and forth across continents and seasons, or else wholly spontaneous and whimsical as child’s play, all of it works for him.

(Tape starts mid-conversation)

I was at Alice Coltrane’s last ever concert.

The NJPAC show??

No, there was a show in San Francisco. I was hoping to hear her harp playing, but she was doing mostly synthesizer. My ears weren’t ready for it at the time. I mean, none of that stuff was out and I didn’t find out about the ashram tapes until years later. I actually contacted them, too, and they were super nice, and were like, “Yeah, we still have some tapes if you want to order some.” But I never did.

Oh no! Last time I saw you was in before times, at a Harlem playground in 2019 sometime with our kids. And now you are up in Kingston? Was that a Covid move?

When Covid hit, we were in the process of moving. That’s one of the reasons that made it really easy for us because all our stuff was in storage. We were going to just to transition back to Brooklyn. We got out of our place in Harlem in January of 2020 right before COVID hit. We were in Park Slope looking at apartments and stuff the weekend before the city shut down. I was working at Mount Sinai Hospital at that time as well. It was really fucking weird and scary.

We went up to Woodstock for the weekend. I had been planning to be on a long Zen retreat and the retreat got canceled obviously, so we’re like “Oh well, I got some time off from work already let’s go upstate.” And we came upstate, the city shut down, and we just never went back.

Did you you beat the real estate bubble out there?

It was kind of bonkers. Realtors were doing stuff like you could see a place over Zoom, then you had to put down a bid, and only then you could come see it in-person. For whatever reason, most people from the city seemed like they wanted to live in the woods. But we live in a neighborhood in Kingston, where you can be on a really beautiful hike, or you can be at the Hudson River in 15 minutes. There’s no reason to live out in the woods. For us, it just felt extreme moving from Harlem to the woods, you know, where we don’t know anybody and it’s 20 minutes in the car because you forgot to buy milk.

How did this move affect your creative process?

I’ve always made music in isolation. And solo music, I’ve always made music in groups and I’ve always made music in isolation. So in some way, it wasn't that much different. I just had space here in our house where I can make music and I just set my gear up and I didn't miss a beat. But in other ways, it was a big transition. So it also just took me a little while to kind of get settled and figure out what I wanted to do. As COVID subsided, I started meeting more people. I made Poverty, which was a culmination of a couple years worth of stuff that I thought was going to be my next Mexican Summer release. But when I made the tape, I was kind of like, “yeah, I think I’m done with that for now.”

It seemed like a shift of sorts.

Yeah, it might have been related to the move and stuff. I was just making music without a lot of focus for a while. I just was enjoying just making stuff and not really knowing where it’s going. That stuff just kind of came out and I just went with it, just enjoying the process. Around that same time I met Joey and he encouraged me to come into his new studio.

I kind of get the feel that this has more of a live feel than Radiance.

That’s totally true. Tracing Back the Radiance was very much, you know, I just sent files to people and they added to it. I sent people (Bing and Ruth) David Moore’s piano part and then they added to it and then I mixed it how I wanted it. Gift Songs is much more people actually playing in a room together.

After so much isolation music-making, was it tricky to create something live?

Honestly, I have to say Andy, I just kind of do whatever’s in front of me without a lot of…I don’t do a lot of planning or conceptualizing. It’s fun to do that stuff, but then it always just changes course.

It reminds me of taking a printmaking class years ago. If I had a preconceived idea, then it would never get there or attain it. But when I just fumbled around or I messed up something or it wasn’t quite right, that felt like the beginning, like, “Okay, I can work with this.”

Yeah, exactly. It makes things interesting in some way, like something unexpected happens. And then it’s like, how do you respond to that? I’m much more drawn to making music and also doing ceramics and having things just end up being.

So Gift Songs was just my friend being like, “Hey, do you want to come play at this studio? Maybe see if we can record.” And I had met Booker [Stardrum] and met Omer [Shemesh]. And I was like, oh, sure, let’s see what happens. And the results were just so captivating to me. And I really felt like, “Oh, there’s a possibility here.” So then I was like, well, I guess I’m going to work on this and make a record out of it.

In some ways, I see this as a continuation of the thread from Tracing Back The Radiance, especially with the cover art of flowers. The blue of Gift Songs feels evocative.

I adore Traianos Pakioufakis’s work and had noticed the photo on his Instagram some time ago, when the record started taking shape. I began to imagine what might fit the music. Traianos’s images came to mind, and when I saw the photo of the blue flowers again, I reached out. I think it fits the music well.

In the title, I also feel like it hearkens back to earlier projects like Songs of Remembrance and Songs of Forgiveness. Is there a through line for you?

Not overtly, no. For me each record stands on its own and doesn’t have to be an extension of any of my earlier work. That said, I am the common denominator in all of my records, so I guess the through line is me – my likes and dislikes, my choices, what I’m drawn towards aesthetically, etc. Certainly when I back out and look at my body of work as a whole I see patterns like what you have pointed out.

Did you feel a shift in community moving from the city to a smaller town upstate?

One of the first things I noticed when we moved to the Hudson Valley was the change in the soundscape. In some ways it can be as loud as a big city here, but the origins of the sounds are completely different – flocks of birds, thunderstorms, wind in trees, rushing streams. It’s a different body of sound. While I didn’t make a conscious connection between the Hudson Valley environment and the sounds on the record, after finishing it and being able to sit back and take it in, it feels like this new landscape of sounds and sights and space undoubtedly played a part in shaping this music.

