The pianist Andy Milne had a unique inspiration for the music on his 12th album as a leader, Time Will Tell, recently released on Sunnyside. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, the pianist and composer has always known that he was adopted and that he was the child of a Jamaican mother and a Pakistani father, but he never knew their identity. But thanks to ancestry.com, Milne discovered first a cousin in 2019, and then another cousin and then in 2022, his birth mother, whom he finally met. This underlying theme of family connections, lost and found, flows through the compositions and arrangements, with help from his core trio of bassist John Hebert and drummer Clarence Penn, as well as guests Ingrid Laubrock on saxophone and Yoko Reikano Timura on koto, a large Japanese zither.
Milne, who will perform the music from this album and his previous one, The ReMission, at The Jazz Gallery on May 16, 2024, talked with me about his journey of discovery and how it informed his music. An experienced educator who teaches at the University of Michigan, Milne also discussed how jazz education has evolved since he was a student, and about Oscar Peterson, one of his early teachers in Toronto.
Listen to our conversation, above.
Interview transcript:
Lee Mergner: Your new album has an underlying theme about the search and discovery of your roots as an adopted child. But I was struck by the fact that this has been nearly a lifelong search. For a lot of people, it's something that comes up later, but you've always known you were adopted and not known who your birth mother is. What was that like to have that lack of knowledge all these years?
Andy Milne: When I was younger, it was a hanging over me kind of thing. In my twenties, I started to search and I came up with very little. There was a bit of information that was eventually disclosed to me, but it was a long process in Canada because there were very limited resources. I was in this queue that was probably 10 or 15 years to begin a search in a formal sense through the Children's Aid Society. I eventually just said, “I can't let this have a hold on me as a person.”
As I went through the phases of life and getting married and getting divorced and then getting married and then getting divorced and so on, you find peace with where you're at. I grew up in a very loving family. I was not going to allow that to define me. I moved forward. There were lots of times when you can have unanswered questions related to your identity, but I was pretty much okay with where I was at. It just took a long time before technology caught up with my nascent question marks that were floating around that I had let lay dormant for a long time.
Your last album was called The ReMission, which is about dealing with your own cancer diagnosis and treatment. The issue of your family medical history is a thing, right? But in your case, you have to say, “I don’t know.”
Every time I would go to a doctor's appointment, there would be that question: “Is there a history of cancer in your family?” And I'm like, “I have no idea.” I did get tired of having to answer that question where it started to feel like a bit of a complex where I'm like, “I have no idea.” And now it’s relevant. In some ways, it's nice not knowing, because then you're just a clean slate. But in other ways, if you know how to live your life based upon a family medical history, that's a bit of a head start. But, yes, I didn't have that information. I had to proceed very cautiously in some ways. Once I was like, “I guess we have to assume the worst in a way and take a diagnosis very seriously.”
Originally, when I started looking for answers, there was the caveat that a person should have some family medical history available to them. That was the point of advocacy that I used and my older sister who was helping me used in trying to identify information about birth family members. This is back in the ‘90s when I was trying to originally get this information on a human rights level where you can't deny this person their health history. I was a healthy person in my twenties, so it was like, “Whatever.” But it was still an angle to potentially use to put pressure on the government essentially. In the end, I did ancestry.com, which was far more revealing than any record keeping that the government had.
What was your journey in this search?
The path was my wife basically saying to me years ago, “I want to help you find your birth mother.” I'm like, “That's wonderful, sweetie. I think that's really admirable, but I'm okay.” I think in her family tree, her brother was getting curious about some stuff. They started getting these ancestry kits, but it was actually a National Geographic kit that he did. She got me one of those for Christmas several years ago. And I did it.
It was more about a very general kind of thing, where you trace the globe in a way. That was interesting. Then a couple of years later, she gave me an ancestry.com gift and I filled that out, sent it in, and I forgot about it. Then I get an email saying, “Okay, your results are up.” If somebody else is in the system, then they show you what kind of matches you had. With very low expectations, I went into it and discovered, “Oh my God, I've got a first cousin, 99.99% match.” Which is pretty for sure. I started corresponding with him and discovering he lives in Toronto. And I'm going to be coming to Toronto for a function in December of 2019, right before COVID. “Would you feel like meeting?” He's like, “Sure, love to.” I met him and his family and his wife and his kids and his mother-in-law. My wife was with me. We really hit it off and it was a very emotional meeting.
