Influenced — Spencer Zweifel: The Life or Death Situation
"Emerging from deep within the Earth’s crust, Spencer Zweifel’s Life or Death Situation delights stranded audiences with a hypnotic marriage of scintillating melody and oppressive soundscapes"
This Colorado-based pianist and composer joined Abi Clark and Andy O on Influenced 02/11/25 to talk about his most recent recording “The Life or Death Situation” and shared a few of his inspirations and influences ahead of his upcoming show at Dazzle 02/21 at 9:30 p.m. MT
Spencer Zweifel grew up in a musical family and formed his first Jazz band at the age of 16. He was selected as a national finalist in the Jacksonville Jazz Festival jazz piano competition where he placed third out of hundreds. He also graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 2019 with a degree in Jazz Studies. In 2021, Spencer completed a master’s degree in jazz studies at William Peterson University where he studied with Bill Charlap and Geoff Keezer.
Zweifel has performed in the Masterpiece Performance Studio live on KUVO with The Life or Death Situation which can be seen on KUVO JAZZ on YouTube.
Spencer stopped by for a chat with Abi & Andy for Influenced to talk about his most recent recordings “The Life or Death Situation” and “Get in Line”, his inspirations and influences as well as his upcoming performance at Dazzle.
Abi Clark: So you're a pianist, and I'm sure that love maybe started when you were young. You have a lot of accolades from when you were in your education, a lot of recognition. So I'd love to learn how you fell in love with music and when you knew you were going to pursue it for a career.
Spencer Zweifel: I started taking piano lessons when I was seven or eight, I think, and I was not the best piano student for many years. I went off and on. I wanted to play, wanted to play rock music. I did not want to learn classical piano. Eventually, I kind of learned a little bit of classical, but I still played some songs by Deep Purple and Meatloaf and stuff like that. I was a big rock fan, and then actually started getting into it in jazz band in middle and high school, and then studied it for real in college and went to UNC in Greeley, and then did a master's at William Patterson in New Jersey.
Andy O: Did you have a piano at home?
SZ: Yeah, growing up. So we had kind of a music room with a piano in there and a big library of just all kinds of sheet music. So I grew up playing out of books of Broadway songs and movie soundtracks. My grandma was a music teacher and had a huge collection of sheet music as well that she would play on request at retirement homes and stuff.
AC: Oh, cute! I was going to say, it sounds like you're from a musical family.
SZ: Yeah, so we had a big library - it was great! If I didn't want to practice, I could distract myself by just playing through this giant stack of really old songs, but that's where I was exposed to a lot of jazz standards and that kind of music.
AC: What was it about jazz that drew you and then ultimately made you want to pursue that form?
SZ: Sure. I think a lot of folks that play this kind of music, that got started in school, will have a similar story where they were attracted to just the ability to play outside the page and do what you want and what you run into as you study it is you kind of have to learn some of the rules at some point just to really understand what's going on. But jumping into it, I wanted to do anything I wanted, and jazz music was like, that's what you hear about it, right? The freedom!
AC: I mean, it gets you kind of used to the free-flowing that is jazz. And The Life or Death Situation has so much room. I feel like you guys go a lot of different places. You released your debut with that band in September, and I love everywhere that you go with that band. I kind of feel like because you have that love of rock, maybe that kind of brings itself into the sound.
SZ: Oh, yeah. I'm really happy with it because something where I get to kind of express this side of me where there is a lot of influence from rock music and from glam rock and punk music and these big loud guitar bands, and also this good kind of stuff where people are just, it feels like, they're doing whatever they want.
AC: The pieces are definitely a journey. A couple that stuck out to me. I really loved Sound and The Fury and Medusa - the beginning part kind of reminds me of a Jimi Hendrix song. What were these writing sessions (like)? These are all originals on the album. So were you collecting music? Did you start writing once you had this, what is it? Like an eight piece or nine piece band?
SZ: I put the band together later in the process. I theorized what the band might look like first and then wrote for that ensemble and then put it together once I had enough music. I wrote a lot of this in, I think, early, maybe 2021-2022, during various levels of Covid. So some of it is these extended sessions where I would just wake up and then try to write music for as much of the day as I could, because there wasn't a whole lot going on, and I had some good ideas about what I wanted to do with the sound. But the Hendrix thing is, I mean, that's for real because it sounds like Castles Made of Sand was kind of that intro..
AC: Yeah, a little quote!
SZ: Yeah, and it's great having people in the band, specifically that I associate with other genres as well, Jack, who plays guitar because he does so much work in the rock and shoegaze world that I can dip into that and know he's going to add that kind of sound.
AC: Definitely the influences came through. Let's talk about some of the music that you were listening to when you were writing this or that inspired this.
SZ: This band largely was inspired initially by, I went and saw a live show in New York at the Jazz Gallery by a band called Chris Lightcap's Superbigmouth. So he had two bands, super-something, and then Big Mouth, and he combined them into this band, Superbigmouth. So there was two guitarists and two saxophones, just one drummer. But there was this huge rhythm section, and the sound was absolutely giant, and I just remember it filling the room, and there was so much to stain and guitar-y wash kind of stuff, and serious volume, and just everybody was just crushing - a lot of writing and pentatonic shapes. And so that show left a big effect on me, and I kind of wanted to put a band together that was similar to that. So that's the most specific influence. And then coming out of studying jazz, I think a lot of the stylistic influences there are I love Charles Mingus and Collective Improvisation. I listened to a lot of Richard Abrams in College, Blues Forever, that record was a big one for me, where it sounds like Duke Ellington, but it sounds like rock music, and it sounds like the world's colliding - It's just unbelievable stuff. And then Dave Holland, the Dave Holland Small groups, were a huge one for me as well.
This episode of Influenced featuring Zweifel’s music and favorite tracks woven with excerpts of this interview aired on February 11 at 12:00 a.m. If you missed it, it's available on the Influenced archives for the next 2 weeks HERE.
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