We were lucky to catch up with Wilfrido Terrazas recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Wilfrido, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Throughout my career, I’ve been a part of many meaningful projects, of various kinds. But here I’d like to highlight my two recent solo records, which were released this year: The Torres Cycle (New Focus Recordings, 2022) and My Shadow Leads The Way (Transvection Ltd, 2022). They are very different from each other and that’s perhaps what’s interesting about them.
The Torres Cycle is my most ambitious project ever. It is a group of musical compositions which honors and celebrates the presence of the cardinal directions in human cultures: North, South, East, West, Above, Below, Center. It comprises seven pieces for different instrumental ensembles, and it took me seven years to complete. These compositions, as most music making I do, exist in the blurry in-between spaces of composition and improvisation, between what’s planned and what’s unplanned. And facing a pandemic, so many things were unplanned! We recorded basically one person at a time, and in various cities. 22 fantastic musicians, plus myself, participated in this record. And the result is outstanding, the music is so collaborative and vibrant, one could never guess that, for the most part, the people were not together in the same room. The level of musicianship is just tremendously high. I am very proud of the final album, which features gorgeous cover art by the fantastic Ensenada-based artist Esther Gámez and brilliant liner notes from my UCSD colleague, the amazing Amy Cimini. The one thing we were not able to do because of the pandemic was presenting the whole cycle in a concert, but we are now set to do that in the Winter of 2023.

In many ways, My Shadow Leads The Way is the opposite of The Torres Cycle. This one might be my most intimate record to date. My Shadow Leads The Way is a collaboration with the Mexico City-based award-winning poet Ricardo Cázares. The record takes great inspiration from a handful of poems from Cázares’ yet unpublished book ‘Latitud’. I selected a few poems and he had them translated into English (translator Joe Imwalle did an amazing job in conveying the strength and beauty of the originals). In the record, I use my spoken voice, saying the poems both in Spanish and in English, as the fundamental musical material, which then extends to several percussion and flute parts (my main instrument is the flute), all performed by myself. The result is a constant dialogue between the poems and their musical doppelgangers, in which the border between words and music constantly blurs and ultimately disappears. I recorded some of my most personal playing ever on this album.

And so there they are, two records that perhaps could not be more different from each other, and yet, they show different collaborative avenues that, in surprising ways, complete each other. It’s been an interesting and revealing journey. We are complex beings.

Wilfrido, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up in Ensenada, Mexico, and first discovered music making when I was 12 years old. I’ll be 48 in a few months, so I’d say it’s been a looooooong time. In such a long career I have of course gone through many phases, but I have been always interested in improvising and composing my own music, as well as collaborating with others and trying out stuff that is clearly outside the box. In recent years, being a professor at UCSD has provided me with an environment that has allowed me to further my ideas in exciting and unsuspected ways, and I am very thankful for that.

My music making ows a lot to several experimental ‘traditions’ (incidentally, UCSD is an institution which prides itself in fostering the “tradition of non-tradition”, which would be an appropriate way to describe what we do at our Music Department) ranging from Western concert/classical music, to jazz, latin jazz, creative music, and free improvisation. It is also heavily informed by many Mexican folk traditions and, in completely surprising ways, by wind instrument performance traditions from all over the world. It took me a long time to understand this, but the way I work is through an organic (and mostly unconscious) process of synthesis which brings together heterogenous influences. In other words, I tend to hybridize stuff. I am, perhaps above anything else, a borderlander.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I think the pretended divide between ‘creatives’ and ‘non-creatives’ is false. We are all creative people in most things we do. Being creative is simply at the core of human behavior, if it weren’t, our species would have become extinct long ago. Perhaps it could be much more interesting to think about how we can learn from each other’s crafts, what kind of problems do people solve in their daily lives, and how creative they need to be to succeed in the most (or least) mundane of tasks. For me, it is always inspiring to see/know people who love what they do, it is irrelevant whether that is their “job”, their “hobby”, or other important work such as providing care for someone, or everyday domestic chores. They all sum up to be “what we do” and all constitute an important part of the complex mystery that we are.

I would also add that I do not think artists struggle in a particularly intense way. Doing anything you really care about is almost always difficult. But to develop our craft we, in many cases, do have to focus and work really hard for years and that can mean not participating in other activities as other people would. This is sometimes understood as a sacrifice of sorts. It’s just an investment. It is also is just a phase among many. Life is suuuuuuuuuper long. And it’s enough for everything. (Yes, even partying).

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Perhaps acknowledging that we are all creative people. Understanding that we all create stuff in some way or another fosters empathy and community. It valorizes the hard work that creating something entails. Artists put fragments of their souls into their creations. Works of art are not commodities. They are tools to generate identity, community, solidarity, awareness, compassion. They convey powerful messages, appeal to our deepest emotions and facilitate life in all sorts of ways. Art makes us human.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wilfridoterrazas.weebly.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wilfrido.terrazas/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/torrehomerica
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfP3RrfYYnn0b8P2spTDzDw
• Other: https://wilfridoterrazas.bandcamp.com/

Image Credits
Frida Hidalgo, José Pita, Manuel Cruces, Alfonso Lorenzana, Erik Mares, Francisco Eme