After about an hour or two, he said, "Okay, are you ready?” And I said, “Yeah.” Then he pulls pictures of my birth mother out and shows her face to me. At his point it’s a very existential moment in one's life where I just never thought it would happen. Looking into her eyes in this way and having no words for this and…. I'm getting choked up thinking about that moment because it was very intense. I didn't have words for it.
Based on that meeting, my cousin Marc and I became really close friends. Then with the pandemic, people are dying. Older people are dying in particular. I knew that my birth mother was alive. Marc was feeling this renewed responsibility to go, “I need to be in better touch with my aunt because now I have this other reason.” But yet now he’s got a secret.
When you're talking about adoption in the sixties and with immigrant families moving to Canada, it makes ancestry’s business model very problematic for people. How does one proceed? You've got a very open-minded person who's of my generation, who's in a way looking for a family member. And then you've got the other side of it. Then you’ve got COVID looming on everybody in those early days where we didn't know what was up. So I wrote my birth mother a letter and told her about my life and I said, “Thanks for giving me life.”
I didn't hear from her. Then I wrote her another letter a year and a half later, because I'd moved and I wanted to just give her my new address. She wrote me back that time. I got a letter and it arrived the day before my birthday. I opened it when my wife got home. She's like, “Give me a call sometime.” The next day was my birthday. I called her on my birthday. We talked for several hours.
So you got the story?
Well, not in the sense that like, “Here’s everything you would want to know.” It was more like I got to know her.
It wasn’t about why she did it?
No, it wasn't like that because she's in her eighties and she's buried a huge portion of her youth. A lot of years have gone by. It's a delicate thing to pick that apart. I think if I'd experience this meeting in my twenties or thirties, the outcome would have not landed as well as it did for me. I've had enough years on the planet where I thought about this a lot and read a lot of books about it and sort of tried to educate myself on the potential perils. There was a show on NBC that came out a few years ago called This Is Us, which was basically chronicling my life as a transracial adoptee and finding a birth parent. I identified with that show so intensely that it was an emotional journey for me in every episode. In another way, it was like a primer for this reality.
My birth mother and I carried on, having phone conversations. Then I finally just posed it to her, “Would you like to maybe meet in person?” She's like, “Yeah, that'd be cool.” It was kind of unenthusiastic, but like, “Sure, I'm curious about this guy.” I went and I met with her and I spent probably seven hours with her. It was one of those things where you're either going to be done in a half hour or you're going to be there until sundown.
This meeting happened at the end of May of 2022. My birthday's in January. The conversations were happening all through the first part of 2022, while I was beginning to write music for this album. I met her in person and then I came home.
I had another three weeks of disciplined effort to get the music finished because we were just preparing to go on tour for three weeks and record right after the tour. There was still music that I needed to write and collect my whole vision for how it was all coming together. A lot of music got written in that those days right after I came home and I'm sitting processing this very weird experience.
It's all folded in together because it was from the top of 2022 when I first heard her voice and started writing music. It’s a theme that's really weaving through the whole album because there's that six-month period of me rediscovering myself, if you will.
There's one cut on the album, which you then reprise at the end, called “Lost and Found,” I was thinking that could be the name of the album too.
Yeah, I thought about it. I was going to do that, but then somebody just released a book called Lost and Found.
In addition to your trio of John Hebert and Clarence Penn, you also have the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and a koto virtuoso, Yoko Reikano Kimura, who plays on that first version of “Lost and Found.” It really has such a melancholy feel to it.
I’m writing for film a lot these days. In terms of the way I think about writing for film where you've got an encapsulated emotion, there's a lot of that that's weaving into my concept and reactions to the music as I'm creating that in this album. That one I know has that main theme to a film kind of feeling.
You asked me earlier, “Well, did you get a lot of answers? Did you find out why you were put up for adoption?” It’s like you still have tons of mysterious things floating around, but in a way that a really great movie doesn't actually answer everything for you. You walk out going, there's three or four possible endings to this. Rather than a movie that's all so neat and tidy. There's no mystery here. Like every person got the same movie, which sometimes is maybe what you're looking for. But other time it's nice to have this thought-provoking conclusion, that's not a full conclusion.
