Alexa Torres Skillicorn is a Latina jazz violinist, band leader, and ethnographic researcher based in Austin, Texas. Her musical goal is to develop improvisational and compositional styles rooted in history and personal experiences, bringing together tradition and innovation in jazz. Alexa made history in 2022 as the first woman and first violinist to graduate from the University of North Texas (UNT) jazz strings program. She has performed in the US, Latin America, and Europe, sharing the stage with acclaimed Grammy-winning artists such as Kurt Elling and Mon Laferte. Alexa recently discussed her career and debut album, ‘In Situ’.
Thank you for agreeing to catch up with Occhi Magazine. Please tell our readers more about your background, and what drew you to a career in the arts?
My path to a career in the arts has had a lot of twists and turns. I started playing violin when I was 5 years old. At that point, we lived in a small rural town in North Carolina called Snow Hill. Opportunities in the arts were generally limited, but I was lucky that our local public school had a Suzuki program! Our nearest, “big city,” Greenville, was home to a really tight-knit Suzuki community that was spearheaded by Joanne Bath – one of the people responsible for bringing the Suzuki Method from Japan to the US. One day, a little girl about my age played violin for my kindergarten class, and I was in awe! I talked to my mom, and she enrolled me in the Suzuki group classes at my school. Soon after, I started taking private lessons and we were subsumed into the Greenville Suzuki community.
I was a very serious classical student throughout my childhood. When the time came for high school, I was selected out of many applicants as the only freshman violinist at University of the North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), a boarding arts high school and university. I went there for my first couple years of high school. We had academic classes for only 4 hours a day, for 4 days a week, and the rest of the time was spent in specialized arts classes with university students. It was a really incredible experience to be surrounded by not only musicians but also dancers, visual artists, and actors 24/7!
We had this romantic image of ourselves as “wild rebellious artists.” We did all these ridiculous things in service of this image, which centered on a veneration of the 1960’s flower-child culture. When it would rain, my friends and I would strip down to our underwear, run around the campus, and paint ourselves with mud. I also have this really visceral memory of waking up early before class to scale a 5th-floor drainage pipe up to the roof and watch the sunrise while listening to Van Morrison’s “Madame George.” At night, we would sneak out of our dorms and go smoke cigarettes at the local Waffle House (this was when smoking inside was still legal). Of course, when I think of all this now, I laugh at my teenage self, but it was fun at the time!
After moving to Austin, TX for my last couple years of high school, I continued to study classical music seriously. I had opportunities like performing at Carnegie Hall and won first prize in a regional Austin school district competition. At the same time, I began to be disenchanted with what I perceived to be the rigidity of the classical paradigm in which my musical practice was entrenched. I started experimenting outside of classical music by playing in indie rock bands at classic Austin venues, festivals, and co-op parties. The summer between high school and college, I toured Europe with an Indie Rock group called the Noise Revival Orchestra. But, despite beginning to dabble in alternative styles, I was not aware that there were options for studying non-classical genres as a violinist in college. Because of this, instead of studying music, I chose to go a different route. I ended up graduating from the University of Texas, Austin with a triple major in Anthropology, Latin American Studies, and Plan II Honors.
I continued to perform with bands throughout college and started playing with a manouche group called Chico Chico. A lot of us lived in the Austin co-ops and on summer nights we would get together and jam on the porch of the co-op I lived at, Eden house. This is when I began exploring jazz and improvisation a little bit. Then, when I studied abroad a year in Santiago, Chile, in 2014, I began to meet and collaborate with musicians who were established in the Chilean scene. Because of this, after finishing my degree from UT Austin, I decided to move back to Chile and pursue music fulltime. I lived in Santiago from 2016 to 2019. This was a very musically formative era for me.
During this time, I had the opportunity to play with a lot of musicians who were prominent in the Chilean scene such (now) grammy-winner Mon Laferte and Rulo from the nationally recognized Chilean funk group Los Tetas. Once, with Rulo, we opened for Anna Tijoux! I also recorded an album – Mundo Zero – as a core member of the jazz fusion group Ensamble de Luz which was nominated for a Premio Pulsar – the Chilean equivalent of a Grammy. Throughout this time, I continued exploring jazz and improvisation on the violin, and played throughout the city’s jazz clubs. I was largely self-taught, but I also learned a lot from the musicians I was collaborating with.
