World-fusion musician and globetrotter Scott Jeffers likes to play it by ear, literally.
“It’s generally the music that guides me to a place.” Jeffers said. “The music will lead me somewhere, and there I’ll be inspired by different melodies and different sounds.”
On Friday, June 23, the music will guide the Arizona musician and his band, Traveler, to the Sea of Glass Center for the Arts, where he will bring with him a bricolage of multicultural sounds.
“It’s definitely like taking a trip,” Jeffers said. “Our music is kind of like if you went on a vacation through Europe and Turkey, through the Middle East, Ireland, Scotland, and down to Morocco. That’s kind of what it would be, like a musical journey.”
Jeffers does his homework. In the last handful of years, he’s explored Ecuador, India, Hawaii, the United Kingdom, Jordan and Egypt, all of which he e-scrapbooks on his travel blog. In one busy June, he checks in from the cliffs of Ireland’s Seven Sisters mountains and the inside of the Egyptian pyramids.
It sounds like a lot of tedious planning, but not for the composer, who usually picks a destination mere weeks before jetting off, and almost always touches down without a hotel booked.
“I tend to follow my nose,” Jeffers said. “I find that’s the best way.
“I just get there, and I start looking. I end up getting places that I would never get unless I was actually there talking to people.”
Be it by ear or by nose, the musician prefers to improvise. His last album, 2021’s “Kings of India,” was heavily inspired by an elephant festival he would have missed if not for a stranger’s spur-of-the-moment invitation.
“I went to the festival and there were 50,000 people that were all Indian except for maybe four people that I saw the entire day.” Jeffers said. “And there were a hundred elephants all painted and dressed up in jewels as they marched down the streets. It was just incredible, and I would have never found that just by looking in a book.
“I know this sounds kind of ‘floating’, but as an artist you want to follow whatever guides you. You don’t want to think too book-like or regimented. You want to follow that feeling, that spirit.”
The same philosophy leads Jeffers to his compositions, which find him as spontaneously as his travel plans do. The musician doesn’t sit behind a desk to write, but instead composes in the moment, pulling influence from somatic experience and consulting his senses for musical direction.
“If you’re standing on a cliff somewhere, and you can smell the vineyards below, those smells and sights and feelings are all captured within the melody that you created there,” Jeffers said.
“I’d bought a wooden flute while I was in India. I was kind of playing around with it at the elephant festival, and this little melody kept coming to me. It just worked with my fingers, and I said ‘whoa, this is a cool melody’. I kept playing that, and it just became the song.”
Jeffers’ on-the-run style of composition allows him to fuse together the music of each place as he travels. In 2019’s “Out of the Dust,” he incorporates sounds from Egypt, Jordan and Scotland. He even stirs Mongolian throat singing into the mix, an experiment born out of a rented wood cabin in Pitlochry.
The reason? He didn’t have a didgeridoo.
“I thought, ‘Ooh, Mongolian throat singing,’” he said. “I started making that sound while stomping on the floor and playing the fiddle, and that was the magic moment that it all came together, and I said, ‘Wow, this is a combination of different sounds that just seems to work.’
“I would say that’s what my talent as an artist is, having a vision of how to fit these different styles and sounds together and make them palatable for a Western audience. I think that deeply rooted ethnic music tends to all sound like the same song to a foreigner. So you fuse different things into it, and you still keep the deeply rooted part, but now you’re bringing different colors forward.”
The musician inherits his instinct for this sort of synthesis from his own cultural fusion. Jeffers’ father is Scottish American, his mother Lebanese, and growing up in Arizona, there was always music in the house. His family’s cultural identity was formative, according to the artist.
“I think my mind developed to hear those sounds.” Said Jeffers. “So, they came naturally to me.”
“When I was playing guitar in my high school band, we did a song called ‘Perfect Strangers’ by Deep Purple, which has an exotic scale pattern in the middle. When I would solo over it, I felt how much easier playing in the exotic scale worked for my brain than just playing straightforward rock.
“That was kind of a clue that this was the sound that just works for me. I started writing more exotic music, and that developed into even more exotic sounds until, eventually, the calling became too clear, that this was my road.”
Traveler
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 23
WHERE: Sea of Glass Center for the Arts, 330 E. Seventh Street, Tucson
COST: Tickets start at $7
INFO: 520-210-4448, theseaofglass.org