So the idea that there's this lost and found nature of a relationship or of a lineage or an interpersonal dynamic such as a child and a parent, maybe you don't ever have all the answers and sometimes you have to be able to smile at that. Because I feel extremely grateful with what I’ve been given. I couldn't have imagined a better outcome in many ways, despite the fact that it's not like I'm super close at this point because my birth mother's still processing this. It’s like she's gone through a serious trajectory over the last four years of realizing this person's out here. I mean, not that she didn't, I think she just had sort of conveniently been able to sort of block it out.
In some ways, you should be really happy that you're getting to know her in a way that’s different from so many children of my generation with their parents.
It's bonuses on a lot of really bizarre levels because I feel extremely blessed as a person, because I came from a very loving family. The relationship I had with the parents that raised me and my siblings is very close. The irony of all this is such that the year that I meet my birth mother is the same year that my adoptive mother died. I went into the year with one mother, I come out with one mother and it's this kind of switcheroo.
I even had the opportunity to tell my mother that I met my birth mother. At that point in her life, she was suffering from dementia. Her short term memory was shot. You could have the same conversation a hundred times. But I told her about this and she was able to look me in the eye and go, “I'm really happy for you.” She processed it. I'm grateful on the on those levels. But I'm also super grateful because of these cousins because the first cousin I mentioned that was the initial connection then connected me to another first cousin. In my birth mother's family there were four children. This cousin Mark’s mother is one of them.
And then another cousin, Tara, her mother is another one of the three sisters. I met her last summer. Ironically, her mother had just died and she was back home in Hamilton, Ontario where she grew up, which is where my birth mother lived, to have a celebration of her life. I happened to be there for a gig on the same weekend. I'm never in Hamilton for a gig. I haven't done a gig in Hamilton since the start of my career. So we arranged to meet. She didn't come to the gig because it was just too much going on in the family, but we met afterwards and we hit it off.
I met a couple of her kids. What was really fascinating about both is that now I have these two new close friends, cousins that I didn't have in my life. They’ve really embraced me into their lives and I've reciprocated as well. It's this wonderful bonus family that I've inherited that I was looking for, but I was content if I didn't find them. Then there’s the complications around having a relationship with a birth parent that's aging, but also you’re unpacking their secret. That's complicated. This next generation doesn't inherit any of that necessarily. These cousins don't have any of that other than how do they explain this new cousin to their family that nobody knew about for 50 years.
What's really wild about that is that in both of those cases, I could have easily met them in my twenties. Like Mark and I share a close friend. We went to the same Christmas parties in our early college years. We know we have mutual friends, but not that many mutual friends, but that one mutual friend was enough that the degree of separation with one person. At the time, he knew I was adopted and knew I was looking, but it never occurred to him…there wouldn't have been a way to necessarily piece it together, I don't think.
Then the other cousin, Tara, she was living in Montreal when I was living in Montreal. She worked at this club called The Rising Sun, which is a club that I went to see Dizzy Gillespie at. Dizzy was only there for one night. She was working that night. I was literally in the same room as her, when she was working at this club that Dizzy was playing in. If we'd met then, the complications probably would have been in a way disastrous. For me, when I don't have words for this sort of experience, the best I can do is a title for a song or an album. And then the rest of it is the feelings that are revealed to me through what this is like. I guess for me, it's similar to writing for a film because the composer's not talking, not reading a paragraph to the audience. They're writing music.
You first met Ingrid, the saxophonist, maybe a decade ago at UCLA
No, we’ve known each other even longer. I think I first met Ingrid when she was still living in the UK. We've known each other and played with her husband Tom [Rainey]. We’ve been in the same orbit for a long time. At UCLA, when we were doing the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute. We had this really wonderful week amongst the many other composers that week at UCLA. You have this wonderful kinship when you have these artistic breakthroughs in a way, in the same space. That was kind of this shared thing.
Then she reached out to me and said, “Hey, do you want to do an album together?” This was during COVID and I was like, “Oh, that'd be fantastic.” That was a really wonderful focal point to be able to have some challenging, inspired music to learn. We made her record and that was the first time we'd ever played together despite knowing each other for a long time. We really had a wonderful time making that album, and we're building a musical community with the two of us. I said, “Do you want to play on this next record?” And she was like, “Sure.” That was an easy connection to make as far as adding her as a guest on the album.