Even though I was performing often, I eventually decided to move back to the US for a variety of reasons. Although I had many enriching musical experiences in Chile, a lot of my steady income at the time came from playing for this production company that I really didn’t like working with. While I was grateful for the regular work and pay, the gig mostly involved playing at malls, sometimes with backing tracks, which I found a little bit unfulfilling. The owners of the production company were also completely Machiavellian and misogynist. They would ask for ridiculous things and then cut your gigs in half if you didn’t comply, or if you upset them in any way. For example, they once asked me to wear a white shirt with a black bra for a performance. They also regularly complained that I did not wear enough makeup and demanded that I buy more. To me, it seemed completely unfair that, because of my gender, I should be asked to invest in more materials than my male colleagues.
But these experiences were valuable because they taught me a lot. They taught me that, while I wanted a career in music, I did not want that kind of career in music. They taught me that while I am definitely a musician, I’m really not an ostentatious performer or “show-woman.” I learned that I am not an entertainer – I really admire people who are – but it’s just not me. I like for the performance to be about the music and not much else, besides maybe a genuine connection with the audience and other players. In other words, I learned that instead of dressing up on stage, I like to strip down. My goal is for the performance to be an opportunity to really try to peel back the layers that we build around ourselves as we move through our daily lives. Rather than use a performance as a chance to inhabit a character, I like to use it as a medium to really try to discover and share myself in a way that is vulnerable and honest. Even if that means sometimes being a little awkward or messy! It’s a hard thing to do for someone like me who can be a bit shy and guarded, and I don’t often succeed in this endeavor. But my time with the production company in Chile really taught me that this was my goal on stage.
It was around this time that I started to consider a return to academia. I also felt that I wanted more time and formal study to really learn and integrate jazz theory, repertoire, and the history embodied in the genre’s practice. So, in the summer of 2019, I moved back to Austin with the goal of applying for a master’s degree in jazz performance. I put together a group and started gigging again around Austin as I applied. And I was thrilled when I was accepted to the University of North Texas (UNT) Jazz String Program to pursue a master’s in jazz performance in Denton, Texas. Now, I’m living in New York City, playing around here – most recently in The Django jazz club and Soapbox Gallery – and pursuing a PhD in Jazz Performance from New York University, fully-funded by the 5-year Steinhardt fellowship.
Who were your early influences and mentors, and how did they impact your appreciation of music?
I had a really incredible first teacher, Jill Foley. Your first teacher is so important. Jill was really the person who established my early love of the violin, and I think she is the reason I still play violin today. I remember I was this little five-year-old kid, and she would get down on her knees to play with me so that I could see what her left hand was doing. She was great at explaining things. A lot of people speak to children in a different tone than they do adults, but I remember she spoke to me just like she did everyone else. I really appreciated that, and it helped me feel as if I was as capable as any adult. I still keep in touch with her to this day!
Joanne Bath was another important influence. She really helped me with my expressivity. She would use one of those paint shade strips to help understand the nuance of dynamics – how there are different gradients of forte and piano. Kevin Lawrence was my teacher for my first couple years of high school at the art’s boarding school (UNCSA). He was strict but fair and helped me enormously with my technique!
In terms of jazz violin, I’ve really learned a lot from working with Scott Tixier and Sara Caswell. I tend to be a bit rigid and theoretically-oriented when learning new music, and both Scott and Sara helped me to open my ears and feel more free when playing. They showed me how to trust my intuition and to be in the present moment which requires listening and responding to others instead of hyper-focusing on yourself.
Finally, I also recently had the opportunity to work with jazz legend Dave Liebman which was an amazing experience. He helped me with my articulation and phrasing. I learned so much about not only music, but also life, and the way that music and life sustain each other. He would read to us from this leather notebook with hand-written thoughts that he has kept since the 1970s. The idea he shared that I most remember is something about how each musician has to decide whether their art will service the past, the present, or the future (their own artistic vision). That really resonated with me.
