Jacob Hand / Northern Spy Records
In January 2008, jazz drummer Jeremy Cunningham's little brother Andrew was murdered in a home invasion robbery. Two men, armed with AK-47s, broke into the younger Cunningham's Cincinnati apartment and killed him after his roommate escaped. This tragic, violent loss was the catalyst for Cunningham's new album The Weather Up There, a raw document of grief that's one of the most affecting jazz albums in recent memory.
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The tragic events that inspired this record happen in 2008 when you were living in Cincinnati. What brought you to Chicago?
I graduated from the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music's jazz program. I was touring around with these and playing in an avant-garde hip hop band. I was floating around during this time. It was the same year and my brother had died and it was just tough all around: brother died, I got testicular cancer, which I had thankfully caught early, and then my girlfriend at the time broke up. It was like one thing after another. I needed to be touring all the time so I could have an escape which was necessary. I started dating the person who'd become my wife and we decided to live in the same city so we moved to Chicago in 2009. I had friends here who were already playing here but I didn't know anything about Chicago music.
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I wasn't. I was just trying to push through. I was a bit of a mess, drinking too much and trying to cope. Playing music with people was definitely helping. I talked to my aunt about how I was feeling pretty numb and hopeless a lot. The aftermath of my brother's death really made me distrust human beings. We're really capable of doing terrible things. She then recommended a grief counselor near the city and it was really helpful. She did this technique called EMDR, which was originally used and really successful in helping Vietnam veterans who had serious trauma from the war. And she did that to me. It reprocesses your memories in a way and your perception of events that have happened to you. After that one session, I walked out of there feeling like I could see color in the world again. I felt a little bit lighter and that really helped me. I don't know where I would necessarily be without that because that's sort of like took me out of something that was really holding me down. A tune that I wrote on my album, "It's Nothing" is sort of about that feeling I had before that therapy.The way you started conceptualizing this album also came from a conversation with drummer Mike Reed, who's also on the LP. What did he tell you?
I was hanging out with Mike at this bar called Hungry Brain and I was telling him about my plans to write a record about my brother's death and how I wanted to focus on what happens to a family and a community after the fact. He listened and said, "you're really just going to write a record about how your brother died? What are you going to tell your newborn daughter about your brother when she's old enough to know about him? It's not just going to be about the horrible way he died." That made me think of all the really fond memories of riding BMX bikes and skateboards, playing in the woods, and listening to records. He said, "shouldn't that also be in there too?"That perspective shaped how I approached this record and changed the entire concept: it's not enough to just focus on the loss. You can't see a person's life just from the circumstances of their death. Like "1985," which focuses on the good memories, the song "Hike" was written when I was walking with my daughter and feeling lucky that I had some beautiful things in my life. That's what the album has become for me: a picture of his life in the best way that I could do it.What was it like interviewing your family, your friends, and your ex about Andrew's death for the album?
I started interviewing family members and friends because I knew I needed a wider perspective for this to make sense. Cause it's just not, it's not just me, it's all of these people who were affected by this. It was tough. To hear people that you really care about and you love talk about how they're still affected, you feel some solidarity but you also want to take that pain away somehow. Losing someone is devastating and it takes a long time. Everyone is still processing it.After 12 years, I knew it was necessary to get their voices because it's not just about my reflection, it needed to be about their reflection of what happened. Having all those voices on it would let the listener be able to actually feel some of that weight that they're carrying around and think about this issue. After Sandy Hook, I thought for sure we would make changes in this country but nothing has happened. There needs to be sweeping federal legislation.