Definitely felt a big shift in the community, though it took me some time to find my place here. The first year here I just focused on my family, worked on finding a job, and kept busy in my Zen community. Once things started opening up after Covid, I started going to shows, meeting folks for tea or lunch and slowly began to imagine playing with people again.

How did you connect with Clarice Jensen, Omer Shemesh, Booker Stardrum, and Joseph Weiss? There’s a live feel/ open air aspect to the music, so how much is rendered live versus in the studio?

I met Booker at a show I was playing with Tyondai Braxton & Ben Vida early in 2023. I think that might have been my first time playing live up here, and that felt like it opened the door to more happening. Clarice I knew of through her solo work, and knew we had some mutual friends in common, so I was able to connect with her and we hit it off. She actually played live with me a couple times in the city and it felt natural to invite her to play on this record.

Omer and I are both parents, so we met through our children. After talking a while with him about music I imagined we would find some common ground. Joey and I also met each other through our children, and he was the one who encouraged me to go into a studio to work on a new record. I had intended to just do it on my own at home. Somehow the conditions came together and I was able to be in a beautiful space with Booker and Omer, playing together live, with Joseph engineering. That was in February 2024, and the record was mostly formed from those first days of improvising together. All of the record was made in the studio. “The Milky Sea” took some time to figure out, in terms of what it was or what it wanted to be, but other than that everything fell together very quickly.

Photo by Brandon Schulman

What was the process like for “The Milky Sea”?

Well, it just started off with the improvisation between drums and piano and it was kind of short, it was like seven or eight minutes. And then I was like, maybe it should be longer? Let's just play piano and drums for a long time, for twenty minutes now, but I had to figure out what else to add. I had an idea that the record was going to be really acoustic, just really minimal. So there was cello, then some piano, and organ. There was bass clarinet, there was flute, there were all kinds of things we tried, but it just didn’t work, you know?

And then I had to give up that idea, because it sounded like this song wants something else. So Joey suggested guitar and I added four guitars and all of a sudden it became a bit closer to what it is now. And the song began to kind of reveal itself and kind of created its own intention to where I was like, okay, well, I guess we’re going down this road now! And then once I did that, it all started to fall into place. But that took months. That took four months to figure out. It was a real beast to mix, there’s tons of tracks on there: four guitar tracks, four or five shaker tracks, modular synths that are processing shakers, Hammond V3…there’s stuff that didn’t even end up on there. There’s actually a vibraphone that you can barely hear. I don’t even know if I can hear it anymore.

Because, again, like, I don’t know what the song is yet. I have to try a few things until my intuition then goes “yeah this is it.” Now I understand the process is that the song has its own its own kind of subjectivity and I’m just waiting for the song to talk to me and say “No we’re going this way.” And then I’m like “okay, thank you for letting me know.” You know like a sculptor with a rock, right? The sculpture’s in there, but you don’t know what it is yet. You’ve got to start chiseling it away.

Were the three “gift songs” on the second side easier to get to?

Those were completely improvised. Those were done the first day, the first thing that happened.

Really??

We were waiting for Booker to show up, and I was like let’s sit down and just jam, let’s test the levels while Joey’s setting up mics and stuff. Actually if you listen closely, the textures of those songs are a little bit different, because Joey was moving the mics between each take. I didn’t think they were going to be anything, but then going home and listening to the demos, I was like, “God, these are really beautiful, you know?”

I have tracks where Clarice is playing on all three of them and there’s bass clarinet But at the end of the day, I was like, yeah, this is too much. It doesn’t work, you know? I’m not going to do this. I’m going to ruin them. They’re just beautiful, kind of simple, just leave them alone.

How would you describe your skills as a piano player?

I can’t play piano, I just bring together some ideas. Someone like Omer, he’s a professional piano player, so I can just be like “Let’s play in this key. Do more of that. No, more like this.” Since I’m not a trained musician, that’s kind of more how I work and the people that I tend to end up with are just insane musicians and they speak the language of music, so if I can just speak enough of the language of music that seems to work for me.

Aside from this in-real-life playing, you have also maintained these long-distance partnerships with Felicia Atkinson and Liz Harris from Grouper. How different is that dynamic?

It’s so different. Because you’re working in isolation and you’re responding, they’re just not the immediacy. My last record with Felicia was built from live sessions in the studio, so that was fun because we were able to respond in the moment. But those projects are almost more meditative in a way because you have time to be with the music outside of the pressure you might feel in the studio. You can live with something. I can live with some sounds that Felicia sends me or vice versa. And the same with, you know, working with Liz. It’s like sometimes it takes months or years. You just live with material and all of a sudden the conditions come together and something presents itself.

I believe the last time we spoke, your day job was as a Chaplin of some sort and earlier you mentioned Zen. How would you sort of describe your spiritual practice?

I’m a Zen student. I’m a Zen priest now. I was ordained like years ago. So that’s pretty central to my life. That’s like how I’m a priest in the world, because I don’t live in a temple. Professionally, I’m a hospice man life in a Buddhist community where I’m a priest. And, you know, music is important and fun for me, but, those things and family are kind of at the center of my life. Music is more –I hate the word– it’s more like a hobby. I take it seriously, you know, and I’m so grateful that I get to do it. But it’s not at the center of my life the way that those other things are.

I make music all the time. And whether or not anybody ever hears it, it’s okay if they don’t. I just enjoy being creative and try to spend time being creative, because I just think it’s nurturing and helpful just being a human.

Behind the paywall, Jefre chats about a few things he’s into at the moment, from a deep dive into consciousness to an early 2000s digital noise entry that has been cathartic for him.