In 2022 you embarked on a one-year research trip to collaborate with improvising violinists across Belgium, France, and Poland. This was funded by two prestigious awards – The Presser Graduate Music Award and The Fulbright Grant. Please tell us more about your project, the collaborations, and how the experience has shaped your approach to music.
The violin played a critical role in the development of early jazz. Its prominence diminished at the start of the be-bop era when it was eclipsed by louder instruments like the drum set, woodwinds, and brass. Today, despite the existence of an array of amplification techniques to compensate for the instrument’s low volume, the violin remains marginal within many jazz paradigms. To help address our limited understanding of how violinists shape jazz practices, my project synthesized qualitative methods for studying cognition with ethnography and musical analysis in three countries with strong jazz violin traditions: Belgium, France, and Poland. The project examined the intersections of cultural, technical, historical, and visceral elements within the improvisational traditions embodied by the lived experiences and performance practices of jazz violinists. As part of the project, I interviewed jazz violinists in all three countries, went to a lot of jazz violin concerts, and I also performed with local jazz musicians in a few cities in Poland. I’m hoping to write several papers from the project – I just submitted the first of these for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal so we will see how that goes! I also audio-video recorded the interviews and I’m hoping to work with someone to edit and release these in an interview series.
I think one takes away from the project was that, even though we exist in a very globalized jazz world, there are still local trends within these countries that shape distinct jazz violin complexes or cultures. Of course, within these cultures, there is a lot of individual nuances – I certainly don’t mean to generalize or imply that all violinists from a specific place play in the same way. What I mean is that – even though a lot of music exists in this digitalized world that transcends physical space, even though we may learn from a YouTube video made by a musician who lives on the opposite side of the world – the physical spaces we exist in and the cultural memory embodied in these spaces still have an effect on our music-making. So, I think as a result of this, I definitely place extra value on in-person musical encounters (that of course came under threat during COVID).
Most of my project time was spent in Poland, which has a really strong violin tradition and some incredible improvising violinists. In Poland, I heard a lot of violinists with not only impeccable technique but also a very expressive way of playing with an attention to detail that moves beyond notes and rhythm. From listening to these players, I learned a lot about music and effects. These things that go beyond the chord-scale theory jazz students are taught in school – expressivity, dynamics, texture, tone – and that can sometimes be overlooked in jazz academia, are often the first things that really affect audience members. Only musicians will hear if you “played the right scale” over a particular chord, but you don’t need to be a musician to intuit the emotional intent of a sudden subito piano, for example. These are things I really hope to keep developing in my own musical practice.
Which three traits define you as an artist?
I think probably the trait that most defines me as an artist is that I’m always looking to learn new things, and to expand my personal improvisational lexicon. I also think of myself as hardworking. Finally, while I am certainly not “fearless,” I try my best not to let my fear limit me. I go for things even when I’m not sure that they will work out.
You are the first woman and first violinist to graduate from the University of North Texas (UNT) jazz strings program. Congratulations on this achievement. Please share your experiences at the university and how do you feel having made this breakthrough?
I had a wonderful experience at UNT. It was very challenging, and I pretty much didn’t have any free time during my two and a half years there, but it was definitely worth it. I can confidently say that going to UNT is one of the best decisions I have ever made. I learned more in my 2.5 years there than during any other period in my life. Working with Scott Tixier, the director of the Jazz Strings Program, was incredible. The school also has an amazing improvisation curriculum. I took 4 improvisation courses while there which covered things from be-bop to more “contemporary” devices like triad pairs and diminished patterns. I also took arranging courses that taught me a lot about harmony and composition. As a plus, I also met my husband in the jazz department at UNT. In one of those strange coincidences that life tends to throw your way, he happens to be Chilean!
The Jazz Strings Program was very new when I started, and when I finished in the summer of 2022, only one other person graduated with me – a good friend and violist Alex Moreno. I was honored to be among the first graduating class and to be the first woman to graduate from the program! Despite recent efforts to address gender-based jazz inequities, the field continues to be very male-dominated. If you look at instrumentalists in jazz studies departments or at the instrumental members of jazz bands, they are overwhelming male-identifying. Because of this, and also because the violin and viola are not common instruments in jazz, it felt like a landmark moment that I was excited to be a part of along with Alex.
