Episode 2.2 - Alonso Malik Pirio
Episode 2 features Alonso Malik Pirio, a Grammy-winning performer, composer, conductor, and orchestrator. We talk with Alonso about his compositional process, finding inspiration, and winning a Grammy! Full transcripts are created by Hollyn Slykhuis and are listed below!
To learn more about Alonso and all recommended groups and resources, check out the links below!
Full Transcript
Carrie Blosser 0:03
Welcome to Diversify the Stand. Together we build a community to listen and learn from the stories and experiences of passionate musicians. I'm Carrie Blosser
Ashley Killam 0:12
And I'm Ashley Killam. In our second season, we talk with musicians, performers, educators, historians, and entrepreneurs to expand how we think of the music we perform and follow non-traditional career paths. We are so excited for our guest today, Alonso Malik Pirio is a three time Grammy nominated artist, composer, director, orchestrator and educator. Alonso is a recent graduate of UCLA, and he's known for writing music from a variety of styles, everything from jazz, R&B, and rock to Afro-Cuban funk and hip hop. So we are so excited to have you here and to talk with you today, Alonso.
Alonso Malik Pirio 0:49
Thanks for having me. I am honored to finally be on a podcast. I've lived in LA almost my entire life, but this is my first podcast.
Carrie Blosser 0:58
Well, we're very glad to have you and to be your first podcast out to the world. So we wanted to ask you a little bit about your background and how you got started in music.
Alonso Malik Pirio 1:07
So growing up as a kid, I was always involved in a lot of different kind of creative stuff. Like it wasn't just music—I drew a lot, I wanted to be at one point, I wanted to be like a film director. At one point, I wanted to be an animator, a visual artist. And once I started taking piano lessons at around like six years old, that's kind of when music really took its course, even then, so I grew up, we lived in Virginia for six years, me and my family. And then we moved out to Los Angeles. And when I got to Los Angeles, I was still doing a lot of art stuff. I even started—I had a little child acting career for a couple years. I had an agent, and I have a resume of like six credits or something like that. But that was, I was not into that at all. Yeah, we kind of dropped that. And music kind of just took over. I started out with piano, I ended up later taking on saxophone, drums, started singing a little bit. Yeah, and all through that my main instrument was definitely piano. And my mom, oh, it's worth mentioning—My mom is also a musician. She's a teacher at Cal State Northridge. And she grew up in Kenya, she grew up during the British occupation colonialization of, the tail end of that of Kenya. And she, when she was growing up, she was going to, most of her experience with music was in these like British boarding schools within the country. And it was all very, very, very, very stale, a very stale experience. She felt like there's kind of a contrast between the music that she really enjoyed listening to and the music that she was actually playing. So she wanted me to have a much more well-rounded kind of musical experience. So in finding me a piano teacher, she wanted to make sure it was someone who encouraged me to improvise, someone who did, like, jazz, pop that kind of all that stuff. And I think through being able to do those things and taking those influences in, that led to a lot of me composing, is just being encouraged to improvise. A lot of my composing just comes from me messing around with anything, I don't know. If it's a piece of classical music that I'm working on, or if it's just something that's coming straight out of my head, I love just, like, messing around and coming up with new ideas. So where did we get to? I think we got to like, around, let's say the start of middle school. Yeah, so I'm taking piano, I'm taking drums, taking saxophone. That's all good. I think it was sometime around eighth grade where I totally decided, okay, like, I can't imagine doing anything else besides music. I didn't know exactly what kind of capacity I wanted to do it in because I kind of just loved doing it all. But I've always been really interested with the idea of music as like a storytelling device. I think also coming from a background wanting to do animation and directing and that kind of stuff. I still wanted to participate in that process, but I think music is kind of my vehicle for that sort of thing. So from there on out, I just set out. I really wanted to be a film composer. I applied to schools, not for film composition, but just for composition in general. So went to UCLA did a lot of stuff there. Lots of composing, lots of performing with the wind ensemble, the Afro-Cuban ensemble, the chorale, the Chamber Singers, we got ourselves a Grammy and here I am.
Ashley Killam 4:42
And could you talk a little about how you approach writing for, you know, writing for film score versus getting into writing for concert music that you're doing more now?
