Lessons Learned by Baron Arnold

Perspective Piece on “Lessons Learned”, written by Matt Adomeit (Bassist)

There is a story behind the making of the album “Lessons Learned” that is indicative to me of Baron’s creative process and the meaning behind his music. Throughout the summer of 2020 we would meet regularly to play duo - double bass and trombone - and work through the music Baron intended to record with the full band in the fall. We got to a piece Baron calls “Meditation,” which starts with a complicated and dissonant solo bass introduction. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what to make of it. Then Baron gave me a simple explanation: the introduction was meant to convey the cacophony of thoughts and anxiety that can overwhelm us to the point where we feel the need to meditate. In other words, meditation was just the effect, and my role in the intro was to convey the cause. It clicked.

Instead of feeling an obligatory faithfulness to notes on a page, I could now express all the emotions that we’d both been feeling, and often suppressing, for months. I played that piece differently than I ever would have partly because I now knew and understood the motivation behind Baron’s composition, but mostly because he gave me permission to be myself. This spirit was still there when the full band assembled months later. Baron brought in six compositions, and crucially he wanted us to interpret those songs together, and to each contribute part of our authentic personalities. It was a liberating feeling.

Although every song on the recording has a highly specific backstory, they do not have a chronological plot and the meaning is rarely literal. “Go High,” for example, draws its title from Michelle Obama campaign speeches during the 2016 presidential election, but their uplifting words only make their mark on the song indirectly. Rather, I think of each piece as its own tone poem, a rumination on a deeply personal theme that we can explore as a band. Many of these themes have been the subject of conversations between me and Baron for years, ever since we both immigrated from the United States to Germany in 2013.

The themes and emotions that I hear throughout “Lessons Learned” are universal, but often complex. It’s one thing to compose about something as concrete as anxiety and relaxation, but how do you interpret a song about the struggle for acceptance? As a bassist, how do I support a piece differently knowing it is about hope, or meaningless gestures, or unhealed scars? These are not easy questions to answer, but the respectful and curious conversations that we had on these topics, first in duo with Baron and then with the addition of Elé, Joschka, and Igor was the lifeblood of this album and its greatest asset.

Baron Arnold fuses contemporary European elements with an already well informed conception of American Jazz and Soul.

Debut Album "Lessons Learned"