Please tell us more about your album, ‘In Situ’ Please tell us more about the origins of the project and your inspiration for each piece.
In situ is an archaeological term that refers to the original position of an artifact found in place. When I was 21, I spent five weeks excavating Maya ruins in the Belizean jungle. We spent 8 or 9 hours a day digging in the wet dirt, often without finding much. But I remember the sense of awe I felt when I finally dug up an artifact. It was a scraper – a type of tool, carved out of stone. As I held it, I thought about how I was likely the first person to touch it in over a thousand years, and I imagined stories about the people who had used the tool before me so long ago. I wanted to bring that very particular feeling of awe to this album. The term in situ evokes a sense of rediscovery and recontextualization which are processes that I think play a big role in improvisation. It also conveys a feeling of connection between past, present, and future. Artifacts found in situ represent material culture which we use to construct narratives of the past in order to better understand our present and our future. Finally, the title is also a nod to my time studying anthropology in my undergrad and acts as sort of a symbolic reconciliation of my research and musical trajectories.
To make the album, I drew on what I learned about jazz idioms during my masters, during my time performing in Chile, and also on my Cuban heritage. I collaborated with some incredible musicians who I met during my masters: drummer Jordan Proffer, bassist Josh Newburry, and guitarist Mario Wellmann. We recorded it in the summer of 2022, right after completing my master’s and right before setting off on my year-long research trip in Europe. Creating the album was a process of reflecting internally on the sound cultures that shape my personal musical milieu before turning my gaze externally to new soundscapes during my research year. I see the album as a bridge in a lot of ways – a bridge between past, present and future; a bridge between different places and times in my life; a bridge between musical genres; and a bridge between my music and my research. Thankfully, I was awarded the Austin Live Music Event Fund grant from the City of Austin to support the release of the album which was essential to getting the album out. And on June 14th, 2024, about two years after recording it, I finally released In Situ into the world!
In Situ is a mix of original compositions and contemporary arrangements of jazz standards, reflecting the album’s goal of bridging past, present, and future. I wrote the tune “When the Wind Breaks the Chime,” which is inspired by the transfer of kinetic energy from one body to another. I know – very esoteric! It can really be a metaphor for a lot of things – when I wrote it, I was thinking of it as a symbol for the way that the balance of power can shift in a personal relationship. Parts of “When the Wind Breaks the Chime” draw from the Cuban rumba, so that was a slight nod to my Cuban heritage. The other original composition, “Consolidation,” was written by my husband and guitarist, Mario Wellmann. In addition to being a musician, Mario is also a neuroscientist, and the song is inspired by the process by which a short-term unstable memory becomes a long-term stable memory (the process is called memory consolidation). I chose to play the tune Inútil Paisagem, a bossa nova, in part because I think that bossas often have very lyrical melodies that sound great on violin. Inútil Paisagem (which translates to “useless landscape” in English) has these lyrics that, to me, really evokes the expressionist movement because the narrator is layering their emotions onto the landscape. I tried to keep these lyrics in mind in my interpretation of the piece. Finally, I chose We See, Yes or No, and Along Came Betty because Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, and Benny Golson are three of my favorite jazz composers! I think they all have distinct compositional styles and reflect different aesthetic trends in jazz history.
Did you apply a particular methodology and process for creating each track?
We recorded the album live in a studio in Denton called the Panhandle House. There weren’t really any special recording techniques that we used that I can recall at the moment!
What other projects are in the pipeline?
I just finished a series of release concerts for In Situ that we performed in Austin and New York City. I’ve also started composing the songs for my next album! I’ve recently started dabbling in poetry, and I’m considering integrating a poetry focus by including compositions that incorporate spoken word sections, and/or that are inspired by specific poems. In addition to my own poetry, this project would foreground poems by woman-identifying Latinx poets, reflecting Latin America’s rich tradition of spoken word.
Where can our readers find out more about you? ( Please share your website and social media feeds)
Website: https://www.alexatorresmusic.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexatorresmusic/
Live Performance at Soapbox Gallery: https://www.soapboxgallery.org/live-stream
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1Ys9558sdbUzXJ1ipq7XAN?si=MpF3CCVGRHaqETKk4AmUqA
All Image credits: Alicja Dębek
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