Alonso Malik Pirio 4:50
Yeah, so film scoring and concert music. Yeah, they do feel very different. I think in terms of film scoring, there's a lot of consideration put into storytelling for example, like I'm not just on my own here, I'm— although you can write programmatic works within concert music. I think I really love being able to have a film to look at and to be able to kind of, there's a relationship there between the music and the film. And sometimes I'm guiding the film, sometimes the film's guiding my decisions, that kind of stuff. But I love the collaborative process. I mean, there's lots of different considerations to be put in. One thing that influences my composing, which might not be the same for everybody, but I always really like when a film has its color done and finalized by the time that I'm writing because I feel like the color and the mood of the scene can really impact some of the sounds I pick, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think in terms of writing concert music, that, I mean, the inspiration there, it's, yeah, it's a different process of finding inspiration. Because it's not just someone else's project. It's just kind of like me doing my thing, whether it be for a commission or just a piece on my own. For both of them, I think, I love to think of things in terms of rhythm. Like a scene in a film has a sort of rhythm to it. And I've got to figure out, okay, what's the, you know, 3/4 here, maybe 7/8 here? What are the tempos? How do we line this up? And how do we make it flow and feel cohesive? And I feel like, as I'm composing, I think a lot very rhythmically as well. I think that comes from playing drums. Even before I started taking drum set lessons I was always just like, drumming on stuff just, like, with my hands. Yeah, I think rhythmically, like, there's a piece I wrote, one of my favorite melodies that I've ever wrote. I was taking a lesson my sophomore year at UCLA. And this composition teacher I had, Mark Carlson, he was all about, like, coming up with the rhythm of a melody—well, that's not what he was all about. He was all about taking a bunch of different approaches to creativity. And this assignment was about coming up with the rhythm to a melody at first before you come up with the notes. And I think I really love that approach. I don't know why, maybe it has something to do with like, the rhythm of how we talk and how we speak. But I feel like thinking about it in that way. And even when I'm playing jazz, like when I'm improvising, I feel like I get the most success when I'm thinking about rhythm first, then everything else comes out afterwards, as I've built that foundation.
Carrie Blosser 7:27
I love that. That's awesome.
Alonso Malik Pirio 7:29
Thank you.
Carrie Blosser 7:29
We were gonna ask you a little bit about—you talked about it just a minute ago. But about kind of like things that influence your writing, like genres, or like you're just talking about, like focusing on rhythms, but we'd love to hear more about like, kind of what influences your unique style.
Alonso Malik Pirio 7:44
Sure, yeah. So I did not grow up listening to a lot of like, classical music. It was kind of funny, I felt like when I got to UCLA, I was kind of immersed in this world where everybody was, you know, they're listening to the greats, the big, the big guys, the big—and I was totally unfamiliar with a lot of it. I mean, I love writing for orchestra. I love writing for kind of western classical instruments. But I think a lot of my influences come from outside of the world that a lot of the people I was surrounded by, were not immersed in, necessarily. So I listened to a lot of, a lot of my music taste comes from my mom, too, but a lot of like, 70s soul, R&B. Yeah, like Afro-Cuban stuff. Recently, I've been listening to a lot of African music from just around the whole continent, trying to get inspiration from just picking up little ideas from like, various places. I have been very fortunate to also do a good bit of traveling in my life. I've traveled to, like, Mexico, the Caribbean, Kenya, where my mom is from, France, those kinds of things. And I think being able to, I'm just really interested in, like, lots of different cultures and what people come up with and how we can take these certain things and kind of fuse them together. I think, I don't know if it comes from like, I'm mixed race myself, I have a lot of different like Kenya, France, Spain, Italy, I've got a little different, I feel like, cultures within me and in addition to being from America, spending time on the East coast or the West coast, that kind of stuff. I think I just love taking inspirations from different things and kind of mixing them up together and creating something new, something that I haven't really heard before.
Ashley Killam 9:45
That's really cool. You always hear of bringing out a certain culture, you know, in their music, and working to like pinpoint one culture in one area. But you hear of less, like, the whole melding and blending of it which I think is super cool.
