New York based percussionist and composer Ches Smith’s latest album Interpret It Well – recorded with guitarist Bill Frisell, pianist Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri – is founded on an improvisational approach to composing, with all accompanying musicians interpreting Smith’s scores with freedom to unearth unexpected outcomes.

“Taborn, Maneri and Frisell are masters of ‘compositional improvisation’,” says Smith over email. “They are accustomed to working with spontaneously invented material to create unpredictable yet coherent music. They apply these tools to written pieces as well – fleshing out passages, exploring implications, travelling far and attempting to find their way back.”

The album's title track includes two movements: one slow, one fast. “Although the listener at times hears the movements the way I wrote them,” Smith continues, “crucial features are improvised by the group collectively, such as departures, arrivals, transitions, dynamics, and colour [...] I hear several concurrent tensions at work in this track: pointillism and lyricism; delicacy and bombast; all the time in the world and yet racing against the clock.”

It is this tension which inspired filmmaker Frank Heath in his visual interpretation of “Interpret It Well”. “The experience of the music itself,” Heath proposes, “is one of being slowly drawn into the vortex of an awesome and powerfully destructive storm”.

“The resulting video “Protect Your Home (Interpret It Well)” is an archival montage on the subject of home security assembled from a torrent of commercials, public service announcements and DIY footage addressing a wide spectrum of possible threats,” explains the visual artist. “Test videos produced by research institutes and insurance companies were the first pieces of the puzzle I assembled. In these clips, full scale housing structures are demolished using simulated environmental conditions in an effort to develop (and sell) methods of reinforcing buildings from severe winds, flooding, fires, and storms. Maybe a lifesaving investment for certain homeowners, but a band-aid level solution when put in the broader context of destruction caused by the climate crisis.”

Interpret It Well is released by Pyroclastic on 6 May. Read an interview with Ches Smith and collaborator Daniel Brevil in The Wire 449. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the magazine's digital archive.