Berlioz: The Tetris Method of Jazz-House

2016 was the year that SoundCloud broke through into the mainstream. And for Jasper Attlee, producer, beatmaker and jazz-house auteur, the music streaming and sharing platform came at just the right time. Born in Cape Town, raised on the English seaside and fed a diet of contemporary art and jazz, Attlee became immersed in the nascent SoundCloud scene, uploading a string of songs under the pseudonym Ted Jasper. Releasing over 50 tracks, traversing everything from vocal-based alternative and indie music to soulful house, Attlee began to rack up praise and accolades, but something deeper was calling.

Alongside friend and visual designer Pat Thomas, Jasper decided to sculpt his musical aesthetic on the principles of impressionism, operating outside the lines of the atypical jazz-house genre. Thus Berlioz was born. Releasing the breakout EP Jazz is for Ordinary People last year, followed swiftly by his highly anticipated debut album Open This Wall, Atlee fulfils his long-held ambition to pair highly skilled session players with spoken word samples to create an elevating brand of jazz-house that’s taking the scene by storm.

What’s your background as a musician? Did you have any training and on what instruments?

My main training was in music and electronic production. I did a BTEC in music technology at college, but growing up I played lots of different instruments, albeit none of them really well. I’m more skilled as a producer than an instrumentalist, but I had such an emotional and romantic attachment to jazz music and it was a big part of our household. For Berlioz, the idea was to bring in session musicians and sample parts of their performances to create the music or create a whole demo based on my samples and have them replayed.

You first started making music as Ted Jasper and posting tracks on SoundCloud… 

As a teenager getting into production I was really into the SoundCloud thing in 2016 and used to idolise artists like Mura Masa. I got addicted to the platform, which took me into singer songwriting indie stuff and heavy club sounds under the alias Ted Jasper. Around 2022, I realised that I was sitting on so many songs that didn’t have a home and just wanted to take everything I’d learned and start something completely afresh. That’s where the first three Berlioz singles came from, and the third one, Miro, got some online traction that I wasn’t expecting. After that, I thought, damn, if this could work I’m going to be able to do what I always wanted, which was to pay session musicians to record my ideas.

What were your first steps in that direction?

It was obviously a big risk to take, but I sold some music equipment and put the money towards paying session musicians, which is how the Jazz is for Ordinary People EP got made. I basically listened to the outside world and let it reflect back where my talent lay and I think it’s good to do that as long as you’re genuinely making the music you want to make. Success came really fast and it got to a point where I felt like I’d found my audience and was fulfilled by that. At the beginning of 2024, I set off on my first live tour and the momentum just kept building. There’s something about how the visual and musical elements brought people together.

Your Berlioz material has a link between visual art and sound. How did painting, in particular, help you to think about music in a different way?

If I’d lived in a vacuum and didn’t absorb stuff, my music would have been really stale and uninspired, so I turned to other forms of art to inform how I make music. Listening back to those first Berlioz songs I – perhaps pretentiously – associated them with the impressionist movement because that broke a lot of rules in order to make really beautiful art. I thought I’d be able to make music based on a palette of visual identities and spoke to a really old friend of mine, Pat Thomas, who’s an incredible graphic designer and asked if he wanted to collaborate. 

How might you respond to Pat’s imagery in practical terms?

As a project, Berlioz uses visuals to inform emotion and feeling and something just happens to my brain when I’ve been absorbing loads of different art. When I’m back in the studio, everything feels more open and that’s what the reels and my TikTok series of animations are all about – helping people to understand the music emotionally so they can get sucked straight in...

I guess the title of your debut EP Jazz is for Ordinary People is self-explanatory. Has it been frustrating trying to break through some of those generic walls?

The title’s from Toni Morrison when talking about her book Jazz. From my understanding, she was trying to put jazz in a place where it can’t be overly intellectualised and gate-kept. That topic’s way over my head, but I’ve been thinking a lot about jazz as a genre and come to the conclusion that the music is more of an attitude than something you can systemically say, this is or isn’t jazz. Because the genre has been so compartmentalised, people don’t think of it as a free and evolving sphere of music and I get that because jazz shares a lot with classical music in terms of people wanting to protect how great pieces of classical or jazz music are taught.

The dominant instrument on your debut LP Open This Wall is the saxophone. Do you pick up the instrument or are you solely reliant on session musicians to perform your ideas?

I haven’t picked up the saxophone in ages and wouldn’t record myself for a Berlioz project. I’ll basically bring in an amazing jazz saxophonist and a lot of the sax lines are taken from solos or stuff that I chopped up, sampled and had replayed again. For Open This Wall, all the songs were based on fully arranged demos that I’d made in my bedroom studio. That’s when I’ll bring in a session player and build things up instrument by instrument.