Alonso Malik Pirio 10:01
Yeah, I feel like that's where things are, the direction things are moving into, I think. I don't know if either of you listen to much Jacob Collier, but he literally says he's like, I don't believe in genres. Music is music. These are all sounds, like, total emancipation of any of these kinds of like boundaries between different styles, and that kind of stuff, which I think is really cool.
Ashley Killam 10:24
Before continuing with questions, Alonzo sent us the second movement for his Sonata for Flute and Piano.
You know, with your background and everything you've done so far, do you have any advice for other composers?
Alonso Malik Pirio 14:14
There's so many ways to answer it, too. I think no matter who you are, if you want to be a composer, I mean, I feel like a lot of people, a lot of these boxes can kind of create, like, limitations within people's minds. Like, are you a proper composer? Am I like, ooh, do I need to like write stuff down on, you know, staff paper? Am I a proper composer if I'm working in, like, a digital audio workstation, like there's so many different things like have you worked with an orchestra? Do you have a degree from this university, you know, how high is the degree whatever, like, all you have to do is literally like write music. Like just like make something. That's all there is to it. And if you want to call yourself a composer, a songwriter. I mean, the labels are I feel like are just kind of where you feel comfortable. Exploring kind of what limiting beliefs people have about— because I've had people come up to me and ask me questions about being a composer and they’re like, oh, I wish I could be a composer. It's like, well, what if he can? I don't know, you don't even need, like, an instrument, you can just like sing something. And if you write a melody, that's, it's yours. I don't know, copyright is a thing. But yeah, you know, you've written something. Yeah and it really, I think it really just starts from there. But also, in addition to formulating a career, I don't know. It really depends what people want out of music. There's so many different avenues people go, especially with film composing. Some people come from universities, some people come from, like, rock bands. Some people start from, like, doing EDM and that sort of stuff. Like I went, the more the university route, because that's what I was more comfortable with. But now I'm just kind of navigating the space of like, I'm not a student anymore. I'm just, like, a guy, like, doing stuff. So I, yeah, it's been interesting. I think one thing for any composer and for anyone, but especially for creatives and people making music, or writing or doing anything, is just to learn more about the outside world, if that makes any sense. Because I feel like a lot of composers I've met, including myself, are very like inward, awkward people, and spend a lot of time inside their own heads, which is very cool. But I think, this is something I've thought about recently, is just like when I'm listening to, like, a piece of music, or watching a film or whatever, like, how does this engage with, like, my understanding of the world? Like, am I trying to push any boundaries? Like, how does this fit within the context of like, what we're all doing, instead of just like, oh, look at me and my creative spirit. I mean, that's awesome, too. But it's just, I feel like recently, especially since I've had a lot of time to like, sit with myself and think why I'm writing music, what kind of projects, say they be for film I want to work on or anything like that. And I think that, like recently, for example, I had at a performance with some friends, I'm in a band with. It was at a coffee shop in the valley in Los Angeles. And I hadn't heard, like, live music in I don't know how long, maybe like a whole year. And I just felt like everyone who showed up was, I felt like a sense of community. And I felt a sense of healing in that moment. And I feel like that's what a lot of people really need, especially now. So I think whatever I'm doing as I want to write music, moving forward, is trying to create sort of a sense of community or pushing boundaries of how people think, I think, thinking about why I write music is important, too.
Carrie Blosser 18:07
I think a lot of us that haven't made music with people in a while, it’s going to be a pretty emotional experience, I think when we finally get back, so I'm hoping to take that sense of community and, like, love of playing with other people and continue it past just the first few times that we play.
Alonso Malik Pirio 18:25
Totally.
Carrie Blosser 18:27
I'm sure everyone has the same, kind of, I don’t want to say struggle, but you know, when you're constantly gigging and playing, and you're just like hustling to make music, sometimes we lose a little bit of like, the joy of that community and that playing. So picking projects that you really care about and keeping that sense of community I think will be, that's like my goal for when I get to play with people again.
Alonso Malik Pirio 18:49
Doing things very fulfilling for the soul. Yeah.
Carrie Blosser 18:53
So as you mentioned earlier, we would love to hear about your experience, because you have now won a Grammy.