With Yoko, I had a project with koto that I'd been developing, and was able to tour and do some work with several years ago. She came in as a sub at one point. Unfortunately, I lost steam for that project, but still wanted to continue collaborating with her because I like her energy and love her musicianship. We become good friends. She had done a gig with Unison right before we made the last record. I was already, at that point in 2019, thinking about the next record in a way. We did a short tour before we made The reMission. The last gig was in New York at Greenwich House. I invited Yoko to play on the gig. I invited Ralph Alessi and the cellist Hank Roberts. We did versions of the music, but exploring in a slightly different way with these three additional musicians. That was the icebreaker for this recording and Yoko being part of it. For a while, she had a koto that was stored at my apartment in Harlem. We got together and she's like, “Can I just leave this here?” I was like, “Sure.” I was wanting to find a home for the musical relationship that we were developing. That was the other artistic expectation I had of myself or I was putting on myself, as I was creating this album that was really started back five years ago.
I also want to talk to you about your work as an educator. You're at the University of Michigan. How do you think jazz education has changed or evolved since you were a student?
It's changed because there are more places to do it. The students have changed, the music has changed, and the parameters around higher education have changed, Certainly the cost is ridiculous. And I think the nature of what a student is looking for feels different to me than when I was coming up, going to school. I think that a jazz student now maybe is like somebody who goes to law school, who’s not intending to become a lawyer, but appreciates the training that law school gives them.
It probably varies from school to school, because before I came out here to Michigan, I was teaching at The New School for 17 years. And it's a much different school student population there than we have here. We have students that are very serious about more than one subject. Students that do dual degrees in varied disciplines, from neuroscience to environmental science, to political science, to design, to education. It’s running this wild gamut. That’s a different kind of pressure point on how you educate someone in terms of the context of what their greater education is. Like learning how to play and learning how to make smart musical decisions instead of just sort of thinking about an idiomatic education in a straight line or some sort of chronology, I find that I have to grapple with those various demands, at least specifically here at U of M, because there are a lot of students studying this music all over the world.
When I came out of school, I wanted to be able to play with someone. I was fortunate that I was able to get the attention of people like Steve Coleman and be mentored in the old school way that for people coming into the music nowadays, doesn’t exist. And they're not even thinking about it that way.
One interesting thing about your early jazz and music education is that you studied with Oscar Peterson when he was teaching at York University there in Toronto. That’s quite an interesting credit. What did you take away from that experience with him?
I learned that the sound is in you and it's not in the piano. I thought it had to be in the piano and I was totally disappointed to discover that he sounded like Oscar Peterson on a really beat-up upright. Okay, I don't have that excuse. That was one huge thing because we didn't do like what might one might imagine when they read that I've studied with Oscar. We didn't do like, “Oh, I'll see you for your lesson next Thursday.” It wasn't that kind of relationship because he was still touring a lot. He would come in and he worked with the ensembles that I got to play in. I was fortunate enough to have those one on ones with a group of students pretty frequently.
But you were the piano player.
Yes, I was the piano player.
So there was a little extra pressure.
It also meant that I had to get off the piano bench so that he could either play with the group or demonstrate something. In a lot of ways, just seeing him and being close to him and listening to him mentor and listening to him nurture and also just seeing him as a human was really interesting for me as someone who basically came into the music because of him. As a young Black kid growing up in Canada and knowing of his existence as a giant of jazz piano, I was drawn to the music because of his presence in a lot of ways.
So to talk to him and humanize him in a way was helpful because I was able to try to humanize musicians and their contributions in a way that maybe you don't get that as a young person looking at the cover of DownBeat or JazzTimes. You just don’t have that context as a young person. You're so impressionable. I think that that was intimidating for sure, but grounding in a lot of ways that I still hopefully carry with me, particularly as someone who's influencing a lot of young musicians as they come through my door.
Oscar was amazing because the impression he left on me was there was this simplicity to the message in a way. It’s so obvious, but you have to learn the music. That was it. I remember thinking, “Well, duh.” But at the same time going, “Oh, it's so much deeper than that.” You're not just memorizing the chords. I still struggle to live up to that expectation of his in a way, but that certainly doesn't go away.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