Tell us more about those demos and how they’re used as a creative spark for other players?

I’d love to be able to share the demos at some point, but when I talk to sax players like Chelsea Carmichael or Sam Miles I’ll definitely ask questions about whether they’ve heard about a particular sax player or song. For example, Sam and I are huge fans of American jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, so on the title track “Open This Wall”, I just asked Sam to get the alto out and create a super sweet sound that would complement the affirmations present on Nancy Wilson’s vocal sample. To prepare for the session, I created a beat and looped it for eight or nine minutes and asked Sam to play how he feels before going through and finding my favourite riffs. As the producer, you get to take a step back from the performance and get a perspective on how you want it to come together and there’s something very cool about that.

Most aficionados would not expect a jazz album to be recorded or mixed in the box, so when did you decide that Ableton would be the right option?

At first, Ableton was intimidating to me, especially compared to Logic, which is what I was taught to use at production school. It took me a second to get used to, then I found that it was so intuitive and fast to use. A huge chunk of my production work is about playing with sound and moving it around and I love Ableton’s warp function and how you can automate the gain on recordings - it works like a dream! Although you can make the same song in any DAW, having used Ableton for 6 or 7 years now it’s really become like a second brain or another limb and the most effective way for me to make and record music.

I read that at some point you watched a Deadmau5 video that persuaded you not to use online tutorials to learn Ableton. Why was that?

Obviously, there are great tips to be found online, but I believe there’s a point where you have to work out your own way of recording and train your ear. Simplifying and reducing my production process has led me to have a better understanding of my sound.  I prefer not to watch tutorials and see what Live is capable of just by playing around with it. Saying that, I do actually use tutorials more now than I did for quite some time. For example, I never use Ableton’s Session View for producing, I only use it for live performance and there are so many interesting functions to deep dive into, like setting a clip to automate a chain that changes so you can access a new bank of samples. 

Like any sequencing tool where you’re moving around components of a recording and adding effects, do you have to be careful not to risk losing the essence of a live session recording?

When notes are out of place, you sometimes have to let that be and not use quantisation. It’s a balancing act because the beats are programmed and everything is played to a tempo, but it’s really important for a performance to swing, fall in and out of time or be out of sync because that’s why you record it live in the first place. It’s probably not going to sound as raw as a quintet recording with some room mics set up, but I’m aiming for somewhere in-between.

Will you record takes directly into Ableton and how much production is done in post?

For the studio sessions on Open This Wall, we went through some outboard and maybe an LA2A preamp straight into the DAW. On some of the trumpets, Beni Giles, who acted as engineer for the album, put some outboard EQ on the way in, but nothing too heavy. In post-production, I’ll be adding backing, instruments, drums and chord progressions to pretty much every track. Once a performance is more or less arranged and hosted in a project, I’ll just keep going until it sounds the way I want it to. For example, on the track “Jocelyn’s Dance”, Ableton has an instrument effect based on a ring modulator that creates these really weird melodies, so I put some MIDI chords in and it created this really bizarre thing that I ended up using for the breakdown. Other than that, I’ll use some of Ableton’s stock instruments if I want a really simple sine sound for the sub bass or a preset for some electronic-sounding strings.

Do you apply the same principles to percussion?

When I made Jazz is for Ordinary People I didn’t have the budget for a percussionist and had to programme everything in myself, so for this album I was really excited to change that. It is fun recording one shots and adding them in, but tracks like “Ode to Rashan” are based on recordings by James Larter who did the percussion across the whole project. There are lots of products that allow you to overlay a sample onto a recording, and on first listen it sounds exactly the same, but it doesn’t always sound right within the context of the whole song. You have to constantly remind yourself about context, so it’s a bit of a Tetris game really. That’s partly why I wanted to record the album at Beni’s studio in London, because you can instantly capture the sound of a room. I wouldn’t wish mixing drums on my worst enemy, but I also think that doing the mixing yourself gives the music its own stamp and a certain consistency.

You sample spoken word rather than use sung lyrics. What are you trying to convey by making that choice?

I love the rush that you get when you’ve made an instrumental that you really like and then listen on YouTube to interviews of people you look up to or think have something to say. I’m often looking for the perfect tone of voice, phrasing or rhythm in the way that someone speaks and then I’ll chop up that vocal and make it my own, which is more difficult to do with a sample from a lyric. Having said that, you can’t move people more strongly than you can with a great vocal melody, so using spoken word samples is a choice and I wouldn’t rule out making vocal-led songs for Berlioz in the future.

Follow Berlioz on Bandcamp and Instagram

Text and interview: Danny Turner
Photos: Danika Magdelena