Alonso Malik Pirio 19:00
Yes, that is true. Yeah, I'll tell you a little bit about the project. So I'll start with going into senior year at UCLA. How it's structured is, for composition majors, is we have to do two years of large ensemble playing. And I play saxophone, I auditioned, and joined the wind ensemble for two years. And then the next year, I was just kind of like on my own. There was no, like, our major classes that everyone was talking to people in and that kind of stuff. There are all these two year classes and two year things that ended and junior year was just like a very, like, inward like, super, like, very lonely experience. And I think going into my senior year, I was like, okay, I want to join more groups, like I want to join the chorale. So I audition for the University Chorale, which is not just music majors, but it's just kind of everybody around campus who wants to join and can sing and that kind of stuff. So what we were putting on that first quarter of my senior year was this piece by my composition professor. He was my orchestration professor. And I think at the time he was head of the composition department at UCLA, his name is Richard Danielpour. He is, he's an amazing composer. The way he talks about music, he's very impassioned all the time. And it's very inspiring, which it was awesome to be able to put on a work by him because I had spent the previous year taking orchestration with him, learning about orchestrating, writing for choir, that kind of stuff. And then to actually sit with the music that he wrote and the stuff that he's been working on and kind of seeing that play. Yeah, it's crazy. So the Passion of Yeshua, it's this, I think, two hour long dramatic oratorio. So there's these different soloists that are playing. So it's about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Very, very light hearted subject matter. But he, his whole thing was taking it and talking about it from a more, like, Jewish perspective. Because I think he is Jewish himself. There were different characters. We have Jesus or Yeshua, there is a narrator there was—I'm blanking on some of the other characters, but the choir, right, the choir, I was in the choir, we played a bunch of different roles. Sometimes we were townsfolk shouting at Jesus, like crucify this man. He says, he's the son of God, like, how dare he, that kind of stuff. Sometimes we are more of like a spiritual element, like not something actually tethered to, like, the physical world. So it's cool being able to be in a choir and being able to fulfill those roles and sing some super awesome music. So that was, so we put that on at UCLA. Then I was aware that the Chamber Singers, which is the more kind of selective group, was going to be going to Buffalo to record it with some of the soloists we had at UCLA, and the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus, all directed by JoAnn Falletta. She is, she's awesome. She's a wonderful conductor. And so it's like, oh, that's super cool. I wasn't in the group that was going at the time. But over winter break, I think one of the tenors had quit Chamber Singers. And one of our directors was like, hey, do you want to join? And I was like, yes, let's do this! So yeah, so we raised some money on our own, to be able to fly to Buffalo and to be able to be housed and have money for food and all that kind of stuff. And we flew out there. This was, it's crazy, because the time difference between the recording and the Grammy was like two years, pretty much. So it was a lot of waiting. But yeah, I knew I had a good feeling about it. Because the composer Richard Danielpour, he's won a few Grammys for his works in the past, JoAnn Falletta had literally just won a Grammy like, with the Buffalo Philharmonic, right before we had left and gone and done the recording and stuff like that. I was like, okay, there's a lot of heavy hitters on this team. I feel like we can do it. And it was, yeah, it was an amazing experience, getting to work with a professional orchestra and meet all these new singers and come together on this piece, like the chorus was, like, 200 people, it was like, it was wild. And we performed it a couple times and did a patch session for any points where like, a ringtone went off, or someone coughed, or whatever so we could get that perfect take. And, yeah, then we just let it sit for a little bit, because we were unsure if JoAnn Falletta could win two Grammys back to back. So we set it aside for a year. And then we, yeah, I had totally forgotten about the project at this point, by the time that it got nominated. Because we're just so in the thick of COVID. And all this stuff going on in the world. I was just like, oh gosh, I was such, I was like a total wreck at this time. And I was, like, checking Facebook and I was like, oh, look at that. It got nominated for Grammy, just totally out of the blue. I was like, wow, time is still moving forward, like, things are still happening. This is insane. From there, yeah, so we got nominated for Best Choral Performance, Best Orchestral Engineering of a Classical Album, and I think Best Contemporary Classical Composition, yeah, I think that's what it was. And then yeah, I think it was mid-March. We didn't get, we got one of the Grammys and it was the Best Choral Performance, which is the thing I did, so like, this is awesome. I was worried that it was gonna win something that, like, wasn't directly related to me. But it just it feels so good that it's the thing that I performed. I won't be getting a Grammy Award, but I might be getting a certificate or something like that, which is super exciting. So yeah, crazy process. It took basically two and a half years from me deciding to join the Chorale to this moment, at least for me, it's probably been like a 6, 10, 15 year journey for the composer Richard Danielpour. But yeah, at least for me, this is, it's crazy. I feel like this has taken so long, but I'm so happy to be able to be recognized in this way.
