Music & Artists: CJ Camerieri

The brass luminary and yMusic co-founder on discovering chamber music, lessons learned from Paul Simon and Bon Iver, growing up with a band-director dad, and much more.

To be sure, the musician, composer, arranger and producer CJ Camerieri has some fascinating stories to tell, including those that might seem surprising coming from a Juilliard-trained trumpeter.

Here’s one: He was onstage with Paul Simon, whose passion for musical discovery remains unabated, even at age 83 and even as it applies to songs that became hits decades ago. Simon coached his horns through a number of variations to improve the outro to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” finally landing on a leaner arrangement that lost a note.

“But I messed up the change in the show,” Camerieri recalls with a laugh, “and it was my first tour with him [in 2014]. He’s playing up there and listening to see how that little, subtle change would impact the way the outro landed.” So Camerieri missed the mark, and Simon looked up and back. He wasn’t angry but he was alert, demonstrating the attention to detail that helped him become one of the most successful recording artists of all time. “I thought, Oh no,” says Camerieri, still chuckling.

Camerieri, who is currently based in Los Angeles, has collaborated with Simon and indie icon Bon Iver both on his own and as a co-founder of yMusic. That chamber ensemble, which formed in New York City in 2008, has earned acclaim in contemporary classical circles as well as through recordings with singer-songwriters like Simon, Bon Iver, Ben Folds and Bruce Hornsby. Alongside those renowned names, Camerieri’s c.v. includes touring and recording credits with a who’s who of thoughtful, emotive indie rock, folk and pop — artists like Sufjan Stevens, the National, Sting and Rufus Wainwright. At the 2012 Grammys, his contributions to the album Bon Iver, Bon Iver earned him two awards.

As a solo artist under the name CARM, he’s released two albums of stirring, atmospheric music defined by inventive production and carefully chosen guests. With singer-songwriter Edie Brickell and the producer, electronic musician and trumpeter Trever Hagen, he formed Heavy MakeUp, an ingenious unit that has the ability to improvise new songs in a pop format live on stage — soup to nuts, from the ground up, including lyrics.

In talking with Camerieri, you get the feeling he’s a quintessential “people person” — that there’s no greater joy for him than creating something with colleagues he respects. He grew up in New Jersey, the son of a band director who taught trumpet, and became immersed in jazz studies in high school. “If you asked 16-year-old me what I wanted to do,” he says, “it was to be a jazz trumpet player or make my living playing in a big band.”

A move to New York to attend Juilliard exposed him to the delights of the modern brass quintet, and to the idea that classical music didn’t exclusively mean playing your part with precise anonymity in an orchestra. Suddenly, the epiphanies that come with intense, intimate collaboration could be found not only in jazz but in the rich tapestry of influences that make up contemporary classical music.

“Chamber music was the beginning of the process of me figuring out what I wanted to do with my career,” says Camerieri. In that tradition, he saw an “unlimited amount of challenges and opportunities to grow.”

We caught up with Camerieri recently to learn more about his experiences in music education, his adventures with Paul Simon and Bon Iver, the secrets of using effects pedals with brass, and much more.

This conversation was edited for length, clarity and flow. 

Why do you think yMusic has become so successful in working with these high-profile artists? Clearly you’ve become a go-to group for interesting musicians in popular music who want a chamber ensemble.

In the classical world, there is an elitism about [performing popular music or collaborating with pop artists]: The stuff I was trained to do is much more interesting than playing this pop song or folk song. They want to play Brahms. That’s what they’re put on this earth to do, in their opinion.

And I felt the opposite. We started yMusic 17 years ago, and I had just finished touring with Sufjan Stevens and playing with the National and Rufus Wainwright. I was drawn to this music. I was like, Let me approach this Sufjan Stevens song in the same way I approach this Bach piece.

When I started playing with Sufjan, I was like, This is it for me. I told all my friends from Juilliard, “Check this stuff out.” And I told Sufjan at one point, “I have so many friends from Juilliard who would love to play your music.” And he said, “Really? Why?” And I’m like, “Because it’s so magical and expressive!”

I wanted to use this training and apply it to music that’s so relevant. I loved playing music for people my own age, which is not something I’d experienced a lot in classical and jazz. So when we started yMusic, it was to kind of weed out the people who wouldn’t be enthusiastic about [pop collaboration].

That’s why we have such strange instrumentation. We have a string trio — violin, viola, cello — and the violinist is a great arranger, plays great guitar. All three strings can improvise. We have a woodwind section with a clarinet player who plays great saxophone and a flutist who’s a wonderful singer. I play French horn in a way more like a woodwind, and I play trumpet. So with these six people, any band would have everything they want, all these orchestral colors.

We started the group [aiming to] only work with singers and songwriters, but then contemporary composers started writing music for us. They were like, Wow, this instrumentation is really interesting. We had all these beautiful pieces written for us. The songwriters and bands we wanted to work with sought us out because they loved our contemporary classical music.

