With a choral project and new orchestral album, Louis Cole pulls magic out of the air

On a recent Friday evening, a hooded figure in dark sunglasses climbed the pulpit at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. Just below, a few dozen singers gathered at the front of the packed sanctuary, conducted by a woman on stilts — elevated to see the choir in full.

This was a first for Louis Cole, the man in the pulpit. Cole is known primarily as a drummer, and his music over the past decade has fallen in the nexus of jazz, funk and rock, albeit with a flair that’s hard to categorize. But now, Cole had given himself a new musical challenge, which might be best described by the tagline he included on the poster for this concert: “Louis Cole attempts to write new music for a choir.”

“It is a new thing for me,” said Cole in an interview with All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang. “I’ve always stacked my voice for my own harmonies, for my own music. But that’s just me by myself. It’s so different having a group of people, tuning with each other, singing with each other in the same space.”

The night of choral music wasn’t the only new musical territory Cole had been testing out recently. He also just released a new album of orchestral music, called nothing, which was recorded with the conductor Jules Buckley and the Dutch orchestra Metropole Orkest.

All Things Considered caught up with Cole in the sanctuary of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles as he was prepping for his show of choral music, and probed the musician about his creative process, the challenges of arranging for an orchestra, and the classic look of a Halloween-style skeleton suit.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

Ailsa Chang: You never get bored. You’re always making sure you don’t get bored, it seems like.

Louis Cole: Yeah, I don’t have any vices, I just like making music. That’s how I grab… I don’t want to sound pretentious, but it’s how I grab magic out of the boring air around me. I think that’s my vice. That’s all I do. I mean, that’s really what I enjoy.

Chang: This new album is unlike anything else you’ve ever done. You worked with a Dutch orchestra, the Metropole Orkest, and the conductor Jules Buckley. Had you ever written arrangements for an orchestra before?

Cole: No, I never had. I’d written arrangements for little sections of, you know, string players or horns or something like that. But never a full orchestra, which is really a different thing. It’s like everyone, all the instruments playing at once. I’ve really spent a long time listening to music like this, but I don’t really know how to do it. But I’m gonna just do it.

Chang: You’re also this really prolific collaborator. Like, beyond this album with Jules Buckley and the Metropole Orkest, you’ve worked with Thundercat, the pianist Brad Mehldau, your longtime collaborator Genevieve Artadi, loads of other people. And it made me wonder — you seem to have such a specific musical vision for each of your songs, how do you stay true to that vision while incorporating the musical brains of all these other people?

Cole: Because I’m a gigantic control freak [who’s] really hard to work with. That’s how I do it. That’s my secret.

Chang: So the people you work with just put up with your dominance.

Cole: Oh yeah. Definitely. It’s like, "Oh I have this vision, it needs to be this, otherwise I’m just gonna do it myself." Usually when I’m collaborating with someone, like even in these orchestra rehearsals with Metropole, even if they changed one note, I’d be like "What’s that? What was that? Can we go back? What is that? Who did that?" You know? And then I’m like, "Can we change it back?"

Chang: But you keep working with bigger and bigger groups of people. Why would you do that, like include more and more minds and musicians into your world when, in this day and age, you could just manufacture all of that?

Cole: I still think that the energy of a group and the sound of a group can never be fully emulated with… I dunno, I’m gonna sound like an old guy… like computers, digital technology. Like, I think there is some magic in there that really does come across still. And I think there’s also the experience of doing it. Working with a group of people, it’s just like, "Wow, I really love doing this. This is fun. I spiritually feel good doing this." But the sound of it, too. I think there is some magic that’s actually tangible in there, and whether you notice it right away or not, I do think it is in there, and I think it’s special.

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