Ashley Killam 25:45
That's so cool. You need to order yourself, like, a little plastic Grammy. You know, now that you have won this Grammy, and are so busy with life, do you have any current projects or things you're working on that you'd like to share a bit about?
Alonso Malik Pirio 26:04
Yeah, sure. There's what I'm currently working on, what I'm currently in the process of finishing right now, is my first solo instrument, or my first—so I got commissioned by the trombonist. I think he's in, he works at Howard University, and he's in the US Naval Academy Band. His name is Myles Blakemore, and he's on Tik Tok. He decided to start making content this year and he's gone from like, 300 followers to like 5000. So he purchased my brass quintet piece last year. And I guess he really liked the trombone solo I wrote in it or something like that. And he was like, hey, I'm recording an album, I'd love to commission you for a work. So I'm, yeah, I'm writing him a solo tenor trombone piece. And, yeah, that's been a lot of fun so far. That's all I can disclose at this moment at least. I've got some other projects, but might not be able to talk about them at this at this point yet.
Ashley Killam 27:05
And then our final question that we ask everyone on this podcast is what's on your music stand this week? And how are you diversifying your stand?
Alonso Malik Pirio 27:14
How am I diversifying my stand? So this is more of kind of like a metaphorical stand, I'll say, because I haven't, I've been spending more time listening to music, transcribing music and that kind of stuff. So as a composer, I've been thinking about different ways, different kind of functions of music. So I've been listening recently to, in my exploration of lots of different African music, I’ve been listening to Fela Kuti. I don't know if either of you have listened to him, but he's a, if you've heard of the genre Afrobeat, he is like a pioneer of that. He did a lot of stuff in the later half of the 20th century. But in addition to his music being very cool and fun and all that kind of stuff, he also uses his music as a way to bring awareness to, like, political corruption, different stuff like that. So he's using, he's very involved in activism, but he's using his music— or he used, he's dead now—but he used his music as a way to bring awareness to certain things of, like, he's from Nigeria, the corruption of the Nigerian government. I mean, we could see that still last year, there's everything with SARS and that kind of stuff. I'm sure if Fela Kati was alive today he would be making songs about those very things. So it was just interesting learning about that. And I think, for me, that's diversifying my idea of what kind of a role music can play within people's lives. Because this music, it sounds on the surface like dance music, like he starts each song, it starts with like, 10 minutes of just, like, solos, like not even singing, just, like, solos and, like, grooves and dance music, and everyone's getting hyped and that kind of stuff. And then you start singing about just more serious topics, getting stuff out there, that kind of stuff. So I thought that was super cool. And I'd be interested to explore how I might be able to use my own musical voice to do something similar.
Carrie Blosser 29:16
Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Alonso Malik Pirio 29:19
Of course. Thanks for having me.
Carrie Blosser 29:20
Links to Alonso's website, plus the groups and projects they're a part of are listed in the podcast description.
Ashley Killam 29:27
Thank you for listening to Diversify the Stand. I'm Ashley.
Carrie Blosser 29:30
And I'm Carrie. If you'd like to support us and our projects, find us on social media and visit our website. We now have a store where you can pick up some Diversify the Stand gear.
Ashley Killam 29:40
And as always, a huge thank you to Trevor Weston and Whitney George for allowing us to use their compositions in our podcast. The musical introduction is Trevor's trumpet duet Fanfare for Changes, and the ending music is Whitney's Incantations for trumpet and piano. Both composers websites are listed in the podcast description.
Carrie Blosser 29:58
Until next week, what's on your stand?