Ben Folds heard our second record; we didn’t seek him out. Paul Simon was a fan of the group before I joined his band. We accidentally achieved the success we were looking for through having these brilliant composers write us these beautiful pieces.

Speaking of Paul, what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from working with him?

Attention to detail, and the importance of curiosity. His sound checks are legendary. We actually don’t call them sound checks; we call them “the matinee.” It was never less than two hours. Every single night we played a show, I had a list of four or five things that I had to remember that were really subtle changes.

It really kept us on top of our game. And it was so inspiring to see this guy who could definitely rest on his laurels [adopt the attitude of] I’m always trying to make these songs better. When we recorded Paul’s In the Blue Light album, he changed lyrics to songs everyone’s known and loved forever, because he was like, I never nailed that second verse.

He’s 83, and when you get together with him, all he wants to talk about is what he’s working on, what he’s fixing, what he’s excited about musically.

How about Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon? What did he teach you?

The thing I think about most with him is the fact that he has the best instrument I’ve ever been on stage with. His voice, 100 percent of the time, is the most expressive thing — in the way that Louis Armstrong can play one note and it gives you whatever feeling he was trying to give you so directly and impactfully.

Justin’s voice is the same thing: One song and you’re grabbed, and it’s not even the sound of the voice or the uniqueness of it; it’s the emotional content behind it. Sometimes, in his more recent songs, you might not even understand what the words are, but you know the feeling and the emotion behind them.

Paul does that with his lyrics, and Justin did that with his voice, his instrument. So that is something I think about every time I’m playing.

The other thing I’ve taken from my experience with him is just his love of music. The most fun thing you can do is watch him listen to a song. He listens so excitedly. He loves music more than anybody I’ve ever met, and knows more about it. From pop-country to John Zorn, he finds the thing in it that speaks to him, and it’s so powerful.

Give us a guiding principle of arranging that you follow no matter what situation you’re in.

Serve the song. What are the lyrics saying? How should that inspire your arrangement decisions? How do you support the voice? That’s one of the reasons I started playing French horn later on. With the French horn, the color and the timbre of it supported the voice so much easier. It’s such a warm color, but it can also get brassy and really expressive.

I found that the trumpet was a little bit hard to play while someone was singing. When you play a note on the trumpet, people go, Oh, he’s playing trumpet. And that’s not the point, unless it is the point. I don’t want to take anything away from the song.

Describe the experience of growing up with a father who was a band director and a trumpet teacher.

It was amazing. There was always music being played. He taught piano lessons at the house. I remember being 3 years old, begging him to take piano lessons and seeing the joy that he [felt]. I would say, “How was your day at school today?” And the worst thing I heard was like, “Little Timmy isn’t practicing his clarinet enough and he’s really talented.”

I’m the only [professional] musician out of four kids, but it was really important that every kid played piano proficiently and learned a band instrument and knew what it was like to make music with people. We learned that that was important for society as a whole, that music education was just as important as everything else you learned in school.

Tell us about your favorite part of studying at Juilliard.

I had the most amazing trumpet teacher, Mark Gould, who just blew my mind at my very first lesson and was like, You need to be more well read. Let’s play chess in your lessons and listen to records and talk about what’s interesting [in them]. Or, I want you to play this one very simple phrase in a way that means something and talk to me about it.

It was outside of the trumpet-tricks, music-as-sport thing that I had been doing up until that point. It was really individualistic; this is what you need. He also taught the best orchestral players in the world. They were like, I want to be principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony. “All right,” Mark might say, “let’s figure out what you bring to that.”

I was a different case. I wrote songs for my private trumpet lessons. We’d go on walks, talk about music and the instrument. If I had a playing problem or a thing that wasn’t happening from a physical standpoint, we would address that too.

But it was more like, what do you want to get out of this? I walked in as a conservative Christian kid from South Jersey, and he knew what was going on in my head before he heard me play, and he knew what I needed to become.

Let’s talk about professionalism and conduct, or the art of being a good hang. You’ve obviously generated a lot of goodwill throughout your career. Any advice there?

A couple of things come to mind. Number one is that — and this might be hard to believe — but 100 percent of the people I work with are super-duper nice. Nobody’s difficult; nobody’s thorny. Everyone is nice, from the artist to the sidemen.

Another thing is that, when I come into a studio to play or overdub, this is such a special day for the artist. This is an extra thing: They get to do horns or strings or pedal steel, and this is a big day for them. So you can’t treat it as any other day for yourself. This is something they’re spending money on. This is their art. This is their life. This is their legacy.

The text I want at the end of the day is What a memorable session. I can’t thank you enough. So don’t be looking at your phone or your watch or trying to get out of there. Get there early, set up, have a coffee with them, ask them how things are going and how the record’s shaping up. Be a part of their musical world for the day. Realize what your role is, and that it’s a really special thing for you to be able to do. And it’s for them.